The Story (50 page)

3
. 
Wag the Dog
is a 1997 black comedy film starring Robert De Niro as a Washington spin doctor who distracts the electorate from a presidential sex scandal shortly before an election by teaming with a Hollywood producer (played by Dustin Hoffman) to start a fake war with Albania, complete with fabricated film footage. The film, an enormous hit whose title quickly became part of the nation's political lexicon, came out just before the Monica Lewinsky scandal erupted and Clinton bombed the Al Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. Clinton's critics lost no time in calling the controversial military strike a “wag the dog” action.

4
. William J. Broad and Judith Miller, “Attack on Iraq: The Arms Monitors; Iraq Said to Hide Deadly Germ Agents,”
New York Times
, December 17, 1998,
www.nytimes.com/1998/12/17/world/attack-on-iraq-the-arms-monitors-iraq-said-to-hide-deadly-germ-agents.html
.

5
. Barbara Crossette, Judith Miller, Steven Lee Myers, and Tim Weiner, “After the Attacks: The Overview; U.S. Says Iraq Aided the Production of Chemical Weapons in Sudan,”
New York Times
, August 25, 1998,
www.nytimes.com/1998/08/25/world/after-attacks-overview-us-says-iraq-aided-production-chemical-weapons-sudan.html
. Precisely what was being done at the Al Shifa plant remains in dispute. Sudan and the plant owner denied that any illicit chemicals were being produced there. And US officials acknowledged later that the evidence that prompted the strike was not as credible as first claimed. But Washington never officially rejected the possibility that Al Shifa was linked in some way to chemical weapons.

6
. Charles Duelfer's report revealed later that several senior French and Russian officials had taken bribes from Saddam's regime, which may have accounted in part for their opposition to stronger UN sanctions and other measures against him.
Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq's WMD
(Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, September 30, 2004),
https://www.cia.gov/library/reports/general-reports-1/iraq_wmd_2004/
.

7
. Peter Bergen, “My 18 Year Odyssey on the Trail of Osama bin Laden,”
New Republic
, August 24, 2011,
www.tnr.com/article/world/magazine/94159/september-11-chasing-al-qaeda#
.

8
. Ahmed Rashid,
Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001).

9
. Camelia Fard and James Ridgeway, “The Accidental Operative: Richard Helms's Afghani Niece Leads Corps of Taliban Reps,”
Village Voice
, June 12, 2001,
www.villagevoice.com/content/printVersion/164992
.

1
. Jason Epstein played a role in helping Philip Zelikow secure the broadest possible readership for what all three of us sensed early on would be a historic report. Over one of our occasional dinners with him when he was visiting New York and just starting his investigation, Jason encouraged Philip to contract with a commercial publisher to produce an instant version of the final report rather than rely on the US Government Printing Office, which had limited ability to publish complex documents quickly and widely and disseminate them cheaply. Jason recommended W. W. Norton and introduced Philip to Drake McFeely, the head of Norton. Philip wound up selecting Norton to publish the 567-page report. It was an inspired choice. The 9/11 Commission report was a huge bestseller.

2
. Paul R. Pillar,
Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy
(Washington, DC: Brookings Institution,
2001). Bound galleys of the book, which was published in April, before 9/11, argue that terrorism, though likely to remain a significant challenge for the United States, must be managed rather than defeated. He argues that assassination “should not be relied on as a counterterrorist instrument” and belittles the danger of WMD terrorism (which he calls CBRN, for “chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear) as overrated or “much-ballyhooed.” A later book
Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2011) accuses the Bush administration of deciding on war in Iraq without an orderly decision-making process, successfully pressuring analysts to distort their estimates and, in general, of politicizing intelligence. In a review of the book, Carl W. Ford, Jr., the former director of the State Department's intelligence unit, whose Iraqi WMD estimates proved most accurate of all the agencies, strongly disputes Pillar's thesis. With respect to the WMD estimates, he argues, the problem was not pressure but poor quality. “I believe that the image depicted in the book of intelligence officers bending to pressure applied by hard headed, opinionated policy-makers is highly exaggerated,” he writes in a review for H-Diplo/ISSF,
Roundtable
3, No. 15 (June 2012),
http://h-diplo.org/ISSF/PDF/ISSF-Roundtable-3-15.pdf
.

