Bob Woodward

by State of Denial (lit)

  Paul Hughes now had to deal with the former Iraqi officers who wanted their soldiers to be given the $20 emergency payments, but who were now shut out under the Bremer order. Hughes stalled for a while but finally went to see the officers.

  Colonel Paul, what happened? asked Mirjan Dhiya, their English-speaking spokesman.

  I don't know, Hughes said. I can't tell you what happened. I'm as shocked as you are.

  Colonel Paul, we have men who have families. They have no food. They are running out. We need to do something.

  Hughes finally got Slocombe's chief of staff to meet with the former Iraqi military representative. There was still a possibility that they might get the $20 each, but things were moving very slowly.

  Garner was out at Baghdad International Airport to meet with a visiting congressional delegation on May 26. He drove back on the BIAP highway in his unarmored Chevy Suburban to the so-called palace where his team had been working, for a little going-away party in his honor. It was a bit of a joke among some of the staffers whether Bremer would show up, but he was there, and was gracious.

  That same day, three American cavalry scouts whose job was to escort or go ahead of convoys of supply trucks were also on the BIAP highway, riding in the first of a team of two armored Humvees. They drove over what looked like a backpack in the middle of the road.

  The backpack exploded, tearing into their Humvee and throwing one of the soldiers from the vehicle. Ammunition started to cook off, causing more explosions.

  The soldiers in the second Humvee slammed on the brakes and manned their machine gun, looking frantically for the enemy. One soldier got out and ran quickly to the fallen man, Jeremiah D. Smith, a 25-year-old Army private from Missouri, one of the first American soldiers confirmed to have been killed by hostile fire in Iraq in weeks.

  Paul Hughes was at the palace at Garner's farewell party. He heard a report: We just lost two Humvees on the BIAP highway.

  I was pissed, Hughes later recalled. He presumed Iraqi soldiers were behind the attack, and was equally sure that the U.S. had missed its best opportunity to keep the Iraqi army under control by working with the Iraqi generals and colonels. I had them by their balls. They would have stood on their head in the Tigris River for me as long as we were dealing fairly with each other. It was just so tragic, so needless.

  The next day, one of the U.S. intelligence agents at the palace had a stark, matter-of-fact assessment. These guys all have munitions in their garages, he said. They're pissed off. This is the beginning.

  On May 27, Garner wrote a formal memorandum to the president. A copy later turned up with a stamp on the first page reading SECDEF HAS SEEN.

  As I near the end of my service, he said, I want to thank you for allowing me to serve the country and you in this important mission. I believe we have set a baseline that will bring stability to Iraq, although there will certainly be ups and downs in the period ahead. We have assembled a wonderful team of professionals, and Jerry Bremer is a fine choice to take the team to the next level and help create the conditions for true political and economic reform in Iraq.

  He listed some of the main tasks ahead—from food to security—putting the most positive possible spin on the accomplishments. Garner did not mention or even hint that he had concluded that Bremer had already made three huge mistakes—broad de-Baathification, disbanding the military, and rejecting the Iraqi council Garner had set up. Instead, the ex-general closed simply, by thanking the president again for the chance to serve. It was challenging, exhilarating, and rewarding. Thank you, too, for your inspired wartime leadership.

  It was ironic, Garner thought, that though Rumsfeld had been eager to ensure that the Defense Department controlled the postwar effort, almost everyone in a position of power within Bremer's new CPA came from the State Department. Bremer, who had been an ambassador but had otherwise never managed a large organization, had wrested control of the effort from Rumsfeld.

  But Bremer didn't know how to delegate, Garner thought. Every decision had to come to him, which meant that nothing moved quickly.

  Rumsfeld's consultant and personnel expert Steve Herbits wrote a scathing, four-page confidential memo to Rumsfeld on Doug Feith's performance as undersecretary for policy.

  After nearly two years, Doug's leadership has not improved; his style and approach to his job continue to produce a significantly under performing team. His negatives continue to accumulate. Six months of post-Iraq planning is now widely regarded as a serious failure, both in substance, personnel selection, cooperation within Department of Defense and in interagency relations.

  Within the interagency process at the NSC, he continued, Policy's nickname is 'The lunatic Feith and his evil spawn.' He reported that Victoria A. Torie Clarke, the Pentagon spokesperson, said that Feith lacked respect and trust.

  Herbits suggested to Rumsfeld that confirmation of these views could be provided by Wolfowitz, Pace and other consultants.*

  At the NSC, Hadley knew that Feith was much criticized, but he thought Feith had a few things in his favor. He was one of the few Rumsfeld trusted, one of the few who could get a decision from Rumsfeld and get it to stick. He generated an enormous number of good ideas and provided the interagency with intellectual leadership, Hadley thought, and he could prepare briefings and memos in a form that Rumsfeld would sign off on rather than sending them back 10 to 15 times. And finally, he was loyal to Rumsfeld.

  * In an interview in 2006, Pace said he did not agree at all with Herbits's assessment, and that he thought Feith was super-smart and had done a good job. Feith later sent me a letter saying that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz also strongly disavowed the Herbits assessment, which Feith called a piece of gutter name-calling that should not be in my book. His memo is just libelous musings from a marginal figure, Feith wrote. It harms me without shedding any true light on anything.

