The Story (22 page)

In an interview with David Sanger, the
Times
's White House correspondent, and me in December 2001, and years later in her memoir, Rice had explained the decision to define the antiterror campaign broadly as a “global” war on terror. Neither of us knew what she knew during our interview: that Bin Laden had escaped to Pakistan from his mountain refuge in Tora Bora, Afghanistan. Rice seemed alternatively combative and apologetic. Before 9/11, she told us, President Bush had characterized earlier efforts against Bin Laden as “swatting at flies.”
⁷

I understood the frustration. For years, I had watched terrorists and American enemies conclude that America was weak and unwilling to defend its interests. Now the fanatics I had covered for so long would understand that a price would be paid. But I questioned whether the CIA was up to its mission. The agency had failed to tell the Clinton and Bush administrations when, where, and how Al Qaeda planned to strike the United States.

Only after 9/11 did the intelligence community's failings become a legitimate topic of debate yet again in Washington. I coauthored several front-page articles about the failures resulting in 9/11 as part of the
Times
's “Terror and Response” series, part of the articles for which the paper would win a Pulitzer. The CIA had no sources inside Al Qaeda; nor did it have a CIA employee in Afghanistan. It had not sent agents to Darunta, where Al Qaeda was supposedly testing chemical and perhaps biological agents. Such failures made senior officials nervous.
⁸

While White House officials struggled to project competence and calm,
I suspected that both were wanting. The anthrax letter attacks within weeks of 9/11 had dramatically intensified anxiety. Vice President Cheney would tell me that both he and President Bush had been vaccinated against smallpox and anthrax. But Condi Rice gave no hint of an even more terrifying incident that she would later recount in her memoir. Less than a week after the death of the first anthrax letter victim, she wrote, White House germ detectors had registered the presence of botulinum toxin, the deadly nerve agent for which there is no known antidote. For twenty-four hours, as tests on lab mice were being performed, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Colin Powell, Rice, and other senior officials who worked in or visited the White House did not know whether they were infected. Only when the lab mice came back “feet down” did security aides conclude that the warning had been a false alarm, one of many.
⁹

Some senior officials and journalists were convinced that the anthrax letters were, as Rice feared, “Al Qaeda's second wave.” Several blamed militants tied to other Islamist causes, or Iraq, or both. At least two of my most reliable sources for
Germs
—Bill Patrick and Dick Spertzel—suspected the source was foreign: Russian or, more probably, Iraqi. Spertzel, the former UN inspector who had uncovered evidence of Iraq's covert germ weapons activities in 1995, was willing to be quoted saying that he was convinced that Saddam was to blame.

Senior Bush officials had signaled before 9/11 that Iraq was unfinished business. If Iraq were linked to the anthrax attacks, there would be no more “fly swatting.” Bush identified Iraq as the leading suspect. “After all, he gassed his own people,” he told another reporter. “We know he's been developing weapons of mass destruction . . . and so we're watching him very carefully.” Sources had told me that Cheney and neoconservatives—the Pentagon's Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, among them—had been quietly pushing the president even before 9/11 to overthrow the regime, and unilaterally if necessary. I figured that Saddam had to know that, too. Would he risk so wildly provocative an attack? He was ruthless, but I doubted he was suicidal.

In mid-December Scott Shane, then at the Baltimore
Sun
, published a front-page exclusive that also helped defuse the pressure to finger Iraq. He reported that tests showed that the anthrax spores in a letter sent to Senator Tom Daschle were genetically identical to those made by US Army scientists at the Dugway research facility in Utah. The evidence pointed to a domestic terrorist rather than an Iraqi or other foreign perpetrator.

