500 Days

by Kurt Eichenwald

  Bush could help Blair keep the upper hand in the debate, Manning said, by giving Britain a role in the formulation of policy, both diplomatic and military, aimed at driving Saddam from power. Blair would, in fact, insist on a carefully calibrated collaboration between the two countries.

  “Failure is not an option,” Manning said.

  Bush was still wrestling with numerous questions, Rice said. How could he persuade the international community that military action against Iraq was necessary? What value should be put on Iraq’s opposition in exile? And, perhaps most important, after war succeeded, what then?

  Other factors needed to be considered, Manning said. “We realize that the administration could go it alone if it wanted,” he said, tipping his hat to Cheney’s breezy assertion of American autonomy. “But if it wants company, it will have to take into account the concerns of its potential coalition partners.”

  Saddam’s 1998 decision to throw U.N. weapons inspectors out of Iraq was not enough to justify a military action now, almost four years later, he said. The Americans would have to work with the U.N. in an attempt to get the weapons inspectors back into the country. If Saddam refused to grant them unfettered access to suspect sites, his obstructionism would be a persuasive argument, even to a hesitant Europe, for a military solution.

  The time had come to raise the issue that had been brushed aside by Cheney; the most important element of any strategy, Manning said, was tackling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

  “Unless we do,” he said, “we could find ourselves bombing Iraq and losing the Gulf.”

  • • •

  The next day, Manning sent a private memo to Blair.

  “My talks with Condi convinced me that Bush wants to hear your views on Iraq before taking any action,” he wrote. “He also wants your support. He is still smarting from the comments by other European leaders about his Iraq policy.”

  Bush’s diplomatic near-isolation gave Blair tremendous leverage for influencing American policy, Manning wrote, not only on getting U.N. weapons inspectors back into Iraq but also on planning for any military action. Clearly, Manning suggested, the United States could also use outside guidance to help trim back its expectations.

  “I think there is a real risk that the Administration underestimates the difficulties,” he wrote. “They may agree that failure isn’t an option, but this does not mean that they will avoid it.”

  • • •

  Bedlam reigned at Guantanamo Bay.

  The intelligence interrogators were untrained. Translators barely had the fluency to order a cup of coffee in Saudi Arabia, much less to bridge language barriers with the detainees. No one seemed to grasp Arab culture or religion. The interrogation hut—built by members of Construction Battalion 423, known as the Seabees—allowed anyone, even prisoners, to see who was inside.

  Major General Dunlavey was appalled. He had just arrived at Guantanamo to assume control of Joint Task Force 170, the coordinator of detainee interrogations, and it didn’t take him long on his first walking tour of the detention center to grasp the magnitude of the disorder.

  Even security was lax—to him, the facility looked like nothing more than a dangling fence. He learned that there had been a small riot. One detainee had sharpened a spoon into a knife, while others had gotten their hands on pieces of metal, like welding rods, and fashioned weapons out of them. Defense Department photographers wandered around unimpeded, snapping pictures for publication without showing the slightest concern about the potential of disclosing valuable information to al-Qaeda.

  Then there were the detainees themselves. Only 5 percent of them had been picked up by the United States. It soon became obvious that far too many of them weren’t terrorist masterminds, but dirt farmers turned over by Afghanis and Pakistanis seeking a bounty. One was hard of hearing and appeared to be over a hundred years old; guards nicknamed him “al-Qaeda Claus.” Three others appeared to be in their seventies and eighties.

  Dunlavey decided that spending time interrogating—or even guarding—these old-timers was a waste of resources. He pushed the Defense Department to send the men home. The Pentagon refused for ten months, then quietly released them. No information had ever been discovered suggesting that the old men had any connection to terrorism.

  • • •

  At a conference table in Jim Haynes’s office at the Pentagon, David Addington was fidgeting with a black binder. He was there for a briefing from Haynes about the Pentagon’s progress in setting up military commissions and—as expected—the news was infuriating.

