Hubris Read online

  For Maguire, it was also personal—a chance to settle an old score and avenge fallen comrades. “We wanted that fucker dead,” he recalled. “We were willing to do anything to get Saddam.”

  The name Luis and Maguire had chosen for the program, Anabasis, had come from the title of a book by the ancient historian Xenophon that recounted the march of 10,000 Greek mercenaries to Babylon in the year 400 B.C. to capture the Persian throne for Cyrus the Younger from his brother. Wolfowitz, according to Maguire, was not keen on this particular name, though Maguire never understood why. But other CIA officials also thought the Anabasis program was inaptly titled—and wondered whether Luis and Maguire had misread history. The Greek army had been victorious at the critical battle of Cunaxa, but Cyrus had been killed, rendering the entire mission moot. The 10,000 Greeks then had to fight their way back to the Black Sea. Anabasis was the story of an unsuccessful operation that ended in retreat.

  The estimated cost of Luis and Maguire’s Anabasis was $400 million over two years. But it wasn’t the price tag that frightened Pavitt and other senior agency officials. It was the lethality. In drawing up the plan, Luis and Maguire had carefully avoided using the A-word: assassination. The agency had a long and troubled history of assassination plots. Most had failed and had cast a dark stain on the CIA’s reputation. An executive order banning assassinations had been in place since 1976 (but occasionally circumvented during wartime). So Luis and Maguire referred instead to “direct action operations,” a bland euphemism. But there was no doubt that, under Anabasis, people were going to die—and that innocent Iraqi civilians, not just government leaders and military officers, would likely be among the victims. When Pavitt and other senior officials in the DO reviewed the Anabasis plans, they were uncomfortable. Blowing up railroad lines? “You’re going to kill people if you do this,” Tyler Drumheller, chief of the DO’s European Division, recalled saying when he first looked at Anabasis. He was stating the obvious.

  But this was the post-9/11 era, when U.S. intelligence agencies, with the encouragement of the White House and fiercely conservative lawyers in the Justice Department, were pushing the envelope. The CIA was snatching terror suspects off the streets in Gambia, in Bosnia, in Sweden, and “rendering” them to friendly foreign intelligence services—where extreme interrogation practices would be used on them. The CIA set up its own network of secret prisons, where suspected al-Qaeda leaders were subjected to aggressive interrogation, including “water boarding,” a technique in which the suspect was strapped to a board and dunked below water long enough to approximate (but not cause) drowning. In a rousing speech to CIA officers soon after the September 11 attacks, Cofer Black, then director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, had proclaimed, “The gloves are off.” The line was widely quoted within the agency, and Black also used it during congressional testimony. But Black had said something to his CIA colleagues that did not attract public notice. There was some dispute as to his precise words. Drumheller recalled that Black had remarked that “someday we can all expect to be prosecuted for what we’re going to do.” Another counterterrorism official said that Black had simply commented that “someday we may all get called before a congressional committee for what we’re going to do.” Whatever the exact words, the message was clear: in the future, the missions the CIA was about to undertake might look different than they did right now.

  On February 16, 2002, President Bush signed covert findings authorizing the various elements of Anabasis. The leaders of the congressional intelligence committees—including Representative Porter Goss, a Republican, and Senator Bob Graham, a Democrat—were briefed. Maguire and a team of his officers made their initial entry into Iraq in April 2002, crossing the Turkish border in Jeep Cherokees and driving into Kurdish areas in the north, a region outside the control of Saddam’s regime. They met with the two rival Kurdish leaders, Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani, and briefed them on the details of the Anabasis plan. The Kurdish leaders were skeptical. They had heard talk from Americans like this in the past. Anabasis called for Kurdish irregulars to take risks—large risks—to recruit sources for the CIA and begin sabotage operations, even “direct action.” People could die. “Is this real? Is the president serious?” Barzani and Talabani wanted to know. Maguire’s response was one that he, and other CIA officials, would repeat: “We’re really serious. This is not going to be some half-baked effort.” Ultimately, the success of the plan rested on the credibility and the determination of George W. Bush—and about that, Maguire had no doubt. “This president is a man of his word,” Maguire told the Kurds. “When we’re finished, Saddam is not going to be there. When we’re finished, we’re going to be in Baghdad.”

