Bob Woodward

by State of Denial (lit)

  The things that Kay had seen going wrong with the 75th XTF didn't seem to be any better with General Dayton's new group, the Iraq Survey Group, he said. They were already off to a bad start. What were they doing in Doha, Qatar, hundreds of miles away from Iraq? Why were they talking about missions besides WMD?

  You don't start the search from Doha. You put people in the field. If they aren't, you've got to move them there. You need to focus on a single mission, Kay said.

  Fucking military can never get anything organized, Tenet said. We need to find them. We don't want this job. The military should have done it. But we're going to be stuck with it. I know we're going to be stuck with it. The president's unhappy with what's happening. Tenet added, The military has screwed this up so much. I don't want it now. Left unmentioned was that most of the intelligence and conclusions about the slam dunk intelligence about WMD had come from or through Tenet's CIA.

  That weekend, Kay and his wife were on a getaway in Virginia when he got a call on his cell phone from Stu Cohen, the 30-year-veteran CIA analyst who had been acting chairman of the National Intelligence Council when the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on WMD in Iraq had been approved.

  The White House has agreed to put George in charge, Cohen said. And he wants you to do it. George wants to know if you'll take the job.

  Kay was surprised that the CIA would look outside its ranks for someone to run the WMD hunt, but he wanted the job.

  Yeah, Kay agreed, but added a caveat— if all the conditions that I talked about with George were to hold true.

  Kay was convinced that Saddam had WMD stockpiles. His experience after the Gulf War had seared itself into his head. When he had gone to Iraq for the U.N. after the Gulf War in 1991, he did not expect to find a nuclear program. Israeli intelligence, for example, was convinced that their strike in 1981 on the Osirak nuclear reactor about 10 miles outside Baghdad had ended Saddam's program. Instead Kay had uncovered the covert funding for a nuclear program code-named PC3 involving 5,000 people testing and building ingredients for a nuclear bomb such as calutrons, centrifuges, neutron initiators, high-explosive lenses and enriched-uranium bomb cores. Saddam was on a crash program to build and detonate a crude nuclear weapon in the desert as a demonstration to the world, to say, Now we've got one.

  Kay vividly recalled how shocking it had been to Cheney, then secretary of defense, and Wolfowitz, the policy undersecretary. I don't know what we would have done, if we had known, Wolfowitz had said. There might have been no Gulf War to eject Saddam from Kuwait. The Saudis might have tried to buy their way out of the problem as was their habit. In 1991 Kay's fellow U.N. inspectors also had uncovered hundreds of gallons of VX nerve gas, the deadliest known nerve agent, and biological weapons, including hundreds of liters of anthrax and some botulinum toxin.

  Leading the new inspection effort in 2003 meant that Kay would have to become an official CIA employee. On Tuesday, June 10, he took a lie detector test and underwent a psychological evaluation. Anyone who could take this job obviously fails the psychological test, Kay said, so just flunk me.

  He passed, and since he had the security clearances from his previous work, that afternoon Tenet swore him in as special adviser to the director on WMD and head of the Iraq Survey Group. Tenet was crowing about getting someone through CIA personnel in 12 hours—an apparent record for the agency—and he said the plan was for Kay to fly that evening for Baghdad, the next day at the latest.

  George, I can't do that, Kay objected. I haven't been read in to all your evidence. I've got to talk to the analysts. I've got to talk with the people that are doing collection. I need to talk to Defense. Look, I can't just jump on a plane and go do this.

  Over the next week or so, Kay embarked on a crash course in WMD intelligence. Since he had not worked the Iraq WMD case since the 1990s, he expected some new treasure trove as he spent 15- to 18-hour days reading and sitting through CIA and Defense Department briefings. He was shocked at what was not there.

  It was nothing new, he recalled. Anything with a strong or reasonable factual basis came from before 1998, when the U.N. inspectors had left. Everything after that either came from a defector or came through a foreign intelligence service in an opaque sort of way.