  The binder alone provoked Addington’s rage; he wouldn’t even bother to open it, and refused to pay much attention to Haynes’s explications of its contents. The thickness of the file told him all he needed to know—the Pentagon had produced a nightmare of bureaucratic red tape. This policy had been rammed through the decision-making process in a matter of days so that the tribunals would be ready to go immediately. All for nothing.

  The document that Haynes was presenting described, in excruciating detail, the procedures the tribunals would have to follow and the responsibilities each participant would have to shoulder. It covered every base, from defining the rules of evidence to setting the qualifications of the presiding judge to prohibiting the filming of the proceedings.

  Addington stewed. Franklin Roosevelt had managed to pull together his military commissions in a matter of days. Why was the Pentagon dragging out the process for what seemed to be an eternity?

  Part of the problem, Addington knew, was that Rumsfeld uncharacteristically had abandoned his usual decisiveness. Instead, he appointed “the wise men”—people like former attorney general Griffin Bell, who knew both the law and the ways of Washington. Predictably, creating this group led to more consultations, debate, and delay.

  As he listened to the briefing, Flanigan pondered all the energy being expended on these rules. Haynes was a good friend, so Flanigan was trying to find a nice way of asking the question on his mind: What the hell are you doing?

  Addington beat him to the punch. “Well,” he said sharply, pushing the binder away, “this looks like just a repeat of the Prosper Commission.”

  That task force, chaired by Pierre Prosper, had dawdled for weeks delving into the minutiae about how to try terrorists, Addington said. That was why he, Flanigan, and Gonzales had stepped into the breach to get an order out.

  “All you’re doing is replaying those issues,” he said. “And by the way, when are you going to be ready to stand up one of those tribunals you’re talking about?”

  Not to worry, Haynes said. “It won’t take very long to do. We’ll get them up and running quickly.”

  “But you have the president’s order,” Addington said. “Why not just use a simple, streamlined process for constituting a tribunal and get moving?”

  “You know we can’t do that,” Haynes said. “The secretary wants it done this way.”

  Addington shook his head. “Does the secretary read the president’s military order as an order? Or does he read it as a license to create a new judicial system?”

  This wasn’t about keeping things simple for the sake of simplicity. The military had plenty of detainees at Guantanamo, Addington said. He had no sympathy for them, but they at least should be given a chance to go to trial.

  Gonzales held up a hand. Addington, he thought, was being too brusque. This was not a way to handle the situation.

  “It looks like you’re doing a very good job,” he said to Haynes, smiling. “Looks like you’re talking to the right people. Keep us informed.”

  The meeting came to an end and the lawyers went their separate ways, confident that the Pentagon would abandon its sluggish approach and get the military commissions running soon. They could not have imagined that years would pass before the first trial would be held.

  • • •

  A group of boys laughed and shouted as they played soccer on a street alongside a sprawling beige villa in Faisalabad. A misp
laced kick sent the ball flying into the gated yard of the house, called Shabaz Cottage. A man sprang to the door.

  “Get out!” he yelled at the boys in Arabic.

  A passing policeman heard the ruckus and took a look. Not only did the man in the house speak a foreign language; he was too pale-skinned to be Pakistani. A little more surveillance, a few quiet questions around the neighborhood, and the policeman learned that a large contingent of Arabs lived there, kept the shutters closed at all times, and never left the property. Something suspicious was going on, the policeman decided. He reported the information to his superiors, who relayed it to Pakistani security forces. They passed it on to the Americans.

  • • •

  The NSA was conducting electronic surveillance of Shabaz Cottage, the surrounding neighborhood, and thirteen other houses identified through intelligence gathering as terrorist havens. The report from the Pakistani policeman confirmed many of their suspicions. At least two of the locations—Shabaz and another called Issa—were determined to be safe houses operated by Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, one of the largest Islamist organizations in South Asia. Some of the initial intelligence indicated that the two were part of a network of houses and operatives enlisted by Zubaydah after the fall of Kandahar to help al-Qaeda fighters escape from Afghanistan.

