The Reluctant Spy (22 page)

Our host was finally satisfied as we checked off the last page.

“Okay, here's the deal,” he said. “We're going to invade Iraq next spring. We're going to overthrow Saddam Hussein. We're going to establish the largest air force base in the world, and we're going to transfer everybody from Saudi Arabia to Iraq. That way, al-Qaeda won't have that hanging over us, that we're polluting the land of the two holy cities.”

His reference to holy cities reflected a dilemma that had its roots in a decade-old conflict. Remember Operation Desert Shield? After Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, we were concerned about Saddam's possible designs on Saudi Arabia. Desert Shield led to a massive American presence in Saudi Arabia that included air bases, hundreds of thousands of ground troops, and the enormous logistical support that attends such war-making enterprises. Our men and women were there as a clear sign to Saddam Hussein that the United States and its coalition meant business when they threatened Iraq with war if its invasion of Kuwait and its implicit threat to Saudi Arabia were not reversed. The subsequent Operation Desert Storm,
which began in January 1991, effectively destroyed Saddam's air force and clobbered his armies, sending them back to Baghdad, tails between their legs.

Afterward, however, a significant U.S. military presence remained in Saudi Arabia, at the grateful invitation of the royal family. This had been a significant sticking point with the Saudi-born bin Laden. His catalog of alleged U.S. sins was long: its unwavering support for Israel, its occupation of Palestinian lands, and its backing of autocratic governments in the Middle East. But garrisoning infidel forces in the land of Mecca and Medina was beyond the pale for the al-Qaeda leader. If the United States left Saudi Arabia, it would release some of the tension in the region.

Grenier wasn't concerned about that: “We're going to invade Iraq?” He was cool as usual, and I wasn't quite sure whether he was stating the fact or asking a rhetorical question. I was incredulous. How could anyone not be?

“It's a done deal, Bob,” our host said. “The decision's already been made.”

“Isn't this premature?” Grenier asked. “We haven't captured bin Laden yet.”

“No matter, the planning's completed, everything's in place.” The idea, our host went on, is to ratchet up the pressure on weapons of mass destruction—keep in mind, everyone thought Saddam had them then. We'd go to the United Nations toward the end of the year to make it look as if we wanted to ask the UN Security Council to authorize force. We expected Russian, Chinese, and French opposition, he said, and we were prepared to go it alone.

This was dumbfounding. Here was someone at the CIA, obviously plugged into the plans of the executive branch, telling us that the public debate in Congress, reflected almost daily in the press, meant nothing: We were going to war regardless of what the legislative branch of the federal government chose to do. We just sat there, wondering what the hell they were thinking over in the White
House. And what was he suggesting about the CIA's place in this evolving story? Was this going to be like Afghanistan? Was he telling us this because the agency would again be in the lead—the tip of the spear in an invasion of Iraq? Maybe our host was a mind reader or maybe it was an accident of timing in his script, but he went directly to my unasked question:

“Our role is going to be one of support,” he said. “It's not going to be a rerun of Afghanistan, where we were running the show.” He reiterated that there would be no turning back: The decision had been made. Just as an aside, the support he mentioned apparently had some odd and even presumptuous components. Once, when I walked into this guy's office for another meeting, I found him at his desk with a bunch of multicolored Magic Marker pens, redesigning the Iraqi flag. At one point, he was using sky blue and white, a bizarre choice in the extreme, given that those are the colors of the Israeli national flag—and, I should add, the Greek flag, too. In any event, you would have thought we'd leave the chore of designing their flag to the Iraqis themselves. The Iraqis did get rid of the old Saddam-era flag and replaced it, in January 2008, with a flag of three horizontal stripes—red, white, and black to reflect Arab liberation colors—with green Arabic script in the white panel with the phrase “God is great.”

As we left the erstwhile flag designer's office that first time and headed for our own, I was shaking my head in disbelief. Bob was just shaking his head, as well, a bemused expression clouding his face. Later, he told me that one of his bosses at the agency had briefed him on the executive branch's thinking a couple of months earlier.

