Going to the UN helped the president win a resolution in Congress, with critical help from House Democratic leader Richard Gephardt. John Kerry, as is well known, went along. At the time, it was the most politic course for a man with presidential ambitions, and not an unreasonable vote. But he never developed a coherent enough explanation of that vote to satisfy the Democratic Party’s antiwar base.
Kerry was not alone. Most Democrats, other than Biden, were simply not asking tough questions about the administration’s underlying case against Saddam and neither were the Republicans. Unlike the debate led by Sam Nunn before the first Gulf War, there was no longer a bipartisan group of Senate intellectuals willing to take on the issue, no matter where the facts led.
When the Iraq resolution came to a vote in the UN that November, we were on the air live. Suddenly, U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte rushed to the chamber holding a cell phone to his ear. What was up? I reached a source who told me the Syrian ambassador, representing the only Arab state in the Security Council, had called to say he would vote with the United States. It was unanimous, a huge personal victory for Powell. But there was an underlying problem. Each side had a different interpretation of what the resolution meant. Powell interpreted its warning that Iraq would suffer “serious consequences” for not complying as a mandate for war. But the language was ambiguous enough to mean something entirely different to France.
To this day, Powell insists that he had a personal commitment from France’s foreign minister, the dashing—and politically ambitious—Dominique de Villepin, that this was a final ultimatum to Iraq. Powell said he even took a call from de Villepin as the secretary of state was about to walk his daughter down the aisle, delaying the wedding to hammer out the interpretation of the war resolution. It is one of the reasons why he viewed France’s later opposition as such a personal betrayal.
As part of the resolution, Iraq was required to disclose how it had disposed of its weapons. Saddam produced twelve thousand pages, overwhelming the UN inspectors with detail. As I reported, former UN weapons inspectors David Kay and David Albright both suggested it was a rehash of previous claims, not a true accounting. U.S. officials immediately dismissed it as inadequate, but we had no independent way to verify either side’s claim. The United States said Iraq had failed the test and was in violation of the UN’s ultimatum. Except for Tony Blair, the rest of the Security Council disagreed.
Now the case for war rested on Colin Powell. I knew how skeptical he was about many of the administration’s arguments. So when he went to CIA headquarters and personally vetted the intelligence community’s case against Saddam before presenting it to the UN, his word carried a lot of weight. The State Department also made sure we knew he had personally eliminated some of the White House and Pentagon claims linking Iraq to terrorism, a connection he considered tenuous. To give his presentation the CIA “Good Housekeeping” seal of approval, he insisted that George Tenet sit behind him, visible in every frame.
Powell’s audio and visual display included satellite photos that we could not possibly analyze for ourselves. Few experts challenged the documentation. When Tom Brokaw interviewed Lee Hamilton, the highly respected former House Intelligence Committee chairman called it “impressive.” Hamilton, who later co-chaired the 9/11 Commission, said, “The administration’s most persuasive advocate who has the greatest credibility in the world, the dove in the administration, makes the case. He’s backed up by the head of the Central Intelligence Agency. Secondly, the intelligence capabilities of the United States came through this presentation powerfully, just showing to all the world what we know about what’s going on.”
Only now, after several investigations by Congress and a presidential panel, do we know that U.S. intelligence agencies misinterpreted the satellite photos, relying on a discredited source. In fact, three key charges—that Saddam had imported aluminum tubes designed exclusively for nuclear fuel production, that he had mobile biological weapons labs, and that he had unmanned aerial vehicles capable of delivering biological or chemical weapons—were completely false. The CIA’s assessment about the mobile labs was based solely on an Iraqi defector code-named “Curveball” provided by the German intelligence service. But American officials ignored warnings as early as May 2000—three years before Powell’s UN presentation—that “Curveball” was unreliable. Red flags were raised about “Curveball” repeatedly during those years, but neither the Defense Intelligence Agency nor the CIA ever circulated what the agencies call a burn notice about his false information, and no one alerted Powell. A second defector, the source for the erroneous claims about the aluminum tubes, was also a known fabricator. Dissenting opinions from the State Department and the Energy Department about the tubes were relegated to a footnote. The air force’s doubts about the unmanned vehicles were suppressed. Powell has said since that he regrets the errors in his presentation to the UN, but not the outcome—the decision to go to war and remove Saddam Hussein from power. But he is known to fear that he will always be remembered, fairly or not, as “the guy who made a bad case to the UN.”
At the time, Powell’s reputation went far toward convincing American audiences that what the CIA said should be accepted at face value. But many members of the Security Council, heavily lobbied by the French, were deeply skeptical. Even Powell admitted at the time that there was no smoking gun.
But the White House was all too willing to believe any “evidence” it could find about Saddam’s weapons capability. Only a week earlier, the president had asserted in his State of the Union address that “the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
At the time, it was just one more administration accusation about Iraq’s efforts to shop for nuclear weapons fuel. No one challenged it. It wasn’t until March, a week and a half before the war started, that Mohamed El Baradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said that charge was based on fraudulent documents. By then, war was inevitable. It took another four months for the simmering feud between the White House and the CIA to boil over because of those sixteen words in the president’s speech.