Contradictory information kept emerging, as it usually does in competitive stories, especially those involving secret government intelligence. So the narrative on the nature of the source shifted as we pried loose tidbits about the attack and the state of the government's inquiry. In an essay in the
Times
in October 2001, Richard Butler, the Australian diplomat who had headed the UN inspectors charged with monitoring Iraq's weapons activities, identified Iraq as his top suspect. He cited no evidence but asserted that bioweapons were “closest to President Hussein's heart” because “it was in this area that his resistance to our work reached its height.” Because Iraq had thrown inspectors out of the country in 1998, it was “impossible to know what further steps” Saddam may have taken to perfect his anthrax arsenal. But “all the signs are that he has remained in the bioweapons business,” Butler wrote. He suggested that an unidentified Iraqi official may have given anthrax spores to 9/11 plotter Mohamed Atta in Prague in June 2000—an idea that former CIA director Jim Woolsey, a neoconservative, was promoting in the British press.

I thought this sounded unlikely, but clearly such a public accusation in my own paper from an experienced Australian diplomat who had headed the UN agency charged with monitoring Iraq's compliance with its pledge to disarm itself of WMD could not be ignored. Reporters who covered intelligence or the UN knew that Butler had access to sensitive information that he would not be at liberty to disclose. Since there was a WMD angle to the charge, I wanted to pursue it. But days after Butler's op-ed, John Tagliabue, an experienced foreign correspondent reporting from Prague, wrote that Czech officials said they did not believe that Atta, the 9/11 plot ringleader, had met any Iraqi officials during his brief stop in Prague. A week later, Tagliabue and Pat Tyler, a national security reporter from the Washington bureau, reported that the Czech interior minister had reversed
himself: Atta had met an Iraqi intelligence agent named Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani in Prague in the summer of 2001. Security experts in Germany were investigating claims by Israeli intelligence that Iraqi agents had given Atta anthrax spores, which he was then said to have carried to the United States in his luggage.

The CIA was furious, as Jim Risen, who covered intelligence, would report. The agency did not believe that Iraq was behind the anthrax letters or 9/11, and was pushing back hard on such allegations. Several of my sources also disputed the alleged Iraqi connection to the 9/11 hijackers and to anthrax terrorism. So Bill and I wrote that while the FBI could not rule out a foreign state or Islamist group as the likely “perp,” most government experts favored the theory that the anthrax culprit was probably a domestic “insider.”
¹⁰

In mid-December 2001 we got a tip indicating that soon after the first anthrax victim died in October, the administration launched an intense, unsuccessful effort to find evidence linking Iraq to the anthrax letters. The hunt for Iraqi fingerprints had continued even after scientists concluded that the lethal germ in the envelopes was Ames, an American strain that the US military, among others, had used.

Normally, I would have pursued that story with Bill and David Johnston, who covered the Justice Department. But I was busy investigating another tip about possible Iraqi WMD that had nothing to do with anthrax. The quest would send me halfway round the world to meet a controversial Iraqi defector. The story I wrote would spark a sustained campaign against me and my reporting.

I spotted Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi opposition leader, at the US Air shuttle baggage area in Washington, DC, one morning in early November 2001 as he was retrieving his leather overnight bag. My battered canvas tote came off last. Like me, he traveled light, but in grander style. Neither of us would have checked a bag if the newly established Transportation Security Administration (TSA) hadn't insisted on it. I was flying to Washington to get to an interview for “A Nation Challenged,” the series that Howell Raines had assigned to explore the weaknesses in pre-9/11 intelligence. Since Chalabi was then based in London, I had not expected to encounter him.

Why was he visiting Washington? He said that he was seeing administration officials and legislators on the Hill to express condolences over 9/11.

And promoting regime change in Iraq?

“Of course!”

Long before 9/11, Chalabi had been pressing his long-standing allies in Washington for their support in ousting Saddam. The day after President Bush's inauguration in January 2001, Richard Perle, an influential defense expert whom I had known for many years, had hosted a brunch for Chalabi
and a small group of neocons who would soon occupy key national security posts in the incoming Bush administration to discuss how best to persuade the new president to overthrow Saddam.
¹
I hadn't known about the brunch at the time. But soon after 9/11, I was told that the president had flatly rejected a proposal from Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, to strike Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan simultaneously.

