A Pretext for War (47 page)

The “script” had been prepared by top Libby and Cheney aide John Hannah, according to the official. Hannah was assigned to Powell’s team to help prepare the presentation. Hannah was also one of the key officials receiving the largely bogus raw intelligence from Chalabi’s INC, according to a memorandum obtained by
Newsweek
. “The memo not only describes Cheney aide Hannah as a ‘principal point of contact’ for the program,” wrote Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff, “it even provides his direct White House telephone number.” The other official named on the memo was William Luti, head of Feith’s Office of Special Plans at the Pentagon.

The script “was a prepared document supposedly written by Scooter Libby,” said the official. He said he later “found out that . . . John Hannah, in the Vice President’s office, who works for Scooter Libby, actually wrote it. Scooter actually may have done some things, but John wrote it, I think. . . . And John came amply papered in order to support that document, but what he was amply papered with was not a professional intelligence trail, it was a trail to a newspaper article, it was a trail to an INC defector, it was a trail to someone else’s speech that was as unsupportable as that. So we tossed it out.”

Instead of the Cheney office “script,” the team decided to use the NIC’s National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq. While not as bad as the “script,” the NIE was also a thrown-together collection of half-baked intelligence, including such things as the Italian Niger yellowcake claim.

Concerned with the rejection of their “script,” members of the WHIG came over to CIA to watch Powell rehearse his presentation in George Tenet’s conference room and assure themselves that he was still following the party line. There were “three major rehearsals, with everybody coming over from the White House,” said the official, “with the exception of the President. Condi Rice came over, Scooter Libby came over, Steve Hadley—Condi’s deputy—came over.” George Tenet was also present.

“On a number of occasions,” said the official, Powell “simply said, ‘I’m not using that, I’m not using that, that is not good enough. That’s not something that I can support.’ And on each occasion he was fought by the Vice President’s office in the person of Scooter Libby, by the National Security Advisor [Condoleezza Rice] herself, by her deputy [Steve Hadley], and sometimes by the intelligence people—George [Tenet] and [Deputy CIA Director] John [McLaughlin].”

Much of the fighting between Powell and the WHIG officials was over what the official said was “the garbage on terrorism.” This included such things as the discredited connections between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks, and meetings between hijacker Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague, Czech Republic. “Cutting some of that stuff out was fought hard by the National Security Advisor [Rice], the Deputy National Security Advisor [Hadley], Scooter Libby from the Vice President’s office. They wanted that stuff back in there. And on one occasion the Secretary actually threw the paper down on the table and said, ‘I’m not saying that.’ And that was the tenor throughout, even when we did two more rehearsals in New York City.”

Even after Powell threw material out, it would occasionally be quietly put back in. “One of the most outrageous ones was the Mohamed Atta meeting in Prague,” said the official. “Steve Hadley on one occasion [put] it back in. We cut it and somehow it got back in. And the Secretary said, ‘I thought I cut this?’ And Hadley looked around and said, ‘My fault, Mr. Secretary, I put it back in.’ ‘Well, cut it, permanently!’” yelled Powell.

“It was all cartoon,” said the official, “the specious connections between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, much of which I subsequently found came probably from the INC and from their sources, defectors and so forth, [regarding the] training in Iraq for terrorists. It was like a chronology of contacts between terrorists, and in particular Al Qaeda or Al Qaeda associates, with the Mukhabaret, the Iraqi intelligence service, Saddam Hussein, whatever, and it just didn’t hold together.”

With regard to the origin of some of the material, the official said, “No question in my mind that some of the sources that we were using were probably Israeli intelligence. That was one thing that was rarely revealed to us—if it was a foreign source.”

With regard to the terrorist connections, said the official, the truth was opposite from what they were projecting. At every opportunity, Saddam Hussein spurned any relationship with Al Qaeda and terrorist organizations. “You would almost always find that Saddam Hussein or someone in his government had rebuffed the attempt by the terrorist organization, whoever it might have been, to get training from, funds from, or establish some kind of operational relationship between Iraqi intelligence and themselves. It had almost always been rebuffed.