3
. The unusual CIA office was called the “Alec” station after the son of its first chief, Michael Scheuer.

4
. Seth Mnookin,
Hard News: Twenty-one Brutal Months at “The New York Times” and How They Changed the American Media
(New York: Random House, 2005), p. 61. He quotes the
New Yorker
story on the paper's September 12, 2001, coverage as having devoted 82,500 words to its coverage of the attack.

5
. Murray Weiss,
The Man Who Warned America: The Life and Death of John O'Neill, the FBI's Embattled Counterterror Warrior
(New York: ReganBooks, 2003). Weiss's book was among the first to examine the life of a man whose professional life was defined by his effort to persuade the US government that Bin Laden posed a grave threat to the American homeland and to take his warnings and growing capabilities seriously. Weiss pays tribute to this admittedly complex man, warts and all, in a book that is dedicated to O'Neill, a man he described as a friend, and to the other victims of 9/11.

6
. Condoleezza Rice,
No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington
(New York: Crown, 2011), p. 98.

7
. Condoleezza Rice, interview, December 19, 2001.

8
. Ibid.;
No Higher Honor
, pp. 101–3.

9
. Ibid., p. 101.

10
. William J. Broad and Judith Miller, “A Nation Challenged: The Bacteria; Officials, Expanding Search, Warn Against Drawing Conclusions on Anthrax Source,”
New York Times
, October 26, 2001,
www.nytimes.com/2001/10/26/us/nation-challenged-bacteria-officials-expanding-search-warn-against-drawing.html
; William J. Broad and Judith
Miller, “A Nation Challenged: The Germ Attacks; Inquiry Includes Possibility of Killer from a U.S. Lab,”
New York Times
, December 2, 2001,
www.nytimes.com/2001/12/02/us/nation-challenged-germ-attacks-inquiry-includes-possibility-killer-us-lab.html
.

1
. Richard Bonin,
Arrows of the Night: Ahmad Chalabi's Long Journey to Triumph in Iraq
(New York: Doubleday, 2011), pp. 2–5. According to Bonin's well-sourced, highly readable account, with which Chalabi cooperated, the informal meeting at Richard Perle's house was attended by Paul Wolfowitz, who would become deputy defense secretary; Doug Feith, who would get the third-most senior Pentagon post; Zalmay Khalilzad, who would be a special assistant to Bush and ambassador at large for Iraqi exiles; and John P. Hannah, Vice President Dick Cheney's national security adviser. I verified his account in subsequent interviews with Chalabi, Perle, Feith, Hannah, and others who'd attended the brunch.

2
. Ibid., p. 106.

3
. Ibid., pp. 100–16. Chalabi confirmed Bonin's detailed account of the events of 1995 and 1996 in interviews after 2003. A similar account of Chalabi's 1995 planned insurrection appeared a decade earlier in Robert Baer's
See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War Against Terrorism
(New York: Random House, 2002), pp. 191–205.

4
. Judith Miller and James Risen, “Tracking Baghdad's Arsenal: Inside the Arsenal: A Special Report; Defector Describes Iraq's Atom Bomb Push,”
New York Times
, August 15, 1998,
www.nytimes.com/1998/08/15/world/tracking-baghdad-s-arsenal-inside-arsenal-special-report-defector-describes-iraq.html
and
http://www.nytimes.com/1998/08/15/world/tracking-baghdad-s-arsenal-defection-cia-almost-bungled-intelligence-coup-with.html
.

5
. Haideri was about to be named by Paul Moran, an Australian freelance photojournalist, in a broadcast about his WMD claims for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Moran, who worked occasionally for the Rendon Group, a consulting firm that the CIA had retained to help promote Chalabi's INC, had also interviewed Haideri—though I learned that only after returning to the United States from Bangkok. According to Wikipedia, Moran was the first “international media casualty of the Iraq war.” He was killed in a car bomb attack in northeastern Iraq near the border with Iran on March 22, 2003. We never met.

