500 Days (81 page)

Now Blair was juggling two challenges to his leadership—impending votes in the U.N., and also in the House of Commons. The prime minister was seeking parliamentary approval for British troops to fight alongside the Americans in Iraq, if an invasion took place.

Bush had won approval from Congress for his own war resolution in a lopsided vote held in October. But the politics of Britain were much more complex. Blair’s own Labour Party was teetering on open revolt, and if the British Parliament rejected his proposal on the heels of a veto at the Security Council, the prime minister would have no choice but to step down. Already, the cabinet secretary was exploring how to establish a caretaker government.

Blair gathered with a few of his aides for a gloomy meeting laced with black humor and speculations about his potential political demise.

Still, he remained unshaken in his decision. “I still feel like we’re doing the right thing,” he said.

•  •  •  

A Gulfstream V executive jet landed at the remote Szczytno-Szymany Airport in northeast Poland at 4:00
P.M.
on March 7. Military officers and border guards secured the perimeter; the civilian employees at the facility had been ordered inside the terminal building. On the edge of the runway, a few vans were waiting, their engines running.

The plane taxied to a halt. The vans raced out to the far end of the runway,
stopping near the jet. A team of CIA agents scrambled out of the vehicles and boarded the aircraft. Soon, they brought out Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, shackled and hooded, and placed him inside one of the vans. The vehicles turned on their brights and drove past the terminal through the security gate, onto a tarmac road lined with pine trees.

About fifteen minutes later, the vans reached an unpaved road, little more than a path, next to a lake. They came to a stop at the Stare Kiejkuty intelligence training base maintained by the Polish government. A group of hulking men in black outfits dragged Sheikh Mohammed out of the vehicle and took him to the basement of the building. There, they put him in a cell, chained his arms above his head, and slashed off his clothes. They left him naked.

Sheikh Mohammed had arrived at the CIA’s premier secret prison.

•  •  •  

That same day, Blix and ElBaradei delivered their latest—and what would be their last—formal report on the weapons inspections in Iraq.

For days, members of the Bush administration had been pushing Blix—sometimes to the point of rudeness—to declare that he had found two types of equipment that violated the requirements imposed by the U.N. on Iraq. But the inspectors believed, at least for now, that the items they had located were insignificant. One, a drone aircraft, was powered by a motorcycle engine and constructed mostly from balsa wood. The second was a cluster bomb, which administration officials maintained was designed to strew smaller bomblets containing biological or chemical material across a large area; the device had been found by the inspectors in an old factory store and appeared to be nothing more than rusting scrap metal. It contained no traces of any life-threatening agents. Neither of these was sufficient—or there simply was not enough information about them—to declare Iraq in breach of its agreements, Blix concluded.

Before the presentation, Blix and ElBaradei took an elevator to the thirty-eighth floor at the U.N. building, then walked to the office of Kofi Annan, the secretary-general. The three men headed down together to the Security Council chamber. Everyone took a seat at the table and Blix was invited to speak first.

The inspectors had followed down the leads provided by Western intelligence services, yet made no damning discoveries. There was no evidence to support claims that Iraq was operating mobile weapons labs. Allegations that Saddam maintained underground armament facilities could not be substantiated; sites identified by the West had been inspected and ground-penetrating radar had
been employed, to no avail. The Iraqis were demolishing what little material had turned up, including some rockets, engines, and the like.

“We are not watching the breaking of toothpicks,” Blix said. “Lethal weapons are being destroyed.”

There was greater cooperation, Blix said, although Iraq’s seriousness of purpose still had to be assessed. The inspectors needed more time, if only to verify whether full disarmament was taking place. “It will not take years, nor weeks, but months,” he said.

ElBaradei spoke next and ticked off the searches that been conducted for each item supposedly maintained by Iraq. “After three months of intrusive inspections,” he said, “we have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapon program in Iraq.”

The presentations changed no minds among the Security Council members.

