I knew nothing of Rumsfeld’s retreat when I hurriedly flew to Damascus and arranged an interview with Mustafa Tlass, Syria’s defense minister, who had been on the job for nearly three decades. Tlass invited me to dinner at his spacious home and afterward walked me down to his basement to show me—bizarrely—his collection of pornography, much of it focused on Gina Lollobrigida, a voluptuous Italian actress. Then it was time for a serious talk. I told Tlass, whose English was fluent, that there was a possibility, as he surely knew, that Rumsfeld would order the Fourth Division, then encamped close to the Iraq-Syria border, to drive across the desert to Damascus. What would you do? I asked. He shrugged. I asked if Syria would unleash its chemical warfare arsenal against the Americans. “Those things?” he asked with obvious contempt. “If we used them, America would incinerate us [by responding with nuclear weapons] and they would be within their right to do so.” Tlass added that Syria’s chemical arsenal had been the brainchild of Hafez Assad, Bashar’s father, who had died in 2000 and who had envisioned them as a deterrent against the growing Israeli nuclear arsenal. They were useless as a deterrent, expensive, and hard to maintain, Tlass said. Okay, I said, if you did not have a deterrent, what would you do? “Let them come to Damascus,” Tlass said, “and we will see what happens.” He was talking about protracted guerrilla war. I returned to Washington and told my American military friends about the different approach to war of a Middle Eastern defense minister whose nation had been in a state of perpetual struggle for decades.
I wrote a bit about my evening with Tlass for The New Yorker but did not mention the courageous young general. A public account of what took place might cost the general his career, and I knew that keeping an officer with his integrity on the job was more important than a few lines in an article.
The one story that broke through, in terms of widespread media coverage, was my reporting on the Abu Ghraib prison and the sexual abuse there of young male prisoners. I had been tracking America’s increasingly violent behavior in what had become a war of occupation in which al-Qaeda, with the support of many disaffected former Iraqi military officers, was creating chaos with hit-and-run ambushes. The brutality of American military prisons was far from a secret in the spring of 2004, when the first of three articles I wrote about Abu Ghraib was published; Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch had put out devastating reports on prisons in Iraq that received little attention. I had learned all I needed to know about Abu Ghraib the previous Christmas when I spent three days in a hotel in Damascus with a former Iraqi air force major general.
The Iraqi army had been banned, as had the Baath Party, and most of the Iraqi generals who did not flee the country or join the resistance had been interrogated by the American command and, in some cases, jailed; others were recruited to work with U.S.-supported militias in the fight against the growing insurgency. The air force general had escaped that fate and was quietly minding his business in the first months after the American invasion, making a meager living selling vegetables and fruits from his garden. He was fluent in English and had been assigned while on active duty in the 1990s to monitor the operations of the UNSCOM team. He became trusted and respected by the UN inspectors for his integrity. When Baghdad fell, he reached out to former UN members, including Scott Ritter, a former marine major who had led many inspections of suspected WMD sites in the 1990s. Ritter, who created controversy after 9/11 by publicly insisting that Iraq had no nuclear weapons, introduced me to the general via Gmail—the internet was up and running in the first months after the American invasion—and we agreed to meet in Damascus, when it was safe for him to make the drive by taxi.
The general had sad tales, mostly secondhand, of the horrors of the American occupation, beginning with the American GIs who went on house raids and repeatedly stole money—many Iraqis kept their savings in hundred-dollar bills—and other valuables. He told of U.S. sergeants who made arrests and demanded cash to free those arrested, and senior American officers who were demanding kickbacks on the many contracts being awarded to local and foreign contractors. In his telling, Iraqi interpreters working for American combat units were constantly abusing prisoners and constantly extorting money from fellow citizens by threatening to tell Americans they were collaborating with the enemy. His most distressing comments, in terms of direct knowledge, were about the American-run prisons and the incessant torture and occasional murder that took place there. The worst was Abu Ghraib, he said, where women prisoners were spied on and assaulted by American and Iraqi guards to the point where they would write to their fathers and brothers and beg them to come kill them in jail because they had been dishonored by American and Iraqi prison guards.
Much of what he told me was impossible to confirm without being in Iraq and, in some cases, hard to credit. But the words about Abu Ghraib were reflected in those pretty much ignored reports by the various human rights groups; his account also smelled right. A few months later I learned that photos depicting some astonishing sexual abuse of male prisoners were floating around, and some were in the possession of 60 Minutes, the CBS news show. I also learned that a few GIs who were assigned there as prison guards were being prosecuted. The photos were said to show naked young male prisoners being forced to masturbate as female prison guards watched. The American military and the CIA had become desperate for reliable inside intelligence about future plans, and one scheme, so I had been told, was to grant early release to a few carefully vetted young male prisoners with the understanding that they, in return, would join the resistance and become informants on future attack planning. I wondered if the idea of converting some male prisoners into intelligence assets had somehow morphed into the sexual depravation shown in the photos. Those prisoners who had refused to become spies for the U.S. military might think differently if the military had photos of their masturbation in front of women. Nothing would be more shameful to a male in the Middle East. While researching the Abu Ghraib story, I was told, but could not confirm, that sexual extortion had been tried by the Israelis in an effort to get Palestinian prisoners to agree to join Hamas and similar radical groups and to spy on them.
