The Longest War (26 page)

While Team B came to the conclusion that there were substantive connections
between Saddam and al-Qaeda, veteran U.S. counterterrorism analysts would come to a different conclusion. In the fall of 2002, Michael Scheuer, the former head of the CIA’s bin Laden unit,
led a review of nineteen thousand
Agency documents, consisting of around eighty thousand pages of material going back more than a decade, looking for al-Qaeda–Iraq links. Scheuer says, “We worked very hard on it, coming to a solidly reached conclusion that there was no formal or ongoing relationship” between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi dictator, a finding that was communicated to the top levels of the CIA. And, strikingly, following the fall of the Taliban, no documents were found in Afghanistan that substantiated an Iraqi link, despite the fact that al-Qaeda was a highly bureaucratic organization.

Daniel Coleman, the FBI special agent whose knowledge of al-Qaeda was unrivaled, says that in August 2002 someone called him from Cheney’s office, something both memorable and quite unprecedented, and asked him “to review everything” on Iraq and the al-Qaeda connection. Coleman recalls: “We had already reviewed the material twice. Again we came up empty.” Coleman, whose son was then serving in Afghanistan as an Army Ranger, subsequently told the staffer from Cheney’s office, “If you came to me for a casus belli
you are not going to get it
.”

On August 15, 2002, Feith presented Team B’s conclusions at CIA headquarters. By then
two new researchers
were at work for him: DIA analysts Tina Shelton and Chris Carney. Shelton gave the presentation, arguing that Iraq’s alliance with al-Qaeda was an “open and shut case” and that they had a “
mature, symbiotic relationship
.” CIA director Tenet remembers that he listened politely to this briefing for a few minutes, thinking this is “complete crap,” and quickly found a way to excuse himself. At the CIA, the Team B approach came to be known as “
Feith-based analysis
.”

Two months earlier, on June 21, 2002, the CIA had issued its own classified assessment, “
Iraq and al-Qa
’ida: Interpreting a Murky Relationship.” The assessment noted that it was “purposefully aggressive in seeking to draw connections, on the assumption that any indication of a relationship between these hostile elements would carry great dangers for the United States.” The paper concluded that there was no evidence of cooperation on terrorist operations but there was enough intelligence on supposed contacts and training, including on chemical and biological weapons, that the relationship between al-Qaeda and Saddam was worrying. Three days earlier the CIA had issued another report concluding that the interaction between Saddam and
bin Laden appeared to be “
more akin to activity
between rival intelligence services, each trying to use the relationship to its own advantage.”

In January 2003
, the CIA produced a paper that was the Agency’s definitive take on the matter, concluding that there was no Iraqi “authority, direction and control” over al-Qaeda. Deputy Director of the CIA John McLaughlin recalls that this did not go down well with the Bush administration: “It took the form of phone calls from people on the vice president’s staff, saying, ‘Here are another dozen questions we’d like you to look at,’ at which point I’d have to say, ‘No, we’ve
turned over every rock
we can on this, and, frankly, there will be a rebellion in this building if we go any further, because we’ve taken our stand on this.’ Now, intelligence people always have to be alert to new information. So you’re arrogant if you say, ‘Nothing will ever change my view!’ But at that point, we could see nothing that would change our view.”

Within the intelligence community there were serious doubts about Saddam’s supposed relationship with al-Qaeda, but several prominent media stories appeared in the run-up to the Iraq War that seemed to provide independent corroboration of some of the more sensational claims that the Bush administration was then making. Take Jeffrey Goldberg’s March 2002 story in
The New Yorker
, in which he wrote that “Iraqi intelligence agents
smuggled conventional weapons
, and possibly even chemical and biological weapons into Afghanistan.” Aside from the obvious implausibility of smuggling weapons into Afghanistan, a nation already awash in every kind of weaponry after two decades of war, a further problem with Goldberg’s story was identified by the British al-Qaeda expert Jason Burke. Goldberg’s source on the arms smuggling story was Mohammed Mansour Shahab, an Iranian arms dealer imprisoned by the Kurds, who claimed to have smuggled the Iraqi weapons to Kandahar, the Taliban stronghold. Burke, who had reported from Kandahar repeatedly over the years, interviewed Shahab after Goldberg’s story had appeared and concluded that the arms smuggler
was lying about his Kandahar trip
since he could not describe the city accurately. And, of course, no evidence has subsequently emerged that Iraqi intelligence agents ever smuggled any weapons into Afghanistan.

