At the end of 1996, the CIA had tried to shut down the INC, issuing a “burn notice” on Chalabi personally.3 But he refused to quit and began raising money privately, spending some of his own to nurture his diverse if fractious coalition of Iraqi opposition groups: Kurds, Shiites, Sunnis, secular and religious critics. In Washington, he had ties to conservatives, neocons, and liberals on Capitol Hill and in the White House.
Chalabi and I first spoke at length in August 1998. I called him to confirm a story I was pursuing with Jim Risen, the paper’s new intelligence reporter, about an Iraqi whom the CIA then considered the highest-ranking scientist to defect from Iraq’s nuclear program: Khidhir Abdul Abas Hamza. I had learned of Hamza’s existence from David Albright, a Washington-based physicist and former inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN group that had surveyed nuclear sites in Iraq. He had hired Hamza after the CIA had finished debriefing him. They were planning to write a book on Iraq’s nuclear program when David offered me the chance to be the first reporter to interview him.
Risen and I wrote a front-page story—an Iraqi’s account of the inner workings of Saddam’s three-decade effort to build a nuclear bomb. The fifty-nine-year-old Hamza told us that on the eve of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Iraq, despite Israel’s attack on its sole reactor a decade earlier, had completed the research and testing needed for an atomic weapon and was scrambling to make at least one crude bomb using uranium. The effort might have produced a bomb in a few months, he told us, had it not been disrupted by the allied bombing campaign.
Before the Gulf War, the CIA had assured policy makers that Iraq was at least a decade away from producing a bomb. Based partly on Hamza’s information, the agency acknowledged having underestimated not only Iraq’s nuclear capabilities but also Saddam’s determination to resume his bomb program once UN inspections ended and economic sanctions against Iraq were lifted. Before leaving the nuclear program in 1990 and defecting in 1994, Hamza told us, he had helped train young Iraqi scientists who were working on nonnuclear projects but could quickly resume work on weapons if Saddam ordered them to do so.
The second part of Hamza’s story particularly intrigued us: he claimed to have nearly slipped through America’s fingers because of CIA bungling. After fleeing to the Kurdish safe haven in 1994, Hamza said, he had sought out Chalabi, who, like him, had graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was then working with the CIA. He said that Chalabi had put him in touch with the agency. But the CIA had dismissed the scientist as a fraud after a cursory telephone interview; it had not sent an agent to vet him in person. So Hamza had sought shelter first in Turkey, and then in Mu‘ammar al-Qaddhafi’s Libya—the oil-rich rogue state with its own nuclear ambitions, which had tried unsuccessfully to recruit him for its own fledgling nuclear program. He fled Libya in 1995 after the Iraqi secret police sent his eldest son to Tripoli to persuade him to return to nuclear work in Iraq. Iraqi agents had tried to kill his son twice, he told us. Hamza again reached out to the United States, this time successfully.
Chalabi confirmed Hamza’s tale of how an intelligence coup for the CIA had nearly become a bonanza for Qaddhafi. He gave me a quote for our story about Langley’s mishandling of Hamza.
My editors were pleased with both stories.4 Chalabi’s information had proven correct. On subsequent occasions, what Chalabi told me had also panned out. So although I knew that the CIA, State Department, and Israeli intelligence loathed and mistrusted him, I thought he had been straight with me.
* * *
Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri reminded me of Khidhir Hamza when I met him in a hotel in Bangkok. Both were slightly pudgy, their thinning hair slicked back, comfortable in cashmere V-necks and tailored shirts with their initials embroidered on the pocket. They wore a lot of aftershave.
I was surprised to learn that Haideri, who was sipping tea with Zaab Sethna when I arrived, was a Kurd. Why would Saddam employ someone from a suspect ethnic minority group for such politically sensitive work? And why would a Kurd work for Saddam? In a corrupt, autocratic regime like Saddam’s, Zaab said, money was a great leveler—as well as a tempting incentive. Being connected to the inner circle would protect a vulnerable Kurd, in addition to making him rich. And with a steady, lucrative government contract for his work, Haideri had prospered.
