500 Days (69 page)

Blix was somewhat uneasy. He was still troubled by Cheney’s speech in August in which he dismissed weapons inspectors as essentially useless and gave his confident assertion that Iraq undoubtedly possessed weapons of mass destruction. There was a strong chance that Iraqis might be hiding illegal weapons—particularly anthrax, Blix thought. But Cheney seemed to be willfully overlooking evidence—such as the results of earlier inspections—that contradicted his narrative, placing his faith instead in the stories spun by Iraqi defectors about secret weaponry concealed throughout the country. Inspections would have to combat assertions.

It all came down to the safety of American citizens, Cheney said. “I always take the security interests of the United States as the starting point,” he said. “Nothing else overrides that. And if inspections don’t get results, they’re not going to go on forever.”

He looked Blix in the eye. “The United States is ready to discredit inspections in favor of disarmament,” he said.

Blix got the message. If his team found the weapons that Cheney was certain had been secreted away, they had done a good job. If they didn’t, they were a naive collection of bumblers, and Saddam would have to be defanged by military might.

Heads I win, tails you lose.

•  •  •  

Minutes later in the Oval Office, Bush shifted about in his chair as he spoke with Blix and ElBaradei. He was a sharp contrast to his dour and unflappable vice president, Blix thought—charming, with an air of almost boyish enthusiasm. And his message was almost the antithesis of Cheney’s.

“The United States genuinely wants peace,” he said. “Contrary to what you may have heard, I’m not some wild, gung ho Texan bent on dragging the U.S. into war.”

He was willing to stand by while the U.N. Security Council debated a new resolution, but not for long. The League of Nations delayed and debated about disarmament without ever making real progress—a failure that set the stage for World War II. The United States was not about to commit the same colossal blunder.

“But America has full confidence in you and Mr. ElBaradei,” Bush said. “We are going to throw our full support behind you.”

“Thank you, Mr. President,” Blix replied. “We appreciate that. I consider the support of the United States to be essential for our success.”

The two diplomats headed off for meetings with the president’s national security team. The conversation with Bush had been devoid of any real substance—probably on purpose, Blix surmised. He had just been subjected to a good-cop, bad-cop routine, with Bush’s cheery tone meant to convey American hopes for his success and Cheney’s forbidding demeanor intended to afford him a glimpse of the consequences of failure.

•  •  •  

That same day, Stefano D’Ambrosio, the head of the Milan office for SISMI, was walking down a street in Bologna alongside Marco Mancini, the second in command for Italy’s military intelligence agency.

A few days had passed since D’Ambrosio had heard from Bob Lady—the CIA station chief in Milan—about the American plan to abduct one of the city’s residents, Abu Omar. Despite Lady’s insistence that the director of SISMI was part of the operation, D’Ambrosio felt obligated to warn his bosses of the CIA officer’s qualms about the scheme and to express his own dismay as well.

Mancini listened in silence, his face stony, as D’Ambrosio spelled out his and Lady’s concerns.

“I seriously urge you to advise the director of these issues,” D’Ambrosio said. “But please don’t let him know that I was made directly aware of this plan by Bob Lady.” Lady, he said, might suffer serious consequences for having filled in D’Ambrosio without permission.

“Also, I want to be clear,” D’Ambrosio added. “It is not possible for SISMI and CIA operatives to come into my territory without my knowing about it.”

Mancini turned to D’Ambrosio, glaring at him. “But was it really Lady himself who told you?” he asked.

“Yes, it was.”

A grunt. “I find that very disturbing.”

“Well,” D’Ambrosio replied, “might it be opportune to make a written note of this?”

“That’s not necessary,” Mancini replied. He would personally alert Gustavo Pignero, SISMI’s director of counterespionage.

The meeting ended. And while D’Ambrosio didn’t know it yet, he had just critically damaged his career.

•  •  •  

Bruce Ivins was sitting at a table, scrawling messages to himself. The anthrax researcher was increasingly troubled. He had made mistakes. His decision to decontaminate his work area against his boss’s instructions had led the FBI to question him; he confessed not only to testing and cleaning there in April 2002, but also a few months before, in December.