  For example, Kay found that all the prewar intelligence about the mobile biological weapons labs that Powell had described at the U.N. in February, and that the president had declared had been discovered on May 29, had come from a single source, the Iraqi defector used by German intelligence code-named Curveball.

  Powell had told the U.N. and the world there were four sources for the allegation, based on the CIA information, but in truth three of the sources only provided information about Curveball's career or about an alleged mobile lab facility of some kind. They had no knowledge of the biological program, Kay said later.

  The surprises kept coming. Kay was aghast to realize that the CIA had never even independently interviewed Curveball, but relied instead on the Germans' reports of 112 interrogations they conducted. Worse still, it appeared that the Germans had warned that Curveball was an alcoholic, although this had been downplayed in the U.S. files.

  On the alleged Iraqi effort to restart its nuclear program, Kay found that the conclusion hinged on only one piece of physical evidence— high-specification aluminum tubes Powell had told the U.N. that Saddam kept trying to acquire. Most U.S. experts think they are intended to serve as rotors in centrifuges used to enrich uranium, Powell said.

  The CIA file on the aluminum tubes ran hundreds of pages, and contained information from foreign sources suggesting that Iraq had tried to purchase 60,000 such tubes to be used as artillery shells. That was a lot by any standard, Kay agreed. But he had learned back in the 1990s that the Iraqis would overspend and buy much more of what they thought they needed. It was a far more serious offense under Saddam for someone in a government program to fail to procure enough than to buy too much.

  After several days, the lyrics to an old Peggy Lee song began running through Kay's head: Is That All There Is? He said later, The more you look at it, the less is there. It was an eye-opening experience. But realize, (a) I still believed they were there. And (b) I thought the answer was not going to be found in Washington or Doha. It was going to be found in Baghdad, in Iraq. So I was anxious to get out in the field and see what I can do.

  At the end of the week of Kay's WMD crash course, Tenet arranged a lunch for the two of them with Rumsfeld at the secretary's Pentagon office. Generals Myers and Franks were there, along with Steve Cambone.

  Tenet proposed that they share responsibility for Kay, and have him report to both Rumsfeld and himself.

  Absolutely not, Rumsfeld said. It was Tenet's responsibility now.

  Kay could see that Rumsfeld deserved respect as one of the best bureaucratic infighters of all time. Presuming Kay found WMD, it would validate the CIA estimates. If he didn't find WMD, no good could come from being associated with the unsuccessful search. It was not a winnable proposition, so Rumsfeld opted out.

  Franks was still on his victory lap. He was to retire later in the month and his replacement, General Abizaid, had been announced.

  I want to be sure you and Keith Dayton get along, Rumsfeld said, and you don't fight over this.

  You don't have to worry, Kay promised, because if we don't get along, I tell you, we will be there longer than either of us wants to be.

  I like that attitude, Franks said, bursting into laughter.

  I understand that attitude, Rumsfeld added.

  Before leaving for Baghdad, Kay expressed a final concern to Tenet. Look, I don't have any base in the CIA, Kay said. I don't want to have to fight people for resources once I'm out there.

  Don't worry, Tenet said. You'll get whatever you want. You have any problems, John and I will take care of it. Putting his arms around Kay in a big Greek hug, Tenet said, Don't fuck up.

  It was his standard farewell to those going into the field.

  On Jun
e 12, 2003, The Washington Post ran a front-page story by Walter Pincus reporting that an unnamed retired U.S. ambassador had been sent to Africa in 2002 to see if Iraq had tried to get uranium from Niger. The retired ambassador disputed that there was any evidence of a deal. This ran contrary to President Bush's assertion in his State of the Union address before the war, in 16 words that would become famous: The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

  The next day, a Friday, I interviewed a senior administration official, someone who did not work in the White House, for my book Plan of Attack. Near the end of the one-hour-and-30-minute background interview, our conversation drifted to a gossipy interchange that is common after a long, substantive discussion. I said I knew the retired U.S. ambassador on the CIA mission was Joseph C. Wilson, who had been ambassador to the African country of Gabon under George H. W. Bush, and who had worked on the Clinton National Security Council.

