The Story Page 19

  Secretary of State Colin Powell and his senior staff feared that ousting Saddam, who was not responsible for 9/11, risked a protracted war and an occupation of an Arab country with unpredictable and possibly dire consequences. Iraqi threats could be contained. Though Powell warned the president about some of them in a private dinner in August 2002, he did not oppose an invasion explicitly but, rather, urged Bush to let the UN try to resolve the problem before resorting to war.9

  By the summer of 2002, I concluded that the hardliners had won. My notes do not contain a single interview or conversation in which I was specifically told that Bush had decided on war if Saddam refused to disarm and honor his other pledges, and in his memoir, he asserts that he did not decide to invade Iraq until the spring of 2003. But soon after 9/11, a giant map of Iraq appeared on the wall of Cheney’s conference room during foreign policy and terrorism discussions, recalled a White House communications official on Cheney’s staff.10 And the president, in his public statements, his body language on TV—his post-Afghanistan swagger—seemed ever more determined.

  In October 2002 Congress authorized the use of force. The vote was 296 to 133 in the House, including 81 Democrats. The Senate vote was 77 to 23, with 29 Democrats in favor of war.11

  The decision for war triggered a second internal battle within the administration. Powell and fellow “realists” fought a rear-guard action not to stop the war but to make it more legally legitimate.12 They criticized Bush’s preemption doctrine against WMD threats—his preventive war13 strategy—and his stated willingness to go it alone if necessary. They pushed for a return to the UN to seek another resolution authorizing the use of force if Saddam would not readmit international inspectors and abide by his pledges.

  The realists won—at least on the key tactical choice of the path to war.14 Bush embraced Powell’s argument that the United States needed another UN resolution to enforce the sixteen earlier ones. Senior officials later wrote that Bush overruled Cheney and the other hardliners and backed the realists partly because British prime minister Tony Blair had warned that his government would not support the war without explicit UN support.15

  The decision to adopt a multilateral approach through the UN, however, locked Bush into justifying the war based largely on alleged violations of Iraq’s WMD disarmament pledges: nine of the sixteen Security Council resolutions focused on Baghdad’s apparent violations of its WMD commitments.16 As a result, most of Secretary Powell’s nearly three-hour speech to the UN concerned Iraq’s alleged violations of international law. Powell would later publicly regret the speech as filled with errors and unintentionally misleading. But at the time, Powell and the realists downplayed other justifications for removing Saddam: his well-documented support for militant Palestinian and other terrorist groups, his murder and repression of domestic opponents, and other violations of human rights. Also downplayed was a favorite neocon theme: the need to promote stability in the region by spreading the rule of law and democracy as an alternative to the secular autocracies whose repressive iron rule fed Islamic militancy. Though “neoconism,” as scholar Frank Harvey later called the theory that a powerful neoconservative cabal had pushed the country to war, would prove stubbornly enduring, on the key issue of why and how to go to war, the neocons lost; the realists prevailed.

  * * *

  I don’t recall precisely when I first concluded that war with Iraq was inevitable. I remember telling Gerald Boyd in early February 2002 that I was convinced President Bush was preparing to confront Saddam. After dozens of telephone interviews and rushed coffees with Pentagon, State Department, and White House sources at what was known as the “NSC Starbucks” a half block away from the Executive Office Building, I told Gerald that not only the neocons but also many officials I interviewed did not consider killing or dispersing Al Qaeda’s leadership and ousting the Taliban from Afghanistan sufficient “payback” for 9/11. To deter future attacks, they said, the administration would have to topple a rogue state with WMD.

  Mostly I just connected the dots, as did many other reporters. An early indicator was the State of the Union address in late January 2002. After citing America’s rapid overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan, President Bush warned that even if Bin Laden was killed or captured, the broader war on terror would not end. He focused specifically on states that constituted an “axis of evil,” which could provide unconventional weapons to terrorists. He would not “wait on events while dangers gather.”

