500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars

by Kurt Eichenwald

That eventuality, Bush knew, would be a huge blow to the Iraq mission. If Blair was forced from office, Britain would pull out of the coalition and America would lose its most important ally. The entire military strategy would have to be rethought.

  The men and their aides crafted a statement declaring their commitment to disarming Saddam and aiding the Iraqi people. Once they were finished, everyone prepared to leave the room. Alastair Campbell, a Blair aide who over the years had struck up a friendly relationship with Bush, approached the president. He was going to be participating in a charity run, Campbell explained.

  “If I do a sub-four-hour marathon, will you sponsor me?” he asked.

  Bush smiled. “If you win the vote in Parliament, I’ll kiss your ass.”

  “I’d rather have the sponsorship,” Campbell replied.

  • • •

  Minutes later, Bush spoke to the assembled reporters, making no effort to mask his anger or sugarcoat his message.

  “Tomorrow is a moment of truth for the world,” he said. “Many nations have voiced a commitment to peace and security. And now they must demonstrate that commitment in the only effective way, by supporting the immediate and unconditional surrender of Saddam Hussein.”

  Blair agreed. “More discussion is just more delay, with Saddam remaining armed with weapons of mass destruction,” he said. “We are in the final stages because, after twelve years of failing to disarm him, now is the time when we have to decide.”

  The reporters didn’t quite know what to make of what they had just heard. Tomorrow, final stages, time to decide. Had Bush and Blair just thrown down the gauntlet and given the U.N. twenty-four hours to act?

  Ron Fournier from the Associated Press asked the question. “When you say tomorrow is the moment of truth, does that mean that tomorrow is the last day that the resolution can be voted up or down and, at the end of the day tomorrow, one way or another, the diplomatic window has closed?”

  Bush didn’t hesitate. “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  • • •

  When the press conference ended, the four world leaders stood together, shaking hands as they bade their good-byes. Bush patted Blair on the shoulder, then walked off toward Air Force One, accompanied by Condoleezza Rice.

  “I hope that’s not the last time we see him,” she said to Bush. In days, they knew, Blair could be a private citizen again.

  The president and his entourage climbed onto the plane. They gathered at a wooden table in the aircraft’s conference room and began hammering out what they called “the ultimatum speech,” which Bush would deliver in an Oval Office address the following night. The message was simple: Hussein had to leave Iraq in forty-eight hours from the time Bush gave his address—by Wednesday at 8:00 P.M. Washington time—or face the fury of American might.

  They completed the draft and settled in for a movie. Bush munched on popcorn as the lights dimmed. The film Conspiracy Theory began. Bush didn’t like it.

  • • •

  Two days later, Tony Blair was reviewing documents in shirtsleeves, his suit jacket beside him on the table. He was in a private room in the House of Commons, directly behind the Speaker’s chair, preparing to beseech Parliament to authorize the use of military force against Iraq.

  The room was a hive of activity, with aides giving him last-minute information and suggesting pungent turns of phrase for his speech. Amid the tumult, one of them studied Blair. The intense machinations of the past year had exacted a toll on the prime minister. He had lost weight and his face had paled. But his energy had not waned—he was reaching the tail end of what would be an eighteen-hour day, and his staffers were still struggling to keep up with him as he rushed from place to place.

  The time approached 12:30 P.M. Blair slipped on his jacket and stepped into the House chamber.

  • • •

  Blair stood at a wooden podium in front of his seat in the House of Commons, the spot where prime ministers historically addressed the members.

  “This is a tough choice indeed,” he said, “but it is also a stark one: To stand British troops down now and turn back or to hold firm to the course that we have set. I believe passionately that we must hold firm to that course.”

  Already, some of the House members saw a difference in Blair, changes in style that underscored the gravity of the moment. There were no sneers or head shakes directed at those he considered fools as there had been so often in the past. There was no cadence of the pulpit. Instead, the words were simple, raw, and respectful. But above all, they were bleak.

  “The outcome of this debate will determine more than the fate of the Iraqi regime,” Blair proclaimed. “It will determine the pattern of international politics for the next generation.”

