Bob Woodward

by State of Denial (lit)

  On August 26, Vice President Cheney had given a speech that Marks believed must have been cleared by U.S. intelligence. Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction, Cheney said. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us. The rhetoric was very strong, and Marks took it as an article of faith that the intelligence behind it was equally strong. Saddam had WMD.

  Marks immediately realized the invading ground forces would probably come from Kuwait, the oil-rich desert country that shared a 100-mile border with Iraq and blocked most of its access to the Persian Gulf. That meant he'd be sent there probably months ahead of war, a sitting duck with the rest of the ground force generals. What better target for Saddam to hit with a preemptive chemical or biological attack? It would be an awful way to go, he thought, but it was all too possible. Odds were he would not be coming home. Marks, a Catholic, kept his fatalistic conclusions from his wife and daughters, but he went to confession and put his affairs in order.

  For the eleven years since the 1991 Gulf War, the United States had been engaged in what amounted to a low-grade undeclared war to keep Saddam in a box. U.S. warplanes enforced two no-fly zones in Iraq, where Saddam was not permitted to fly any aircraft. U.S. pilots, permitted by U.N. resolution, had entered Iraqi airspace 150,000 times in the last decade. The Iraqis had attacked hundreds of times but not a single U.S. pilot had been lost, mainly because the U.S. had unsurpassed technical intelligence. Overhead satellite photos, other imagery and extensive communications intercept operations by the National Security Agency provided an astonishing edge. If Iraqi pilots or air defense used their radios, NSA picked it up. The Iraqi skies were an open book, a glass ball theater, in military and intelligence slang. U.S. intelligence graded its performance based on its ability to penetrate Iraq in support of the Northern and Southern Watch Operations, and gave itself an A plus.

  But in studying the Iraq intelligence, Marks found that this superior technical intelligence had become a crutch—a wait for the next satellite pass culture. It could be invaluable in pinpointing the location, disposition, strength and movement of Saddam's forces during an invasion. The downside was that it was collection from a distance. They had almost no on-the-ground intelligence, the sort they'd need to find the WMD they were sure Saddam was hiding.

  Marks arranged to meet with the top experts on Iraq and WMD at the Defense Intelligence Agency. He thought of these experts at DIA— the brainchild of Kennedy-Johnson-era Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara and the military's premier, all-source intelligence service— as the smart guys.

  On October 4, 2002, he settled into a conference room at the Pentagon with a dozen or so DIA smart guys. There were the overhead satellite smart guy, the chemical, biological and nuclear weapons smart guys, the Middle East regional smart guys, and the overall intelligence collection systems smart guys.

  What do we really know about Saddam's WMD? he asked them.

  They presented him with their highly classified WMD database on Iraq, called the Weapons of Mass Destruction Master Site List (WMDMSL). It was a list of 946 locations where intelligence indicated there were production plants or storage facilities for chemical, biological or nuclear-related material in Saddam's Iraq.

  The first issue, Marks wrote in his notes, would be SSE—Sensitive Site Exploitation. What would the invading U.S. ground forces do with each WMD site? Destroy it? Test it? Guard it? Render it useless?

  Who physically will be doing that? Marks asked.

  Well, we don't have their names, one of the guys answered.

  Why not? Marks asked. What units are doing that?

  Oh, we've got units who do that.

  Have you notified them?

  Of course not.

  Well, then how's this all going to come together? Marks asked. I hate to be a jerk here, guys, but I'm the guy who's going to be—I and about 400 to 500 guys—are going to be holding the bag on this thing. Can you throw me a bone?

  The precise details on each of the 946 suspected sites—location, type of WMD, what kind of security was there—were more important to the forces on the ground than to anyone else, including the president. Bush might be staking his political capital, but the troops were staking their lives.

  The truth was that the civilian Pentagon experts in their suits, shirts and neckties didn't have much to tell Marks on these points. We haven't done anything, one of them said. Those were operational considerations, several of the smart guys indicated, to be decided by the military commanders, not by them.