Long before the president issued his ultimatum, there was no turning back. We were all at our stations in the newsroom, ready to begin continuous coverage, but when the war started, it was still a surprise. Acting on information from a spy in Baghdad, the president had moved up the timetable and ordered an air strike against one of Saddam’s compounds, hoping there was a chance to take out the Iraqi leader and his top advisors.
We had assembled a team of retired generals and other expert commentators from all of the services to guide us, and our viewers, through the military maze. For the first time, our correspondents were embedded with the troops, reporting live as they advanced toward Baghdad. They were all heroic, but what will forever be imprinted in my memory of the war is the reporting of David Bloom.
It was David’s inspiration to retrofit a tank recovery vehicle, known as an M88A, and combine it with a mobile Ford uplink truck so that he could report in real time as he rolled through the desert. His cameraman, Craig White, rode with him, using a highquality broadcast camera instead of the more primitive videophone being used by other reporters. The pictures were astounding. Viewers were taken deep inside the armored division. Their guide to the Third Infantry Division was a man they’d known previously as an impeccably groomed White House correspondent and Sunday morning anchor. Now he was a modern-day Lawrence of Arabia, driving hard through the desert with bloodshot eyes and hair clotted with sand. Instead of a camel, he had what we called the Bloom-mobile.
At times Brokaw cautioned us, and the audience, not to get distracted by the gee-whiz toys that were bringing the war into our living rooms. In one breathtakingly poignant interview, Nancy Chamberlain, mother of U.S. Marine captain Jay Aubin, quietly told Tom, “I truly admire what all the network news and news technologies are doing today to bring it into our homes. But for the mothers an
d wives who are out there watching, it is murder. It is heartbreak. We can’t leave the television. Every tank, every helicopter, ‘Is that my son?’ And I just need you to be aware that technology is great. But there are moms, there are dads, there are wives who are suffering because of this.” Mrs. Chamberlain’s son died on the third day of the war, when his Sea Knight helicopter crashed during a sandstorm.
Bloom’s genius was that he never lost sight of the human story. He was a newsman’s newsman, in Brokaw’s words, “a warrior, fearless, hard charging, always eager for the next difficult assignment. He’d arrive on a story and within twenty-four hours have a notepad full of the secret cell phone numbers of the best sources.” He was such a life force that it was inconceivable that David, who outhustled the rest of us on every story, would not be at the other end of a satellite or a telephone saying with rapid-fire enthusiasm, “Hey, buddy, here’s what I’ve got.” David started having severe leg pains as he rode through the desert with his knees propped up in the compact vehicle, but apparently did not want to stop telling the stories of the soldiers in his unit long enough to get medical help. It is a determination that all of us understand, completely. He was heading toward Baghdad, doing the best reporting of his life. Two weeks later, David, only thirty-nine years old, collapsed from a pulmonary embolism. He died only days before his unit, the Third Infantry Division, entered Saddam’s capital. The doctors assumed the clot had formed in his leg because of the cramped conditions inside the tank recovery vehicle. Retired general Montgomery Meigs, one of our analysts, likened him to Ernie Pyle, telling war stories for another generation of soldiers. Irrepressible and full of life until the abrupt end, David’s last call to the NBC news desk was to check on the scores of the Final Four basketball play-off games.
On April 8, two days after David’s death, coalition troops—led by the Third Infantry Division—pushed into Baghdad. Iraq’s infamous information minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf (ridiculed in the American press as “Baghdad Bob”), gave his last briefing. In an unconscious echo of Al Haig after Ronald Reagan was shot, Saddam’s spokesman told reporters, “We are in control.” The next day, with the Third Infantry Division rolling through the Iraqi capital, Saddam’s statue was toppled and pulled to the ground by what appeared to be a jubilant crowd. Few of us had predicted that Iraq’s capital would fall so rapidly, and with so little resistance.
In fact, the entry of U.S. troops into Baghdad was so unexpected that until the last moment I had been planning to fly with Alan that morning to the Reagan library in Simi Valley, California. Alan was scheduled to give a lecture, and Nancy Reagan was hosting a dinner. Instead, I stayed behind to track reaction here to the dramatic fall of Iraq’s capital. From the narrow perspective of the video being fed back, the streets of Baghdad seemed to erupt in celebration. Perhaps Washington’s war hawks had been right all along. But even then, we knew that it was far too early to celebrate a victory for American policy makers. The furthest thing from our minds was that no weapons would be found. Instead, the fear was that Saddam would use chemical weapons on our troops and set fire to his oil fields.
None of that happened. Now, with American troops inside Baghdad, administration officials hoped they’d finally discover Iraq’s stockpiles of weapons. David Kay, our dogged weapons expert, left NBC to lead the CIA’s hunt for the weapons. But Iraq is a large country. At first, Kay thought that some of the evidence, both documents and weapons, might have been destroyed during looting immediately after the invasion. No one had any answers, and before long Washington was in full battle cry over whether the administration had deliberately misled the American people and Congress about Saddam’s weapons.
