The Twilight of the Bombs

by Richard Rhodes

  Most analysis of the Bush administration’s reasoning about invading Iraq has focused on the neoconservative campaign to reorder the Middle East by forcing regime change, first in Iraq and then in Iran. That campaign extended back to 1996, however, and envisioned an Iraqi exile insurgency, not another United States–led ground war. Nor had the idea of attacking Iraq along with Afghanistan been welcomed by Bush’s advisers or Bush himself when Rumsfeld first floated it on 15 September. What happened to change the president’s mind between the Al Qaeda attacks of September 11 and his 21 November order to Rumsfeld?

  Once the question is posed that way, the answer leaps out from the cluttered background of post–September 11 activity: What happened was the multiple anthrax-letter attacks that frightened and paralyzed Washington and alarmed the rest of America beginning in early October. The first letters contaminated with Bacillus anthracis had been mailed on 17 or 18 September, only a week after 9/11. They failed to attract media attention because their first victims, at the New York Post and in the regional post office in Hamilton, New Jersey, thirty-five miles south of Manhattan near Asbury Park, suffered only skin lesions that were successfully treated with antibiotics. The first case of inhalation anthrax, a much more lethal form of the disease, afflicted a sixty-three-year-old British photo editor, Robert Stevens, at the tabloid newspaper The Sun in Boca Raton, Florida. Stevens began feeling ill on 30 September. Inhalation anthrax was confirmed on 3 October, and Stevens died two days later. Even he was first assumed to have acquired the disease naturally; people can be infected with anthrax through contact with contaminated raw wool, leather, meat, and other animal products, although there had been no U.S. cases since 1992.7

  A second case of inhalation anthrax emerged on 5 October in a seventy-three-year-old coworker of Stevens named Ernesto Blanco, a mail clerk. With aggressive antibiotic therapy, Blanco survived.

  These first anthrax cases elicited a significant threat from Donald Rumsfeld on 9 October. Rumsfeld declared that the U.S. would directly attack Iraq if it proved to be connected to the Florida infections. The first case outside Florida, a skin lesion on a thirty-eight-year-old New Yorker named Erin O’Connor, who was an assistant to the NBC television correspondent Tom Brokaw, was reported the same day. The following Friday, 12 October, Cheney appeared on public television’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer to say that it was “reasonable” to link the anthrax attacks with September 11. “Maybe it is coincidence,” he added, “but I must say8 I’m a skeptic.” To justify his skepticism, Cheney cited Al Qaeda’s terrorist training manuals, which he said teach “how to deploy these kinds of substances.” He said that over the years Bin Laden had “tried to acquire weapons of mass destruction.” Most ominously, he cautioned, “we have to assume [a terrorist attack] will happen again.”

  Neither Cheney nor Rumsfeld was yet prepared to beat the war drums, at least not publicly. A paragraph from an analysis in the London Guardian accurately identifies the dilemma the Bush administration faced:

  In a sense, September 119 changed little as far as Iraqi policy was concerned. The US desperately wants to get rid of Saddam Hussein, as it has done ever since troops first began massing for Desert Storm in 1990. As a matter of dynastic honor, the president would dearly love to settle the business his father failed to finish. But there is no evidence that his administration has any more idea how to achieve that goal than its two predecessors. “I think the debate is over for now and I’m not even sure it went so far as to be a real argument in the first place,” said Judith Kipper of the Council on Foreign Relations. “The truth is that nobody knows how to go after that regime and bombing won’t do the job.”

  By mid-October twelve people had been exposed to anthrax, five of whom would eventually die. The U.S. government deployed military units nationwide to guard nuclear power plants, water supplies, oil refineries, airports, railroad terminals, the Empire State Building, the Brooklyn and Golden Gate bridges. Then a letter arrived at the Senate offices of the Democratic majority leader Tom Daschle containing not the low-grade form of anthrax included in the first round of letters mailed to Florida and New York but a highly purified, military-grade aerosolized powder that was ten times as deadly. The Senate shut down the next day, 16 October, the House the day after that. Twenty-eight staffers were found to have been exposed. The Senate office building attacks made front-page world news and sowed panic throughout Washington.