  The gap between intelligence and operations doesn't exist in combat, Marks said. The ops guy and the intel guy are as tight as Siamese twins. You are co-joined, he said, dependent on each other. In the heat of warfare, the two had to work together because everything happened instantly in real time. Survival and success depended on it.

  For example, when the WMD exploitation teams would arrive at a suspected site in Iraq they were going to have to do triage, and assign priorities based on urgency and threat. There wouldn't really be a hard-and-fast line between intelligence—what they needed to know—and operations—what they needed to do.

  It will be a function of experience and equipment, he explained. Does this WMD sample have to go back to the lab to be tested? Would it even be possible to get samples? Is this sample benign? Can this be bagged and marked to be examined later?

  The faces of the intel smart guys seemed to say, Not my problem.

  Marks looked over the WMDMSL printout. Are they prioritized? he asked. Was Site Number 1 more important than Site Number 946?

  Of course, General, one of the people at the table said dismissively. Why wouldn't it be?

  No, my point is this: Where physically is 946? Marks asked. Is the prioritization based on the likelihood of WMD being there? Were these all certain sites? Some more certain than others?

  No one had an answer.

  He tried to dig deeper. If site Number 946 was less important than Number 1, he wanted to know why.

  Again, nobody had a real answer.

  Was the first site listed first because they thought it had the most WMD? Or was it because of the type of WMD—chemical, biological, nuclear or missile-related activity or another category? Was it related to the overall threat from the site? Or was it a matter of how quickly or easily Saddam could use the WMD? How are these things racked and stacked? Marks asked.

  The experts indicated that Number 1 was by some measure more valuable.

  Okay. Let's try to define valuable, Marks said.

  They eventually said that 120 of the 946 were top priority, and Marks wrote it in his notes.

  Operationally, Marks began. He stopped for a second as he looked around the table. The lack of interest in the room seemed to grow. Most of these guys have never served in uniform, he surmised. He drew a rough map on a piece of paper.

  Iraq kind of looks like this. We're probably going be down here in Kuwait, Marks said. There are going to be a bunch of kids in Bradley Fighting Vehicles and tanks that are going to be the very first guys that run across these sites that are scattered across the country. As they crossed the border, Marks said, a hypothetical private would have many missions. He's got to kill bad guys. He's got to protect himself. He's got to protect his buddies. He has got to run his equipment. Now they were going to give him another mission: Secure nearly a thousand suspected WMD sites.

  A lot of the smart guys were rolling their eyes at him, Marks thought. Too much detail, too many practical operational issues and questions.

  The very first site might be right here, right across the border, Marks said. But it might be Site 833. So, does he blow by it? Do you want him to stop? Is it important? I mean, there's an operational requirement, and I need you to kind of give me a sense. He added that he was not asking them to tell him what specifically the ground troops should do. That wasn't their job. But I've got to be able to give the operators a sufficient sense of the impor
tance and priority of that site. And just by putting it 833 on the list tells me nothing.

  Marks left the meeting very disturbed. I was shocked at the lack of detail, he said later. These were supposed to be some of the smartest, most dedicated men and women working on WMD intelligence in Iraq. The Pentagon was not going to be much help on this critical issue, he realized.

  Marks dug into the underlying evidence that suggested each of the 946 sites on the Weapons of Mass Destruction Master Site List actually had WMD. It was thin. There were very old satellite images—five years or more in some cases—and some signals intelligence. These were snippets of intercepted conversations, but nothing conclusive relating to a specific site or to specific WMD. There was nothing even remotely like an intercept of an Iraqi officer saying, The VX nerve gas is stored on the first floor of 1600 Saddam Avenue. The WMD list was all on a computer network, but if he printed out the total information on any one site file or folder, he'd get at most 15 or 20 pages, much of which was of doubtful value.

