The Story (23 page)

In 1998 Clinton had made regime change in Iraq official US policy after becoming the second US president to sign a secret lethal finding authorizing Saddam's overthrow.
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The 1998 Iraq Liberation Act had authorized $97 million to help Iraqi dissidents—most of which had gone to Chalabi and his coalition, much to the consternation of the State Department and the CIA. Both had long regarded him as corrupt and duplicitous and his information useless. The bitterness was mutual. In March 1995 Chalabi was furious at the CIA and the Clinton White House for refusing to support an insurrection against Saddam that Chalabi's forces and the far more numerous Kurdish Peshmerga guerrillas had staged in the Kurdish zone patrolled by US jets in northern Iraq. A year later, in June 1996, as
60 Minutes
producer Rich Bonin would report in his book on Chalabi,
Arrows of the Night
, Saddam foiled a CIA-planned coup by arresting some two hundred Iraqi army officers involved in the plot, executing eighty of them. He also tortured to death the three sons of the coup's leader, who was orchestrating the insurrection from the CIA station in Amman, Jordan. Forging a temporary alliance with a Kurdish leader with whom Chalabi had quarreled, Saddam sent his army into northern Iraq to destroy Chalabi's headquarters and his CIA-funded infrastructure. More than two hundred of Chalabi's men were lined up and shot; the CIA airlifted another six thousand INC members from Turkey to Guam for safekeeping.

Chalabi said that he had tried to prevent the debacle. At a meeting in Washington in March, he had warned CIA director John Deutch that Saddam's Mukhabarat had penetrated the plot. Agency officials were furious, convinced that Chalabi had exposed the CIA's plans to prevent them from replacing Saddam with a dependable Sunni general instead of him. The agency would learn only after the 2003 invasion, as Bonin disclosed, that the culprit of the leak was an Egyptian smuggler—one of the agency's own couriers. But Chalabi's relations with the CIA had soured by then.

At the end of 1996, the CIA had tried to shut down the INC, issuing a “burn notice” on Chalabi personally.
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But he refused to quit and began raising money privately, spending some of his own to nurture his diverse if fractious coalition of Iraqi opposition groups: Kurds, Shiites, Sunnis, secular and religious critics. In Washington, he had ties to conservatives, neocons, and liberals on Capitol Hill and in the White House.

Chalabi and I first spoke at length in August 1998. I called him to confirm a story I was pursuing with Jim Risen, the paper's new intelligence reporter, about an Iraqi whom the CIA then considered the highest-ranking scientist to defect from Iraq's nuclear program: Khidhir Abdul Abas Hamza. I had learned of Hamza's existence from David Albright, a Washington-based physicist and former inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN group that had surveyed nuclear sites in Iraq. He had hired Hamza after the CIA had finished debriefing him. They were planning to write a book on Iraq's nuclear program when David offered me the chance to be the first reporter to interview him.

Risen and I wrote a front-page story—an Iraqi's account of the inner workings of Saddam's three-decade effort to build a nuclear bomb. The fifty-nine-year-old Hamza told us that on the eve of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Iraq, despite Israel's attack on its sole reactor a decade earlier, had completed the research and testing needed for an atomic weapon and was scrambling to make at least one crude bomb using uranium. The effort might have produced a bomb in a few months, he told us, had it not been disrupted by the allied bombing campaign.

Before the Gulf War, the CIA had assured policy makers that Iraq was at least a decade away from producing a bomb. Based partly on Hamza's
information, the agency acknowledged having underestimated not only Iraq's nuclear capabilities but also Saddam's determination to resume his bomb program once UN inspections ended and economic sanctions against Iraq were lifted. Before leaving the nuclear program in 1990 and defecting in 1994, Hamza told us, he had helped train young Iraqi scientists who were working on nonnuclear projects but could quickly resume work on weapons if Saddam ordered them to do so.