  But something else happened that week in Washington that had an even greater impact on George Bush and Dick Cheney’s thinking. Special sensors that detect chemical, biological, or radiological agents had been installed in the White House to protect the president. On Thursday, 18 October, they went off while Cheney and his aides were working in the Situation Room. “Everyone who had entered10 the Situation Room that day,” the journalist Jane Mayer reported, “was believed to have been exposed, and that included Cheney. ‘They thought there had been a nerve attack,’ a former administration official, who was sworn to secrecy about it, later confided. ‘It was really, really scary. They thought that Cheney was already lethally infected.’” Cheney had recently been briefed about the lack of U.S. defenses against a biowarfare attack, Mayer revealed. Thus, “when the White House sensor11 registered the presence of such poisons less than a month later, many, including Cheney, believed a nightmare was unfolding. ‘It was a really nerve jangling time,’ the former official said.”

  Cheney got religion. Within a week, Mayer writes, he “had convinced the President12 to support a $1.6 billion bioterrorism-preparedness program” and “argued that every citizen in the country should be vaccinated against smallpox,” a prophylaxis that had fallen out of favor in the decades since the eradication of wild smallpox in 1977 because a small number of those vaccinated contracted systemic infections as a result. On 29 October Cheney literally13 went underground, moving to a nuclear bunker dug deep into bedrock near Camp David—the famous “secure, undisclosed location” of contemporary news references to his whereabouts. When he traveled to Washington, he traveled with a duffel stuffed with a gas mask and a biochemical protective suit beside him in his limo. The terror Cheney and his colleagues felt was palpable, Mayer wrote:

  Officials who worked14 in the White House and other sensitive posts with access to raw intelligence files during the fall of 2001 say it is nearly impossible to exaggerate the sense of mortal and existential danger that dominated the thinking of the upper rungs of the Bush Administration during those months.

  “They thought they were going to get hit again. They convinced themselves that they were facing a ticking time bomb,” recalled Roger Cressey, who then headed what was known as the Terrorist Threats Sub-Group of the National Security Council.

  (I witnessed the government’s residual panic six months later when I went to Washington to participate in a one-day discussion of terrorist psychology sponsored by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. Our DTRA host welcomed us by congratulating us on our “courage” in daring to set foot in the nation’s capital.)

  Two Washington postal workers died of anthrax on 21 and 22 October. A New York hospital worker succumbed on 29 October. For the next three weeks, no new cases emerged, and it began to seem the attacks might have ended. Then, on 16 November, a ninety-four-year-old Connecticut woman, Ottilie Lundgren, was admitted to a Derby hospital suffering from an upper-respiratory infection and shortness of breath. Inhalation anthrax was confirmed on 20 November, by which time her breathing had worsened despite antibiotic treatment, and her kidneys had begun to fail. A story about Lundgren appeared in The Washington Post the next day,15 21 November, the day she died.

  Lundgren’s death was a turning point. She had seldom left home and had no apparent link with the sources of anthrax infection identified earlier in Florida, New York, and Washington. Her case was actually an outlier, and a link through cross-contaminated mail was eventually identified, but an infection in rural Connecticut seemed to the beleaguered White House to mark the beginning of a wider epidem
ic, if not a national attack. If George W. Bush had not already been briefed on the Lundgren case, he would have known of it from the Washington Post story on the morning of her death. He probably discussed it with Cheney16 that morning, as he did with Condoleezza Rice. “I think the seminal event17 of the Bush administration was the anthrax attacks,” someone close to the president told the journalist Jacob Weisberg. “It was the thing that changed everything. It was the hard stare into the abyss.” What is certain is that Bush met with Donald Rumsfeld on the afternoon of 21 November and gave his secretary of defense the order to investigate removing Saddam Hussein.