•  •  •  

Anonymous attacks against Blix and ElBaradei appeared in news articles worldwide. The
New York Times
reported that Washington officials were angered that Blix had failed to mention cluster bombs that had been found by the inspectors. A Reuters dispatch said that the White House was annoyed at his failure to disclose the existence of the drone in his presentation. The State Department issued a “fact sheet” falsely claiming that inspectors had concluded that the drone was definitely a violation by Iraq.

These were the smoking guns, officials maintained, that had been hidden by Blix in his desperation to avoid war. Rarely was it mentioned that both items had been included in a document provided by Blix to the Security Council.

The effort to publicly undermine ElBaradei’s credibility was spearheaded by the vice president. The supposed nuclear expert, Cheney argued in an appearance on
Meet the Press
, didn’t know what he was talking about.

“I think Mr. ElBaradei frankly is wrong,” the vice president said. “If you look at the track record of the International Atomic Energy Agency and this kind of issue, especially where Iraq’s concerned, they have consistently underestimated or missed what it was Saddam Hussein was doing.”

•  •  •  

Peter Goldsmith, Blair’s attorney general, changed his mind. Britain could lawfully invade Iraq with the Americans after all.

The dramatic turnaround had been weeks in the making. Just six days earlier, Goldsmith had sent a note to Blair, amending his earlier ruling with waffling, on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand language. The small step struck Blair and
his other advisors as a sign that Goldsmith might, if pushed, reverse his original decision. The prime minister went all out: Give a final judgment, he told Goldsmith. And make it explicit, yes or no.

On March 13, Goldsmith met with Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, with the news that he was reversing himself. “I’ve decided to come down on one side,” the attorney general said: “1441 is sufficient.”

Resolution 1441 was the declaration approved by the Security Council in November setting out the new requirements for Iraq’s disarmament. One resolution—not two—would carry the day.

Goldsmith’s new analysis depended on comparing the November resolution with Resolution 687 from 1991, which imposed a cease-fire in the Persian Gulf War if Iraq disarmed. In Resolution 1441, Iraq was declared in breach of Resolution 687—in other words, Goldsmith maintained, Saddam had failed to comply with the terms of the cease-fire. An invasion now would not be an independent event. Instead, it was a resumption of hostilities in the Gulf War.

“In public, I need to explain my case as strongly and unambiguously as possible,” Goldsmith said. “And I might need to tell the cabinet when it meets on March 17 that the legal issues were finely balanced.”

Straw disagreed. It would be better to distribute a draft letter from Straw to the relevant committee in Parliament and make it Goldsmith’s official explanation. Delving into a detailed conversation with the cabinet members would be a mistake.

“You need to be aware, there’s a problem with the cabinet,” Straw said. “They leak everything.”

•  •  •  

The following day, an annual awards ceremony took place at the Pentagon. It was a formal affair, held to honor civilian employees who had made exceptional contributions to the mission of the Defense Department.

Three men selected to receive the Decoration for Exceptional Civilian Service wore boutonnieres designating them as the winners. Some of the army’s top brass milled around them, offering congratulations for everything they had done in their technical work with anthrax at the research institute based at Fort Detrick.

The ceremony began, and a presenter lauded the recipients’ role in helping the United States respond to the threats posed by the deadly bacteria.

Each of the scientists was handed the award. Bruce Ivins, the mentally
unstable researcher who would soon be the prime suspect in the anthrax killings, beamed as he accepted his medal.

•  •  •  

Sheikh Mohammed’s cell had no windows, denying him any perceptions of night and day. Bland and uninviting meals were served at ever-changing intervals and the hum of white noise was pumped incessantly through a speaker. Interrogations were conducted irregularly. Eventually, he lost all sense of time—a classic technique designed to throw him off balance.

This was not what he had expected. When the terrorist mastermind was turned over to the Americans, he proclaimed with cocky self-assurance that he would not speak until he was taken to New York and assigned a lawyer. But there would be no lawyer, no court, no rights. He was now, an interrogator told him, the property of the United States government.