  His wife works in the agency, the official said. She is a WMD analyst out there.

  He said Wilson's wife had proposed him for the mission because Wilson knew Africa. We moved on to another subject.

  After the interview, I told Pincus what I had heard about Wilson's wife working as a WMD analyst at the CIA, without saying who I had learned it from. Pincus later said he did not recall our conversation.

  A few weeks later, on July 6, Wilson wrote an op-ed piece in The New York Times and said it was highly doubtful that any Iraq-Niger deal had taken place. Eight days after that, syndicated columnist Robert Novak wrote that two senior administration officials had told him that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA operative on weapons of mass destruction and had been instrumental in his going to Africa. The Justice Department launched a criminal investigation into how Wilson's wife's CIA ties were revealed to the press and whether it meant an undercover agent had been revealed. A special prosecutor was soon named to take over the investigation, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald of Chicago.

  Jay Garner basically hid out for a couple of weeks when he returned to the U.S. in the beginning of June, not wanting to see anyone at the Pentagon or talk about his experience in Iraq. Larry DiRita called several times. You've got to get over here and see Rumsfeld, DiRita implored. Finally, Garner agreed to go over on Wednesday, June 18.

  When he was alone with Rumsfeld around the small table in the secretary's famous office, where they had met back in January, Garner felt he had an obligation to state the depths of his concerns.

  We've made three tragic decisions, Garner said.

  Really? Rumsfeld said.

  Three terrible mistakes, Garner said, laying out what he'd omitted from his May 27 memo to the president. He cited the extent of the de-Baathification, getting rid of the army, and summarily dumping the Iraqi leadership group. Disbanding the military had been the biggest mistake. Now there were hundreds of thousands of disorganized, unemployed, armed Iraqis running around. It would take years to rebuild an army. They'd taken 30,000 or 50,000 Baathists and sent them underground, Garner told Rumsfeld. And they'd gotten rid of the Iraqi leadership group. Jerry Bremer can't be the face of the government to the Iraqi people. You've got to have an Iraqi face for the Iraqi people.

  Garner made his final point: There's still time to rectify this. There's still time to turn it around.

  Rumsfeld looked at Garner for a moment with his take-no-prisoners gaze. Well, he said, I don't think there is anything we can do, because we are where we are.

  He thinks I've lost it, Garner thought. He thinks I'm absolutely wrong. Garner didn't want it to sound like sour grapes, but facts were facts. They're all reversible, Garner said again.

  We're not going to go back, Rumsfeld said emphatically. Discussion over. Come on. Let's go in the other room.

  In 2006, I asked Rumsfeld if he recalled Garner's warning about the three mistakes.

  Vaguely, Rumsfeld answered. I remember having a very good discussion with him. I felt that he had not been properly recognized for what he had done. I think he's a fine retired officer and a very talented guy who cares a lot about Iraq.

  After their discussion, Rumsfeld and Garner walked into the large conference room where most of Rumsfeld's top people were assembled—Wolfowitz, Feith, Ryan Henry, DiRita and Torie Clarke, General Pace and General Casey.

  In a small ceremony, Rumsfeld pinned the Defense Department Medal for Distinguished Public Service on Garner, who didn't want the medal.

  Afterward, Rumsfeld and Garner held a press conference.

  I do want to thank Jay for the absolutely superb job that he has done, the secretary said, laying the foundation for the Iraqi people to begin this process of rebuilding from the rubble of decades of Saddam Hussein's tyranny and to put themselves on a path towards democratic self-government.

  Rumsfeld told the press corps that the water system in Iraq was now operating at 80 percent of its prewar level, and that close to 2 million Iraqi civil servants were being paid. He read off a list of impressive statistics: Basra had 24-hour electricity, and Baghdad's power was on 19 or 20 hours a day. Lines to buy gasoline were disappearing, there was no health crisis, and Iraqi children were returning to school. Eight thousand police officers were back on the job, he said. Two thousand of them were patrolling. As for the security situation, Rumsfeld said, In those regions where pockets of dead-enders are trying to reconstitute, General Franks and his team are rooting them out. In short, the coalition is making good progress. It was made possible by the excellent military plan of General Franks and by the terrific leadership of the stabilization effort by Mr. Jay Garner and his team.