Unlike Hamza, Haideri seemed nervous. I couldn’t blame him. I had interviewed Hamza in a comfortable apartment in Virginia four years after his defection. The CIA had given him a green card, compensation for his cooperation, and assurances of his safety. Haideri had none of these and was to be interviewed the following week by US intelligence officials who would decide his future.
If he had been coached by the INC about what to say, there were few signs of it. There was no coherent narrative. He seemed accustomed to keeping secrets, hesitant to volunteer anything beyond what I had asked him.
He claimed to have personally renovated secret facilities he was told were for biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons. He was careful to say that he had never seen such weapons at the twenty places he had visited or helped refurbish. Iraqi military officials had told him that the sites were intended to store such weapons. He could think of no alternative plausible reason why such rooms would need to be lined with lead-filled concrete and made waterproof. He gave me copies of contracts from the Military Industrialization Organization and a front company called Al Fao that had paid for his work. The storage areas were built alongside wells, in private villas, and even under the Saddam Hussein Hospital in Baghdad. He described how Iraq used foreign companies to circumvent the sanctions aimed at preventing it from acquiring barred equipment and technology. He named companies he had worked with and provided contracts for these deals, too. He drew detailed maps of the locations of the storage areas where he said he had worked or visited. He told me that Saddam’s “presidential sites” from which UN inspectors had been barred in 1997 were being used for concealment.
Over the next two days, I grilled Haideri repeatedly about the names of Iraqi civilian and military officials he claimed to have worked with, the type of work he had done before and after his contracts with the military, the details of his family’s background. He had relatives in Australia, he told me, and if the Americans didn’t believe him, he would try to flee there. He also had family in Iraq, so at first he asked not to be named in my article. It would be impossible to remain anonymous, I told him. If he wanted his story publicized, he would have to be identified by name.
About a week later, the story was about ready to run. It seemed solid. The head of Leycochem, a German construction materials company based in Cologne, confirmed that he had worked with Haideri in Iraq. He denied that he or his firm had any connection to WMD. Charles Duelfer had shared copies of Haideri’s contracts with some of his former inspectors. The contracts and maps seemed authentic, they told me. Duelfer agreed to be quoted. Zaab and I talked by phone. A joint CIA-DIA team had interviewed Haideri twice and was attempting to verify his claims. Haideri had told him and the US intelligence analysts something he had not mentioned to me: that Iraq had tested chemicals and germ agents on Shiite and Kurdish prisoners at undisclosed sites in the desert in 1989 and 1992. Finally, Zaab said that Haideri would, though reluctantly, be named in the story.5 The US team had now taken him to a secure location. In Washington, a military intelligence officer I trusted confirmed this, adding that the analysts’ tentative conclusion was that Haideri’s information seemed reliable.
My story appeared on the front page. Haideri’s account was “consistent with other reports” that continued to emerge from Iraq about unconventional weapons activities, Charles Duelfer was quoted as saying. “The evidence shows that Iraq has not given up its desire for weapons of mass destruction.”6 The story also quoted Richard Butler, the former UNSCOM chief, who called Haideri’s claims “plausible.” The places and projects that Haideri had identified were “known to, or suspected by, his inspection commission,” I quoted him as saying
.
Given the potentially explosive nature of Haideri’s charges, editor Steve Engelberg and I made sure that the story was heavily qualified. There was “no independent way to verify Haideri’s account,” I wrote. I disclosed in its fourth graph that my interview had been arranged by Chalabi’s INC, “the main Iraqi opposition group, which seeks the overthrow of Mr. Hussein.” If verified, I wrote, Haideri’s allegations would provide “ammunition to officials within the Bush administration who have been arguing that Mr. Hussein should be driven from power partly because of his unwillingness to stop making weapons of mass destruction, despite his pledges to do so.”
