The Story (31 page)

With time running out, I called Robert Joseph, President Bush's senior adviser on proliferation. I bluffed. Michael and I were writing a front-page story about the tubes whether or not the administration would discuss them. He promised to get back to me.

With Condi Rice's blessing, Joseph and his deputy, Susan Koch, met us on Friday morning at his office in the Old Executive Office Building and confirmed much of what Michael had unearthed. He outlined the administration's concerns about Iraq's purchases within the past fourteen months of tens of thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes that CIA officials believed were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium. The specifications of the tubes had persuaded American intelligence experts that they were meant for Iraq's nuclear program, he told us. While several efforts to ship the aluminum tubes to Iraq had been blocked or intercepted, he declined to say who had sold them, where they had come from, or how or where they had been stopped. We suspected there was far more to this story, but this was the first time that any senior official had discussed any aspect of the tubes for publication. Indeed, the administration had only recently become confident enough of its assessment to begin briefing the relevant congressional oversight committees.

After that meeting, Michael and I continued our frantic hunt for more details about the tubes. I called David Albright, the former International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) weapons inspector whose Institute for Science and International Security often consulted for the government and whose expertise and judgment I trusted. No answer. I left messages everywhere for him, stressing our urgent need to reach him.

Michael and I wrote through the night on Friday. His byline was first. The tip on the tubes was his. When our 3,500-word story appeared Sunday, September 8, with an assertive headline, “U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts,” I was okay with it. The story contained numerous caveats. The sixth graph, for instance, warned that there was “no indication” that Iraq was “on the verge of deploying a nuclear bomb” anytime soon. It also noted that the “hard-liners in the Bush administration” were using intelligence like this “to make the argument that the United States must act now.”

I was still comfortable with our effort until I watched the Sunday talk shows. Vice President Cheney and National Security Adviser Rice both trumpeted the tube story, attributing it to the
Times
rather than to their own intelligence agencies. Rice paraphrased a line that another analyst had given us. The administration was unwilling to wait till the first sign of a “smoking gun” was a “mushroom cloud.”

Both Michael and I were uncomfortable with the administration's use of our story. But while neither of us had wanted our work to become fodder in a campaign to justify war, a lead article on the front page of the nation's most influential newspaper made that inevitable.

David Albright called back Tuesday. He had been overseas when he read our “tube” story. “There is a problem,” he told me. The government's experts were divided about whether the aluminum tubes were intended to enrich uranium in a nuclear program or, rather, as several experts at the nation's nuclear labs believed, intended for use in conventional artillery rockets. Either way, he acknowledged, Iraq had failed to report the tube purchases as the UN required. But there was obviously a significant difference between a failure to report equipment for conventional and unconventional arms.

I called Michael. We had to write a follow-up to our tube story. There might be a conventional use for the tubes. Michael was not pleased. Home
with a son who was ill, he was about to travel overseas on a Pentagon trip. I volunteered to do the legwork. Still, he asked, why would we want to undermine our own scoop?

“Because it might be wrong,” I replied as breezily as possible in a conversation still etched in my memory and recorded in my notes. If there was a plausible, less ominous purpose for the tubes, we should be the first to say so. He agreed quickly.

Having spent the past three years researching bioweapons, my nuclear sources were rusty. Scientists I trusted at Los Alamos and Livermore National Laboratory said they had heard nothing about a dispute over aluminum tubes. They weren't in the “tube loop.” I called back David Albright. My sources were coming up cold, I told him. He suggested that I quote him about the tubes. Not without a second, confirming source, I replied. I begged him to call a few friends at the labs and urge them to talk to me. I assume he did and that none of them would.

In search of nuclear dissenters, I took a taxi to the home of an intelligence analyst, a curmudgeonly skeptic who had occasionally been helpful on other nonproliferation issues. I felt like a journalist cliché, pacing outside his house for over an hour till he returned from work. He was not thrilled to see me. I never got to finish a sentence. He shot me a “Sorry.” He couldn't help me.

Bill Harlow, the CIA spokesman, confirmed that the agency stood solidly behind its assessment. The CIA had “high confidence” that the tubes were for nuclear centrifuges, he told me. He refrained from answering my questions about whether other intelligence agencies might have an alternative view but made a point that struck me as important: despite their dissenting views about the purpose of the tubes, none of the fifteen intelligence agencies or the Department of Energy had contradicted the NIE's “key finding” that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear program and was trying to acquire a bomb. I would learn later that the most skeptical of the intelligence agencies, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, had asserted that the evidence was “insufficient” to conclude that Saddam was reconstituting its nuclear program. But even INR, as the bureau is known, did not assert that Iraq was not doing so.
¹⁶
So differences
over the tubes hadn't affected the intelligence community's bottom-line conclusion about Saddam's nuclear intentions, he said.

I was getting nowhere. Working from home, Michael wasn't having much luck either. On Wednesday, September 12, the White House published a paper repeating the CIA's assertion that the tubes were hard evidence that Saddam was still trying to make a nuclear bomb. I called Michael. We couldn't wait. If we mentioned the tubes again, we had to write whatever we knew about the dispute over their purpose, which wasn't much.

With our deadline approaching, I called Bob Joseph again. Analysts and scientists were telling us that the tubes were meant for conventional arms, not nuclear centrifuges, making David Albright's still-unconfirmed report more solid than it was. Why hadn't he told us about this fierce intelligence dispute? Joseph seemed taken aback. The agency had assured him “at the highest levels” that the tubes could not have been used for anything other than centrifuge rotors. Yes, some analysts disagreed. That was not unusual in intelligence assessments. But the CIA was adamant, he stressed. “Judy, they
have
the tubes,” he said. Physical possession of the tubes meant that their assessment was based not on vague defector tips, or purchase orders, or satellite photographs, but on an examination of the equipment in question.