The smirk stayed on Sheikh Mohammed’s face; he would not reveal anything, he said. Americans were weak and lacked resilience. They wouldn’t do what was necessary to stop jihadists from achieving their goals.

An interrogator pressed him for information about future attacks. Sheikh Mohammed just smiled.

“Soon, you will know,” he said.

The arrogance would not last. In the earliest days, Sheikh Mohammed was subjected to what the interrogation plan called “conditioning techniques.” He was shackled to the ceiling standing up, with his hands handcuffed in front of him; he was left in that position to prevent him from sleeping and was kept awake for more than ninety-six hours. He was nude at all times, except when he was forced by his chains to stand up; then he was dressed in a diaper so that he didn’t have to be released when he needed to go to the bathroom. His diet was manipulated, with a near-tasteless liquid substituted for his usual meals.

None of those tactics were used to force him to deliver answers. Instead, by demonstrating that he had no control over his basic needs, they were intended to induce a high state of anxiety in hopes that he would begin to value his own welfare more than the secrets he held.

The questioning followed the traditional good-cop, bad-cop routine, although the chasm between good and bad was enormous. The gentler portion was handled by Deuce Martinez, a CIA officer who had worked much of his career as a narcotics analyst. Martinez spoke no Arabic and had no background
with interrogations, but quickly demonstrated a skill with Sheikh Mohammed that astonished CIA colleagues.

The two men discussed religion as Martinez fed dates to his subject. The CIA officer listened with seeming compassion when Sheikh Mohammed expressed anguish over the likelihood that he would never see his children again. The terrorist composed poems for Martinez’s wife as a sign of respect; they were sent instead to CIA psychologists for analysis.

Sheikh Mohammed grew relaxed and almost friendly in Martinez’s presence. He spent time explaining the similarities between Martinez’s Christianity and his own Islamic beliefs.

“Can’t we get along?” Sheikh Mohammed eventually asked.

“Isn’t it a little late for that?” Martinez replied.

A different team replaced Martinez when the time came for rougher treatment. The interrogators began with what they called “corrective techniques”—slapping Sheikh Mohammed in the face and the abdomen, holding his head motionless, and grabbing him when his attention wandered. They escalated to the interrogation plan’s “coercive techniques,” repeatedly throwing him against a false wall; dousing him with water of about fifty degrees; and forcing him into stress positions and cramped confinement. Finally, they pushed the trauma button—waterboarding. During his first month in the Polish secret prison, Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times.

Before March ended, Sheikh Mohammed began to talk. Much of his information struck interrogators as little more than attempts at deception. But before long, he was divulging details that were confirmed to be true.

He described the traits and profiles for Western sympathizers that al-Qaeda had begun to seek out as recruits after 9/11, and gave details of how the terror group selected and conducted surveillance of its targets. He exposed active terror plots in America. He said he had been scheming with a man named Sayf al-Rahman Paracha to smuggle explosives into the United States for an attack in New York; as a result, Paracha was named an enemy combatant and his son was arrested. He described how a truck driver in Ohio named Iyman Faris was conspiring to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge; that led to Faris’s arrest and his agreement to act as a double agent for the FBI by sending deceptive e-mail and text messages from a safe house in Virginia to his terrorist commanders.

Sheikh Mohammed also told his interrogators about a plan to attack
Heathrow Airport, but that news was outdated; the British had already caught wind of the threat and averted it by making mass arrests.

The biggest payoff from questioning Sheikh Mohammed was not a single revelation, but the sheer volume of information that the CIA could use to trick other detainees into spilling their secrets. Sheikh Mohammed, at times, didn’t even realize what he had done. In one instance, he said that he had met three men running al-Qaeda’s project to produce anthrax, identifying one as Yazid Sufaat, who was already in custody. The interrogators thought Sheikh Mohammed revealed the information because he believed—falsely—that Sufaat had told his captors about his work. The CIA then confronted Sufaat, who was so shaken by the discovery of his role that he identified the other two terrorists working on the biological weapons program. They were promptly arrested.