  On this trip, Maguire himself headed south into Saddam-controlled territory, a white-mustachioed spy behind enemy lines. He drove in the backseat of a Toyota Super Salon dressed in the uniform of an Iraqi Army colonel with a red stripe on his shoulders. Maguire was waved through border crossings and checkpoints and drove right up to the perimeter of an Iraqi Army base. The unit was in disarray. There were soldiers milling about in flip-flops and shorts—with no guns or ammunition. “They looked like refugees,” said Maguire. The Iraqi V Corps was supposedly the front line against an American invasion, but it seemed a shambles. On another occasion, a CIA officer working with Maguire inspected the line separating Kurdish-controlled territory from Saddam-controlled Iraq. On the other side were the deteriorating Iraqi military forces Maguire had seen. And one of those units, having spotted the CIA man, sent a runner across the line with a message: “Are you the Americans? We don’t want to fight.” When Maguire heard about this, he was pleased. It seemed that these Iraqi troops were eagerly awaiting an invasion—so they could surrender. He wrote it all up in a report that went directly to the president and the vice president. An invading American army, it appeared, could roll right through to Baghdad. Perhaps they would even be greeted as liberators.

  BACK at headquarters, Luis and Maguire were eager to tell Cheney about Anabasis. The Kurdish leaders were fully on board; operations were beginning. The vice president, as always, asked tough questions: What kind of support are you receiving from the Kurds? Who are the people you’re working with? Where are they placed? He was, Maguire recalled, “way in the weeds.”

  The answers Cheney received that day were reassuring. Luis and Maguire were can-do operatives firm in their conviction they were serving a righteous cause. After Cheney finished with them, he turned toward several analysts. He had a different set of questions for them: What was Saddam’s force structure? How could the intelligence they have be used to support U.S. ground forces during an invasion? What Iraqi units were positioned where? Which ones might have chemical and biological weapons? Cheney was not posing the sort of questions a policy maker would need answered in order to determine whether Iraq posed a threat to the United States. He was not seeking information on whether Saddam was dangerous because he possessed weapons of mass destruction. He was not soliciting material that would help him decide if an invasion of Iraq was absolutely necessary. His queries were all pegged to the assumption that Iraq would be invaded. And he was not happy with what he was hearing, for the analysts were unable to provide concrete answers to his queries about the invasion to come.

  Cheney’s line of questioning was a logical follow-up to the briefing he had received on Anabasis, for from the start Luis and Maguire had made it clear that their top secret plan by itself should not be expected to eliminate Saddam. The various actions they had envisioned—the sabotage, the assassinations, the disinformation—could destabilize and weaken Saddam’s tyrannical regime. They could create chaos and sow distrust. But truly ending the Iraqi dictator’s grip on power would require the intervention of the U.S. military. Bush and Cheney, they believed, understood this. In response to a Bush directive, General Tommy Franks, commander of the U.S. Central Command, was already drawing up invasion plans. And Cheney was asking questions at the CIA that indicated he expected the Un
ited States to invade Iraq. Anabasis, from its inception, was a precursor and a complement to war—not a substitute.

  There was even a timetable. When Maguire and Luis were instructed to devise a paramilitary plan, according to Maguire, the message they received from the agency leadership on the seventh floor was explicit: “Be ready to turn this thing on by January 2003. Be ready to go in a year. You got a year.” That meant, as far as Maguire was concerned, there was going to be an invasion—and the clock was ticking.

