Between October and December 2001, Maloof and Wurmser, who called themselves “Team B,” combed through a decade of CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) files looking to find hitherto-overlooked connections, particularly between Saddam’s regime and al-Qaeda. Maloof said, “We did not leave any dot unconnected. We took the information from CIA and DIA, material that was overlooked. They were missing a lot because they had a preconceived idea that secular and religious groups would not work together. Anything that didn’t fit that theory was just disregarded.”
In an unusual arrangement, some of Team B’s information came directly from Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress (INC), rather than from U.S. intelligence. Maloof says, “I found that information was useful and I never found it inaccurate” (in fact much of the INC-supplied information turned out to be false). Once they had completed their analysis, Maloof and Wurmser presented their findings to Feith. Maloof says Feith “expressed amazement at what we found.” Team B concluded that there was “consultation, training, financing and collaboration” between al-Qaeda and Iraq. The fruits of Team B’s labors were eventually distilled into a 150-page slide presentation that was made available to senior Bush officials.
While Team B came to the conclusion that there were substantive connections between Saddam and al-Qaeda, veteran U.S. counterterrorism analysts would come to a different conclusion. In the fall of 2002, Michael Scheuer, the former head of the CIA’s bin Laden unit, led a review of nineteen thousand Agency documents, consisting of around eighty thousand pages of material going back more than a decade, looking for al-Qaeda–Iraq links. Scheuer says, “We worked very hard on it, coming to a solidly reached conclusion that there was no formal or ongoing relationship” between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi dictator, a finding that was communicated to the top levels of the CIA. And, strikingly, following the fall of the Taliban, no documents were found in Afghanistan that substantiated an Iraqi link, despite the fact that al-Qaeda was a highly bureaucratic organization.
Daniel Coleman, the FBI special agent whose knowledge of al-Qaeda was unrivaled, says that in August 2002 someone called him from Cheney’s office, something both memorable and quite unprecedented, and asked him “to review everything” on Iraq and the al-Qaeda connection. Coleman recalls: “We had already reviewed the material twice. Again we came up empty.” Coleman, whose son was then serving in Afghanistan as an Army Ranger, subsequently told the staffer from Cheney’s office, “If you came to me for a casus belli you are not going to get it.”
On August 15, 2002, Feith presented Team B’s conclusions at CIA headquarters. By then two new researchers were at work for him: DIA analysts Tina Shelton and Chris Carney. Shelton gave the presentation, arguing that Iraq’s alliance with al-Qaeda was an “open and shut case” and that they had a “mature, symbiotic relationship.” CIA director Tenet remembers that he listened politely to this briefing for a few minutes, thinking this is “complete crap,” and quickly found a way to excuse himself. At the CIA, the Team B approach came to be known as “Feith-based analysis.”
Two months earlier, on June 21, 2002, the CIA had issued its own classified assessment, “Iraq and al-Qa’ida: Interpreting a Murky Relationship.” The assessment noted that it was “purposefully aggressive in seeking to draw connections, on the assumption that any indication of a relationship between these hostile elements would carry great dangers for the United States.” The paper concluded that there was no evidence of cooperation on terrorist operations but there was enough intelligence on supposed contacts and training, including on chemical and biological weapons, that the relationship between al-Qaeda and Saddam was worrying. Three days earlier the CIA had issued another report concluding that the interaction between Saddam and bin Laden appeared to be “more akin to activity between rival intelligence services, each trying to use the relationship to its own advantage.”
In January 2003, the CIA produced a paper that was the Agency’s definitive take on the matter, concluding that there was no Iraqi “authority, direction and control” over al-Qaeda. Deputy Director of the CIA John McLaughlin recalls that this did not go down well with the Bush administration: “It took the form of phone calls from people on the vice president’s staff, saying, ‘Here are another dozen questions we’d like you to look at,’ at which point I’d have to say, ‘No, we’ve turned over every rock we can on this, and, frankly, there will be a rebellion in this building if we go any further, because we’ve taken our stand on this.’ Now, intelligence people always have to be alert to new information. So you’re arrogant if you say, ‘Nothing will ever change my view!’ But at that point, we could see nothing that would change our view.”