I eventually got the names of a few American prison guards who were in trouble, learned who their lawyers were, and went to work. I soon had copies of the photographs, including some not in the possession of 60 Minutes, but I had managed to obtain something far more important—an internal report of the criminal goings-on at the prison that had been written by an army major general named Antonio Taguba. The detailed report was as incendiary as the photos. I learned that the senior executives at CBS were extremely skittish about broadcasting the photos, after being urged by the Bush administration not to do so. I convinced a skeptical Remnick that there was no need for our magazine to scoop 60 Minutes on its own story; an airing of the photos by the network would provide millions of dollars of free publicity for The New Yorker once we published the Taguba report. I sensed it would be easy to resolve the executive anxiety at CBS. I telephoned Mary Mapes, the CBS producer on the story, at her home in Texas and told her I had both the photos they had and a report they did not have and if CBS did not run the photos the next week—60 Minutes aired Sundays and Thursdays in those days—I would have no choice but to write about the network’s continuing censorship in The New Yorker. I knew Mapes hated the extensive censorship at CBS. The photos aired Thursday, and, to my amusement, Dan Rather, the anchor for the show, who I knew had also been fighting to get the story on the air, began his report by stating that CBS was showing the photos only after learning other media—he did not say The New Yorker—had the story. It wasn’t hard to guess that he had been ordered to make such an asinine excuse for an important news story.
It worked out beautifully. There was no way the mainstream media could ignore the report Taguba had written. Of course my old newspaper tried to avoid having to quote and give credit to another publication; Jeff Gerth was told to give me a call when The New Yorker came out and ask if I wo
uld give a copy of the report to the Times. We both laughed at the silliness of the request.
The New Yorker story was major news, and I was flooded with interview requests, and did many—it was good for the magazine and good for me—but I knew there was more to do.*3 The contempt GIs had for prisoners, and the notion that they could do what they wished, stemmed from the top. I said as much in one national radio interview and added, totally spur of the moment, that if anyone listening knew more about the prison they could call me, and quickly rattled off my office telephone number. I had no idea why I went so far, and feared that I would be flooded with callers trying to sell me magazine subscriptions and the like. I instead got a call from the mother of one of the soldiers, a young woman, who had been involved in the abuse. I returned the call and went immediately to see her. She had telephoned me out of desperation. Her young, vibrant daughter, in the army reserve, had been assigned to a military police unit at Abu Ghraib and returned from the war zone totally changed. She was depressed and disconsolate; newly married before going overseas, she left her husband, moved away from the family, and took a night job. No one could figure what was going on. The mother read the Abu Ghraib story in a local newspaper and confronted her daughter with the story. The daughter took a look and slammed the door. At that point, the mother remembered she had given her daughter a portable computer before she deployed to Iraq; the goal was to make it easier for the two of them to stay in touch. The computer had been left at home. The mother decided after reading about Abu Ghraib to take the computer to her office as a backup computer and, before doing so, began to delete files. She opened a file marked Iraq and was flooded with dozens of digital photographs of naked prisoners. One stood out: a terrified young Iraqi standing in terror in front of a prison cell with both hands protecting his privates as two snarling Belgian shepherd dogs strain at their leashes a foot away. She heard my interview soon after and called me. She was hesitant at first about releasing the photos for use in The New Yorker, but in the end she agreed, and also agreed to get permission from her troubled daughter to do so. There was something else she wanted to tell me as I was about to leave. Every weekend after she returned from Iraq, her beautiful daughter would go to a tattoo parlor and darken her body with large black tattoos that eventually covered all that could be seen. It was as if, the mother said, she wanted to change her skin.
The Abu Ghraib exposé and my other work led to a book contract, and Amy Davidson, my editor at the magazine, was hired to weave new material I had and the stories I had done into Chain of Command, which was published in late 2004. It probably sold as many copies overseas as it did in America, which may not have been what the publisher had hoped for, but I sure liked the reviews. One, written by Michiko Kakutani, a daily reviewer for the Times, went straight to my heart: “And much of his post-9/11 reporting—which frequently provoked controversy and criticism when it first appeared—had since come to be accepted as conventional wisdom.” I was pretty sure I would continue for the next few decades to provoke controversy and criticism, and it felt good to begin doing so with a clean slate, at least in her view. I always paid more attention to peer reviews, rather than sniping that invariably came from academics, and Jonathan Mirsky, a former editor for the London Times, complained, very nicely, in a review for The Spectator, “This is the only book I have reviewed that is impossible to summarize. It covers…much of which appeared in over 20 New Yorker stories….All of this becomes a titanic—devastating is not a strong enough adjective—case against Washington and, by extension, London.”