  Another early indication came in early February 2002 at dinner in New York with the leader of a delegation of Kuwaiti parliamentarians. Muhammad Jassem al-Saqer, chairman of the Kuwaiti Parliament’s foreign affairs committee, whom I had known since Cairo, praised President Bush for vowing to act against Iraq, Iran, and North Korea for developing WMD. Calling Iraq the “richest, most dangerous state” in his region, he told me that he had urged officials in Washington to act quickly. “The longer you wait, the more dangerous Saddam will become.”

  Based on his conversations in Washington with Secretary Powell and Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz, al-Saqer was convinced that Bush would oust Saddam. That assessment got my attention. My story about his impressions appeared deep inside the paper.17

  The administration’s public pronouncements became ever more bellicose, particularly those of Vice President Cheney. In late March he told CNN—incorrectly, it turned out—that Saddam was “actively pursuing nuclear weapons at this time.” He told a group of Republican senators that the question was no longer if the United States would invade Iraq, but when. Then in June came the president’s commencement address at West Point: “We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge.” America, Bush promised, “will act.”

  The president’s warning was not missed or misinterpreted by the media, as some would later contend. The Times described it as a “toughly worded speech that seemed aimed at preparing Americans for a potential war with Iraq.”

  Once I concluded that the president was probably set on war, I decided to concentrate on trying to learn why administration officials seemed sure that Saddam posed so grave a threat. What intelligence was driving this choice? Were the collapsing UN sanctions deepening Bush’s concern about how long Saddam could be “contained”? Was new information about Saddam’s weapons activities responsible?

  I also decided to position myself to ensure that I would not be excluded from covering the next Iraq war as I had been during the 1991 Gulf War. Despite my extensive experience in the Middle East and decade-long focus on terrorism, the news stories that I had broken before the 1991 invasion, and the publication of a bestselling book on Saddam’s regime that I had coauthored, I had been sidelined. It would not happen again if I could help it.

  * * *

  I was in New York on April 8, 2002, when the Pulitzers were announced. The jury awarded the Times an unprecedented seven prizes for its coverage in 2001—half of all the prizes it gave that year. Our stories on Al Qaeda’s global network and the government’s underestimation of its threat, which I had coauthored with a small team of reporters and Steve Engelberg, who had edited the series, won the coveted prize for “explanatory” reporting.

  It was the most satisfying day of my professional life. The militant Islamist threat I had been so determined to highlight, the stories I had struggled so hard to research and write, were recognized. The award went to the “staff” of the paper, not to the lead writers by name. But Steve assured me that our early stories on Al Qaeda had been dispositive in the Pulitzer jury’s decision. Until the day the Times abandoned its historic home at 229 West Forty-third Street, a photo display of those of us who had produced the series hung on the paper’s Pulitzer row flanking the editorial writers’ offices on the tenth floor. The prize, an unassuming crystal triangle, still sits proudly on my bookshelf.

  Later that day, Howell Raines mounted a wooden platform beneath the spiral staircase that connected the third and fourth newsroom
floors to thank the staff. Abe Rosenthal, who hadn’t set foot in the paper since Arthur Sulzberger had broken his heart by canceling his column two years earlier, gave me a bear hug. “I’m so proud of you,” he whispered. “I was so smart to hire you!”

  Several days later, Arthur threw a bash for the staff at a funky hotel on the West Side. At the start of the party, he announced that he was suspending his one-martini-a-night limit in honor of the paper’s triumph: he would drink one martini for each prize. He and I hugged and drank and even attempted a disco dance—something we hadn’t done since our days in Washington. I had missed Arthur. But those of us who were close to him in Washington knew that he was determined to distance himself from us once he became publisher. His father had given his friends top jobs at the paper, a practice that the staff resented deeply; Arthur was determined not to be accused of such favoritism. Despite my regrets about the wisdom of his keeping the peers who knew him best at arm’s length, I respected his decision.

  Three martinis or so into the evening—we all began losing count—he toasted Steve Engelberg and me for making Al Qaeda’s life “miserable.” Pulling me aside and thrusting his arm around me, he said he had always loved my “passion” for the paper and for journalism. “So what will you do for us next year?” he joshed.