A further exhibit that was advanced by proponents of the supposed links between al-Qaeda and Saddam was the Salman Pak training camp, some twenty miles from Baghdad, where Islamist terrorists were supposedly taught how to hijack aircraft using the fuselage of a passenger jet. Several defectors associated with the anti-Saddam opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress
(INC), made this claim to a variety of major media outlets in the run-up to the Iraq war. One of the defectors, a former Iraqi general, Jamal Abu Zeinab al-Qurairy, told
Vanity Fair
in January 2003 that he helped to train “non-Iraqi Islamic fundamentalists at the Salman Pak camp …
to hijack aircraft with knives
.” Sound familiar?

Over the course of two days in November 2001, another INC-supplied defector, former Iraqi “army colonel” Sabah Khalifa Khodada al-Lami, gave a series of media interviews about Salman Pak, telling the Agence France-Presse wire service that he had worked at the training camp and had observed Arabs from a number of countries learning
how to hijack planes
. The
New York Times
similarly quoted
Khodada—although in this incarnation he had been mysteriously demoted to captain—saying that Islamist radicals from countries such as Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Algeria, and Egypt had passed through the camp. Khodada was described in the
Vancouver Sun
as an “
intelligence officer
,” while the London
Times
quoted him as a “
former Iraqi army officer
.” During his various interviews Khodada had changed in rank from colonel to captain, and had also morphed from an army officer to an intelligence officer.

Khodada’s bogus claims also made their way into a
White House “white paper”
drafted by Bush aide Jim Wilkinson, which charged that Salman Pak was a training camp for anti-American terrorists. The paper, dated September 12, 2002, recycled the nonsense about Salman Pak being used to train “
non-Iraqi-Arabs
” in “hijackings,” showing that the INC fabrications were making their way into official White House documents. After the invasion of Iraq, the Defense Intelligence Agency’s investigation of Salman Pak found
no “credible reports
that non-Iraqis were trained to conduct or support transnational terrorist operations at Salman Pak.”

The Salman Pak story was emblematic of a wider problem: information that seemed to prove the Iraq–al-Qaeda connection often came from the INC. Vincent Cannistraro, the head of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center in the early 1990s, says, “Ahmad Chalabi is a fraud and provided us with a stream of coached alleged defectors with information to get us into Iraq. Chalabi flooded the system with
so much of this crap
.”

A road map of where that crap ended up in the media and the U.S. government is provided in a 2002 letter that the Washington office of the INC wrote to the Senate Appropriations Committee to justify the
tens of millions of dollars
of American taxpayer money then being lavished on the INC. The letter said that “defectors, reports and raw intelligence are cultivated and analyzed
by the INC and are reported through the … western media.” Attached to the memo was a list of
more than a hundred stories
that the INC had successfully planted in venues ranging from NPR to the
Washington Post
, many of which were later demonstrated to be false. The memo went on to note that recipients of INC information included senior officials at the Department of Defense and the Office of the Vice President. This was significant because it shows that INC’s nonsensical information was bypassing American intelligence agencies and instead going directly to those in the Pentagon and the vice president’s office who were most gung-ho about the coming Iraq War.

Exhibit A for the “connection” theory between Iraq and al-Qaeda was the supposed April 9, 2001, meeting in Prague between the lead 9/11 hijacker, Mohammed Atta, and Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, an Iraqi agent. This story was first put into play by Czech government officials who shortly after 9/11 said that Atta met the Iraqi intelligence official in Prague
before flying to the United States
. In congressional testimony on June 18, 2002, CIA director George Tenet said, “Atta allegedly traveled outside the US in early April 2001 to meet with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague, we are
still working to confirm or deny
this allegation.” Despite Tenet’s uncertainty about the Atta-Ani meeting, in January 2003 Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, briefed senior Bush officials that Atta had in fact met with the Iraqi intelligence agent
as many as four times
. Libby’s presentation was deemed “a strong case” by Wolfowitz.