  He reviewed the twelve-year history of the U.N.’s efforts to disarm Iraq, reciting the dashed hopes, the endless delays, the fruitless talks. Now Security Council members were singing that same old song. The choice was no longer about whether action against Saddam would be postponed, Blair said. It was about whether there would be any action at all.

  “The tragedy is that the world has to learn the lesson all over again that weakness in the face of a threat from a tyrant is the surest way not to peace but, unfortunately, to conflict,” Blair said.

  These were not simple issues, the prime minister said, and reasonable people could disagree in good faith on how to proceed. There had, of course, been efforts to link Saddam with bin Laden, though no firm proof of a meaningful relationship had yet been found.

  “At the moment,” he said, “I accept fully that the association between the two is loose. But it is hardening.”

  Blair’s voice stayed steady, but his hands began to tremble. His wife, Cherie, watched from the gallery, her face frozen.

  “To retreat now, I believe, would put at hazard all that we hold dearest,” he said, “to tell our allies that, at the very moment of action, at the very moment when they need our determination, Britain faltered.”

  He looked around the packed room. “I will not be a party to such a course,” he said.

  With that, Blair pushed aside his prepared remarks.

  “This is the time not just for this government—or indeed for this Prime Minister—but for this House to give a lead,” he said, “to show, at the moment of decision, that we have the courage to do the right thing.”

  Blair stopped speaking, and the members erupted in applause and cheers.

  • • •

  The debate lasted late into the night. At 10:00 P.M., a majority beat back an amendment offered by 139 members of Blair’s own party, declaring that the case for war had not been proved. Learning of his victory, Blair breathed deep and sighed. The revolt against his war policy had been quelled. Britain would be joining the Americans in the fight to defang Saddam Hussein.

  • • •

  On the afternoon of March 19, in the private dining room just off the Oval Office, members of the war cabinet were showing Bush maps of Baghdad and pointing out a proposed strategic target.

  The combined CIA and army Special Forces unit—called the Northern Iraq Liaison Unit—had turned up intelligence the previous day. As relayed by an important source, information from Iraq’s communications headquarters indicated that Saddam, his sons, and other top members of his government would be hiding out at Dora Farms, an estate owned by the dictator’s wife. Aerial reconnaissance suggested that the location’s security had been tightened. Rather than fleeing Iraq and seeking asylum abroad before Bush’s forty-eight-hour deadline expired that night, Saddam apparently planned to hole up at the small complex on the outskirts of Baghdad.

  Bush clasped his chin. “How good are your sources on this?” he asked Tenet.

  “Very good,” Tenet replied. “But we can’t guarantee that it isn’t wrong, or that it isn’t a trick.”

  Saddam was capable of doing anything to stay in power. He might have moved an orphanage to the site, luring the United States into unknowingly raining bombs on child
ren and earning the censure of the world. Or maybe Dora Farms was just a stopping point on his way out of the country. But, Tenet said, the intelligence that placed Saddam there was as good as it got.

  The president furrowed his brow. Launching an air war now would be a drastic departure from the carefully choreographed invasion plan; there were supposed to be two days of covert operations before bombing began. Plus, he couldn’t underestimate Saddam’s ruthlessness, he thought. Launching this strike could annihilate the Iraqi dictator and his lieutenants, or it could kill innocents put in danger by that sociopath. Bush wanted more information before making a decision.

  Either way, General Tommy Franks, head of U.S. Central Command, had to be briefed on the situation. General Dick Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, walked out of the room to call him.

  • • •

  At that moment, just west of Doha, Qatar, Tommy Franks was asleep in his bedroom at the Al Udeid Air Base, the forward headquarters of CENTCOM. As he dozed, a movie—a 1949 John Wayne western called She Wore a Yellow Ribbon—was playing, unwatched and unheard, on his television.

  By his bed, the secure phone rang. It was Myers.

  “Tom,” the general said, “I’m in the White House with the president, Secretary Rumsfeld, and George Tenet. Are you aware of the emerging target at Dora Farms?”