“And so it didn’t make sense to be talking about contacts which clearly had happened but didn’t turn into anything. That didn’t become a relationship. It didn’t become a sponsorship, or a host-sponsor type of thing.” But the truth was not what the WHIG was hoping to pass on to the American public.

Powell was so concerned about the quality of intelligence he was getting that he told Tenet,
“
George, you’re going to be there with me at the UN, you’re going to be sitting behind me. You have got to put your imprimatur on it—this is your presentation as much as it is mine.” Tenet agreed. “Mr. Secretary,” he said, “I’ve got to go defend it on the Hill after you say it. And that’s going to be a much tougher audience. So I’m standing behind it one hundred percent.”

On February 5, 2003, Powell took his seat at the round Security Council table and made his case to the world. It was a powerful and convincing performance, particularly because of his assertive language and lack of qualifiers. “My colleagues,” he said, “every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.”

But Powell knew that the case was anything but solid and was based almost entirely on poor guesswork. He began with what he likely thought would be the most dramatic and convincing evidence—by playing actual NSA intercepts of Iraq military personnel. “What you’re about to hear is a conversation that my government monitored. It takes place on November 26 of last year, on the day before United Nations teams resumed inspections in Iraq. The conversation involves two senior officers, a colonel and a brigadier general, from Iraq’s elite military unit, the Republican Guard.”

The colonel says, “We have this modified vehicle . . . What do we say if one of them sees it?” He notes that it is from the al-Kindi company. “Yeah, yeah. I’ll come to you in the morning. I have some comments. I’m worried you all have something left.”

A second intercept, recorded on January 30, 2003, involves a conversation between Republican Guard headquarters and an officer in the field. “There is a directive of the [Republican] Guard chief of staff at the conference today,” says headquarters. “They are inspecting the ammunition you have . . . for the possibility there are forbidden
ammo . . . We sent you a message yesterday to clean out all of the areas, the scrap areas, the abandoned areas. Make sure there is nothing there. . . . After you have carried out what is contained in the message, destroy the message.” The officer agrees.

And a third intercept, said Powell, “shows a captain in the Second Corps of the Republican Guard being ordered by a colonel to ‘remove the expression “nerve agents” from wireless instructions.’”

In years of monitoring Iraqi communications, that was the best NSA had—comments about a “modified vehicle,” an order to get rid of some “forbidden ammo,” and an order to “remove the expression ‘nerve agents’ from wireless communications.” Even NSA Director Hayden agreed that they were little more than ambiguous.

“We were asked, what do you have,” said Hayden in a late-January 2004 interview. “And we surfaced several, including these three. . . . If you take a textural analysis of that, they are ambiguous. That said, you don’t have to be a dishonest or intellectually handicapped person to be very suspicious about when the guy’s saying remove all references to this from your codebooks, or the other guy saying ‘I’ve got one of the modified vehicles here.’”

Asked, “Modified in what way?” Hayden said, “Well, we don’t know. That’s the ambiguity. So we went ahead and played them. . . . In my heart, each one of them individually could be explained away as this, that, or the other. Collectively they made a reasonably good package. . . . Now you say they’re ambiguous. And I admit that, yeah, I can intellectualize and you can explain away some of these things. . . . For example, let’s just take the one about ‘remove all references to “nerve agents” in your codebooks.’ If I’m innocent and I’m on the other side of the fence—[I might say] ‘Oh, give me a break, for God’s sake, we all have codebooks, we all need references in it, you tell me you don’t have codewords for nerve agents on the battlefield. All modern armies have those codewords, you idiots.’”