— CHAPTER 14 —
PHASE 2: IRAQ
I never had an opportunity to interview senior White House officials about the decision to invade Iraq and the role that Iraqi WMD played before the war began. I have never met George Bush. I did not discuss the war with Dick Cheney until the winter of 2012, when I was seated next to him at a dinner in New York, years after he had left office. I interviewed him about that decision in January 2013. While I would have relished an opportunity to interview either of them before the war, the administration’s passion for secrecy and its aversion to the media made that unlikely. So did the paper’s traditions.
The Times has always been a tribal, turf-ridden organization. David Sanger, a collegial White House correspondent, would have vigorously resisted my trespassing. The Pentagon was covered by two able correspondents. I had worked on several intelligence stories with Jim Risen, but the decision to oust Saddam was being made at the White House, not at Langley. The CIA’s role was to provide assessments of Iraq’s links to terror and its WMD actions and capabilities. Its conclusion, that Iraq was continuing to hide chemical and biological weapons and had an active nuclear program, turned out to be wrong, but it was widely shared even by foreign intelligence agencies of governments that opposed the war.
I was a lead reporter on a part of the prewar buildup: what the Bush administration knew, or thought it knew, about Iraqi WMD. Even this aspect was not mine exclusively. I would not have written a story about WMD that involved the CIA without asking Jim Risen if he wanted to join forces. A beat reporter had contacts and context that roving investigators like me lacked. Their input made our stories richer and usually more accurate. For that reason, I had long campaigned for joint bylines years before the executive editor allowed them. When I joined the paper, only one reporter’s name could appear on a story, a policy that had stoked a reluctance to cooperate. Having been big-footed by senior reporters, I knew what it was like to be frozen out of front-page stories. Citing anonymous Times staff, several critics would later write that some reporters had refused to work with me because they doubted my reporting. But my stories both before and after 9/11 were mostly joint bylined.1
Still, I sensed even early in 2002 that my near-constant presence in the Washington bureau was causing resentment. But during those frantic months after 9/11, I had little time to dwell on Times internal politics. I agreed with Howell Raines, Gerald Boyd, and Steve Engelberg that the paper had a historic duty to publish as much information as quickly as possible about Al Qaeda, the source of the mysterious anthrax letters, the pre-9/11 policy misjudgments and intelligence lapses that had resulted in the death of thousands, and what the Bush administration was doing to prevent the next attack. And the administration was doing plenty.
Having campaigned for president with a cautious foreign policy critical of his predecessor’s humanitarian and nation-building interventions, President Bush had radically altered his outlook and policies after September 11. “I had just witnessed the damage inflicted by nineteen fanatics armed with box cutters,” he wrote in his memoir. “I could only imagine the destruction possible if an enemy dictator passed his WMD to terrorists.”
As Vice President Cheney stressed in public statements and interviews, America had to act to thwart such threats if there was only a “one percent chance” that Al Qaeda might get a nuclear bomb or a germ weapon of mass destruction.2 The two of them began each day in the Oval Office with a parade of potential horribles: the CIA’s “Presidential Daily Brief.” The PDB’s terrifying tips, reports, and rumors of plots about to unfold, many of them involving WMD, seemed “a frighteningly real possibility,” Bush wrote. Between 9/11 and the middle of 2003, the CIA reported an average of four hundred specific threats a month and tracked more than twenty alleged large-scale plots against American targets. FBI Director Robert Mueller told Bush in late September 2001 that there were 331 potential Al Qaeda operatives inside the United States.3
Less than three weeks after 9/11 came the anthrax letter attacks, which Bush feared might be the start of Al Qaeda’s “second wave”—a “sickening thought,” he wrote. One of the “best intelligence services in Europe” had told them that the letters might be the work of Saddam. While others suspected Al Qaeda, what terrified Bush was the realization that the intelligence community had no clue about the perpetrator’s identity.4
In October 2001 the detection of the presence of deadly botulinum toxin by White House biodetectors, for which there was no reliable antidote—though a false alarm—had further upset senior officials. That month, CIA director Tenet told Bush and Cheney that Pakistan had arrested two nuclear scientists who had been in contact with Osama bin Laden, possibly to help Al Qaeda build a bomb—“heart-stopping news,” as Times reporter Peter Baker would later call it. In December, Richard Reid, a British citizen, tried to blow up an American Airlines flight carrying 197 people from Paris to Miami by detonating an explosive in his shoes.
