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N A T I O N
A Question Of Trust
The
CIA's Tenet takes the fall for a flawed claim in the State of the
Union, but has Bush's credibility taken an even greater
hit?
By MICHAEL DUFFY AND JAMES
CARNEY
KEVIN LAMARQUE/REUTERS CIA director Tenet takes the blame for not
stopping Bush from making the flawed claim
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Sunday, Jul. 13, 2003
The State of the
Union message is one of America's greatest inventions, conceived by
the Founders to force a powerful Chief Executive to report to a
public suspicious of kings. Delivered to a joint session of Congress
in democracy's biggest cathedral, it is the most important speech a
President gives each year, written and rewritten and then polished
again. Yet the address George W. Bush gave on Jan. 28 was more
consequential than most because he was making a revolutionary case:
why a nation that traditionally didn't start fights should wage a
pre-emptive war. As Bush noted that night, "Every year, by law and
by custom, we meet here to consider the state of the union. This
year we gather in this chamber deeply aware of decisive days that
lie ahead."
Just how aware was Bush of the accuracy of what he was about to
say? Deep in his 5,400-word speech was a single sentence that had
already been the subject of considerable internal debate for nearly
a year. It was a line that had launched a dozen memos, several
diplomatic tugs of war and some mysterious, last-minute pencil
editing. The line—"The British government has learned that Saddam
Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from
Africa"—wasn't the Bush team's strongest evidence for the case that
Saddam wanted nuclear weapons. It was just the most controversial,
since most government experts familiar with the statement believed
it to be unsupportable.
Last week the White House finally admitted that Bush should have
jettisoned the claim. Designed to end a long-simmering controversy,
the admission instead sparked a bewildering four days of changing
explanations and unusually nasty finger pointing by the normally
disciplined Bush team. That performance raised its own questions,
which went to the core of the Administration's credibility: Where
else did the U.S. stretch evidence to generate public support for
the war? If so many doubted the uranium allegations, who inside the
government kept putting those allegations on the table? And did the
CIA go far enough to keep the bad intelligence out?
To that last question, at least, the answer was: apparently not.
In what looked like a command performance of political sacrifice,
the head of the agency that expressed some of the strongest doubts
about the charge took responsibility for the President's
unsubstantiated claim. "The CIA approved the President's State of
the Union address before it was delivered," said CIA Director George
Tenet in a statement. "I am responsible for the approval process in
my agency. And ... the President had every reason to believe that
the text presented to him was sound. These 16 words should never
have been included in the text written for the President."
Yet the controversy over those 16 words would not have erupted
with such force were they not emblematic of larger concerns about
Bush's reasoning for going to war in the first place. Making the
case against Saddam last year, Bush claimed that Iraq's links to
al-Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) made the country an
imminent threat to the region and, eventually, the U.S. He wrapped
the evidence in the even more controversial doctrine of pre-emption,
saying America could no longer wait for proof of its enemies'
intentions before defending itself overseas—it must sometimes strike
first, even without all the evidence in hand. Much of the world was
appalled by this logic, but Congress and the American public went
along. Four months after the war started, at least one piece of key
evidence has turned out to be false, the U.S. has yet to find
weapons of mass destruction, and American soldiers keep dying in a
country that has not greeted its liberators the way the
Administration predicted it would. Now the false assertion and the
rising casualties are combining to take a toll on Bush's standing
with the public.
FOLLOW THE YELLOWCAKE ROAD
How did a story that much of
the national-security apparatus regarded as bogus wind up in the
most important speech of Bush's term? The evidence suggests that
many in the Bush Administration simply wanted to believe it. The
tale begins in the early 1980s, when Iraq made two purchases of
uranium oxide from Niger totaling more than 300 tons. Known as
"yellowcake," uranium oxide is a partially refined ore that, when
combined with fluorine and then converted into a gas, can eventually
be used to create weapons-grade uranium. No one disputes that Iraq
had a nuclear-weapons program in the 1980s, but it was dismantled
after the first Gulf War. Then, in the mid-1990s, defectors provided
evidence that Saddam was trying to restart the program.
Finally, late in 2001, the Italian government came into
possession of evidence suggesting that Iraq was again trying to
purchase yellowcake from Niger. Rome's source provided half a dozen
letters and other documents alleged to be correspondence between
Niger and Iraqi officials negotiating a sale. The Italians' evidence
was shared with both Britain and the U.S.
When it got to Washington, the Iraq-Niger uranium report caught
the eye of someone important: Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney's
chief of staff, Lewis Libby, told TIME that during one of his
regular CIA briefings, "the Vice President asked a question about
the implication of the report." Cheney's interest hardly came as a
surprise: he has long been known to harbor some of the most
hard-line views of Saddam's nuclear ambitions. It was not long
before the agency quietly dispatched a veteran U.S. envoy named
Joseph Wilson to investigate. Wilson seemed like a wise choice for
the mission. He had been a U.S. ambassador to Gabon and had actually
been the last American to speak with Saddam before the first Gulf
War. Wilson spent eight days sleuthing in Niger, meeting with
current and former government officials and businessmen; he came
away convinced that the allegations were untrue. Wilson never had
access to the Italian documents and never filed a written report, he
told TIME. When he returned to Washington in early March, Wilson
gave an oral report about his trip to both CIA and State Department
officials. On March 9 of last year, the CIA circulated a memo on the
yellowcake story that was sent to the White House, summarizing
Wilson's assessment. Wilson was not the only official looking into
the matter. Nine days earlier, the State Department's intelligence
arm had sent a memo directly to Secretary of State Colin Powell that
also disputed the Italian intelligence. Greg Thielmann, then a
high-ranking official at State's research unit, told TIME that it
was not in Niger's self-interest to sell the Iraqis the
destabilizing ore. "A whole lot of things told us that the report
was bogus," Thielmann said later. "This wasn't highly contested.