Within the intelligence community there were serious doubts about Saddam’s supposed relationship with al-Qaeda, but several prominent media stories appeared in the run-up to the Iraq War that seemed to provide independent corroboration of some of the more sensational claims that the Bush administration was then making. Take Jeffrey Goldberg’s March 2002 story in The New Yorker, in which he wrote that “Iraqi intelligence agents smuggled conventional weapons, and possibly even chemical and biological weapons into Afghanistan.” Aside from the obvious implausibility of smuggling weapons into Afghanistan, a nation already awash in every kind of weaponry after two decades of war, a further problem with Goldberg’s story was identified by the British al-Qaeda expert Jason Burke. Goldberg’s source on the arms smuggling story was Mohammed Mansour Shahab, an Iranian arms dealer imprisoned by the Kurds, who claimed to have smuggled the Iraqi weapons to Kandahar, the Taliban stronghold. Burke, who had reported from Kandahar repeatedly over the years, interviewed Shahab after Goldberg’s story had appeared and concluded that the arms smuggler was lying about his Kandahar trip since he could not describe the city accurately. And, of course, no evidence has subsequently emerged that Iraqi intelligence agents ever smuggled any weapons into Afghanistan.
A further exhibit that was advanced by proponents of the supposed links between al-Qaeda and Saddam was the Salman Pak training camp, some twenty miles from Baghdad, where Islamist terrorists were supposedly taught how to hijack aircraft using the fuselage of a passenger jet. Several defectors associated with the anti-Saddam opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress (INC), made this claim to a variety of major media outlets in the run-up to the Iraq war. One of the defectors, a former Iraqi general, Jamal Abu Zeinab al-Qurairy, told Vanity Fair in January 2003 that he helped to train “non-Iraqi Islamic fundamentalists at the Salman Pak camp … to hijack aircraft with knives.” Sound familiar?
Over the course of two days in November 2001, another INC-supplied defector, former Iraqi “army colonel” Sabah Khalifa Khodada al-Lami, gave a series of media interviews about Salman Pak, telling the Agence France-Presse wire service that he had worked at the training camp and had observed Arabs from a number of countries learning how to hijack planes. The New York Times similarly quoted Khodada—although in this incarnation he had been mysteriously demoted to captain—saying that Islamist radicals from countries such as Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Algeria, and Egypt had passed through the camp. Khodada was described in the Vancouver Sun as an “intelligence officer,” while the London Times quoted him as a “former Iraqi army officer.” During his various interviews Khodada had changed in rank from colonel to captain, and had also morphed from an army officer to an intelligence officer.
Khodada’s bogus claims also made their way into a White House “white paper” drafted by Bush aide Jim Wilkinson, which charged that Salman Pak was a training camp for anti-American terrorists. The paper, dated September 12, 2002, recycled the nonsense about Salman Pak being used to train “non-Iraqi-Arabs” in “hijackings,” showing that the INC fabrications were making their way into official White House documents. After the invasion of Iraq, the Defense Intelligence Agency’s investigation of Salman Pak found no “credible reports that non-Iraqis were trained to conduct or support transnational terrorist operations at Salman Pak.”
The Salman P
ak story was emblematic of a wider problem: information that seemed to prove the Iraq–al-Qaeda connection often came from the INC. Vincent Cannistraro, the head of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center in the early 1990s, says, “Ahmad Chalabi is a fraud and provided us with a stream of coached alleged defectors with information to get us into Iraq. Chalabi flooded the system with so much of this crap.”
A road map of where that crap ended up in the media and the U.S. government is provided in a 2002 letter that the Washington office of the INC wrote to the Senate Appropriations Committee to justify the tens of millions of dollars of American taxpayer money then being lavished on the INC. The letter said that “defectors, reports and raw intelligence are cultivated and analyzed by the INC and are reported through the … western media.” Attached to the memo was a list of more than a hundred stories that the INC had successfully planted in venues ranging from NPR to the Washington Post, many of which were later demonstrated to be false. The memo went on to note that recipients of INC information included senior officials at the Department of Defense and the Office of the Vice President. This was significant because it shows that INC’s nonsensical information was bypassing American intelligence agencies and instead going directly to those in the Pentagon and the vice president’s office who were most gung-ho about the coming Iraq War.
