On September 11, Gibson was at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City—Bush was marking the one-year anniversary of the attacks with a brief speech at Ellis Island—finalizing the UN speech. Gerson called to say that there was a new piece of intelligence that might fit into the speech. Gibson should get on a secure phone and call Robert Joseph, the NSC’s proliferation expert who had, reporters Michael Isikoff and David Corn later wrote, “a reputation for pushing evidence related to Iraq as far as it could possibly go.” The information that Joseph had for Gibson would become one of the best known and most controversial elements of the case against Iraq: Hussein’s regime, Joseph said, had been trying to acquire a substantial amount of yellowcake uranium—a key ingredient in the enrichment process used to make fuel for an atomic weapon—in Africa.
Joseph faxed Gibson three sentences to insert laying out the allegation and its significance. The CIA had cleared the language, and Gibson and Joseph talked about how best to insert it. But then word came from the CIA that it was backing off the claim. Based on a single foreign source of information, it was too tenuous to put into a presidential address.
The common security of all nations, Bush told the diplomats on Thursday, September 12, was threatened by a confluence of factors, including terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, and rogue states. “In one place—in one regime—we find all these dangers in their most lethal and aggressive forms, exactly the kind of aggressive threat the United Nations was born to confront,” Bush said. He ticked off a litany of Iraq’s misdeeds, which did not include the yellowcake claim. “In 1991, the Iraqi regime agreed to destroy and stop developing all weapons of mass destruction and long-range missiles and to prove to the world it has done so by complying with rigorous inspections,” he said. “Iraq has broken every aspect of this fundamental pledge.”
There had been intense debate within the administration about whether the president should request a new resolution from the UN Security Council demanding that Iraq submit once again to weapons inspections. Powell favored a new resolution and Cheney opposed one, arguing that it was not necessary. Powell had apparently won the fight. The line was in the speech, but when Bush reached it, he skipped it. Sitting in the General Assembly chamber, Powell gasped. But it was an unintentional omission, and after a sentence, Bush ad-libbed: “We will work with the U.N. Security Council for the necessary resolutions.” Powell exhaled. But Bush had said “resolutions.” Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, wondered if they should clarify that he meant only one, but decided not to, hoping it would go unnoticed.
Bush issued a challenge: Iraq must abide by the UN resolutions and the terms of the 1991 peace agreement—in other words, it must give up its stores of weapons of mass destruction. “The purposes of the United States should not be doubted,” Bush said. “The Security Council resolutions will be enforced, the just demands of peace and security will be met, or action will be unavoidable. And a regime that has lost its legitimacy will also lose its power.”
The administration’s anti-Iraq push continued through the fall, with efforts focusing on gaining congressional approval to take action against Hussein. Speaking in Cincinnati on October 7, Bush was to give a nationally televised address on Iraq and its growing stockpile of lethal weapons. On October 4, the NSC sent the sixth draft of the speech to the CIA for clearance. It contained the assertion that “the regime has been caught attempting to purchase up to 500 metric tons of uranium oxide from Africa—an essential ingredient in the enrichment process.” Gibson had worked on this speech as well, using the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction programs issued by the CIA on October 1 for guidance. The assertion was in the intelligence estimate, so Gibson reasoned that it must be usable now.
The following day, the CIA sent a three-and-a-half-page, single-spaced, twenty-two-point reply to Gerson, deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley, and others, pointing out places where the assertions against Iraq could be made tougher. The draft stated that Iraq had admitted to having twenty-five liters of anthrax and other biological weapons, when the figure should be thirty. The CIA memo also pointed to instances where the speech needed to be toned down. Regarding the uranium assertion, the memo said: “Remove the sentence because the amount is in dispute and it is debatable whether it can be acquired from the source. We told Congress that the Brits have exaggerated this issue. Finally, the Iraqis already have 550 metric tons of uranium oxide in their inventory.”
When the CIA received draft seven on Sunday, October 6, the line had been modified but not removed: “…and the regime has been caught attempting to purchase substantial amounts of uranium oxide from sources in Africa.” At this point the CIA officials dealing with the draft brought Director George Tenet into the discussion. He telephoned Hadley and told him that Bush “should not be a fact witness on this issue” because the “reporting was weak.” More bluntly he added, “You need to take this fucking sentence out because we don’t believe it.”
After Tenet’s call, CIA officials dealing with the speech sent another memo to Hadley and Rice underscoring their concerns with the uranium story. It said: “…More on why we recommend removing the sentence about procuring uranium oxide from Africa: Three points (1) The evidence is weak. One of the two mines cited by the source as the location of the uranium oxide is flooded. The other mine cited by the source is under the control of the French authorities. (2) The procurement is not particularly significant to Iraq’s nuclear ambitions because the Iraqis already have a large stock of uranium oxide in their inventory. And (3) we have shared points one and two with Congress, telling them that the Africa story is overblown and telling them this is one of the two issues where we differed with the British.”