  Analysts listened in on satellite calls from those residences to Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and other countries. Evidence piled up; authorities grew confident that Zubaydah was hiding at Shabaz Cottage.

  • • •

  At the Civil Lines Police Station in Faisalabad, Pakistan, officers were readying themselves for a raid. The assignment seemed routine—the industrial and agricultural city was a magnet for illegal immigrants, and police often arrested crowds of them in late-night sweeps.

  Just past midnight on March 28, the police chief, Tsadiqui Hussain, was busying himself in his colonial-era office when a throng of men clad in bulletproof vests paid him a visit. They included officials with Pakistani intelligence, the CIA, and the FBI; they told Hussain that they needed his help.

  The raid tonight would not be a typical roundup, one of the Pakistani agents told Hussain. It involved much bigger prey than usual, a Middle Eastern terrorist that the United States wanted locked up. One of the Americans brought out a stack of photocopies and passed them around. Each page contained a picture of an Arab man and many showed how the man might look if disguised—clean-shaven, with a goatee, with long hair, with short hair.

  The man, the officials told Hussain, was Abu Zubaydah, a key player in al-Qaeda. If he was captured, American officials were confident they would gain unparalleled insight into the terror group’s inner workings, and possibly obtain the evidence they needed to track down bin Laden himself.

  This would be, the officials cautioned, a very dangerous undertaking. The terrorists would be well armed with guns and explosives, and they had already demonstrated a willingness to kill. But the police couldn’t just go in shooting—finding out what the terrorists knew was the goal.

  “You need to capture the subjects alive at all costs,” one of the Pakistanis told Hussain.

  The chief called in reinforcements. More than one hundred officers were assigned to raid Shabaz Cottage, while others were stationed at checkpoints on roads in Faisalabad or dispatched to cover alternate means of escape.

  • • •

  The police arrived at the mansion at 3:00 A.M. and scaled the front gate. After snipping the electric wire at the top, they dropped down into the yard and made their way to a garage. Three guards were sleeping there, and the assault team subdued them. The police called out for the men inside to surrender. When there was no response, they bashed open the door and pushed their way inside.

  Zubaydah was there. He and three other Arabs snapped up cash and fake passports in the house and ran upstairs to the roof, with the police just steps behind. Trapped, Zubaydah and the other men took a running leap off the house, soaring over barbed-wire fencing and landing on the roof of the villa next door. But the Pakistanis had anticipated that escape route—four officers were waiting for the Arabs and grabbed them. Zubaydah exploded in anger.

  “You’re not Muslims!” he shouted.

  “Of course we are,” one of the officers replied.

  “Well, you’re American Muslims!” Zubaydah said.

  Suddenly one of his comrades lunged at a police officer, grabbing his AK-47. A firefight broke out, and Zubaydah was hit in the stomach, the leg, and the groin. The man who grabbed the gun, Abu al-Haznat, was shot dead. Another terrorist and three police officers were injured.

  John Kiriakou, a CIA agent, rushed to the scene and grabbed the senior Pakistani security officer. “Where is Abu Zubaydah?” he shouted.

  The officer pointed to a bloodied body sprawled on the ground. “This is Abu Zubaydah,” he said.

  This had to be a mistake, Kiriakou thought. He had studied Zubaydah’s appearance, and this guy didn’t look like him at all. He was fatter, maybe by forty pounds. His hair was wild. His face was different. Kiriakou sought out a colleague for advice.

  “Get me a picture of his iris,” the colleague said. Optical identification through biometric scanning would do the job.

  Kiriakou leaned down to Zubaydah. “Open your eyes!” he ordered. It was no use—the man’s eyes were rolled back in his head.

  “Okay,” the colleague said. “Then get me a close-up of his ear.”

  Ear identification? That was something new to Kiriakou. The Dutch had been the first to try it and had solved a series of gas-station robberies by examining the image of an ear captured on video. The CIA adopted the technique soon after.

  Kiriakou snapped a picture and, using his cell phone, sent it to his colleague.

  A moment passed. “It’s him.”