Exhibit A for the “connection” theory between Iraq and al-Qaeda was the supposed April 9, 2001, meeting in Prague between the lead 9/11 hijacker, Mohammed Atta, and Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, an Iraqi agent. This story was first put into play by Czech government officials who shortly after 9/11 said that Atta met the Iraqi intelligence official in Prague before flying to the United States. In congressional testimony on June 18, 2002, CIA director George Tenet said, “Atta allegedly traveled outside the US in early April 2001 to meet with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague, we are still working to confirm or deny this allegation.” Despite Tenet’s uncertainty about the Atta-Ani meeting, in January 2003 Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, briefed senior Bush officials that Atta had in fact met with the Iraqi intelligence agent as many as four times. Libby’s presentation was deemed “a strong case” by Wolfowitz.
The centerpiece of the Bush administration’s case for going to war in Iraq was Secretary of State Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003, six weeks before the invasion. Cheney’s office pressed for the most expansive case for the connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda in the speech, which was supposed to replicate the presentation that Adlai Stevenson, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, had given in 1962 at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In that speech Stevenson had used aerial photographs to convince the world that the Soviets had installed nuclear missiles in Cuba.
Powell’s deputy, Richard Armitage, remembers that the vice president’s office wrote up a submission for his boss to deliver to the UN that included “every kitchen sink that you could imagine,” including the increasingly dubious idea that Atta had met in Prague with the Iraqi intelligence agent before 9/11. A month earlier a CIA report titled “Iraq Support for Terrorism” had already concluded that “we are increasingly skeptical that Atta traveled to Prague in 2001 or met with the [Iraqi official].” Deputy CIA director John McLaughlin recalls that the White House material about the putative al-Qaeda–Iraq connections had not been cleared by the Agency. McLaughlin told Powell and his staff, “This is not our draft. There’s all sorts of garbage in here.” Despite the good-faith efforts to exclude questionable material about Saddam’s connections to al-Qaeda in Powell’s speech, much that remained in the final text would later be discounted following the occupation of Iraq.
Powell’s presentation was a bravura performance that seemed to establish beyond a doubt that Saddam was actively concealing an ongoing WMD program and was in league with al-Qaeda. At one point the secretary of state dramatically brandished a small vial of a white powder of supposed anthrax, saying “about this amount … shut down the US Senate in the fall of 2001.” As Powell gave his speech, sitting directly behind him was CIA director Tenet, giving a visual imprimatur to what Powell was saying. Tenet later wrote, seemingly without irony, that “it was a great presentation, but unfortunately the substance didn’t hold up.”
One section of Powell’s UN speech tried to make the case for an emerging alliance between Saddam and al-Qaeda. Powell was careful not to use any material that was obviously suspect, such as the supposed meeting between Atta and the Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague. Instead he said:
Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda lieutenants. … When our coalition ousted the Taliban, the Zarqawi network helped establish another poison and explosive training center camp, and this camp is located in northeastern Iraq. … Baghdad has an agent in the most senior levels of the radical organization Ansar al-Islam that controls this corner of Iraq. In 2000, this agent offered al-Qaeda safe haven in the region. … After we swept al-Qaeda from Afghanistan, some of those members accepted this safe haven. They remain there today. Zarqawi’s activities are not confined to this small corner of northeast Iraq. He traveled to Baghdad in May of 2002 for medical treatment, staying in the capital of Iraq for two months while he recuperated to fight another day. During his stay, nearly two-dozen extremists converged on Baghdad and established a base of operations there.