I was torn between experts I respected who disagreed. I had dealt with Bob Joseph on many stories. As far as I knew, he had never misled me. Though David Albright was a physicist and a former inspector, he had never examined an actual tube. In fact, as he had told me, he hadn't participated in any of the intelligence community's debates about it. Michael and I had the CIA on the record, plus the White House's most senior nonproliferation official, on background, standing solidly by the claim. Albright's anonymous allies had refused to talk to either of us. Finally, whatever the experts' differences on the tubes, most of them had endorsed the CIA's conclusion that Saddam was back in the nuclear game.

On deadline, I wrote a first draft of our follow-up story. It led with the new White House paper on WMD. The sixth paragraph disclosed for the first time the existence of a dispute about the tubes' intended purpose. Although
the CIA was “adamant” in its view that the tubes were evidence of a nuclear bomb hunt, we wrote, the Energy Department and experts at State believed that the tubes were intended for “multiple launch rocket systems.”

The story noted the government's enormous “sensitivity” about suggestions that the intelligence community was divided about the tubes and Iraq's intentions, because Saddam's pursuit of WMD, we wrote, was “the centerpiece of the argument for planning a military campaign to topple him.”

Finally, we wrote, the “dominant” view among the most senior analysts was that the tubes were for Iraq's nuclear program and that they were only one of several indications that Iraq was reconstituting and expanding its effort to acquire nuclear weapons. “This is a footnote, not a split,” I quoted an unnamed “senior administration official”—Bob Joseph—as saying. The story was 880 words long and ran on page 13.

David Albright's objections to the administration's tube claims did not appear in the final version. Perhaps his name was cut for space—or by me or the Washington bureau or foreign desk editors. I no longer remember or have the original draft. He was furious. Why had we suggested that the most experienced experts had sided with the CIA? And why hadn't I quoted him?

In October 2004, almost two years after our initial story was published, David Barstow, Bill Broad, and Jeff Gerth—friends as well as colleagues—wrote a 10,000-word dissection of the tube disaster based heavily on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's 550-page report on the Iraqi WMD intelligence failure. Their front-page article, which Michael and I were not shown until shortly before it was scheduled to run, contained details about how officials had repeatedly failed to disclose the “contrary views of America's leading nuclear scientists” and how officials and experts alike had “overstated even the most dire intelligence assessments of the tubes,” while minimizing or rejecting the Energy Department's view that the tubes—the only physical evidence the United States had of Saddam's alleged nuclear weapons drive—were “too narrow, too heavy, too long” to be of practical use in centrifuges.

Years later, Bob Joseph, still at a loss to explain some of the worst
WMD intelligence failures that had helped pave the path to war, recalled that George Tenet had personally and repeatedly assured him that the CIA was right about the tubes.
¹⁷
John McLaughlin, Tenet's deputy, had carted part of a tube around the White House and the offices of congressional Iraq War skeptics. “I told you exactly what I had been told about the tubes,” Joseph asserted in June 2013, over coffee near his government think tank in Virginia. “I never lied to you.”

The complexity of such intelligence disputes—and the difficulty inherent in writing about them—was described in a book about intelligence failures published in 2010 by Robert Jervis, a professor of international relations at Columbia University and a former consultant to the CIA. Jervis, who had participated in an internal CIA review of the prewar intelligence failures, pointed to a plausible explanation of the CIA's adamancy on the tubes, one that had not appeared even in the meticulous
Times
account. The army's National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC), which DIA and CIA analysts traditionally relied on for technical expertise, had found the tubes, from a technical standpoint, “poor choices for rocket bodies.” In other words, the army's main center of expertise had concluded that the tubes were probably not intended for the most plausible conventional use.

Jervis argued that the army center's verdict might also help explain why Secretary Powell, who hailed from the military, had embraced the CIA's view over that of his own agency's intelligence division in his UN presentation.
¹⁸
The importance of the army center's view was not noted in the paper's reconstruction of the intelligence disaster. But it was cited earlier by the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, the bipartisan committee chaired by former Democratic senator Charles Robb of Virginia and the conservative judge Laurence H. Silberman. After spending a year reviewing thousands of intelligence documents and interviewing hundreds of intelligence officials and experts, the Robb-Silberman commission concluded in its March 2005 report that the army center's finding had played a key role in the intelligence community's conclusion with “moderate” confidence that Iraq was reconstituting its gas centrifuges for a nuclear weapons program. The verdict on the tubes, in turn, was bolstered by Iraq's reported attempts
to purchase such “dual-use” items as “magnets, ‘high-speed balancing machines,' and machine tools,” by claims that Saddam had “ ‘reassembled' many scientists, engineers, and managers from Iraq's previous nuclear program,” and by reports of suspicious activity at sites formerly associated with Iraq's pre-1991 nuclear weapons program.
¹⁹

Powell himself would not comment on the evolution of his thinking about the tubes. But interviewed almost a decade after the intelligence mess, Carl Ford Jr., who headed the State Department's intelligence unit that had challenged the CIA's view of the tubes, agreed that the army technical center's view had deeply affected his boss Powell. “He was clearly impressed with that,” Ford recalled. “I just wasn't persuading him. And in intelligence, persuasion is everything.”

Another crucial factor was the tube dissidents' endorsement of the intelligence community's broader claim that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program. David Albright, who later said he had opposed the war, appeared to believe that Iraq was trying to acquire a bomb. Four days after Michael's and my initial tube story appeared, Albright and a colleague published a paper suggesting that new activity at Al Qaim in western Iraq might be part of the regime's secret effort to make atomic weapons.