  When Garner finally had a chance to speak, he was more sober. To all of you, I'd like to just say one thing. There are problems in Iraq and there will be problems in Iraq for a while. There's always problems when you've been brutalized for 30 years and you take people out of absolute darkness and put them in the sunshine. So I think there's more goodness, far more goodness than there is badness, and the glass absolutely is half full.

  At the end of his remarks, Garner completely contradicted what he had privately told Rumsfeld, saying of Bremer, I think all the things he's doing are absolutely the right things.

  Next, Rumsfeld and Garner went to the White House to see Bush. It was Garner's second time with the president.

  Mr. Secretary, who's that famous man you have with you? the president called out, coming through the doorway from the Oval Office. He reached out his hand. Hi, Jay.

  Mr. President, Garner said, you've got more important things to do for this nation today than take time out to talk to me, so all I want to do is shake your hand and thank you for the chance to serve.

  Bush took Garner's hand and in one of his trademark moves pulled Garner in close physically.

  I do have time for you, Bush said, and I'm going to take time. I want to be with you. Bush put his arm around Garner and propelled him into the Oval Office, stopping by one of the windows. Look out here, Jay. Look out here on the lawn. If I wasn't spending this time with you, I'd probably be out there with the press corps or somebody kissing their ass. Or if I weren't with the press corps I'd probably be up there on Capitol Hill with a bunch of congressmen kissing their asses.

  Bush led Garner over to the main pair of chairs in the Oval Office. You sit here and I'll sit here, the president said, taking his usual position and offering the other chair to Garner. Why wouldn't I want to be in this comfortable office in these two nice chairs sitting here with you kissing your ass?

  Cheney and Rice joined them.

  Mr. President, let me tell you a couple of stories, Garner said. It was his turn.

  Garner had an overly long story and he recalls telling it this way to Bush: Buck Walters, a retired Air Force one-star who was Garner's man in charge of the southern Iraq region, called him one day when he was visiting Hillah, near Babylon. Malcolm MacPherson, a reporter for Time magazine, and Mike Gfoeller, a State Department officer who had a reputation for be
ing an even better Arabic speaker than most Iraqis, were there. Before you leave, Walters said, I've got to take you up to see Darth Vader.

  Who's that? Garner asked.

  He's the leading cleric here.

  Why do you call him Darth Vader? Garner asked.

  Well, you'll understand that when you see him.

  So Garner told Bush and the others that he went to meet the man. Out comes this giant guy, a Shiite cleric the size of basketball great Shaquille O'Neal dressed all in black. Black turban. Big black beard. He was said to be a direct descendent of the Prophet Muhammad. Everybody sits down. He speaks good English.

  Your Excellency, Garner began, as you know we've been here several weeks now and we've done some things that were good and we've done some things that weren't good. And we've not done a lot of things because we didn't know to do them. And so what I'd like during this period of time is I'd like your evaluation on what we've done right and on what we've done wrong, and then I'd like your guidance on what we should do next.

  Good, said Darth Vader. I've thought about this a while. Let me talk to you. Do you mind if I speak in Arabic? Do you have a translator?

  Garner told Bush and the others: I had the best translator in the United States with me. So Darth Vader talked in Arabic for the next hour.

  I've taken so long and I apologize for being this long, finished Darth Vader (later identified as Sheik Farqat al-Qizwini), switching back to English. I shouldn't have taken this much of your time.

  No, this has been wonderful, Garner recalled. I'm going to go back and we're going to work on these things that you brought up.

  But Darth Vader said, Let me summarize. What we need to do now is get a working government. But that working government has to be based on a constitution. That constitution has to be written by all the Iraqi people. It has to be founded on the democratic principles, and it must take care of everyone regardless of their religion, of their ethnic background.