  Franks knew about it. He had heard from the CIA the previous day of the intelligence suggesting Saddam and some of his senior lieutenants might be planning to hide out on March 19 at the compound. He told Myers that his group had been laying the groundwork for an aerial attack on the grounds.

  “Can you strike it tonight?” Myers asked.

  Franks pulled on his boots. This would be a last-minute change in the strategy. There would be none of the long-planned “shock and awe” from the initial moments of attack, more like puzzlement and laughter. Still, Franks understood that there was a chance to end this war by taking out Saddam in one shot. The American military would have pulled off a feat to astonish the world.

  • • •

  Timing was tight.

  The intelligence indicated that there was an underground concrete shelter at Dora. The only aircraft in the area that could carry a bunker-busting bomb, hit a precise target in the middle of a populated area, and, with luck, return safely was an F-117 Stealth Fighter. Sending a bomber now, without having first crippled Baghdad’s air defenses, would never be authorized in normal circumstances. F-117s could barely be detected by radar, and at night, they were almost impossible to observe from the ground. But in daylight, they could be seen and shot down. For this mission, the Stealths would have to drop the bombs, then flee the Baghdad skies before the first glow of dawn. To pull that off, Bush had give the go-ahead for the attack by no later than 7:15 P.M. Washington time, just three hours away—and forty-five minutes before the deadline Bush had given Saddam for leaving Iraq.

  • • •

  Tenet had more news. Saddam had been spotted arriving at Dora in a taxi.

  Bush paused as he considered the new development. It was 7:11, four minutes before the deadline Franks had set for a decision. The president looked around the room at his advisors.

  “Do you favor a strike?” he asked. Each of them—Myers, Rumsfeld, Tenet, Cheney, Rice, and Powell—said yes.

  “Let’s go,” Bush said.

  7:12 P.M. The moment that Bush issued his last major policy decision in the terror wars, launched on a clear day in Washington some eighteen months before.

  • • •

  Three minutes later, Tony Blair was in his private residence on the third floor of Number 10 Downing Street, watching soccer highlights on the ITV television network. He was disheartened to see that his favorite team, Newcastle United, had been knocked out of the Champions League tournament with a 0–2 loss to Barcelona.

  The telephone rang. David Manning, the special advisor on foreign affairs, was on the line. “I just received a call from the White House,” he said. “The president has just authorized a decapitation strike against Saddam and the Iraqi high command.”

  A last-minute change. The war wasn’t supposed to start this way. Blair mentioned that he wanted to speak to Bush, to hear more about what was happening.

  There wasn’t much else to learn, Manning said. “And the president’s gone off for dinner.”

  Blair thanked Manning and hung up.

  • • •

  George and Laura Bush were sitting in the living room of the White House residence when a call came through from Andy Card, the chief of staff. It was 8:05 P.M. The deadline Bush had issued two days before had passed.

  “Mr. President,” Card said, “our intelligence officials say they have no information that Saddam has left Iraq.”

  Now there was no longer any reason for Bush to call off the F-117s that were hurtling toward Baghdad. They would reach their target, he knew, in just over an hour and a half.

  • • •

  At 5:34 Baghdad time, the Stealth bombers dropped laser-guided GBU-28 bunker busters on Dora Farms. Explosions thundered over the sleeping city. Apparently, the Iraqi military had not been expecting a morning attack; a full minute passed until air-raid sirens sounded, followed by another lengthy delay before antiaircraft fire began.

  • • •

  A crowd of senior administration officials dashed into and out of the Oval Office dining room, making calls in search of news from Baghdad. Bush came down from the residence and joined his advisors just after ten o’clock. Steve Hadley, the deputy national security advisor, approached him.

  “Mr. President,” he said. “It appears that the bombing mission went according to plan. The planes are still in stealth mode and are heading back to base.”

  Bush nodded. “Let’s pray for the pilots,” he said.