“This is crazy,” I said. “You know how busy we were in Pakistan? You know how busy the next year's going to be? It'll be hell.”

“I'm not even sure how to proceed here,” Bob said. “Right now, we're a staff of exactly two. How are we going to organize ourselves?”
Pretty simple, really, you're the boss, and I work for you
.
Between us, we'll end up working eighty to one hundred hours a week and get half the job done. The long hours are okay; it's the prospect of not finishing the job that hurts
.

Later that day, Bob heard from his boss, the deputy director of operations, who apparently had signed the secrecy papers, too, because he phoned specifically to name Bob the Iraq mission manager. That meant Bob Grenier would be the agency's face to the rest of the Washington community on everything having to do with Iraq. Bob would have direct access to the director of central intelligence, George Tenet. If anybody wanted anything done by the CIA, Bob was the go-to guy.

WE HAD BEEN
focused almost single-mindedly on al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, and international terrorism. Nobody in our shop had even considered shifting to Iraq. Now, we had to turn on a dime and redirect our attention. We quickly learned that much of the pressure to go to war in Iraq was coming from two sources—the Office of the Vice President (OVP) and the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD). In other words, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and their subordinates. The key players below them included several people in the OVP, including Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, and David Addington, his legal counsel; at OSD, the cast of characters below Rumsfeld was led by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith.

As best we could tell, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and their two-and three-star subordinates were less than enthusiastic about an Iraq invasion. The generals and admirals could make their best case for caution, but they were in a position of weakness. If the suits, reflecting the commander-in-chief's will, said the United States was going to war, the uniforms would salute and follow orders. Under our Constitution, there was only one other choice: Resign your commission in protest. To the best of my knowledge, none did.

Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their people put great stock in what they
were hearing from the Iraqi National Congress (INC), a group of Iraqi exiles generally based in London. In particular, they looked to Ahmed Chalabi, the INC's leader. Chalabi was a real piece of work. He was an Iraqi Shiite whose family left the country in 1956 when he was twelve years old. He lived abroad, mainly in England and the United States, got a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Chicago, became a banker, made a lot of money, and got in trouble with the Jordanian government over alleged financial fraud. Through the INC, and on his own, Chalabi had been feeding his Washington friends in high places a steady diet of dirt on the Iraqi dictator and his plans. Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. He intended to use them. He had close ties to al-Qaeda and even to bin Laden himself.

As I said before, our intelligence suggested that Saddam did have weapons of mass destruction, certainly chemical and biological weapons and a nuclear program in development; in our view, that's why he wouldn't permit international weapons inspectors, whom he had expelled in 1998, to return to Iraq. But the rest of Chalabi's sales pitch was complete bullshit. There was no evidence to suggest Saddam was intending to use these weapons or that he even had the delivery systems to do so. The Osama-Saddam connection was partly notional: After all, didn't both men despise the United States? But it also turned on an alleged meeting in Prague in early April 2001 between Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence officer. Atta was one of the key hijackers of American Airlines Flight 11 on September 11, 2001. Ergo, Saddam must have had something to do with 9/11, perhaps even with the planning of it.

The Atta tale of a meeting in Prague, promoted heavily by Vice President Cheney, proved to be untrue. And on the general proposition of an unholy alliance between Iraq and al-Qaeda, there was a large troubling fact that had to be ignored: Osama bin Laden reviled Saddam Hussein as much as he did the United States. There's that old saw about the enemy of my enemy being my friend, which
I suppose encouraged some true believers to buy into the idea of an Osama-Saddam alliance. But at the agency, the alleged partnership between this odious pair was widely known as the Big Lie.

