The WHIG began priming its audience in August when Vice President Cheney, on three occasions, sounded a shrill alarm over Saddam Hussein’s nuclear threat. There “is no doubt,” he declared, that Saddam Hussein “has weapons of mass destruction.” Again and again, he hit the same chord. “What we know now, from various sources, is that he . . . continues to pursue a nuclear weapon.” And again: “We do know, with absolute certainty, that he is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon.”
Facing network television cameras, Cheney warned, “We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. . . . Among other sources, we’ve gotten this from firsthand testimony from defectors, including Saddam’s own son-in-law.” The relative was Hussein Kamel, who defected to Jordan in 1995 with a great deal of inside information on Iraq’s special weapons programs, which he managed. He was later convinced by Saddam to return to Iraq, but executed by the ruler soon after his arrival.
But what Kamel told his interrogators was the exact opposite of what Cheney was claiming he said. After numerous debriefings by officials from the United States, the UN, and Jordan, he said on August 22, 1995, that Saddam had ended all uranium-enrichment programs at the beginning of the Gulf War in 1991 and never restarted them. He also made it clear that “all weapons—biological, chemical, missile, nuclear—were destroyed.” Investigators were convinced that Kamel was telling the truth, since he supplied them with a great deal of stolen raw data and was later murdered by his father-in-law as a result. But that was not the story Feith’s OSP, Bush’s WHIG, or Cheney wanted the American public to hear.
At the same time that Cheney began his media blitz, Ariel Sharon’s office in Israel, as if perfectly coordinated, began issuing similar dire warnings concerning Hussein and pressing the Bush administration to go to war with Iraq. Like those from Cheney, pronouncements from Sharon’s top aide, Ranaan Gissin, included frightening “evidence”—equally phony—of nuclear, as well as biological and chemical, threats.
“As evidence of Iraq’s weapons building activities,” said an Associated Press report on the briefing, “Israel points to an order Saddam gave to Iraq’s Atomic Energy Commission last week to speed up its work, said Sharon aide Ranaan Gissin. ‘Saddam’s going to be able to reach a point where these weapons will be operational,’ he said. . . . Israeli intelligence officials have gathered evidence that Iraq is speeding up efforts to produce biological and chemical weapons, Gissin said.”
It was clear, based on the postwar reviews done in Israel, that Israeli intelligence had no such evidence. Instead, the “evidence” was likely cooked up in Sharon’s own Office of Special Plans unit, which was coordinating its activities with the Feith/Wurmser/Shulsky Office of Special Plans. The joint get-Saddam media blitz would also explain the many highly secret visits by Israeli generals to Feith’s office during the summer.
“Israel is urging U.S. officials not to delay a military strike against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, an aide to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Friday,” the AP report continued. “‘Any postponement of an attack on Iraq at this stage will serve no purpose,’ Gissin told the Associated Press. ‘It will only give him [Saddam] more of an opportunity to accelerate his program of weapons of mass destruction.’”
As expected, Sharon’s call was widely publicized and increased pressure on Congress, which often bows to Israel’s wishes, to vote in favor of the Bush war resolution. “Israel To U.S.: Don’t Delay Iraq Attack,” said a CBS News headline. “Israel is urging U.S. officials not to delay a military strike against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, an aide to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Friday,” said the report.
The story also made news in London, where the
Guardian
newspaper ran the headline: “Israel Puts Pressure on US to Strike Iraq.” It went on, “With foreign policy experts in Washington becoming increasingly critical of the wisdom of a military strike, and European governments showing no willingness to support an attack, the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, wants to make it clear that he is the US president’s most reliable ally.”
It was as if the Feith-Wurmser-Perle “Clean Break” plan had come full circle. Their plan for Israel to overthrow Saddam Hussein and put a pro-Israel regime in his place had been rejected by former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Now Bush, with Sharon’s support, was about to put it into effect.
Across the Atlantic, British Prime Minister Tony Blair also contributed to the war fever by releasing a much-hyped report that reinforced the White House theme that Iraq was an imminent threat not only to the United States but also to Britain. In addition to including a reference to the bogus Iraq-Niger uranium deal, the report—later dubbed the “doggie dossier”—made another frightening claim. It warned that Iraq could launch a deadly biological or chemical attack with long-range ballistic missiles on British tourists and servicemen in Cyprus with just forty-five minutes’ notice.
Only after the war would it be publicly revealed that the reference was not to a strategic weapon that could reach Cyprus, but simply to a short-range battlefield weapon that could not come anywhere close to Cyprus. And because all the missiles were all disassembled, even to fire them on the battlefield would take not forty-five minutes but days of assembly and preparation. At least three times prior to the war, Blair was warned by intelligence officials that the report was inaccurate, but he made no public mention of it.
The disinformation blitz continued into early September, timed for the congressional elections and in order to prepare the country for Bush’s preemption decision and possible United Nations fight. On September 7, Bush told reporters gathered at Camp David about alarming new evidence. “A report came out of the . . . IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency],” he said, “that they [Iraqis] were six months away from developing a weapon. I don’t know what more evidence we need.”
A week later, on September 14, Bush repeated his nuclear charge during his weekly radio address. “Saddam Hussein has the scientists and infrastructure for a nuclear-weapons program, and has illicitly sought to purchase the equipment needed to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon.” But, again, there was no new report. The IAEA document he was referring to was from 1996, and it described a weapons program the inspectors had long ago destroyed.
Off on the sidelines, George Tenet was one of the few who knew the truth. But instead of speaking out, he was quietly attempting to stick his finger in the dike by trying to persuade first the British and then the White House to stay away from the Italian Niger report.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned that time was short and the threat imminent. “No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people, and the stability of the world, than the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq,” he told Congress that September.