George Tenet later called his community’s intelligence reports chilling enough to “make my hair stand on end.” In his memoir, he wrote that the daily PDBs for the White House were more “assertive” than the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s WMD capabilities.5
Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, an NSC expert on biological and nuclear threats for the Bush administration who had also worked for Clinton, said that if anything, the administration had downplayed the dire warnings the CIA delivered each day after 9/11 and the anthrax letters. She called the PDB daily warnings “bone-chilling scary.”
“What haunted the president,” Michael Anton, a former NSC official, agreed, years after the war, “was the prospect of a nuclear 9/11: WMD terrorism.”
Such intelligence reports, false alarms, and foiled plots, coupled with Iraq’s continued stonewalling of UN WMD inspectors, led Bush to reevaluate the threat posed by Saddam. “Virtually every major intelligence agency in the world,” Bush wrote, was convinced that Saddam was hiding unconventional weapons and programs to make them. After 9/11, he wrote, “the stakes were too high to trust a dictator’s word against the weight of the evidence and the consensus of the world.” The lesson he had drawn from 9/11, Bush wrote, was “if we waited for a danger to fully materialize, we would have waited too long.”
Support for such preventive action was strong, too, on Capitol Hill, and not just among Republicans. Dick Gephardt, the House Democratic leader, called the intelligence exchanged at the weekly breakfast meetings that Bush, Cheney, and senior staff held with the Republican and Democratic leadership terrifying. “It’s easy to forget a decade later the mood after 9/11,” he told me years later. “We all feared there would be another attack, possibly with WMD. The chilling reports of Al Qaeda activities—throughout Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia—gave us goose bumps. All of us were focused on doing everything we could to prevent such an attack—whatever was necessary.”
Prominent Democrats such as Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Joe Biden, and Al Gore, among others, agreed with the neocons and now their new convert, President Bush, that Saddam had to go. “We know that he has stored away secret supplies of biological weapons and chemical weapons throughout his country,” Gore said in February 2002. “We are perfectly capable of staying the course in our war against Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network while simultaneously taking those steps necessary to build an international coalition to j
oin us in taking on Saddam Hussein in a timely fashion,” he said in September 2002. Bush had to be “prepared to go the limit” against Saddam, Gore declared. “Failure cannot be an option.”6
Bush’s speech at West Point in June 2002 endorsing preventive war was formalized in the fall of 2002 in a new national security strategy. The thirty-three-page document asserted that the United States would “not hesitate to act alone” and “preemptively” to thwart dangers from hostile states or terrorist groups “armed with, or seeking, nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons.”7
After the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, a rift had developed within the administration over whether the global war on terror’s next target should be Iraq. Hardliners clearly thought so. Among the most influential were Cheney and his staff, as well as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his two neocon deputies, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith; Richard Perle, then chairman of the Defense Policy Board, an important advisory post; several other senior national security officials; and, most critically, the president himself. Nowhere else were US planes being fired upon as they enforced the no-fly zone. Saddam had not only invaded and bullied his neighbors but also used chemical weapons against his own people. He had tried to kill President Bush’s father. Finally, as Peter Baker wrote, “the last time America went to war with him, intelligence agencies discovered that he was further along in his nuclear program than they had known.”8
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