I mentioned to Chalabi two
Times
stories that seemed to have his fingerprints all over them. The more explosive was about a defector: an Iraqi general who had allegedly seen his officers train Arab fighters to hijack airplanes without weapons at a camp near Salman Pak in Iraq. The story suggested a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda—and, hence, between Iraq and 9/11. Had he been responsible for that story? Yes, Chalabi confirmed; he had connected my
Times
colleagues and others to the general, as well as other defectors.

In Washington, Chalabi was widely known for his fervent advocacy of regime change in Iraq. Within the Arab world, he was known for having been convicted by a Jordanian military court of stealing millions of dollars from Jordan's Petra Bank and having fled Amman in the trunk of a car to avoid jail. He insisted that the charges had been trumped up because of his opposition to Saddam, on whom King Hussein depended economically. Remembering the king's impassioned defense of Saddam before the 1991 Gulf War as a “deep thinker” and “strong leader,” I gave Chalabi the benefit of the doubt.

As my bag appeared on the carousel, I asked him if he had any new information about Iraq's efforts to acquire illicit WMD components or expertise. His smile vanished. “We really don't have much on that,” he said. “Your people keep asking us to provide WMD defectors and information. But solid information on this is hard to get and even harder to verify.”

I hadn't thought much about that chance encounter when Zaab Sethna, one of Chalabi's top aides, called me in early December 2001. “Ahmad says hi,” Zaab said. “We have someone he thinks you should meet.”

The “someone” was an Iraqi defector: an engineer who claimed to have refurbished facilities throughout Iraq to enable Saddam to store radiological and other unconventional weapons and material safely. He had copies
of government contracts to substantiate his claims, Sethna told me. The Iraqi National Congress, Chalabi's opposition group, had partially vetted him—which meant that it had decided he was who he claimed to be and was known to at least one or more INC members. He seemed to be the real deal, Zaab said. American intelligence agents were eager to interview him. Could I travel abroad soon?

On December 9, 2001, less than a week later, I was on a plane to meet the Iraqi in Bangkok. Zaab said the engineer had flown to Thailand after Saddam's thugs had tracked him to Damascus and threatened to kill his family members in Iraq if he talked about his work.

My editors were enthusiastic about the story but concerned that it would take me away from my other competitive assignments: the anthrax investigation, ongoing terror threats, and our inquiry into the intelligence failures that had led to 9/11. But Chalabi had offered the defector to the
Times
as an exclusive, too tempting to turn down.

If Saddam's stonewalling of the UN unconventional weapons inspectors was an annoyance to the Bush administration before 9/11, it became an obsession once the towers fell. After routing the Taliban so easily, Bush was ready to turn his attention to Iraq and the potentially dangerous nexus between rogue states and WMD terrorism. So were newspapers. If this mysterious engineer had evidence that Iraq had refurbished facilities to store or work on nuclear, chemical, or biological materials, the trip would be well worthwhile.

Before agreeing to go, I tried verifying what Chalabi's aides had told me: where the engineer had worked and what he claimed to have done for Iraq's Military Industrialization Organization, which had, indeed, organized and served as a cover for many of Iraq's earlier WMD activities. High on my list of experts was Charles Duelfer, who had recently resigned as the deputy chief of UNSCOM, the WMD inspectors for Iraq. Duelfer, who would eventually head the US WMD hunt in Iraq, was skeptical but curious. The Iraqi's biography sounded “credible,” he said. The contract that Zaab Sethna had faxed me seemed legit—not a forgery, at least. But there
was no way to assess the defector's veracity without meeting him. When a Pentagon source confirmed that the DIA wanted to debrief the defector and that CIA analysts were also arranging to see him, I decided to try to get to him first, before the intelligence community snatched him away to an undisclosed location. If the
Times
was unwilling to hear him out, other newspapers or TV networks would surely do so.

Though I had met Chalabi briefly soon after the 1991 Gulf War, I got to know him better after human rights activists began crediting him with having helped smuggle out of Iraq the official documents about Saddam's use of poison gas against the Kurds in 1988. I had depended on those records for my 1993
New York Times Magazine
cover story on the massacre.