  ALTHOUGH NO REASON WAS as visceral, there were others besides protecting America from anthrax for going to war with Iraq. Bush had long thought his father should have finished the job in 1991; he would eventually insult the elder Bush by saying his administration had “cut and run early.”18 Regime change had been the conventional wisdom in Washington for years. Paul Wolfowitz from the inside, Richard Perle and others from the outside, were vigorously promoting the neoconservative vision of remodeling the Middle East a little closer to their hearts’ desire, and in time Bush would embrace it.

  Most fundamentally, terrorism provoked the same dilemma that the development of nuclear weapons had provoked: the impossibility of defense. Rumsfeld discussed the problem with Bob Woodward four months after September 11, a discussion that reflected the debates within the Bush administration at the time. “The key thought about this,”19 Rumsfeld said, “is that you cannot defend against terrorism.… You can’t defend at every place at every time against every technique. You just can’t do it, because they just keep changing techniques, time, and you have to go after them. And you have to take it to them, and that means you have to preempt them.” The problem of the impossibility of defense against nuclear weapons had led the United States to seriously consider attacking the Soviet Union preemptively in 1954, before the Soviets had built up a nuclear arsenal sufficiently large to deter the United States from doing so. President Dwight Eisenhower had rejected preemption out of hand as un-American; the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was still a vivid memory. Now it had emerged again as a possible strategy for preventing further terrorist attacks on the United States.

  There was yet another problem with tolerating the existing regime in Iraq, one that the independent scholar Christian Alfonsi first identified as a motive for Bush’s decision to prepare for war: Saddam’s propensity to cause trouble when it was most inconvenient politically. Alfonsi located an early discussion of this problem at the Bush team’s Camp David meeting of 15 September 2001:

  Since the end of the Gulf War20 ten years earlier, Saddam Hussein had exhibited a consistent pattern of capitalizing on major crises involving the United States in order to challenge the will of the international community. Many in the room—including Vice President Cheney, Secretary Powell, and Wolfowitz himself—had had bitter firsthand experience of this during the summer of 1992, when Saddam Hussein capitalized on a White House distracted by the outbreak of ethnic war in the Balkans to mount an “across-the-board” challenge to the UN regime imposed on Iraq after the Gulf War. Now, in the aftermath of the worst attack ever on American soil, there was concern that Saddam might “take advantage” of the situation [whether he was involved in it or not].…

  By the end of the day on September 15, the focus of the planning in the group had shifted entirely to al Qaeda and Afghanistan. Still, President Bush remained concerned about the possibility of Iraq taking hostile action at a moment of perceived American weakness.

  STARTING A WAR WITH Iraq would require more justification than a handful of anthrax letters, however terrifying. In any case, by November 2001 the FBI was working on the theory that the letters had been sent by a domestic terrorist, not Al Qaeda or Iraqi infiltrators; the strain of anthrax in the letters identified the powder as an American product developed for U.S. biowarfare research. It was difficult to see how Iraqi or Al Qaeda terrorists hiding out in the United States, with minimal laboratory facilities at best, could have purified the low-grade anthrax used in the first round of mailings into the weapons-grade anthrax used in the second round of mailings in the short span of time between the two. Nor was the scale of the attacks consistent with state sponsorship; despite all the contamination and panic they caused, only seven letters had been mailed. A serious anthrax attack would almost certainly have involved distribution of the deadly organism by aerosol spray from aircraft, which could contaminate an entire city and produce casualties on the scale of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings.