  The U.S. isolation of Iraq since the Gulf War had been nearly complete, and there was no routine commerce, no interchange, no political dialogue—and thus, no real ground intelligence. Technical intelligence had been great for enforcing the no-fly zones, but it was almost useless for the mission of finding, neutralizing or destroying WMD at nearly a thousand sites around the country before it could be used.

  What Marks was confronting was a decade of intelligence blindness. In fact, he realized, of the 946 sites on the WMD site list, he couldn't say with confidence that there were any weapons of mass destruction or stockpiles at a single site. Not one.

  We're on our ass, became a Marks catchphrase, something he repeated to the DIA staff and his own people in meeting after meeting. He would have to galvanize everyone. And yet he kept wondering, Why are we the only guys doing this? I don't get it.

  11

  bush was to give A prime-time speech in Cincinnati on October 7 spelling out the case against Saddam. The CIA kept tabs on what Bush was going to say, and at one point realized that the president planned to make an alarming claim about a potential Saddam nuclear program, by charging that Iraq had been caught trying to buy uranium oxide in Africa.

  You need to take this fucking sentence out because we don't believe it, Tenet told Hadley when he read the draft. Hadley pulled the reference. Instead, Bush said, Many people have asked how close Saddam Hussein is to developing a nuclear weapon. Well, we don't know exactly, and that's the problem. It was a modest claim that accurately reflected the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), the collective judgment of all U.S. intelligence agencies, that had been issued five days earlier. The TOP SECRET NIE said with moderate confidence that Iraq does not have a nuclear weapon or sufficient material to make one but is likely to have a weapon by 2007 to 2009.

  But instead of saying a nuclear Iraq was probably five years off, the president pulled out the stops. Facing clear evidence of peril, he warned, we cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun—that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.

  In a secure video conference October 9, General Franks explained that President Bush, the war cabinet and he himself were still focused on the war plan for invading Iraq.

  The president is not fulfilled with the plan we have, Franks said. Bush was worried that Saddam and his forces would retreat to the capital and hunker down in a kind of Fortress Baghdad, leading to prolonged urban warfare. This concern had been voiced by Rice and Card in secret war-planning meetings for months. Now the first priority was to find a strategy to counter it.

  The president's second priority, Franks said, after Fortress Baghdad, was the WMD problem.

  That was Marks's problem.

  Marks called in favors as he trolled the Army's promotion lists, building up his staff until it reached 400 military officers and others from the civilian intelligence agencies. He selected as his deputy Colonel Steve Rotkoff, 47, a senior military intelligence officer with 25 years in the Army who had been two years behind Marks at West Point. Marks thought Rotkoff was one of the most gifted officers in the Army, his absolute first choice to be the number two officer on the intelligence staff.

  Rotkoff was an atypical officer in some ways—a Jewish intellectual, a bookish, irreverent New Yorker with distinctive, thick, bushy eyebrows. He was also a real bulldog who knew how to get things done. Marks knew that Rotkoff was getting ready to retire from the Army. That was a bonus; he might be especially willing to break some crockery and make things happen. His initial orders to his new deputy: You have complete authority to be strident and border-line disruptive and insubordinate.

  Rotkoff decided to keep a daily war journal, and over the next six months he filled six volumes. Pressed for time on many occasions, he summarized his thoughts and emotions with three-line haiku.

  One of his early observations:

  Rumsfeld is a dick

  Won't flow the forces we need

  We will be too light.

  By the time General McKiernan moved his headquarters to Kuwait to prepare for war, during October and November 2002, Rotkoff could see that the top generals and planners weren't very focused on WMD. But Marks, Rotkoff and their staff spent time on it. As a practical matter, if Saddam launched even a small chemical or biological attack on U.S. forces as they crossed from Kuwait into Iraq, he might slow or even stop the advance.