  WHILE Luis and Maguire were briefing Cheney on the top floor of CIA headquarters that day, another group of CIA operatives was toiling away on a related mission in the basement. In a space the size of a football field and divided into cubicles by partial walls, three hundred or so employees of the Counterproliferation Division (CPD) of the Directorate of Operations were mounting espionage operations aimed at obtaining intelligence on weapons of mass destruction programs around the globe. They also were plotting covert actions that might thwart these programs. A particularly busy unit in the CPD at this time was the Joint Task Force on Iraq, charged with digging up information on the top priority: Iraq’s WMD programs. Its chief of operations was a career officer named Valerie Wilson.

  Valerie Wilson, who had entered the CIA in 1985 as Valerie Plame, had been at the CPD for several years. Previously, she had served overseas in Europe, first as a case officer posing as a State Department employee and then as a supersecret NOC—an officer under “nonofficial cover.” NOCs were the most clandestine of the agency’s frontline officers. They did not pretend to work for the U.S. government—and did not have the protection of diplomatic immunity should anything go awry. They had to be independent, resourceful, confident—and careful. Valerie Wilson told people she worked for an energy firm. After returning from Europe and joining the CPD, she had maintained her NOC status. And now she was running ops aimed at uncovering intelligence on Iraq’s unconventional weapons. Her job was to find the evidence of Saddam’s clandestine efforts that Bush, Cheney, Libby, and other administration officials desired.

  A year earlier—about the time Valerie Wilson joined it—the CPD’s Iraq unit had been small, employing only a few operations officers. Not much was going on within it. In the years since 1998, when UN weapons inspectors had left Iraq, the CIA had not had a single source on Iraq’s weapons programs. Prior to 1998, the CIA had used the UN inspection team to gather intelligence. With the inspectors gone, the CPD had utterly failed “to gain direct access to Iraq’s WMD programs,” as its deputy chief later told Senate investigators. Most of the Iraq action at the CIA—such as it was—had been occurring within the operations directorate’s Near East Division, which had not done much better than the CPD. By 2001, the NE Division had developed only four sources in Iraq—and none was reporting on WMDs. But in the summer before 9/11, the word came down from the top brass: we’re ramping up on Iraq. The CPD’s Iraq unit was changed into the Joint Task Force on Iraq. And in the months after September 11, the JTFI grew to include about fifty employees; Valerie Wilson was placed in charge of its operations group.

  By the spring of 2002, the JFTI, including Wilson, was under intense pressure to get more solid intelligence on Iraq’s weapons programs. With Bush and his Cabinet members obviously focused on (or perhaps obsessed with) Saddam and Iraq, everyone in the intelligence community, from Tenet on down, realized it was crucial to do whatever they could—probe every corner, chase any lead—to penetrate Saddam’s Iraq. The JTFI was frantic to do so.

  Slowly, the JTFI began to develop sources within Iraq. Yet the group was coming up with nothing.

  The JTFI’s primary target was Iraqi scientists. The goal was to make indirect and surreptitious contact with these experts and find out what they knew about unconventional weapons in Iraq. JTFI operations officers tracked down relatives and associates of Iraqi scientists living in America. “It would be, ‘Knock, knock, we’re here from the U.S. government, we know you’re a loyal citizen and we want to talk to you about your brother back in Iraq,’ ” a CIA officer recalled. “They would say, ‘My brother is a good man.’ We’d say, ‘We know that.’ They’d say, ‘My brother knows nothing.’ We’d say, ‘I’m sure. But can we find a way to have him tell us that?’ ” JTFI officers occasionally persuaded an Iraqi émigré to pay a visit to a relative in Iraq and—when no one else was near—pose certain questions to the relative. Valerie Wilson and the operations officers of JTFI sought out Iraqi graduate students studying abroad who had previously studied under Iraqi scientists of interest to the CIA. What can you tell us about your mentor’s work? Would you be willing to report secretly to us after returning to Iraq? What if we paid you? What if we could help you stay in this nice Western city? In some instances, JTFI attempted to persuade a defector to go back to Iraq. “It was ‘So glad you’ve risked your life getting out,’ ” one CIA official said. “ ‘Now, will you go back for us?’ Yeah, right, that was an easy sell.”