Powell’s speech made a gossamer-thin case for the Iraq–al-Qaeda nexus, even with the faulty intelligence that was then available. The relationship between Zarqawi and al-Qaeda was already known to be far from clear-cut. Until 2004, Zarqawi ran an organization separate from al-Qaeda, known as Tawhid, whose name corresponds to the idea of monotheism in Arabic. Indeed, Shadi Abdalla, a member of Tawhid who was apprehended in Germany in 2002, told investigators that the group saw itself to be in competition with al-Qaeda. An indication of his independence from bin Laden is that when Zarqawi founded a training camp in Afghanistan in 1999, he established it near the western city of Herat, near the border with Iran, several hundred miles away from al-Qaeda’s training camps, which were in southern and eastern Afghanistan.
Even after the Iraq War began in March 2003, Zarqawi was still running his own outfit independent of al-Qaeda. Unlikely support for that fact came from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who said of Zarqawi at a Pentagon briefing in June 2004, “Someone could legitimately say he’s not al-Qaeda.” Not only did Zarqawi run a terrorist organization that was separate from and even competitive with al-Qaeda, but he also was independent of Saddam Hussein. On June 23, 2004, Zarqawi released an audiotape on a jihadist website that delivered a blistering critique of Saddam, whom he described as a “devil” who “terrified the people.” That audiotape came a week after President Bush had described Zarqawi as “the best evidence” of Saddam’s connection to al-Qaeda. On October 25, 2005, the CIA released a report that finally disposed of the myth that Saddam and Zarqawi had ever been in league, assessing that prior to the war, “the regime did not have a relationship, harbor, or turn a blind eye towards Zarqawi.”
An additional exhibit in Powell’s UN speech that was intended to prove an al-Qaeda–Saddam–WMD nexus was the Kurdish Islamist group Ansar al-Islam, which was experimenting with crude chemical weapons in its training camp in northeastern Iraq, a facility that was described as a “poison factory” in the aerial photograph of the camp that Powell displayed in his UN presentation. However, the only reason that Ansar al-Islam could exist in that part of Kurdish Iraq was because the U.S. Air Force had been enforcing a no-fly zone in the region for more than a decade, which meant that the Pentagon had more control over that part of Kurdistan than Saddam did. Obviously well aware of the fact that Saddam did not control Kurdish Iraq, Powell said that the Iraqi dictator had a high-level spy in Ansar al-Islam. However, while Saddam may have had a spy in Ansar al-Islam, this hardly meant that he had control over the group.
Charles Faddis, the
senior CIA officer on the ground in Kurdistan during the summer of 2002, spent many weeks investigating the poison factory as well as Ansar al-Islam and its al-Qaeda allies: “What we did night and day, seven days a week, eighteen to twenty hours a day for two months was suck every piece of data we could get on that place because what we had were reports of al-Qaeda on the ground and chem-bio work.” Faddis discovered that at their poison factory the Ansar militants were ordering large quantities of cyanide and experimenting with chemical weapons on donkeys. But he found that none of this activity was in any way linked to Saddam. Faddis told his team, “If we find intelligence that’s credible, that says that Saddam Hussein is in bed with al-Qaeda and Ansar al-Islam, I will be more than happy to be the guy who gets to press the buttons and send the report back…. The only Iraqi intelligence we ever found in that area were doing the exact same thing we were doing, which is keeping an eye on Ansar.”
When a group of reporters visited the Ansar al-Islam “poison factory” in Kurdistan a week after Powell’s UN presentation, in the words of the New York Times they found a “wholly unimpressive place.” The poison factory turned out to be a collection of some dozen mud houses without plumbing and whose electricity was provided by a generator. If this was the poison factory linking Saddam and al-Qaeda, it just didn’t seem very threatening, and if it really was that threatening, then why not just bomb it? After all, the United States controlled the airspace in the Kurdish no-fly zone. Faddis repeatedly requested to his bosses at CIA headquarters in August 2002 to mount an operation to take out the poison factory as well as the hundred or so al-Qaeda foot soldiers and the larger group of allied Ansar al-Islam fighters concentrated in the immediate vicinity of the facility, all of whose positions had been painstakingly mapped out by Faddis’s team. Faddis recalls: “We submitted a series of proposals to Washington to go get rid of these guys. … None of those proposals were accepted largely because it was concluded that it might somehow or another derail the plans for the invasion of Iraq and that had already taken priority.”
The Longest War Page 19
