A Pretext for War (42 page)

While Miller’s article continued to serve the war policies of the Bush administration well, a team of reporters from Knight-Ridder’s Washington bureau decided to look into the story and found it contained far more smoke than fire. “We began hearing from sources in the military, the intelligence community, and the foreign service of doubts about the arguments the administration was making,” bureau chief John Walcott told reporter Michael Massing in the
New York Review of Books
.

“These people,” Walcott added, “were better informed about the details of the intelligence than the people higher up in the food chain, and they were deeply troubled by what they regarded as the administration’s deliberate misrepresentation of intelligence, ranging from overstating the case to outright fabrication.”

At the time, Knight-Ridder was virtually alone among national news organizations attempting to look behind the aluminum tubes story. “In the period before the war,” wrote Michael Massing, “U.S. journalists were far too reliant on sources sympathetic to the administration. Those with dissenting views—and there were more than a few—were shut out. Reflecting this, the coverage was highly deferential to the White House. This was especially apparent on the issue of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction—the heart of the President’s case for war. Despite abundant evidence of the administration’s brazen misuse of intelligence in this matter, the press repeatedly let officials get away with it.”

Knight-Ridder reporters Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay found a number of senior U.S. officials with access to intelligence on Iraq who thought the administration claims were fraudulent. “While President Bush marshals congressional and international support for invading Iraq,” Strobel, Landay, and Walcott wrote, “a growing number of military officers, intelligence professionals, and diplomats in his own government privately have deep misgivings about the administration’s double-time march toward war.”

These officials, they said in the fall of 2002, “charge that administration hawks have exaggerated evidence of the threat that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein poses—including distorting his links to the al-Qaida terrorist network. . . . They charge that the administration squelches dissenting views and that intelligence analysts are under intense pressure to produce reports supporting the White House’s argument that Saddam poses such an immediate threat to the United States that pre-emptive military action is necessary.”

Meanwhile, three days after the Sunday media blitz, Senator Bob Graham (D–Fla.), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, sent a secret letter to George Tenet demanding that the agency weigh in on the controversy. He asked that the CIA issue its own analysis in the form of a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) prepared by the National Intelligence Council (NIC), a sort of community-wide think tank.

From the start, the White House Iraq Group was hoping to avoid any interference as they continued to take the mushroom-cloud image to the public. They knew “there were disagreements over details in almost every aspect of the administration’s case against Iraq,” one official told Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus of
The Washington Post
. And they did not want “a lot of footnotes and disclaimers.”

Senior State Department intelligence official Gregory Thielmann agreed. “Instead of our leadership forming conclusions based on a careful reading of the intelligence we provided them,” he said, “they already had their conclusion to start out with, and they were cherry-picking the information that we provided to use whatever pieces of it that fit their overall interpretation. Worse than that, they were dropping qualifiers and distorting some of the information that we provided to make it seem more alarmist and more dangerous than the information that we were giving them. . . . There seemed to be an unseemly eagerness to believe any information which would portray the Iraqi threat as being extremely grave and imminent.”

Thus, the NIE was rushed out in just two weeks—a process that usually takes months—and despite the lack of valid intelligence, it continued to boost the Iraq “nuclear threat” charge. A “key judgment,” concluded the NIE, was that Hussein was intent on acquiring a nuclear weapon. It added, “Most agencies assess that Baghdad started reconstituting its nuclear program about the time that UNSCOM inspectors departed—December 1998.” The NIE then included the phony Italian Niger claim. According to “a foreign government service,” it said, Iraq had arranged to purchase “several tons of ‘pure uranium’ (probably yellowcake)” in Niger.

The NIE also contained a frightening section indicating that Iraq might launch drones—unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)—loaded with deadly germs against the United States. “Baghdad’s UAV,” it said, “could threaten Iraq’s neighbors, U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf and if brought close to, or into, the United States, the U.S. homeland.”

George Tenet and Dick Cheney later explained the drone threat in more detail to members of Congress. They were hoping to convince the legislators to vote in favor of giving Bush a blank check to launch his preemptive war against Iraq. In a bug-proof room, they laid out what they said was the “smoking gun,” proving that Iraq was a grave threat to the United States. Later, other House and Senate members were given the same briefing.

The “smoking gun” turned out to be a fleet of UAVs with the potential for delivering deadly quantities of chemical and biological agents. In addition, they said, Iraq had also sought software used for producing sophisticated maps of cities along the East Coast of the United States.

Florida Democratic Senator Bill Nelson was one of those convinced by what he heard. “I was one of seventy-seven Senators who voted for the resolution in October of 2002 to authorize the expenditure of funds for the President to engage in an attack on Iraq. I voted for it,” he later said. A key reason for his vote, he said, was information “very convincing to me that there was an imminent peril to the interests of the United States.”

According to Nelson, “I was looked at straight in the face and told that Saddam Hussein had the means of delivering those biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction by unmanned drones, called UAVs, unmanned aerial vehicles. Further, I was looked at straight in the face and told that UAVs could be launched from ships off the Atlantic coast to attack eastern seaboard cities of the United States. . . . It was in a highly classified setting in a secure room.”

Later, Secretary of State Colin Powell, in his presentation before the United Nations Security Council on February 5, 2003, used the UAV threat as a key justification for going to war: “Iraq could use these small UAVs, which have a wingspan of only a few meters, to deliver biological agents to its neighbors or, if transported, to other countries, including the United States.”

But the intelligence, like virtually all the rest, was bogus. The drones, it was later determined, were made for observation, not delivery of chemical or biological agents. Instead of chambers for holding germs or powder, they had only glass viewing ports and brackets to hold cameras. There was no room for anything else.