  Marks and Rotkoff together drove their staff. It became a kind of sweatshop. They made an individual target folder for each of the 946 sites, and they went to work trying to improve and update the intelligence for the main sites. This entailed requests for new satellite passes and other overhead imagery.

  Air Force Lieutenant General Michael V. Hayden, the head of the National Security Agency, had ordered that $300 million to $400 million of the NSA's money be redirected to Iraq unique operations and targets. Most of that was for battlefield intelligence, but NSA was picking up intercepts about WMD. In Hayden's view they were collecting a massive but circumstantial amount of evidence of WMD. Marks didn't consider it massive, just more and more snippets, and it was indeed circumstantial.

  Beginning in late November 2002, when Saddam permitted the United Nations weapons inspection team headed by Swedish lawyer Hans Blix back into Iraq, Marks noticed suspicious activity in a number of new satellite photos. U.N. inspectors were seen coming in the front gate of a suspected WMD site, while Iraqis were seen taking some sort of material out the back and loading it on trucks.

  Are they just a step ahead of the hounds? he wondered. Are they that lucky? How did they know the inspectors were coming to that site? He ordered his staff to see if they could track the trucks to the Syrian border.

  The big problem, though, was that no one knew for sure if they were looking at WMD. They could only guess or assume that was what it was.

  I don't know if there are bicycles in there from Toys R Us, Marks lamented after looking at the trail of one truck to Syria. He repeated an old military expression about not being able to decipher the real meaning: You're a pig looking at a watch.

  It was a paradox. On the one hand, he was troubled that he still couldn't say with conviction that he could prove any particular site had WMD. On the other, he still harbored no real doubt that they were there—somewhere. The intelligence had conditioned him to expect it.

  Unbeknownst to Marks, Rumsfeld was wrestling with the same worries about WMD intelligence. In a classified three-page memo dated October 15, 2002, Rumsfeld listed 29 things that could go wrong in an Iraq war. He reviewed it with the president and the NSC. In the middle, item Number 13 said, U.S. could fail to find WMD on the ground.

  He obviously had some serious doubts and I asked him about it in 2006.

  I was very worried about it, he said. I worry about intelligence. I have to. At the same time, intelligence was the responsibility of Tenet and others. I developed confidence over time and conviction, and I think everyone did.

  Did he know about a two-star general named Spid
er Marks who was in charge of ground intelligence and had had doubts about WMD?

  No, Rumsfeld said. I mean, we dealt with the combatant commander's people. I may have met him, but I don't know him.

  In October Congress voted overwhelmingly to authorize war with Iraq. Three weeks later, in the midterm elections, the Republicans retained control of the House and took control of the Senate—picking up two Senate seats and eight in the House. It was exceedingly rare for a president's party to make gains in midterm elections. How They Aced Their Midterms (And Now for the Big Tests) was the headline on the cover of Time magazine, with an Oval Office photo of a smiling George W. Bush, his arm draped around a laughing Karl Rove.

  At State, Armitage worried that the drive to invade Iraq had received a significant boost. Bush, he said, really believes that his role is to change the face of the world and that attack, 9/11, did it. Combined with the '02 elections, where he became the mighty president of all the people, that's the effect of the off-year victory. He finally became the popularly elected president.

  Armitage and Powell received reports from foreign leaders who met with Bush that the president was acting as if he had received validation and vindication. He was saying, We got to seize this moment. This is an opportunity given us. Armitage thought Rice was running more and more interference for Bush. Condi, in my view, anytime someone wasn't ready to do immediately exactly what the president wants, it was almost disloyal.

  No one knows the pressure I will put on you to get to Baghdad. You will assume risk, General Tommy Franks told his generals on December 7, remarks that Spider Marks recorded in his diary. That was the point of the plan, right there. Get to Baghdad, and fast. It echoed Rumsfeld's desire— assume risk. The Powell Doctrine of trying to guarantee success was out. Rapid, decisive warfare was in.