  When Feith got in trouble publicly, Hadley concluded, it was always because he was carrying out Rumsfeld's policy. Hadley felt strongly that Feith went undefended, hung out to dry. The problem was not Feith. It was Rumsfeld.

  Feith was practically pulling his hair out, Frank Miller of the NSC staff could see. Bremer wouldn't speak to him. He had his deputies answer Feith's memos. His message was very clear: I work for the President of the United States, skipping over Feith and therefore Rumsfeld.

  Miller found the decision to disband the Iraqi army jarring. They'd been telling Bush for months about the plan to use 300,000 Iraqi troops for reconstruction. Miller counted Walt Slocombe, Bremer's point man on the military, among his close friends, but he thought it was silly when Slocombe and others justified the decision by saying that the Iraqi army had disbanded itself. That's what we told them to do, he thought—the CIA had dropped leaflets over Iraqi positions saying, Go home. Put down your weapons and go home.

  But with Bremer on the scene, Miller's interagency group working on postwar Iraq plans, the Executive Steering Group, had disbanded. The feeling at the White House was the same as it was at the Pentagon— Bremer didn't need them looking over his shoulder. But reports flowed into the NSC, from the British and through the media, and from Frank Miller's military contacts, although not from Bremer himself. Looting was still going on. Iraqi civil servants weren't getting paid. There was a report that 40,000 teachers had been fired because they were Baathists.

  Bremer was making statements and holding press conferences suggesting he expected to be in Baghdad for a long time.

  Occupation is an ugly word, not one Americans feel comfortable with, but it is a fact, Bremer told a reporter from The Washington Post, as they flew together in a C-130 transport plane from Baghdad to the southern city of Umm Qasr on May 28. President Bush has always said that we will be here as long as it takes to do the job, and not a day longer. At the same time, we should make sure we don't leave a day earlier.

  We found the weapons of mass destruction, President Bush declared in an interview with a Polish television reporter on May 29. We found biological
laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said, Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They're illegal. They're against the United Nations resolutions, and we've so far discovered two. And we'll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong. We found them.

  Bush was on a whirlwind, seven-day trip through Europe and the Middle East, and he made similar remarks about finding WMD in an interview in France. The only problem was that the weapons hadn't actually been found. The military's 75th Exploitation Task Force was running into massive problems in the Great Hunt for Saddam's WMD, not the least of which was a series of highly publicized false positives. Each time they seemed to have found something that could be portrayed as a smoking gun—an alleged stockpile, a vat or even a small vial of biological weapons—it would soon be discredited.

  Unknown to the president, four days before his TV interview, the DIA had dispatched a nine-member team of civilian experts to Iraq to examine the two mobile labs that had been found. The team had sent back a three-page field report the day before Bush's statement with their conclusion that the labs were not for biological weapons. Their secret 122-page report, finished the next month, said the labs had nothing to do with WMD. All the evidence was that the labs were most likely for manufacturing hydrogen to be used in weather balloons.

  A day after Bush's remarks, at a Pentagon press conference, Rumsfeld's undersecretary of defense for intelligence, Steve Cambone, and Army Major General Keith Dayton, the head of the human intelligence service at DIA, officially announced the creation of the new Iraq Survey Group. Now, Dayton said, his new, 1,400-member group would take over the hunt, but they would have other tasks such as gathering intelligence on terrorism and war crimes. His unit would be based in Qatar, some 400 miles south of Iraq on the other side of the Persian Gulf, where the military's Central Command had sophisticated communications systems in place for sending information back to the U.S.

  Spider Marks was ready to go back to the U.S. Colonel Rotkoff was exhausted. He was ready to retire from the Army, and he'd arranged for a desk job in Washington for a few months while he figured out what to do in the civilian world. Just before he left the Middle East, he summarized his thoughts on the war, the fear, the stunning military victory, the failure to find any weapons of mass destruction, and the chaotic aftermath—in one of the final haiku in his journal.

  We knew how to fight

  Not so; building a NATION

  We may lose the PEACE

  On June 2, about 1,000 ex-soldiers gathered in Baghdad outside the gates of the CPA headquarters to protest the army's disbanding. An internal CPA memo recounted the event, focusing on the widespread coverage in Arabic-language media like the Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya television networks, and in the English-language Reuters news service.

  There have been public statements by some former MOD [Ministry of Defense] members that they will resolve to suicide attacks if their grievances are not addressed, the memo said. Other protesters have continued to state that they will organize armed units to fight against the CPA and occupation.

  The entire Iraqi people is a time bomb that will blow up in the Americans' face if they don't end their occupation, one protest leader told reporters after he'd met with an official from the CPA.

  All of us will become suicide bombers, declared another protester, a former military officer. I will turn my six daughters into bombs to kill the Americans.

  We're not going to be blackmailed into producing programs because of threats of terrorism, Bremer said in response. Besides, he noted, the demonstrations marked the first time in decades that anyone had dared protest outside Saddam's presidential palace. Wasn't that progress?