The second part of Hamza's story particularly intrigued us: he claimed to have nearly slipped through America's fingers because of CIA bungling. After fleeing to the Kurdish safe haven in 1994, Hamza said, he had sought out Chalabi, who, like him, had graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was then working with the CIA. He said that Chalabi had put him in touch with the agency. But the CIA had dismissed the scientist as a fraud after a cursory telephone interview; it had not sent an agent to vet him in person. So Hamza had sought shelter first in Turkey, and then in Mu‘ammar al-Qaddhafi's Libya—the oil-rich rogue state with its own nuclear ambitions, which had tried unsuccessfully to recruit him for its own fledgling nuclear program. He fled Libya in 1995 after the Iraqi secret police sent his eldest son to Tripoli to persuade him to return to nuclear work in Iraq. Iraqi agents had tried to kill his son twice, he told us. Hamza again reached out to the United States, this time successfully.

Chalabi confirmed Hamza's tale of how an intelligence coup for the CIA had nearly become a bonanza for Qaddhafi. He gave me a quote for our story about Langley's mishandling of Hamza.

My editors were pleased with both stories.
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Chalabi's information had proven correct. On subsequent occasions, what Chalabi told me had also panned out. So although I knew that the CIA, State Department, and Israeli intelligence loathed and mistrusted him, I thought he had been straight with me.

Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri reminded me of Khidhir Hamza when I met him in a hotel in Bangkok. Both were slightly pudgy, their thinning hair slicked back, comfortable in cashmere V-necks and tailored shirts with their initials embroidered on the pocket. They wore a lot of aftershave.

I was surprised to learn that Haideri, who was sipping tea with Zaab Sethna when I arrived, was a Kurd. Why would Saddam employ someone from a suspect ethnic minority group for such politically sensitive work? And why would a Kurd work for Saddam? In a corrupt, autocratic regime like Saddam's, Zaab said, money was a great leveler—as well as a tempting incentive. Being connected to the inner circle would protect a vulnerable Kurd, in addition to making him rich. And with a steady, lucrative government contract for his work, Haideri had prospered.

Unlike Hamza, Haideri seemed nervous. I couldn't blame him. I had interviewed Hamza in a comfortable apartment in Virginia four years after his defection. The CIA had given him a green card, compensation for his cooperation, and assurances of his safety. Haideri had none of these and was to be interviewed the following week by US intelligence officials who would decide his future.

If he had been coached by the INC about what to say, there were few signs of it. There was no coherent narrative. He seemed accustomed to keeping secrets, hesitant to volunteer anything beyond what I had asked him.

He claimed to have personally renovated secret facilities he was told were for biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons. He was careful to say that he had never seen such weapons at the twenty places he had visited or helped refurbish. Iraqi military officials had told him that the sites were intended to store such weapons. He could think of no alternative plausible reason why such rooms would need to be lined with lead-filled concrete and made waterproof. He gave me copies of contracts from the Military Industrialization Organization and a front company called Al Fao that had paid for his work. The storage areas were built alongside wells, in private villas, and even under the Saddam Hussein Hospital in Baghdad. He described how Iraq used foreign companies to circumvent the sanctions aimed at preventing it from acquiring barred equipment and technology. He named companies he had worked with and provided contracts for these deals, too. He drew detailed maps of the locations of the storage areas where he said he had worked or visited. He told me that Saddam's “presidential sites” from which UN inspectors had been barred in 1997 were being used for concealment.

Over the next two days, I grilled Haideri repeatedly about the names of Iraqi civilian and military officials he claimed to have worked with, the type of work he had done before and after his contracts with the military, the details of his family's background. He had relatives in Australia, he told me, and if the Americans didn't believe him, he would try to flee there. He also had family in Iraq, so at first he asked not to be named in my article. It would be impossible to remain anonymous, I told him. If he wanted his story publicized, he would have to be identified by name.

About a week later, the story was about ready to run. It seemed solid. The head of Leycochem, a German construction materials company based in Cologne, confirmed that he had worked with Haideri in Iraq. He denied that he or his firm had any connection to WMD. Charles Duelfer had shared copies of Haideri's contracts with some of his former inspectors. The contracts and maps seemed authentic, they told me. Duelfer agreed to be quoted. Zaab and I talked by phone. A joint CIA-DIA team had interviewed Haideri twice and was attempting to verify his claims. Haideri had told him and the US intelligence analysts something he had not mentioned to me: that Iraq had tested chemicals and germ agents on Shiite and Kurdish prisoners at undisclosed sites in the desert in 1989 and 1992. Finally, Zaab said that Haideri would, though reluctantly, be named in the story.
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The US team had now taken him to a secure location. In Washington, a military intelligence officer I trusted confirmed this, adding that the analysts' tentative conclusion was that Haideri's information seemed reliable.