At this point the FBI still considered him a valued member of the investigative team and dismissed his actions as just the behavior of a quirky guy. But having to explain himself to the bureau unnerved Ivins. He was embarrassed and anxious. He tried to appear blasé about it—he laughed to colleagues that maybe the government thought he might be the killer, as if such an accusation was the most absurd idea conceivable.

But when he was alone, symptoms of his stress bubbled over. He had long been fond of composing bizarre poems, and now he dashed them off more frequently, with stranger twists than ever. He wrote about a colleague’s circumcision, another’s obesity, manically jumping from topic to topic. Recently, he had gone a step further, scrawling notes to himself that vaguely threatened his perceived enemies.

His hand swooped maniacally as he wrote his latest tirade on a steno pad in wild block letters interspersed with flowing cursive strokes. The words were laced with rage at unspecified adversaries.

I DON’T CONGRATULATE OPPONENTS, I HUMILIATE THEM

I DRAW FIRST BLOOD . . . AND LAST

I’M NOT YOUR OPPONENT—I’M YOUR ENEMY.

Ivins finished his scribbling. He ripped the page off the pad and stuffed it into a drawer.

•  •  •  

A forensic investigator with the Indonesian police slowly scanned the light beam from a Mini-CrimeScope 400 down the mangled remnant of a car chassis. The five-foot length of metal discovered at the Bali bombing site had been examined repeatedly for clues, without success. Now, with the case underway for weeks, investigators were falling into near desperation. The trail was going cold, and they still didn’t have a single suspect.

The investigation had seen successes in the early days. The morning after the bombing, a team from the Australian Federal Police offered to assist the Indonesians with the inquiry. That same day, officers discovered the Yamaha motorcycle used by the terrorists dumped at a nearby mosque. They tracked down the shop where the bike had been purchased, and witnesses there provided enough information for police sketches. Still, authorities had no names and no hints of where else to look.

The investigators thought they had obtained critical evidence when the twisted piece of chassis was discovered on the roof of a nearby bank. If they could track down the owner of the car, they knew, they stood a fair chance of closing in on the perpetrators.

But their hopes collapsed as they examined the chunk of metal. The terrorists had filed down the two vehicle identification numbers—the VIN numbers—rendering them illegible. If they were smart enough to take that precaution, police officials feared, the chance that they left behind other clues was slim.

The man leading the investigation for the Indonesians, General I Made Mangku Pastika, fell into a deep depression about the lack of progress. He ordered his men to reexamine the evidence and then, without telling anyone, he left the office. A devout Hindu, he decided to visit his temple and pray for a breakthrough.

The investigators gave the chassis another look. It was the same exercise in futility—it was nothing, just a scrap of steel with unreadable numbers. But one forensic investigator hadn’t given up. As he illuminated each spot, he studied it meticulously, looking for something—anything—that might help.

Wait.

He saw a tiny piece of metal, just one and a half inches long. On previous inspections, it had appeared to be part of the chassis, but this time the investigator could see that it was welded on. It somehow looked different from the rest of the frame, with a slight variation in color.

The investigator reached for a tool and pried off the sliver of metal. He fixed the light on the spot that had been covered. And his heart leaped.

“Come here!” he yelled out to his colleagues. “I have something!”

•  •  •  

Pastika was in the middle of his devotions at the temple when his cell phone rang. One of his deputies was on the line.

“General, where are you?” the deputy asked. “Are you not in the office?”

“No,” Pastika replied. “I’m praying for the success of the investigation.”

The deputy laughed. “Your prayers have been answered,” he said. “We just found a number on the chassis.”

•  •  •  

The discovery of another VIN number was so far-fetched that more than a few of the investigators suspected there might have been some divine intervention.

The terrorists had unwittingly purchased the wrong kind of van in the wrong country. They had known that Indonesian cars and trucks had two VIN numbers, one stamped on the chassis and the other on the engine. But, under Indonesian law, commercial vehicles like the van were required to have a
third
number, also stamped on the chassis. The perpetrators had successfully filed down the usual two, but had no inkling that the third even existed.