  A month later at the Pulitzer award luncheon in May, Steve Engelberg revealed that he had decided to leave the paper. Why on earth? I asked him. This should have been the pinnacle of his career, he later confided. But as he contemplated a future of unending quarrels with Howell Raines over story ideas and how hard he was pushing reporters, he had grown ever more depressed. He and Howell were “fire and ice.” Howell never seemed to appreciate Steve’s creativity or the loyalty he commanded from reporters like me. If seven Pulitzers were as good as it got, Steve had concluded, he was in the wrong job.

  Losing Steve, a friend and cowriter as well as an editor with perfect pitch, whose judgments the investigative reporters trusted, was a loss not only for me but also for the Times. Steve had a knack for making stubborn reporters rethink our assumptions. He had written some of the most challenging chapters of our book Germs. He had been an inspired intelligence reporter and gifted writer who worked as hard as his staff. When he told me that he was accepting an offer to start an investigative unit at the Oregonian in Portland, where his wife had grown up, I was devastated. The loss of an editor who I thought might lead the paper one day was a harbinger of tumultuous upheavals. Though I didn’t know it at the time, a staff revolt was brewing against Howell and Gerald that would reshape my career and the paper.

  — CHAPTER 15 —

  “WHERE’S WALDO?” THE HUNT FOR WMD IN IRAQ

  The abandoned ammunition storage dump in southern Iraq near Karbalā’ was in the middle of nowhere. Late one night in early April 2003, flashlight in hand, I inched through the derelict buildings and sheds. Desert dogs howled in the distance.

  I was freezing. I had left my down jacket back at the base at Camp Udairi in northern Kuwait, the launching pad of the military’s WMD-hunting brigade, the 75th Exploitation Task Force—the 75th XTF—to accompany Mobile Exploration Team Alpha, one of the brigade’s units that were surveying suspect sites. This was supposed to have been a three-hour mission to Mussayab, a town where buried barrels of suspicious-looking liquids had turned out to be gasoline. That was ten days ago. Ever since then, MET Alpha and I, the brigade’s sole embedded reporter, had been moving from one site to another, and, finally, to this abandoned facility. The unit members had hosed down the floor of a building in the complex and were sleeping on its icy floor.

  I had stopped carrying my gas mask. So had other members of MET units Alpha and Bravo, both of which were led by enthusiastic young officers still hoping that any day now we would find traces of the elusive WMD that had brought us all here.

  Col. Richard R. McPhee, forty-seven, who commanded the eight-hundred-person XTF, had insisted I wear a uniform if I wanted to travel with his METs. A reporter in civilian clothes was a natural target, he said. He was not going to be the first commander in Iraq to get his embed killed. Eventually we compromised. Wearing my own beige cargo pants and white T-shirt, I borrowed desert boots and an army jacket, which warmed me against the cold. Where was the weather that the military had warned would be too hot to fight in?

  For the past ten days, Chief Warrant Officer Richard “Monty” Gonzales’s ten-man unit had maneuvered its way up from Camp Udairi through southern Iraq past a series of ancient towns and villages—Nasiriya, Samarra, Najaf, Hilla—near the ruins of Babylon. Because we had assumed we would be back at Udairi by evening, I hadn’t brought a sleeping bag or a change of clothes. To top it all, the mosquitos were ravenous.

  Although more than 775 reporters and photographers were embedded in US military units at the start of the war, I was the only reporter with the military brigade that was charged with hunting for WMD. That was no accident.

  As it became clear in the fall of 2002 that President Bush was heading for war, the media were clamoring for access to soldiers and “action.” When I learned in November that administration officials were apt to grant “embed” slots, I asked my Pentagon contacts whether I could embed with teams searching for WMD. I had trouble learning much about the Pentagon’s plans for its WMD hunt. Later I would discover that the secrecy masked not the mission’s sensitivity but the lack of serious planning.