The CIA and the National Security Council were each blaming the other. Then, on a Saturday night in July when I was preparing to fill in for Tim Russert on Meet the Press, the show’s executive producer, Betsy Fischer, called to alert me to a column in the next morning’s New York Times. Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador, revealed that he had traveled to Africa for the administration a year earlier and told them that charges that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from Niger were untrue—long before the president repeated that claim in his State of the Union address.
We called Wilson and added him to our show. Already appearing were Senators Carl Levin and John Warner from the Armed Services Committee and, importantly, columnist Robert Novak, a frequent guest. To my knowledge, Novak had never met Wilson before arriving that day in our greenroom, or since. That meeting had farranging ramifications.
On the program, I asked Wilson whether the administration was politicizing the intelligence to justify the war. He said, “Either the administration has some information that it has not shared with the public, or yes, they were using the selective use of facts and intelligence to bolster a decision in the case that had already been made.”
The president was traveling in Africa, but the White House was forced to acknowledge its error. Condi Rice’s deputy, Stephen Hadley, who later replaced her as national security advisor, stepped forward to take the blame. So did George Tenet, for not having caught the mistake before the president’s big speech. After a week of bloodletting, the White House struck back. In his syndicated column, Robert Novak quoted two anonymous administration officials who seemed to be suggesting that Wilson had a political agenda because his wife, Valerie Plame, worked at the CIA.
Wittingly or not, Novak had revealed the name of a covert agent. Plame had the deepest kind of cover, a false identity carefully created over years so that she could safely and secretly perform her missions. The Washington Post reported, erroneously, that in addition to Novak, I was one of six other reporters to whom the administration had tried to leak Plame’s identity in order to discredit Wilson. That was not the case. Someone in the administration had steered me in that direction, but only after Novak’s column appeared. The consequences for Plame were severe—she could no longer travel overseas or work undercover. For at least a year afterward, the subsequent criminal investigation into the leak seemed to focus more on reporters than government sources. The net effect was to intimidate other officials from talking to journalists, especially those targeted by the prosecutor. And in a twist worthy of Alice in Wonderland, at least two of the reporters swept up in the probe hadn’t written a word about Plame or anything related to the case.
The Wilson affair damaged the CIA’s standing in the White House, despite the president’s close personal relationship with George Tenet. Within the vice president’s office and the National Security Council, officials questioned the judgment of sending Wilson on such a sensitive mission in the first place. Worse yet, no weapons of mass destruction had been found, Saddam Hussein was still at large, and the agency badly needed a victory.
Even Washington pauses during the Christmas season. On Saturday, December 13, Alan and I were going to a holiday party at the Rumsfelds’. I was juggling all my roles: I’d just been to trustee meetings at the University of Pennsylvania and had rushed home to decorate the dining room and set the table for a dinner we were giving the next night for Federal Reserve officials. At the Rumsfelds’, everyone seemed especially jolly. The defense secretary was almost bouncing on his heels. The vice president and my husband huddled in a corner. George Tenet was cracking jokes. At one point, Tim Russert told the CIA director that he’d dreamed Saddam had been captured. Tenet looked startled, but laughed it off.
We got to bed late, but that was all right, because it was Saturday night. The phone rang at five a.m. The Iranian news service was reporting that Saddam had been captured. Turning to Alan, I asked, “Was that what you and the vice president were talking about last night?” He said, “Don’t ask me that question.”
I jumped out of bed, called two sources to get it confirmed, and did a phone report for the network. By five-thirty a.m., half an hour later, I was dressed and in the newsroom helping to report one of the biggest stories of the decade. It was not too much to hope that Saddam’s capture would mean the beginning of th
e war’s end. The insurgency would collapse, and our troops would start coming home. It was the holiday season and there was no reason not truly to celebrate peace on earth.
CHAPTER 9
Red/Blue Nation?
We knew we were getting through to our audience the night a man jumped onto the outdoor set for Hardball in Herald Square during the 2004 Republican convention in New York and tried to take out Chris Matthews. Was this an illustration of how divided we were as a nation, or just a passing drunk looking to pick a fight? Television news had indeed come a long way from “Good night, Chet. Good night, David.”
With the nation at war, perhaps it was inevitable that our politics would inspire so much passion. Vulnerable to terrorists at home, fighting an invisible enemy in Iraq, Americans were angry, or at least worried. In polls, large percentages of people claimed the country was heading in the wrong direction, usually a bad indicator for an incumbent president. Protestors in New York wanted to be heard. When security barriers prevented them from getting anywhere near the Republicans at Madison Square Garden, we were the next best target.
Our outdoor broadcasts, produced in front of live audiences in all kinds of terrible weather, quickly turned into a media circus. One night, thousands of demonstrators massed across the street, separated from us only by a line of mounted police. After a while, you tune out the madding crowd. If the convention speakers went on long enough, we would even grab a hamburger and eat on the set, since that was the only chance we’d get. Once, when I tried to figure out what the protestors were chanting, I was startled to realize that it was, “How can you eat while this is going on? How can you eat while this is going on?” It was not my best New York dining experience.
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