  Kiriakou looked down at Zubaydah. His wounds were severe; he was almost certainly going to die. They had to get him medical attention right away.

  The senior Pakistani security officer disagreed. Zubaydah had killed one of his men. “We will fuck with him,” he said. “Then he’s going to die.”

  No, Kiriakou snapped back. “I’m going to get fucked if he dies before we get him to the hospital,” he said. “Those are my orders. This is nonnegotiable.”

  Zubaydah was handed off and dumped in the back of a Toyota mini truck that raced away from the scene.

  • • •

  Shabaz Cottage and the other safe houses proved to be gold mines of intelligence. Searches turned up computers, three dozen memory disks, cell phones and notebooks filled with phone numbers, electronic notes, an al-Qaeda artillery manual, and ten thousand pages of other material. On a table was a partially built bomb, along with evidence that indicated it was to be used in an attack on a school. A roster on the wall listed the names of those in the house assigned kitchen duty; the most fascinating entry read “Saturday, Osama.”

  Whatever resentments lingered between the United States and Pakistan over bin Laden’s escape from Tora Bora melted away. The joint raid by police and security agents was celebrated as proof that Islamabad was becoming a full partner in the war on terror.

  Pakistan soon enjoyed the fruits of that cooperation when the administration paid a bounty of millions of dollars for its help in capturing Zubaydah.

  • • •

  The hospital room was stifling and infested with mosquitoes. Zubaydah lay in the bed motionless, with wires and plastic tubing connected to his body. A few feet away, John Kiriakou was sitting in a fold-up metal chair; he had been ordered to watch Zubaydah until he woke up. Hours passed as the agent swatted at the buzzing insects while sweating through a crimson T-shirt emblazoned with the image of SpongeBob SquarePants.

  At last, Zubaydah stirred. Kiriakou walked to the head of the bed. His captive opened his eyes and fear spread across his face. His heart rate jumped, setting off an alarm. A doctor and nurse ran into the room and administered Demerol, a narcotic. Zubaydah drifted back to sleep.

  Time passed. Zubaydah woke a
gain for a few seconds, delirious and asking for wine. After another few hours, he came around a third time, fully conscious. He motioned to Kiriakou. The agent walked over and moved his oxygen mask.

  “Please, brother,” Zubaydah said, weeping softly. “Kill me.”

  “Kill you?”

  “Yes, please, brother, kill me. Take the pillow, put it over my face, and kill me.”

  “No, my friend, no one is going to kill you. You’re very important to us. We worked hard to find you. And we have a lot of questions we want to ask you.”

  Zubaydah sobbed. “Please,” he moaned, “please kill me.”

  • • •

  The Chilterns lie northwest of London, a vista of sweeping grasslands, honeysuckle-draped cottages, and the crack of cricket bats on plush village greens. Church bells ring out across the leafy stillness, adding an almost mystical aura to the scene’s unearthly beauty.

  Unobtrusively tucked into the chalk hills is Chequers, the sixteenth-century mansion that serves as the official country residence of Britain’s prime minister. The estate overflows with treasures from European history, including letters written by Oliver Cromwell, Napoléon, and the poet Robert Browning, as well as a ring worn by Queen Elizabeth I.

  While Chequers is traditionally used as a weekend getaway, Blair and his staff traveled there on Tuesday, April 2, for an in-depth and hard-edged debate about Iraq. The meeting with Bush at the Crawford ranch was three days away, and this would be Blair’s best opportunity to hammer out a strategy for bending the president’s will a bit closer to his own.

  The British officials gathered at ten that morning on the first floor in the Long Gallery, and Blair described his predicament.

  “I believe that Bush is in the same position I am,” he said. “It would be great to get rid of Saddam, but can it be done without terrible unforeseen consequences?”

  British intelligence presented an assessment of the situation in Iraq. The state of its military forces was adequate, the opposition to Saddam was feeble, and Saddam himself—well, he was a maniac. Those elements made a combustible and unpredictable mix. The consequences of an American-led invasion were anybody’s guess.