  When a senior Pentagon official asked me to inscribe a copy of Germs to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, I attached a letter to the man I had never met asking to embed in the WMD-hunting units. I heard nothing. In early January I explored the idea with Torie Clarke, the Pentagon’s spokesperson, who said she found it “interesting.” That is Washington bureaucratese for “Get lost.” Finally, I wrote to Paul Wolfowitz. If WMD were found in Iraq, I wrote, the presence of an “independent” journalist with the American team could only “enhance the administration’s credibility.” I heard nothing.

  In late February 2003 I left for Erbil, in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, via Turkey, to cover the Iraqi National Congress’s first meeting on Iraqi soil in a decade, a watershed. After the Gulf War, in 1992, Chalabi, with financial help from the CIA, had founded the diverse coalition of Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, Islamic fundamentalists, secularists, democrats, monarchists, nationalists, and former military officers in Vienna, Austria, to help oust Saddam. Chalabi had wanted to assemble the group months earlier on Iraqi soil to declare the existence of a provisional government run by Iraqi dissidents, but the State Department objected. They also slow rolled the INC’s request for American military training for coalition fighters who would be able to provide post-invasion security. (By the end of February, the United States had trained only forty Iraqi volunteers at a military base in Hungary.) Against all odds, the meeting was about to be held.

  The long-postponed gathering in the Kurdish region was electrifying. I was preparing for interviews I had arranged when my sat phone rang—an unusual event, given the cost. It was the Pentagon: my request for an embed had been granted. While the 75th Brigade had already left for Kuwait, I was to return to Washington immediately for briefings and immunization against anthrax, smallpox, and other potential biological hazards. I was to tell no one about this except my direct supervisors.

  Now all I had to do was persuade my editors to let me go.

  Before I raised the idea with the Pentagon, I had discussed it with Gerald Boyd, Howell’s number two. He confirmed that I was not being considered for one of the paper’s embed slots. Neither the foreign desk nor the Washington bureau had selected me. The new acting foreign editor, Roger Cohen, was no fan of mine, and I was not on Jill Abramson’s list of reporters from the Washington bureau she led. If I could negotiate my own arrangement, I should try, Gerald told me. I suspected that he was humoring me.

  “I have just spent the last week in Washington discussing a special assignment that I proposed to the Pentagon last fall,” my memo to Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Howell, and
Gerald began. We were being offered a “rare chance to chronicle a unique mission.” Never before had the US military “attempted to forcibly disarm another state of weapons of mass destruction during ongoing combat operations.”

  I would have access to most of the search activities. The only major restriction would be one that applied to all embeds: I would not be allowed to publish material that jeopardized operational security. And the Pentagon would insist on the right to review copy before it was filed, a requirement for all embedded reporters in sensitive posts.1

  I compared the opportunity to that given William L. Laurence, the paper’s science reporter, who had secretly been assigned to Los Alamos, New Mexico, to chronicle the development of the atom bomb during World War II. The articles he wrote after the bomb was used at Hiroshima had not only helped Americans understand the scientific and political significance of the weapon that had been created but also remained a valuable source of material for future historians. Such access in Iraq would enable us to tell “a rich story of a great challenge” comprehensively and with nuance, I wrote. “And it will be a great story whether or not the administration is able to find the weapons of mass destruction it claims Saddam Hussein has hidden.”

  Howell approved the embed. Seven days later, my arm still aching from the vaccines I had been given, I was at Camp Udairi, fifteen miles from the Iraqi border. The next day, March 20, American land forces crossed into Iraq. The invasion had begun.

  * * *

  The early days of my assignment were frustrating. While I had been warned that Colonel McPhee would be crucial to my assignment’s success, the XTF’s leader made it known that he was not thrilled to have a reporter embedded on such a sensitive mission. McPhee was traditional, and set in his ways. Concerned about exposing female soldiers to unconventional weapons, he had assigned none to the MET teams, much to their chagrin, as they had quickly told me. Would I not prefer to write about the army’s support activities that his wife was leading back at Fort Sill, Oklahoma?