6
. Judith Miller, “Secret Sites: An Iraqi Defector Tells of Work on At Least 20 Hidden Weapons Sites,”
New York Times
, December 20, 2001,
www.nytimes.com/2001/12/20/international/middleeast/20DEFE.html
.

1
. In 2002 alone, I shared bylines with nineteen reporters—most often with William Broad, my coauthor for
Germs
, as well as intelligence correspondent James Risen and David Sanger, the White House reporter.

2
. Ron Suskind,
The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), pp. 61–62; George Tenet with Bill Harlow,
At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA
(New York: HarperCollins, 2007), pp. 264–65; Peter Baker,
Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House
(New York: Doubleday, 2013), p. 178; Dick Cheney, interview, January 2013.

3
. George W. Bush,
Decision Points
(New York: Crown, 2010), pp. 153–54.

4
. Jacob Weisberg,
The Bush Tragedy
(New York: Random House, 2008), pp. 189–94. Almost a decade would pass before the FBI finally named Bruce Ivins, a US military scientist, as the likely anthrax letter culprit, and only after years of arguing, wrongly, that Steve Hatfill, a scientist and military contractor whom I had interviewed for our book
Germs
, was to blame.

5
. Tenet,
At the Center of the Storm
, p. 370.

6
. Explaining his own vote in October 2002 to support the use of force in Iraq, John Kerry said he believed that “a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security.” Hillary Clinton, too, who had not read the classified version of the NIE, echoed the Bush administration's claims. She asserted repeatedly that Saddam “had given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members,” and that he was determined to increase his stockpile of germ and chemical weapons and “keep trying to develop nuclear weapons.”

7
. One of the many paradoxes of this saga is Scooter Libby's opposition to issuing the National Security Study Directives (NSSD) in the fall of 2002. Libby argued at interagency meetings—futilely, it seems—that the national security doctrine would be interpreted by Bush's critics as justification for the war in Iraq. Libby, speaking on behalf of the vice president's office, argued that the rationale for the war was not preventive war but Iraq's failure to adhere to its UN WMD and antiterror commitments, as illustrated by sixteen UN resolutions criticizing Iraq.

8
. Baker,
Days of Fire
, p. 213.

9
. President Bush and others have discussed what he called Powell's “passionate” warning about the potential consequences of an Iraq discussion in their one-on-one White House meeting. One of the best third-party accounts of the so-called Pottery Barn meeting is in Peter Baker's book
Days of Fire
, pp. 207–8, in which Powell lists the possible adverse effects as the “cost to international unity, the possibility of oil price spikes, the potential destabilization of Saudi Arabia, and other allies in the region.” An invasion, he warned, would “suck all the oxygen out of Bush's term . . . and would mean Bush would effectively be responsible for a shattered country, for twenty-five million people and all their hopes and aspirations.”

10
. Ronald I. Christie, interview, February 2014.

11
. Frank P. Harvey,
Explaining the Iraq War: Counterfactual Theory, Logic and Evidence
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 70–76; Stephen F. Knott,
Rush to Judgment: George W. Bush, the War on Terror, and His Critics
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012), pp. 138–40. The books contain numerous prowar quotes from leading Democrats who would later backpedal their support for the Iraq War.

12
. Rand Beers was the only senior White House official I knew who quit his National Security Council staff job over Iraq, though Condi Rice later told several top aides that Beers, who then began working for Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign, had denied in his exit interview with her that Iraq was the cause. Richard A. Clarke, in his book
Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror
(New York: Free Press, 2004, p. 241), says Beers quit over Iraq.

13
. Jack S. Levy, “Preventive War and Democratic Politics,”
International Studies Quarterly
52, no. 1 (March 2008): 1–24. Levy clearly articulates a distinction that is widely agreed upon by legal scholars and academics but less so by White House speechwriters and journalists between “preemptive war,” in which the initiator acts against imminent aggression, and “preventive war,” which he defines as a “strategy designed to forestall an adverse shift in the balance of power and driven by better-now-than-later logic.” While many who wrote about the Bush doctrine asserted that Bush had endorsed preemptive war, he was, in fact, embracing the legitimacy of unilateral, aggressive prevention. I'm indebted to Philip Zelikow for my initial tutorial on this and other subjects.