  Bush and his colleagues sent mixed signals at first of their new animus. In the White House Rose Garden on 26 November the president noted, “Saddam Hussein agreed21 to allow inspectors in his country, and in order to prove to the world he’s not developing weapons of mass destruction, he ought to let the inspectors back in. Afghanistan is still just the beginning.” On 9 December Cheney emerged from his bunker to appear on Meet the Press positing a connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Most notably and pointedly, Bush used the memorable phrase “axis of evil”22 in his State of the Union address on 29 January 2002 to link Iraq with Iran and North Korea as “regimes that sponsor terror.” Significantly, Bush mentioned anthrax first in his list of particulars against Iraq, claiming that “the Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade.” The would-be war president had begun to nail down his argument, adding, “This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens—leaving the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children. This is a regime that agreed to international inspections—then kicked out the inspectors. This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world.” But Bush was still unprepared to single out Iraq from his trio of evildoers, speaking of “states like these, and their terrorist allies” as “arming to threaten the peace of the world” and posing “a grave and growing danger.” The argument that he would later focus on Iraq was there, but still hypothetical; Bush’s people had not yet assembled credible evidence to support it: “They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic.”

  In mid-March 2002, David Manning, a foreign-policy adviser to the British prime minister, Tony Blair, met with Condoleezza Rice to prepare the way for a Blair visit to Bush’s Texas ranch where Iraq would be discussed. “Condi’s enthusiasm for regime change is undimmed,” Manning reported back to London. “But there were some signs since we last spoke of greater awareness of the practical difficulties and political risks.” Manning continued:

  From what she said,23 Bush has yet to find the answers to the big questions:

  • how to persuade international opinion that military action against Iraq is justified;

  • what value to put on the exiled Iraqi opposition;

  • how to coordinate a US/allied military campaign with internal [Iraqi] opposition (assuming there is any);

  • what happens on the morning after?

  A few days later the British ambassador to the United States, Christopher Meyer, welcomed Paul Wolfowitz to Sunday lunch and reported their conversation to Blair. Wolfowitz indicated that Bush was leaning toward using threat inflation—fear of Iraqi WMD—to justify war, Meyer wrote:

  [Wolfowitz] took a slightly different position from others in the Administration, who were focused on Saddam’s capacity to develop weapons of mass destruction. The WMD danger was of course crucial to the public case against Saddam, particularly the potential linkage to terrorism. But Wolfowitz thought it indispensable to spell out in detail Saddam’s barbarism. This was well documented.…

  Wolfowitz said that it was absurd to deny the link between terrorism and Saddam. There might be doubt about the alleged meeting in Prague between Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker on 9/11, and Iraqi intelligence (did we, he
asked, know anything more about this meeting?). But there were other substantiated cases of Saddam giving comfort to terrorists, including someone involved in the first [1993] attack on the World Trade Center (the latest New Yorker apparently has a story about links between Saddam and Al Qaeda operating in Kurdistan).

  There is something plaintive in Wolfowitz’s appeal to the British for information about the supposed meeting between Atta and Iraqi intelligence in Prague five months before September 11. The New York Times had first reported the supposed contact in late October 2001, attributing the story to the Czech minister of the interior.24 Then, early in 2002, the Czech president, Václav Havel, had called the White House25 personally to caution Bush that there was actually no evidence for the contact, which Bush would nevertheless continue to use in promoting his war. But Wolfowitz’s cautions and concerns about focusing the argument for war on WMD indicate that the argument was taking shape within the Bush administration.

  Jack Straw, Blair’s foreign secretary, wrote the prime minister on 25 March outlining an argument Blair might use to test Bush’s assumptions about Iraq during their forthcoming meeting in Crawford, including:

  3. The Iraqi regime26 plainly poses a most serious threat to its neighbours, and therefore to international security. However, in the documents so far presented it has been hard to glean whether the threat from Iraq is so significantly different from that of Iran and North Korea as to justify military action (see below).

  What is worse now?

  4. If September 11 had not happened, it is doubtful that the US would now be considering military action against Iraq. In addition, there has been no credible evidence to link Iraq with [Osama bin Laden] and Al Qaeda. Objectively, the threat from Iraq has not worsened as a result of 11 September. What has however changed is the tolerance of the international community (especially that of the US), the world having witnessed on September 11 just what determined evil people can these days perpetuate.