  Everyone in the room bowed their heads in silence. When the moment passed, Bush walked into the Oval Office and sat at his desk, the same one used twelve years before by his father, President George H. W. Bush, when he announced the commencement of bombing against Iraq in the opening salvo of the Persian Gulf War.

  Now, once again, a camera and sound equipment rested on wooden planks that had been laid across the floor. A member of the television crew approached Bush, brushed his hair, applied some makeup, and straightened his lapel. When she finished, the president glanced at an aide and pumped his fist.

  “Feel good,” he said.

  Seconds before 10:15, the countdown began. His image appeared on televisions worldwide.

  “My fellow citizens,” he began. “At this hour American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.”

  He spoke for four minutes, then sat completely still with his eyes focused on the camera.

  “And, we’re out,” the director said. “Thank you, Mr. President.”

  Bush stood and approached the men and women who had helped guide him through the tumultuous months since 9/11, shaking their hands and accepting their congratulations. Then he strolled away, leaving his aides behind as he headed upstairs for bed.

  EPILOGUE

  Beneath a flawless late-summer sky, two bagpipers and a drummer played “Amazing Grace” in the concrete canyon where the World Trade Center once stood. Alongside them, police officers and firefighters unfurled the tattered American flag that had previously fluttered over the rubble of the towers, as a tribute to the terrorists’ victims and a display of the nation’s resolve.

  The crowds that gathered for the second anniversary memorial service were smaller than the previous year, and fewer official ceremonies were taking place around the country. Still, thousands had come to Ground Zero this day, wearing ribbons of remembrance and holding photographs aloft of loved ones who had perished on 9/11. At 8:46, exactly two years after American Airlines flight 77 smashed into the North Tower, a single bell chimed and the crowd went silent.

  A boy named Peter Negron, dressed in a dark
suit that hung loosely over his thin frame, stepped up to a wooden podium near the flag. He was no longer the eleven-year-old mischief maker he had been on the day his father was murdered. He was a teenager with an ache that wouldn’t go away and eyes that wept whenever he recalled his father’s last words to him: “I love you, champ.”

  Peter leaned in to the microphone. “I wanted to read you this poem,” he said, “because it says what I am feeling.”

  In a reedy, tremulous voice, Peter recited an elegy called “Stars,” describing his affection for the lights in the sky because they never told him to cheer up or asked him the reasons for his sadness, yet somehow calmed him in their silent vigil.

  He reached the final lines. “I felt them watching over me, each one—and let me cry and cry till I was done.”

  Peter was followed by two hundred other children who had lost loved ones in the attack and who now stood, two at a time, to speak the names of the dead. It was a poignant and potent scene. These were the youngest victims, the sons, daughters, nieces, nephews, and grandchildren of the three thousand who lost their lives that day.

  And gradually, with the passage of time, they were being forgotten by an emotionally exhausted nation. Patriotic fervor was giving way to doubt. Sorrow had been subsumed by anger and protests—about Iraq, Guantanamo, detainee treatment, military commissions. Soon, the domestic political conflict would spread to other controversies, with the disclosures of the NSA’s new powers to monitor electronic communication, the CIA’s secret prisons, and the legal analyses proclaiming the president’s almost unfettered powers at a time of war. The revelations spilled out, one after another, ripping the national fabric as nothing had done since Vietnam.

  Bush was already losing credibility. The invasion of Iraq was emerging as a strategic debacle—there were no weapons of mass destruction, no connections to 9/11, no adequate preparations for the aftermath of victory. Looting, blackouts, and mayhem were turning the Iraqi people against the United States. Bush and some of the strongest advocates for the war revised the rationale, nudging aside the claims about nuclear and biochemical arsenals and about Saddam’s connivance with al-Qaeda, proclaiming instead that the mission was largely to free Iraqis from the rule of a tyrant. But a growing number of Americans were unconvinced—that same day, even as crowds were softly weeping at Ground Zero, a new Gallup poll was released showing that Bush’s approval among Americans had tumbled to its lowest level since the 9/11 attacks. By the time Bush left office, he was the most unpopular departing president in history, with Gallup showing a final approval rating of 22 percent.