The mapping software of the U.S. east coast was equally a fabrication. Iraq, like many countries, had simply been offered the program by an Australian company that produced maps similar to the kind anyone can obtain for free from MapQuest or any other mapware offered on the Internet. “The software,” said one official, “apparently produced maps not much better than those sold at gasoline stations.” But it was all moot anyway, since Iraq neither asked for the software nor ever purchased it. “The vendor,” said an official, “in the interest of making further sales, suggested this to the Iraqis, and there was no confirmation that we could find that the Iraqis had actually purchased the software.”

“We now know,” said Senator Nelson in January 2004, “after the fact and on the basis of [CIA chief weapons inspector] Dr. [David] Kay’s testimony today in the Senate Armed Services Committee, that the information was false; and not only that there were not weapons of mass destruction—chemical and biological—but there was no fleet of UAVs, unmanned aerial vehicles, nor was there any capability of putting UAVs on ships and transporting them to the Atlantic coast and launching them at U.S. cities on the eastern seaboard. . . . The degree of specificity I was given a year and a half ago, prior to my vote, was not only inaccurate; it was patently false.”

What Nelson was not told was that even within the CIA there was disagreement over the information, just as there was concerning the uranium from Niger. “Not only was it in vigorous dispute,” said Nelson, “there was an outright denial that the information was accurate. That was all within the intelligence community.”

During his State of the Union address to Congress in January 2003, President Bush used both the phony UAV threat and the bogus Niger uranium allegations in his argument for war with Iraq. “The British government,” he said, “has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Again, the American public was left with the image of nuclear annihilation.

CHAPTER 13

LANGLEY

In the days, weeks, and months following the September 11 attacks, the CIA was in chaos as it scrambled to quickly beef up its ranks with case officers, analysts, linguists, and paramilitary specialists. For many working at the agency, there was a renewed sense of mission as they drew together to fight a common enemy—terrorism in general and Al Qaeda in particular. But within a few months, for many the morale once again began to drop through the floor as they began getting pressure to come up with Saddam Hussein’s fingerprints on 9/11 and Al Qaeda.

One of those who felt the pressure was a DO case officer who spent years running agents overseas, but who had been reassigned to the unit charged with finding weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, a part of the Counter-Proliferation Division. According to the official, the group never found any indications of WMD in Iraq. “Where I was working, I never saw anything—no one else there did either,” the person said.

Nevertheless, there was a great deal of pressure to find a reason to go to war with Iraq. And the pressure was not just subtle, it was blatant. At one point in January 2003, the person’s boss called a meeting and gave them their marching orders. “And he said, ‘You know what—if Bush wants to go to war, it’s your job to give him a reason to do so,’” according to the official. It was the first time the official had ever heard anyone order employees to slant their analysis for political purposes.

“And I said ‘All right, it’s time, it’s time to go,’” said the official. “I remember, when it happened I looked around and I said ‘This is awful.’ He said it at the weekly office meeting. And I just remember saying, ‘This is something that the American public, if they ever heard, if they ever knew, they would be outraged.’ The fact that we’re sitting in the meeting and we’re not outraged at this, and we can’t do anything—it was just against every moral fiber of my being. He said, ‘If President Bush wants to go to war, ladies and gentlemen, your job’s to give him a reason to do so.’ . . . He said it to about fifty people. And it’s funny because everyone still talks about that—‘Remember when [he] said that.’”

Though the case officer still holds a very high security clearance and works on similar activities within the intelligence community, the person left the WMD unit. It is the cult of secrecy within the CIA, the person said, that keeps people from speaking out. “No one is willing to say the emperor has no clothes—no one is willing to say that,” said the official. “Your job is just to salute and say okay. . . . I said to another colleague how embarrassed I was, and he said you better be careful, someone’s going to report you.”

When the official arrived in the office, others there mentioned that Vice President Cheney had also made very unusual visits to the agency to pressure analysts to come up with something to justify the war. “Before I got there,” said the official, “Cheney came and literally went around to people saying find something. I was in there at the time when everyone said, ‘Remember when Cheney came in, said we needed to find something nuclear?’ Everyone was talking about it still—I think it was like November or December.”

Another former CIA official who heard agency employees complain of pressure from above to slant intelligence reports was Larry Johnson, who later served as deputy director of the State Department’s Office of Counter Terrorism. A registered Republican, he voted for George W. Bush and contributed financially to his 2000 presidential campaign. In February 2004 he said:

By April of last year, I was beginning to pick up grumblings from friends inside the intelligence community that there had been pressure applied to analysts to come up with certain conclusions. Specifically, I was told that analysts were pressured to find an operational link between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. One analyst, in particular, told me they were repeatedly pressured by the most senior officials in the Department of Defense.

In an e-mail exchange with another friend, I raised the possibility that “the Bush administration had bought into a lie.” My friend, who works within the intelligence community, challenged me on the use of the word, “bought,” and suggested instead that the Bush administration had created the lie. . . . I have spoken to more than two analysts who have expressed fear of retaliation if they come forward and tell what they know. We know that most of the reasons we were given for going to war were wrong.

In congressional testimony, former CIA Counterterrorism chief Vince Cannistraro said that in the weeks and months leading up to the war in Iraq, the White House had exerted unprecedented pressure on the CIA and other intelligence agencies to come up with evidence linking Iraq to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Pressure was also placed on analysts, he said, to show that Baghdad was trying to build a nuclear bomb. “They were looking for those selective pieces of intelligence that would support the policy,” Cannistraro said.