Given the obvious ambiguity of the intercepts, Hayden was surprised that the Iraqis did not argue that case more strongly. “They didn’t do that. What they said was, these are third-class forgeries that any high school student can fabricate. That was very interesting to me, because rather than taking the textual criticism and attacking them on their merits, or lack of merit, they dismissed them as forgeries. I just looked at it and said, ‘Well, why are you going down that track?’ It lessened the sense of ambiguity. Whatever lingering sense of ambiguity about these intercepts was in my mind got lessened by the Iraqi government’s response to it.”

Even within Powell’s small task force, the NSA intercepts—the most dramatic evidence they had—was looked upon as ambiguous. “If Captain Hindi with a Republican Guard unit was saying, ‘Take nerve agents out of his CEOI—out of his communicating instructions,’” said the senior official, “that could have a double meaning. I mean, we took it as having a meaning that they didn’t want the inspectors to know they had nerve agents. But it could be the other side of the coin, too—they got rid of them, so they’re taking it out of the CEOI because they don’t need it anymore.”

But the public was never told how weak and ambiguous the best evidence was. They would be told the opposite.

In addition to hearing the intercepts, Powell brought up the frightening topic of biological weapons. “Saddam Hussein has investigated dozens of biological agents, causing diseases such as gas gangrene, plague, typhus, tetanus, cholera, camel pox, and hemorrhagic fever. And he also has the wherewithal to develop smallpox.” Then he warned, “One of the most worrisome things that emerges from the thick intelligence file we have on Iraq’s biological weapons is the existence of mobile production facilities used to make biological agents.

“Let me take you inside that intelligence file and share with you what we know from eyewitness accounts,” said Powell. “We have firsthand descriptions of biological-weapons factories on wheels and on rails. The trucks and train cars are easily moved and are designed to evade detection by inspectors. In a matter of months, they can produce a quantity of biological poison equal to the entire amount that Iraq claimed to have produced in the years prior to the Gulf War. . . . We know that Iraq has at least seven of these mobile biological-agent factories.” Powell then unveiled dramatic drawings of these germ factories on wheels. For proof, Powell pointed to multiple human sources:

The source was an eyewitness, an Iraqi chemical engineer who supervised one of these facilities. He actually was present during biological-agent production runs. . . . This defector is currently hiding in another country, with the certain knowledge that Saddam Hussein will kill him if he finds him. . . . His eyewitness account of these mobile production facilities has been corroborated by other sources.

A second source, an Iraqi civil engineer in a position to know the details of the program, confirmed the existence of transportable facilities moving on trailers. A third source, also in a position to know, reported in summer 2002 that Iraq had manufactured mobile production systems mounted on road trailer units and on rail cars. Finally, a fourth source, an Iraqi major, who defected, confirmed that Iraq has mobile biological research laboratories, in addition to the production facilities I mentioned earlier.

But despite Powell’s hard sell and dramatic flourishes, the evidence was all bad, largely supplied by Chalabi’s team of con men. According to a March 2004 interview with a senior official involved in the presentation:

We had four sources for the biological labs, four sources. About a month ago we found out that one of them had fallen away, and then about two weeks ago I found out that two more had fallen away. And yesterday I learned that the fourth source had probably fallen away.

George [Tenet] is saying all around town that three of the four are absolutely bogus. I make this point, only because that is one of the things that the Secretary of State of the United States looked at the DCI [Director of Central Intelligence] of the United States and said, “George, are you sure about these mobile labs, because we were putting a lot of stuff up on the screen.” And George said, “Mr. Secretary, that’s a slam dunk.” And that’s the way he talks—I mean, when he says something like that, basketball, when he says something like that, you go with it. Because George was standing by it.

There were three sources for the labs as production facilities, and there was a fourth for the labs as a research facility in addition to production. To George’s credit, he admitted it. That source had been declared a fabricator a year or two before we put the presentation together but the CIA had lost computer contact for that information. And so when it was run through the computers, it didn’t show up. But in their subsequent scrub, that he ordered to find how they so screwed up, they found it. And so he had to come forward and say, “Well, that fourth source, it wasn’t worth anything, and we even declared it not being worth anything two years or so before you did the presentation.”