With no reason to think they were being lied to, the public was left to believe that Saddam Hussein had restarted his nuclear weapons program and was just six months away from having a working atomic bomb. “Senior officials made statements which I can only describe as dishonest,” said senior State Department intelligence official Gregory Thielmann, who saw much of the intelligence. “They were distorting some of the information that we provided to make it seem more alarmist and more dangerous. . . . I thought there were limits on how much one was willing to do in order to twist things.”
The only thing left was for the national media to give the bogus information its imprimatur. Like clockwork, that happened the next morning, Sunday, September 8, when
The New York Times
published a major story under the stark headline “U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts.”
Written by veteran reporters Judith Miller and Michael Gordon, it stated that “more than a decade after Saddam Hussein agreed to give up weapons of mass destruction, Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb, Bush administration officials said today.” Emphasizing the need for speed to eliminate the Iraqi leader, they quoted an official as saying, “The closer Saddam Hussein gets to a nuclear weapon, the harder he will be to deal with.’’
The proof, according to the article, was the Iraqi leader’s alleged attempted purchase of “specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium.” The article concluded, “Mr. Hussein’s dogged insistence on pursuing his nuclear ambitions, along with what defectors described in interviews as Iraq’s push to improve and expand Baghdad’s chemical and biological arsenals, have brought Iraq and the United States to the brink of war.”
As icing on the cake, the reporters quoted the vivid imagery of unnamed administration officials as worried that “the first sign of a ‘smoking gun’ . . . may be a mushroom cloud” and that, according to one defector, “all of Iraq is one large storage facility.” Few words are as easy for the public to understand, or evoke more emotion, as “A-bomb” and “mushroom cloud.”
As if the entire event had been scripted, administration officials had all agreed days earlier to appear on the Sunday talk shows that same morning. Once the cameras clicked on, they made generous use of the allegations contained in the article, now free from worries about releasing classified information. It was a perfect scheme—leak the secrets the night before so you can talk about them the next morning.
“It’s now public,” said Dick Cheney during his appearance on
Meet the Press,
that Saddam Hussein “has been seeking to acquire” the “kind of tubes” needed for the production of highly enriched uranium, “which is what you have to have in order to build a bomb.” Condoleezza Rice, on CNN’s
Late Edition
with Wolf Blitzer, regurgitated the “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud” phrase from the morning’s article.
On Fox News, Colin Powell talked of the “specialized aluminum tubing” that “we saw in reporting just this morning.” And on CBS’s
Face the Nation,
Donald Rumsfeld tied it all in to September 11. “Imagine a September 11 with weapons of mass destruction,” he said, which would kill “tens of thousands of innocent men, women, and children.”
The series of events produced exactly the sort of propaganda coup that the White House Iraq Group had been set up to stage-manage. First OSP supplies false or exaggerated intelligence; then members of the WHIG leak it to friendly reporters, complete with prepackaged vivid imagery; finally, when the story breaks, senior officials point to it as proof and parrot the unnamed quotes they or their colleagues previously supplied.
Bush later evoked the mushroom-cloud scenario himself during his major address to the nation from Cincinnati in October 2002. “The Iraqi regime is seeking nuclear weapons,” he said. “Does it make any sense for the world to wait . . . for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud?” And in November, General Tommy R. Franks, the chief of the U.S. Central Command, said inaction might provoke “the sight of the first mushroom cloud on one of the major population centers on this planet.”
Times
reporter Judith Miller was an obvious choice for the leaks. Several times before, she had turned information from Iraqi defectors into front-page stories. As she acknowledged in a May 2003 internal e-mail to
Times
Baghdad bureau chief John Burns, her dealings with Chalabi went back a long time. “I’ve been covering Chalabi for about 10 years,” she said, “and have done most of the stories about him for our paper, including the long takeout we recently did on him. He has provided most of the front page exclusives on WMD to our paper.”
But relying on Iraqi defectors—especially those supplied by Chalabi—was risky business. Many journalists who covered national security during the Cold War knew that the bulk of information provided by defectors—then from the Soviet Union—had to be taken with a grain of salt. The more exaggerated their charges, the better the chances of receiving political asylum or even large payments from intelligence agencies. It was a constant problem for CIA case officers and analysts.
Using the aluminum-tube story to kick off their “Get Saddam” media blitz, the White House claimed it backed up their charges that Iraq posed a dangerous, immediate threat to America. Ultimately, just four days after the story appeared, again as if the whole event had been planned, President Bush himself referred to the tubes in his dramatic speech before the United Nations General Assembly. “Iraq has made several attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes used to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon,” he said.
Yet by now a number of experts in the field, including many within the U.S. government working for nuclear research labs, were beginning to question the validity of the claims contained in the story. Among those was State Department intelligence and proliferation expert Gregory Thielmann.
“It was not a difficult assessment for us to arrive at, ultimately,” Thielmann said, “that the Department of Energy experts were correct in seeing these tubes as being not well suited for uranium-enrichment centrifuge rotors, but were, in fact, for something else. As we explored the alternative possibilities, we really came up with a very good fit. It was for the casings of Iraqi artillery rockets—the kind that are used in multiple-launcher rocket systems.” In fact, that is the purpose Iraq had previously claimed.
An expert called on by the U.S. nuclear laboratory at Oak Ridge also agreed that the tubes were unlikely for use in a centrifuge. “It would have been extremely difficult to make these tubes into centrifuges,” said Houston G. Wood, founder of the Oak Ridge Centrifuge Physics Department. “It stretches the imagination to come up with a way. I do not know any real centrifuge experts that feel differently.”