Perhaps a mundane misstep, but it was another factor that led some officers to see the hand of providence. The bombers hadn’t just missed seeing the number—by virtue of an improbable act, it had become almost impossible for them to have discovered it. A former owner of the van had welded a support strut onto the chassis, and by sheer chance, it had covered the VIN number. That not only hid it from the bombers, but also shielded it from the explosion. The van had been torn to pieces in the blast, but the third VIN number emerged unscathed.

The police ran the number through a computer database and found the names of the vehicle’s previous seven owners. The most recent, Amrozi bin Nurhasyim, had a record. He was a member of Jemaah Islamiyah, the Asian terrorist organization affiliated with al-Qaeda, and the brother of Ali Imron. And now the authorities knew his address.

•  •  •  

The next morning, November 5, teams of Indonesian police raided Amrozi’s home in East Java. The forty-year-old mechanic was sleeping in the rear of the house. When the officers kicked in his door, he made no attempt to flee. Instead, he started to laugh.

“You guys are very clever,” he said with a smile. “How did you find me?”

The authorities swept through the house, quickly locating vital pieces of evidence. They found Amrozi’s cell phone, which had numbers for other conspirators; bags of bomb-making chemicals and the receipts from where they were purchased; training manuals on ambush techniques; and copies of speeches by Osama bin Laden.

Officers handcuffed Amrozi and ushered him outside. He beamed as he was led through the gaggle of investigators, shoved into the back of an armored van, and driven to the police station.

•  •  •  

Amrozi readily confessed. He not only took responsibility for his role in the attack, but also identified other plotters. He was proud of what they had done and seemed to delight in talking about it.

In his confession, he told the police that he hadn’t been near Kuta on the night of the bombing. Instead, he learned that it had been successful the next morning at seven, when he heard a news report on Radio Elshinta.

“I was very happy,” he told the police. “How can I describe it? It was like when I was still a bachelor trying for a girl and you finally get to meet her. It was that sort of excitement. But this was even better.”

Eventually, the police put on a public show of Amrozi’s bizarre grandstanding. Questioned behind glass, he merrily recounted the bombing as dozens of reporters and photographers listened in. He described the allure of Jemaah Islamiyah and bin Laden as well as his own dedication to jihad.

He pointed at the journalists. “These are the sort of people I wanted to kill,” he said.

•  •  •  

The debate about revving up the interrogation of al-Qahtani to harsh new levels was going nowhere. Dunlavey’s request to establish three ascending categories of aggressive techniques had been sent up the line; discussions had been held, but after a month, no decisions had been made.

By November, Dunlavey was gone, replaced by General Miller. His superior, General Tom Hill, the SOUTHCOM commander, had taken responsibility for consulting Rumsfeld about the proposals.
5
Finally, on November 12, Hill
gave a verbal approval for the use of Category I and Category II techniques. That meant interrogators could yell at or deceive detainees, force them to assume stress positions, question them for twenty hours at a time, take away their clothes, forcibly shave them, and turn their phobias against them. But there would be no waterboarding of Guantanamo detainees, no death threats, no exposure to frigid cold.

That day, military intelligence officials at Guantanamo wrote an interrogation strategy for al-Qahtani, and it went far beyond anything approved by Hill. Entitled the Special Interrogation Plan, it involved four phases, not just three. Before questioning began, al-Qahtani would have both his beard and hair forcibly shaved. During the first stage of the interrogation, he would be subjected to pressures such as stress positions but would be forbidden to talk. If he tried to speak, the interrogators would tape his mouth shut. Military dogs would be brought into the room to frighten him. Then, when al-Qahtani was allowed to speak, the proposal said, he would be eager to “tell all.”

The second phase would not be controversial—a government translator would pose as a fellow detainee and try to pry out his secrets. Phase three would employ the techniques requested by Dunlavey in the October 11 memo.

Then, phase four: torture. American soldiers would not
personally
inflict pain on al-Qahtani. Instead, he would be shipped out of Guantanamo, temporarily or permanently, to either Egypt or Jordan, where beatings, burnings, and other abuses were routinely deployed. The strategy “would allow those countries to employ interrogation techniques that will enable them to obtain the requisite information,” the plan said.