  Bush flew to Qatar for a stopover on the Middle East leg of his trip, and Bremer came down from Baghdad to meet him. The two men talked in the back of Bush's limousine as they headed from Central Command headquarters near the airport to the Ritz-Carlton hotel.

  How's the overall situation? Bush asked, Bremer recalled in his book.

  I'm optimistic for two reasons, Mr. President, Bremer began, and gave an explanation that sounded as if it came from Encyclopaedia Britannica. First, Iraq has excellent resources, plenty of water, and it's fertile, besides the huge oil reserves. And, the Iraqis are energetic and resourceful folks.

  At the same time, Bremer added, the Iraqi people were psychologically shattered after living so long under Saddam.

  Without mentioning the de-Baathification policy or disbanding the military, which had left hundreds of thousands of Iraqis without work, Bremer told the president, Our most urgent problem is unemployment. We think it's about 50 percent, but who really knows? Also, Iraq's got a young population, with about half of them under the age of nineteen. That's an explosive combination.

  In a discussion with Rumsfeld and Bremer, Bush had asked the two men point-blank who was in charge of finding the WMD. Who had the hunt as their primary, exclusive mission? Given that it was one of the main reasons for war, there was a heck of a lot riding on the outcome.

  Bremer indicated it was Rumsfeld's responsibility.

  Rumsfeld said Bremer was in charge.

  Bush just about exploded. He said the task would go to someone else. He wanted someone in charge, someone for whom it would be his one mission in life. Since the CIA had insisted Iraq had WMD, the agency could go find the weapons. So finally, two and a half months into the war, the administration was going to give some focus to the hunt.

  Although Bremer technically was to report to Bush through Rumsfeld, Rice could see that the Pentagon did not have that much influence over Bremer, let alone control.

  It's not going well, she told Frank Miller. He'd been the NSC's point man on Iraq in the run-up to the invasion, with his Executive Steering Group, and now she wanted him to reprise his role in the postwar era. Reconstitute the ESG, she said.

  21

  the afternoon of Thursday, June 5, David Kay, one of the world's foremost experts on nuclear weapons inspections, was at CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia. Kay, 63, a short, intense, outspoken Texan with a Ph.D. in political science, had been the chief United Nations nuclear weapons inspector inside Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War and had led the successful effort to uncover Saddam's secret nuclear program, which was six to 18 months away from building a bomb. It had been one of the major intelligence shocks of the 1990s.

  As a member of a so-called Gray Beards panel of old hands, Kay was now at Langley to review a highly classified report on North Korea's clandestine efforts to reprocess plutonium for nuclear weapons. The initial report was pretty poor in Kay's view because the U.S. surveillance flights close to North Korea had been halted for fear of losing a plane. Kay had recommended that the CIA report be up front and say the data was not reliable. Just say you simply don't know, he advised, because the technical data was open to any interpretation.

  Afterward, John McLaughlin, Tenet's deputy at the CIA, asked Kay to stop by his office. George would like to see you, McLaughlin said.

  Kay had just returned from Iraq, where he had spent a month working as an expert analyst for NBC News, following the work of the military's WMD-hunting task force. He'd even tagged along on some of their searches. Once he'd gone with them to search a chicken farm where the WMD Master Site List suggested there were banned substances. It turned out to be just a chicken farm.

  What do you think? Tenet asked. Why aren't they finding anything?

  These guys probably couldn't find it if it was in front of them, Kay said bluntly. They're not organized, equipped or led to do it.

  Okay. If you were king, what would you do?

  First of all, you've got to have a group that is dedicated to the task that has the expertise necessary, he said. The 75th Exploitation Task Force did not have a clue. You're not going to get there with the military leading it because the military has shown a massive lack of interest. T
hey were interested in deterring their use, and they didn't view finding WMD as a military task.

  Second, it was a mistake to start the search based on the WMD Master Site List, with its 946 locations, some of which had been labeled suspect sites for more than a decade. It was a catch-all catalogue of maybes. Kay had seen the list in Baghdad in May. A large number of the sites were places he'd inspected himself in 1991 and 1992, and found nothing.

  You simply cannot find weapons of mass destruction using a list, he said. You have to treat this like an intelligence operation. You go after people. You don't go after physical assets. You don't have enough people in the country. It's too big a country. You can't dig up the whole country. So you treat it by going after the expertise, the security guards that would have been there, the movers, the generals that would have seen it, the Special Republican Guard.

  Instead of looking for stockpiles or warheads, it was more important and easier to look for the capability—find the scientists who made the weapons, those who worked at the production facilities, the guards who provided security, the truck drivers who transported the weapons. If Iraq had WMD, then they had to have either produced them or bought them somewhere.

  Yeah, that makes sense, Tenet said.

  Kay knew names, and he rattled off a list of key Iraqis, explaining how he thought they should find and question them. He thought Spider Marks had been pushing the WMD Master Site List, thinking they would find it if they only went to every site. Kay had been told that when the CIA station chief in Baghdad had tried to set up a meeting for Kay to talk to General McKiernan, McKiernan had declined, saying, I don't have any interest in WMD. Why should I talk to Kay?