At that point, in 2002, Chalabi was no stranger to me, although I'd never met the man. While I was still an analyst, the agency received a request from one of the congressional oversight committees on Capitol Hill seeking detailed information on Chalabi. The reason, unstated, was almost certainly because Chalabi was continuing to cultivate friends in high places, and committee members wanted to know if he was on the level. I had been following Chalabi for much of my professional life, so I was enlisted to draft the CIA response. I wanted to be especially thorough. There's an old joke at the agency that you can anger your boss and live to tell the tale, but never run afoul of the security, finance, or medical departments of the CIA because they can end your career. A corollary: While the CIA works for the president, you never want to run afoul of Congress because it can really do you damage.

Working with two junior analysts, I researched and wrote a long response to the committee's questions, sourced the document, and sent it through the agency's long coordination and review process. In the Directorate of Intelligence, everybody with a stake in what is said in such papers gets a shot at them. On this one, everybody in the building agreed with what I was saying—that Ahmed Chalabi was completely unreliable, a serial fabricator who should be avoided at all costs. We sent the paper to the State Department for comments. What we got back was our document with every critical point deleted; what remained was only his personal information. Stunned and outraged, I called the analyst—someone I respected enormously—at State's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. She chuckled at my initial reaction and then turned serious. She had nothing to do with the changes, she insisted. It had been a policy decision, made far above our pay grades.

I consulted a colleague about what to do next. We were
mystified; State's Near East experts knew Chalabi well—well enough to know he was a con man. We were confident about what I had written, and we could ignore State in responding to Congress if we saw fit. Which is what we did: We sent my original paper, the one vetted by my CIA colleagues, to the committee, putting us on record. Ahmed Chalabi richly deserved the figurative scarlet letter: an order that no agency officer was to have contact with him.

Still, no-contact order or not, the willing suspension of disbelief seemed to be epidemic in certain Bush administration quarters during those days. In the vice president's office and at Defense, they were just lapping up Chalabi's stuff. The question was why. These guys weren't stupid. Yes, we knew ideology played a big part: They thought they could remake the Middle East, and toppling Saddam was central to the effort. They really did think our troops would be greeted as liberators in Baghdad and everywhere else in Iraq. I attended meetings on Iraq nearly every day, often by teleconference, and heard one NSC official actually say the words: “They're going to throw flowers at us on the streets of Baghdad.” Who knows, it might have worked out that way if the administration had used the plan envisioned by some experts after the regime was toppled in April 2003. That plan, and it had several permutations, would have saturated Iraq with an occupation force of at least three hundred thousand soldiers, marines, and allied troops; the idea was to secure critical infrastructure, win hearts and minds with a benign, overwhelming presence, get Iraq back on its feet, nurture political pluralism, and leave as quickly as events would permit.

But as numerous books in recent years have pointed out, the administration completely botched the critical months after President Bush announced an end to major combat operations. The answer to why we're still in Iraq to this day has almost everything to do with the failures of leadership in 2003 and 2004 and, in some cases, the ascendance of rank deception—deliberate distortions of the facts on the ground.

It's also important to concede that we probably dropped the ball on our reading of Saddam and what he would do. In many respects, during the period leading up to the beginning of the war, Saddam seemed to be goading us to invade. Why would he do that if he didn't actually have weapons of mass destruction? In retrospect, I believe it's because we didn't understand the importance of “face” in Arab culture. Saddam couldn't act in ways that made him look weak among his Arab neighbors and especially to his own people. There were no chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons, but he couldn't simply go public and say, “All right, all right, I give up. In fact, I destroyed all those programs. Come in and see for yourselves. And, by the way, would you please lift the sanctions now?”

Conversely, Saddam wasn't very smart in his reading of the American side. He didn't understand that an American president generally means what he says when he threatens war. He probably thought Bush was posturing by sending troops to Kuwait and two carrier groups to the Gulf; by negotiating with the Turks, Jordanians, and Syrians for overflight clearance; and by going to the United Nations for a new resolution. In Saddam's world, this was all part of the game—what he expected from us because we had to
look
tough even when we'd finally come to some accommodation and let him lose with dignity. He probably calculated that our spies would be able to learn, without admitting inspectors, that his programs were history and that we'd eventually back away rather than risk a real shooting war.