There weren't strong advocates on the other side. It was done, shot
down."
Except that it wasn't. By late summer, at the very moment that
the Administration was gearing up to make its case for military
mobilization, the yellowcake story took on new life. In September,
Tony Blair's government issued a 50-page dossier detailing the case
against Saddam, and while much of the evidence in the paper was old,
it made the first public claim that Iraq was seeking uranium from
Africa. At the White House, Ari Fleischer endorsed the British
dossier, saying "We agree with their findings."
THE DOUBTS THAT DIDN'T GO AWAY
By now, a gap was
opening behind the scenes between what U.S. officials were alleging
in public about Iraq's nuclear ambitions and what they were saying
in private. After Tenet left a closed hearing on Capitol Hill in
September, the nuclear question arose, and a lower-ranking official
admitted to the lawmakers that the agency had doubts about the
veracity of the evidence. Also in September, the CIA tried to
persuade the British government to drop the allegation completely.
To this day, London stands by the claim. In October, Tenet
personally intervened with National Security Adviser Condoleezza
Rice's deputy, Stephen Hadley, to remove a line about the African
ore in a speech that Bush was giving in Cincinnati, Ohio. Also that
month, CIA officials included the Brits' yellowcake story in their
classified 90-page National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's weapons
programs. The CIA said it could neither verify the Niger story nor
"confirm whether Iraq succeeded in acquiring uranium ore and/or
yellowcake" from two other African nations. The agency also included
the State Department's concerns that the allegations of Iraq's
seeking yellowcake were "highly dubious"—though that assessment was
printed only as a footnote.
At a time when it was trying to build public support for the war,
the Bush Administration did not share these internal doubts about
the evidence with the public. In December, for example, the State
Department included the Niger claim in its public eight-point
rebuttal to the 12,200-page arms declaration that Iraq made to the
U.N. two weeks earlier. And a month later, in an op-ed column in the
New York Times titled "Why We Know Iraq Is Lying," top Bush
aide Rice appeared to repeat the yellowcake claim, saying, "The
declaration fails to account for or explain Iraq's efforts to get
uranium from abroad." Nor did the U.S. pass on what it knew to
international monitors. When the International Atomic Energy Agency,
a U.N. group, asked the U.S. for data to back up its claim in
December, Washington sat tight and said little for six weeks.
The battle between believers and doubters finally came to a head
over the State of the Union speech. Weeks of work had gone into the
address; speechwriters had produced two dozen drafts. But as the
final form was taking shape, the wording of the yellowcake passage
went down to the wire. When the time came to decide whether Bush was
going to cite the allegation, the CIA objected—and then relented.
Two senior Administration officials tell TIME that in a January
conversation with a key National Security Council (nsc) official
just a few days before the speech, a top cia analyst named Alan
Foley objected to including the allegation in the speech. The nsc
official in charge of vetting the sections on WMD, Special Assistant
to the President Robert Joseph, denied through a spokesman that he
said it was O.K. to use the line as long as it was sourced to
British intelligence. But another official told TIME, "There was a
debate about whether to cite it on our own intelligence. But once
the U.K. made it public, we felt comfortable citing what they had
learned." And so the line went in. While some argued last week that
the fight should have been kicked upstairs to Rice for adjudication,
White House officials claim that it never was.
NUCLEAR FALLOUT
But if it was good enough for bush, it
wasn't good enough for others. Colin Powell omitted any reference to
the uranium when he briefed the U.N. Security Council just eight
days later; last week he told reporters that the allegation had not
stood "the test of time." Nor did Tenet mention the allegation when
he testified before the Senate panel on Feb. 11. "If we were trying
to peddle that theory, it would have been in our white paper," an
intelligence official told TIME. "It would have been in lots of
places where it wasn't. A sentence made it into the President's
speech, and it shouldn't have."
Did Bush really need to push the WMD case so hard to convince
Americans that Saddam should be ousted? In a TIME poll taken four
weeks before coalition forces invaded, 83% of Americans thought war
was justified on the grounds that "Saddam Hussein is a dictator who
has killed many citizens of his Iraq." That's one claim that has
never been contested. In the same TIME poll, however, 72% of
Americans thought war was also justified because it "will help
eliminate weapons of mass destruction in Iraq."
The unseen threat of a Saddam with WMD was an argument that
played to Bush's strengths. As a politician, Bush has always been
better at asserting his case than at making it. After 9/11, his
sheer certitude—and the faith Americans had in his essential
trustworthiness—led Americans to overwhelmingly support him. The
yellowcake affair may have already changed that relationship, for as
the casualties mount in Iraq, polls suggest that some of that faith
is eroding. Which means the next time Bush tells the nation where he
wants to go, it may not be so quick to follow.
—With reporting by Massimo Calabresi, Matthew Cooper and Adam
Zagorin/Washington, John F. Dickerson with Bush in Africa, J.F.O.
McAllister/London and Andrew Purvis/Vienna
From the Jul. 21,
2003 issue of TIME magazine
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