The sentence came out of the speech. It was not the only one the CIA excised. Gerson and Gibson wanted to include a line to the effect that a single canister of one of Hussein’s chemical weapons could wipe out New York or some other major city. It was a compelling image, but the CIA would not sign off on it.
The October 7 address was plenty tough and startling even without the specific uranium allegation.* “Some citizens wonder, after eleven years of living with this problem, why do we need to confront it now?” Bush said. “And there’s a reason. We’ve experienced the horror of September the 11th…. Knowing these realities, America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun, that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”
The mushroom cloud image had first appeared publicly when an anonymous administration aide was quoted in a September 8 New York Times story. It was a Gerson creation. He had brought it up at a meeting of the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, a collection of senior staffers that included Rice, Hadley, Scooter Libby, Karl Rove, and Gerson. The WHIG had coordinated the fall rollout of the anti-Iraq publicity campaign. One of its members had used the “mushroom cloud” line when speaking to the Times reporter. Rice had echoed it later, on September 8, and now almost a month later Bush finally got to use it.
Three days later, on October 10, 2002, the House of Representatives passed a resolution authorizing Bush to employ military force against Iraq. The Senate passed the same resolution hours later.
As Gerson, McConnell, and Scully—who had returned from promoting his book—geared up for another “death march” to produce the 2003 State of the Union, making the case for war against Iraq remained a priority. Sitting around McConnell’s computer, with the National Intelligence Estimate before them, they sought to build the strongest case against Saddam Hussein that they could muster. “These findings seemed very credible and compelling and there was a certain drama and almost a chill in the air when we got to certain passages,” Scully recalled. He cited one line: “Imagine those nineteen hijackers with other weapons and other plans, this time armed by Saddam Hussein,” Bush would say. “It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror li
ke none we have ever known.” They wrote that passage very fast, Scully remembered, it came quickly. “We certainly believed that this was a very grave moment and that we were drawing attention to a very serious danger,” he said.
An Iraqi nuclear threat remained a potent argument. And the claim about attempts to purchase yellowcake was still in the National Intelligence Estimate. The speechwriters often pushed the evidence to the limit. Their reasoning, Scully said, was, “this will be checked…. We’re not competent to judge in every case what intelligence is sound, what intelligence is useful, what claims should or should not be made. That’s for others…. We felt a certain freedom in that because what typically happened was others would pull us back.” And pulled back they were. “We had stuff taken out of speeches all the time,” McConnell said. “I know that we often did overstate the case and it would fall to someone like Steve Hadley, a very capable man, or Condi or Colin Powell to sort of pull us back a little bit and tone it down,” Scully agreed.
To deal with the allegation that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium, now specifically in the African country of Niger, the speechwriters settled on the specific phrasing that “The British Government has learned…” in an effort to make the claim as specific as possible. They felt that “it was more cautious and guarded and of course more defensible to state it as a fact that British intelligence has determined some of this,” Scully said. That was strengthened by Karen Hughes, who had left the administration but came back to help on big speeches. The section of the speech listing Iraq’s transgressions had been written as a litany of factual statements, each starting with “We know,” including, “We also know that [Saddam] has recently sought to buy uranium in Africa.” Say where the evidence comes from, Hughes told them. Hence, “The British Government has learned…”*
Intelligence was not the only place where the speechwriters stepped beyond their bounds. Secretary of State Colin Powell, reviewing a draft of the speech, was surprised to read that he had just been “directed” to go abroad on a mission. Bush had given no such order—the speechwriters had written themselves into a corner and solved their problem by dispatching the Secretary of State. The line was removed.
Although intelligence regarding yellowcake and Niger had twice been removed from previous presidential speeches, it remained in the State of the Union. Hadley and Gerson both later said that they had forgotten about the previous warnings. Tenet was given a hard copy of the speech the day before Bush was to deliver it, but did not read it. He handed it off to an assistant to take to the deputy director for intelligence, who handled the CIA clearance for such speeches. It is not clear whether it was delivered, or to whom. Asked about it by the Senate Intelligence Committee, no officials from that office could remember receiving the speech for coordination. And while the head of the agency’s Weapons Intelligence Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center did speak to a National Security Council official about the assertion, he was worried about revealing intelligence sources and methods—not about the credibility of the intelligence.
When the facts underlying the Niger claims came to light—that it had been repeatedly removed from previous speeches, and that the CIA did not think the claim was credible—it became a prime citation of the theory that the administration had knowingly used bad intelligence to take the nation to war in Iraq. The speechwriters bristle over the assertion.
McConnell points out that the British never withdrew their original allegation that Iraq had sought to buy uranium in Africa. “The final conclusion was, that’s not the evidentiary standard we would ordinarily want in a State of the Union,” he said. “And that’s fine, as a standard you want to adopt. If the standard is, we will not accept something that is maintained by British intelligence if it is not also specifically adhered to by American intelligence, that’s a coherent standard. It doesn’t make the sentence a lie. The sentence is true as he said it. And so I am personally bothered…when something like that is cited as a lie by the president of the United States, it’s really a so deeply unfair interpretation.”