The centerpiece of the Bush administration’s case for going to war in Iraq was Secretary of State Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003, six weeks before the invasion. Cheney’s office pressed for the most expansive case for the connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda in the speech, which was supposed to replicate the presentation that Adlai Stevenson, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, had given in 1962 at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In that speech Stevenson had used aerial photographs to convince the world that the Soviets had installed nuclear missiles in Cuba.

Powell’s deputy, Richard Armitage, remembers that the vice president’s office wrote up a submission for his boss to deliver to the UN that included “
every kitchen sink
that you could imagine,” including the increasingly dubious idea that Atta had met in Prague with the Iraqi intelligence agent before 9/11. A month earlier a CIA report titled “Iraq Support for Terrorism” had already concluded that “
we are increasingly skeptical
that Atta traveled to
Prague in 2001 or met with the [Iraqi official].” Deputy CIA director John McLaughlin recalls that the White House material about the putative al-Qaeda–Iraq connections had not been cleared by the Agency. McLaughlin told Powell and his staff, “This is not our draft. There’s
all sorts of garbage
in here.” Despite the good-faith efforts to exclude questionable material about Saddam’s connections to al-Qaeda in Powell’s speech, much that remained in the final text would later be discounted following the occupation of Iraq.

Powell’s presentation was a bravura performance that seemed to establish beyond a doubt that Saddam was actively concealing an ongoing WMD program and was in league with al-Qaeda. At one point the secretary of state dramatically brandished a small vial of a white powder of supposed anthrax, saying “about this amount … shut down the US Senate in the fall of 2001.” As Powell gave his speech, sitting directly behind him was CIA director Tenet, giving a visual imprimatur to what Powell was saying. Tenet later wrote, seemingly without irony, that “it was a great presentation, but
unfortunately the substance didn
’t hold up.”

One section of Powell’s UN speech tried to make the case for an emerging alliance between Saddam and al-Qaeda. Powell was careful not to use any material that was obviously suspect, such as the supposed meeting between Atta and the Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague. Instead he said:

Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda lieutenants. … When our coalition ousted the Taliban, the Zarqawi network helped establish another poison and explosive training center camp, and this camp is located in northeastern Iraq. … Baghdad has an agent in the most senior levels of the radical organization Ansar al-Islam that controls this corner of Iraq. In 2000, this agent offered al-Qaeda safe haven in the region. … After we swept al-Qaeda from Afghanistan, some of those members accepted this safe haven. They remain there today. Zarqawi’s activities are not confined to this small corner of northeast Iraq. He traveled to Baghdad in May of 2002 for medical treatment, staying in the capital of Iraq for two months while he recuperated to fight another day. During his stay, nearly two-dozen extremists converged on Baghdad and established a base of operations there.

Powell’s speech made a gossamer-thin case for the Iraq–al-Qaeda nexus, even with the faulty intelligence that was then available. The relationship between
Zarqawi and al-Qaeda was already known to be far from clear-cut. Until 2004, Zarqawi ran an organization separate from al-Qaeda, known as
Tawhid,
whose name corresponds to the idea of monotheism in Arabic. Indeed, Shadi Abdalla, a member of Tawhid who was apprehended in Germany in 2002,
told investigators
that the group saw itself to be in competition with al-Qaeda. An indication of his independence from bin Laden is that when Zarqawi
founded a training camp
in Afghanistan in 1999, he established it near the western city of Herat, near the border with Iran, several hundred miles away from al-Qaeda’s training camps, which were in southern and eastern Afghanistan.

Even after the Iraq War began in March 2003, Zarqawi was still running his own outfit independent of al-Qaeda. Unlikely support for that fact came from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who said of Zarqawi at a Pentagon briefing in June 2004, “
Someone could legitimately say
he’s not al-Qaeda.” Not only did Zarqawi run a terrorist organization that was separate from and even competitive with al-Qaeda, but he also was independent of Saddam Hussein. On June 23, 2004, Zarqawi released an audiotape on a jihadist website that delivered a
blistering critique of Saddam
, whom he described as a “devil” who “terrified the people.” That audiotape came a week after President Bush had described Zarqawi as “
the best evidence
” of Saddam’s connection to al-Qaeda. On October 25, 2005, the CIA released a report that finally disposed of the myth that Saddam and Zarqawi had ever been in league, assessing that prior to the war, “
the regime did not have a relationship
, harbor, or turn a blind eye towards Zarqawi.”