My story appeared on the front page. Haideri's account was “consistent with other reports” that continued to emerge from Iraq about unconventional weapons activities, Charles Duelfer was quoted as saying. “The evidence shows that Iraq has not given up its desire for weapons of mass destruction.”
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The story also quoted Richard Butler, the former UNSCOM chief, who called Haideri's claims “plausible.” The places and projects that Haideri had identified were “known to, or suspected by, his inspection commission,” I quoted him as saying.

Given the potentially explosive nature of Haideri's charges, editor Steve Engelberg and I made sure that the story was heavily qualified. There was “no independent way to verify Haideri's account,” I wrote. I disclosed in its
fourth graph that my interview had been arranged by Chalabi's INC, “the main Iraqi opposition group, which seeks the overthrow of Mr. Hussein.” If verified, I wrote, Haideri's allegations would provide “ammunition to officials within the Bush administration who have been arguing that Mr. Hussein should be driven from power partly because of his unwillingness to stop making weapons of mass destruction, despite his pledges to do so.”

I never had an opportunity to interview senior White House officials about the decision to invade Iraq and the role that Iraqi WMD played before the war began. I have never met George Bush. I did not discuss the war with Dick Cheney until the winter of 2012, when I was seated next to him at a dinner in New York, years after he had left office. I interviewed him about that decision in January 2013. While I would have relished an opportunity to interview either of them before the war, the administration's passion for secrecy and its aversion to the media made that unlikely. So did the paper's traditions.

The
Times
has always been a tribal, turf-ridden organization. David Sanger, a collegial White House correspondent, would have vigorously resisted my trespassing. The Pentagon was covered by two able correspondents. I had worked on several intelligence stories with Jim Risen, but the decision to oust Saddam was being made at the White House, not at Langley. The CIA's role was to provide assessments of Iraq's links to terror and its WMD actions and capabilities. Its conclusion, that Iraq was continuing to hide chemical and biological weapons and had an active nuclear program, turned out to be wrong, but it was widely shared even by foreign intelligence agencies of governments that opposed the war.

I was a lead reporter on a part of the prewar buildup: what the Bush administration knew, or thought it knew, about Iraqi WMD. Even this aspect was not mine exclusively. I would not have written a story about WMD that involved the CIA without asking Jim Risen if he wanted to join forces. A beat reporter had contacts and context that roving investigators like me lacked. Their input made our stories richer and usually more accurate. For that reason, I had long campaigned for joint bylines years before the executive editor allowed them. When I joined the paper, only one reporter's name could appear on a story, a policy that had stoked a reluctance to cooperate. Having been big-footed by senior reporters, I knew what it was like to be frozen out of front-page stories. Citing anonymous
Times
staff, several critics would later write that some reporters had refused to work with me because they doubted my reporting. But my stories both before and after 9/11 were mostly joint bylined.
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Still, I sensed even early in 2002 that my near-constant presence in the Washington bureau was causing resentment. But during those frantic months after 9/11, I had little time to dwell on
Times
internal politics. I agreed with Howell Raines, Gerald Boyd, and Steve Engelberg that the paper had a historic duty to publish as much information as quickly as possible about Al Qaeda, the source of the mysterious anthrax letters, the pre-9/11 policy misjudgments and intelligence lapses that had resulted in the death of thousands, and what the Bush administration was doing to prevent the next attack. And the administration was doing plenty.

Having campaigned for president with a cautious foreign policy critical of his predecessor's humanitarian and nation-building interventions, President Bush had radically altered his outlook and policies after September 11. “I had just witnessed the damage inflicted by nineteen fanatics armed with box cutters,” he wrote in his memoir. “I could only imagine the destruction possible if an enemy dictator passed his WMD to terrorists.”