On Saturday, February 1, McConnell was in bed in his apartment at a little before 9 am, contemplating the first day since Christmas that he had nothing to do. The phone rang. The space shuttle Columbia had blown up during reentry, he was told, and all aboard were lost.
McConnell rushed into the office and started writing with Gerson and Scully. Somebody suggested that they look at Reagan’s remarks from the Challenger disaster. “Our instant reaction was: We’re not going to look at what Reagan said!” McConnell recalled. “We didn’t look at it. It’s not our job to say what did the other guys do. Our job is to serve our president now. And we just kind of bristled at that.”
Karen Hughes was at home in Austin when she got the call. She started browsing through her Bible, looking for a suitable verse. She turned first to the Twenty-third Psalm, but remembered that Bush had used it on September 11. Psalm Nineteen looked promising, mentioning “The heavens,” which “declare the glory of God.” But its tone was too upbeat. Her Bible had a footnote that referred to Isaiah. She read through that book and finally settled on Isaiah 40:26–29. She e-mailed the verses to Gerson.
Bush spoke from the Cabinet Room shortly after 2 pm. “The cause in which they died will continue,” he said.
Mankind is led into the darkness beyond our world by the inspiration of discovery and the longing to understand. Our journey into space will go on. In the skies today we saw destruction and tragedy. Yet farther than we can see, there is comfort and hope. In the words of the prophet Isaiah, “Lift your eyes and look to the heavens. Who created all these? He who brings out the starry hosts one by one and calls them each by name. Because of His great power and mighty strength, not one of them is missing.” The same Creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today. The crew of the shuttle Columbia did not return safely to Earth. Yet we can pray that all are safely home.
The first bombs dropped on Iraq on March 19, 2003. That was sooner than the United States and its allies had planned to strike,* but the CIA had reports indicating that Hussein was at a complex in southwest Baghdad called Dora Farms, and they hoped a quick, decapitating strike could end the war before it began. In fact, he had not been to Dora Farms since 1995, the military later learned. According to the advocacy group Human Rights Watch, a civilian was killed in the attack. Hours later, the ground assault began. U.S. and allied forces moved steadily toward Baghdad, turning up no chemical or biological or nuclear weapons along the way. Within three weeks, the first U.S. units entered Baghdad, making quick strike “thunder runs” into the city at first, but then remaining. The conventional battle for Iraq was essentially over.
The president was going to speak on May 1 to declare success in Iraq. The staging would have made the Reagan team proud: Bush would pilot a plane that would land on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and walk before the cameras in a flight suit before giving his speech. The New York Times called it “one of the most audacious moments of presidential theater in American history.”
Gerson came in with a copy of General Douglas MacArthur’s “the guns are silent” speech in one hand and a muffin in the other.† He had an outline and an opening. “The sirens of Baghdad are quiet,” he had written. “The desert has returned to silence. The Battle of Iraq is over, and the United States and our allies have prevailed.”
“These are beautiful sentences,” Karen Hughes wrote on the third draft when the writers sent it out for review, “but may overstate the case—there is still shooting going on.” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld also objected, saying that it was a serious overstatement of the facts. They took out the passages about the sirens of Baghdad being quiet.
Bush spoke on the Lincoln before a huge banner proclaiming “Mission Accomplished.” As Iraq festered in the months after the speech, the banner became a symbol of administration overreach and arrogance. Rumsfeld told Bob Woodward that he had personally removed the phrase “mission
accomplished” from a draft of the speech Bush gave on the Lincoln. But according to Scully, the phrase was never included in any draft of the speech. He added that “mission accomplished” did appear in “our jumble of notes that we sometimes had on the screen when we wrote.” They had spoken on the telephone with Scott Sforza, a former ABC News producer who worked at the White House arranging the televisual backdrops of Bush’s speeches. Sforza spent several days on the carrier preparing the event. “Scott was simply reporting to us, describing what the television audience would see,” Scully recalled.
On Sunday, December 14, McConnell was again trying to sleep a bit later, so he had some trepidation when his visiting mother woke him to say that Scully was on the phone, and that he said it was important. Oh no, McConnell thought, bad news. Have you been watching? Scully asked. We got Saddam Hussein! “That was the first time that I’d ever been called in to work [suddenly] for good news,” McConnell recalled.
For Scully, that morning was the only time that working at the White House seemed in real life as it often did in the movies: Driving through the White House gate and heading directly for the Oval Office to confer with the president. Bush had gotten a tentative heads-up the day before from Rumsfeld. “Mr. President, the first reports are not always accurate,” the Defense Secretary had started before Bush interrupted him. “This sounds like it’s going to be good news,” the president said.
White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters Page 55