  By that spring, JTFI was sending out dozens of reports based on its new sources. But none of these sources had anything definitive to report about unconventional weapons activity within Iraq. At the same time, Valerie Wilson’s operations unit was overwhelmed with walk-ins. As the anti-Saddam rhetoric coming from Bush administration officials had intensified, would-be informants were increasingly approaching U.S. embassies and offering—or peddling—information on Iraq’s weapons programs. JTFI operations officers were traveling throughout the world to debrief these possible sources to determine if they were legitimate. Often it would take only minutes to conclude that someone was pulling a con. But the JTFI had to treat each case as potentially the breakthrough for which its officers yearned. “We knew nothing about what was going on in Iraq,” a CIA official recalled. “We were way behind the eight ball. We had to look under every rock.”

  In one episode, an Iraqi showed up in Damascus claiming he had been taken blindfolded to a facility outside Baghdad where political prisoners or Iranian prisoners from the Iran-Iraq War (which ended in 1988) were being held. He was to repair equipment at this site. But, he claimed, he had witnessed the most gruesome experiment: Twenty or so subjects were strapped down and injected with a poison. Within hours, blood was pouring out of their noses and ears. And they died. JTFI officers flew to Syria to meet with this Iraqi. His story made them wonder if Iraq was testing a botulinum-based weapon. He told them how long he had sat blindfolded in the car that had ferried him to this site. He described the facility and the surrounding environs. Back in the CIA’s basement, JTFI staffers pored over satellite photos and tried to determine where this facility was. They couldn’t find anything. Then this fellow failed a lie detector test. Another nothing. Later, CIA officers would come to suspect that this informant, as well as other defectors bearing dramatic WMD allegations, had been sent their way by Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, the exile group that had been lobbying Washington for years to overthrow Saddam.

  A walk-in in India claimed he had been involved with a biological weapons program based at an Iraqi university. He had to be checked out. The Joint Task Force on Iraq dispatched one of the intelligence community’s best BW experts to the subcontinent, a doctor named Les. (His last name remains a secret.) The shrewd doctor concluded the Indian was a fabricator. “We were trying to find something,” a CIA official recalled. “We were motivated. We knew this was important. But it was our job to be skeptical.”

  As the cases piled up, Valerie Wilson traveled overseas under assumed names to monitor walk-in operations and other activities. Members of the unit were putting in long hours. But the results were frustrating. None of the JTFI’s operations was generating evidence that Saddam had biological or chemical weapons or a revived nuclear weapons program. Did the task force’s lack of results mean it was not doing its job well enough—or rather, might Saddam not have the arsenal of unconventional weapons most CIA people (and White House officials) assumed he was hiding? Valerie Wilson and other JTFI officers were almost too overwhelmed to consider the p
ossibility that the small number of operations they were conducting was, in a way, coming up with the right answer: that there was no intelligence to find on Saddam’s current chemical and biological stockpiles and nuclear weapons programs because they did not exist. Instead, Valerie Wilson pushed on, doing all she could to uncover information—any information—on Saddam’s weapons.

  In over a year, she would become a household name—but not for anything she did to find Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

  THERE was a profound disconnect between Valerie Wilson’s endeavors and those of her colleagues upstairs who were briefing Cheney on Anabasis. The operating premise of the officers of the Counterproliferation Division—and of the CIA as a whole—was that accurate intelligence mattered. It was the duty of the CIA and the other intelligence agencies to obtain truthful information, however they could, and to get it into the hands of policy makers. Spies, eavesdroppers, and analysts collected and processed intelligence so senior government officials, especially the commander in chief, could render the best decisions possible. But Bush, Cheney, and a handful of other senior officials already believed they had enough information to know what to do about Iraq. They still were seeking information about unconventional weapons in Iraq, but it was for reasons other than for evaluating whether Iraq was an immediate threat that would have to be neutralized by an invasion. They were drop-dead sure of their presumptions: Iraq was a danger, Saddam had to go, and war was the only option that would achieve this policy goal. They did not need intelligence to reach these conclusions—or to test them.