It would be wonderful to say that my reporting on Abu Ghraib changed the course of the war and ended torture, but of course nothing like that happened, just as the My Lai story had not ended the Vietnam War or its brutality. I stayed with the growing American-made mess in Iraq, the Middle East, and South Asia over the next few years, writing about
a critically important change in American policy in the War on Terror, in which the Bush administration decided it would work with extremist Sunni groups in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Middle East in an effort to add to the pressure on Shiite-dominated Iran, Hezbollah, and Alawite Syria. The March 2007 article, titled “The Redirection,” was heavily reprinted for years;
Dick Cheney’s repeated but unfulfilled desire to attack Iran, which, as I insisted, to much incredulity from my colleagues in the media, was repeatedly found by the U.S. intelligence community not to have an ongoing nuclear weapons program;
Pakistan’s burgeoning nuclear weapons programs, which had Washington terrified to the extent that there were secret plans to take out its entire nuclear weapons complex in a crisis;
Cheney and Bush’s secret intelligence and arms support for the failed 2006 Israeli war against Hezbollah that was, as I wrote, a strategic setback for Israel, and one that diminished its ability to deter a future Arab attack;
the September 2007 Israeli bombing attack on what it claimed was a nuclear reactor in Syria, and why the site might not have been what Israel said it was;
similar American covert intelligence and arms support for the Israeli war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip in late 2008, just as Bush and Cheney were leaving office. That war ended on January 19, 2009, after President-elect Obama privately warned Israel that if it was still under way at his inauguration the next day, he would publicly call for its end.
My reporting after 9/11 necessarily involved many trips to the Middle East and interviews with prominent leaders relatively unknown to most Americans, including President Bashar Assad of Syria and Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, the Shiite militia invariably depicted in the U.S. media as the A-team of terrorist organizations.
My first interview with the tall, gangly Assad took place in 2003 in his downtown office in Damascus. He had been president for three years and clearly was uncertain about dealing with an American reporter. I asked my first question, and he responded by asking me, shyly, if it was all right if he gave me a detailed answer. I told him he was the president and it was his call, and then asked why he had raised the issue. He explained that he had been interviewed sometime earlier by Lally Weymouth, the journalist daughter of Katharine Graham, and she told him his answers were much too long. Because I was the first American journalist he had met with since, he wondered if there was some rule about the length of answers. I later asked Weymouth, who wrote often on foreign affairs for The Washington Post, about Assad’s comment, and she vigorously denied telling the president, essentially, to shut up.
Assad had not supported the Bush/Cheney invasion of Iraq, as his father had done during the Bush family’s far more successful first invasion in 1991, but the secular Syrian leader assured me that he supported America’s war against al-Qaeda. He reminded me that he had issued a statement in support of America after 9/11, and further said he had supplied thousands of intelligence files on the Muslim Brotherhood in Hamburg to the American intelligence community, as well as operational details about a future al-Qaeda attack on the U.S. Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain.
Once back in Washington, I confirmed that Assad’s intelligence had been invaluable; I also learned that some in Washington were convinced the 9/11 attack had been planned in Hamburg. I further learned—Assad had not given me this detail—the planned attack on the Fifth Fleet called for a glider loaded with explosives to crash into a headquarters building at the base. It also turned out that a tip about Bahrain had come from an invaluable source inside al-Qaeda who was cooperating with Syrian intelligence. The CIA, which had been unable to develop any similar sources, began pressuring Assad, through the U.S. embassy in Damascus, to tell all there was to know about the source. Assad resisted for months but finally relented after being guaranteed that the CIA would make no effort to contact the source. Assad told me in a later interview that he was stunned to learn that the CIA had done precisely what it promised not to do—made a clumsy effort to recruit the source
who responded by immediately breaking off all contact with Syrian intelligence. Assad urged me not to write about the double cross because, he explained, he hoped the Bush administration would come to realize that Syria, as a secular nation, could be an asset in the War on Terror.
One rarely discussed issue among journalists has to do with access; we of course tend to like those senior officials and leaders, such as Assad, who grant us interviews and speak openly with us. But access inevitably provokes ethical dilemmas. I met again with Assad in Damascus at eleven o’clock in the morning on February 14, 2005, and the immediate topic had to do with a dispute he was known to have had with Rafic Hariri, the prime minister of Lebanon. Syria then played a dominant role in Lebanon and controlled many aspects of its politics and military. Hariri, like all Lebanese prime ministers at the time, toed the line and followed Syria’s demands, but Damascus was buzzing with gossip about the meeting. I began my talk with a much more comfortable and confident Assad by asking what was up with Hariri. The issue was money, Assad said. Syria was going into the cell phone business, an extremely high-profit activity, and everyone wanted in, including members of his family. Hariri’s proposal was especially onerous, because he was insisting on controlling 70 percent of the profit. Even his greedy in-laws, Assad said, were offering a larger slice of the take. The issue had been resolved, he said, and Hariri had returned to Beirut. Corruption was of course endemic in the region. We moved on to the important geopolitical issues of the day.
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