CHAPTER NINETEEN

THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

Just two days after Porter Goss and his weasel hunters forced Mary McCarthy to resign, CBS’s 60 Minutes aired an explosive interview with the former European division chief of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations.

“Tyler Drumheller, a twenty-six-year veteran of the Agency, has decided to do something CIA officials at his level almost never do: speak out,” intoned correspondent Ed Bradley, with all the gravitas he could muster.

Clearly undeterred by the CIA’s internal investigation, Drumheller was an angry man. Despite all his best efforts, the story line on prewar intelligence had shifted once again from White House lies to CIA incompetence, or even perfidy. “It just sticks in my craw every time I hear them say it’s an intelligence failure. It’s an intelligence failure? This was a policy failure!” he sputtered, his thick jowls shaking righteously.

JABBA THE HUT

Drumheller had decided to reveal details of two classified operations: the recruitment of Iraqi foreign minister Naji Sabri, and the debriefing of the Iraqi defector known as CURVEBALL. Along the way, he told a series of outright lies that left his former colleagues just shaking their heads.

According to Drumheller, who ran both operations, CIA director George Tenet delivered Sabri’s information to the president, the vice president, and then–national security advisor Condoleezza Rice at the White House. “They were excited that we had a high-level penetration of Iraqis,” Drumheller said.

And what did this high-level source tell them? Bradley wanted to know.

“He told us that they had no active weapons of mass destruction program,” Drumheller said. Bush lied, people died!

Ed Bradley wanted to make sure his viewers understood the full import of what Drumheller had just revealed. “So in the fall of 2002, before going to war, we had it on good authority from a source within Saddam’s inner circle that he didn’t have an active program for weapons of mass destruction?”

“Yes,” Drumheller replied. “He says there was no doubt in his mind at all.”

How could that be so, Bradley wondered. “It directly contradicts what the president and his staff were telling us.”

No one at the White House cared about the facts, Drumheller said. “The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming. And they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy.”

Bradley also asked him about the Niger uranium scam. Drumheller claimed he understood immediately that the whole thing was a fake and tried to put the kibosh on the story, but the White House politicos overruled him. This, too, was patently false. Drumheller passed on three glowing reports from Rome station chief Jeff Castelli without any such comment. The Robb-Silberman Commission concluded that the “failure to undertake a real review of the documents—even though their validity was the subject of serious doubts—was a major failure of the intelligence system.”¹ In the coded, impersonal language of government reports, those words constituted a serious rebuke.

The same went for CURVEBALL, the Iraqi defector in Germany who provided false intelligence on mobile biological weapons labs—labs the CIA later said did not exist. Drumheller claimed that he had seen right through the fraud, but nobody—nobody!—would listen to him, because the fix was in at the White House.²

In CIA circles, Tyler Drumheller was known as Jabba the Hut, after the grotesque Star Wars character whose toadlike face disappears into a blubbering mass of fat. After watching him on 60 Minutes, conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham quipped that he was the only person who could make Web Hubbell look like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

“I thought he was pathetic and the entire episode degrading,” a former colleague of Drumheller’s told me. “Don’t ask me how he ever got to be European division chief. I never heard about him until late last year with all the hoohaw about CURVEBALL.”

Then there was Drumheller’s claim that he had recruited the Iraqi foreign minister, when in fact he was a French source.

One of Drumheller’s superiors, who asked not to be quoted by name, said he was struck when he watched the 60 Minutes piece because he knew that Drumheller’s claims were just flat-out wrong. “Drumheller never told me that CURVEBALL was a fabricator. Didn’t happen.”

But apparently Drumheller had no intention of letting the truth get in the way of a good story, especially now that he had a book contract. He repeated his allegations that the Bush White House ignored information “proving” that Saddam had no WMD on MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews, on CNN’s Lou Dobb’s Tonight, and other shows. Then, in June, he told the Washington Post that “he personally crossed out a reference to the [mobile biological weapons] labs from a classified draft of a UN speech by Secretary of State Powell because he recognized the source as a defector, code-named CURVEBALL, who was suspected to be mentally unstable and a liar.”

Those statements finally attracted the attention of Senator Pat Roberts (R-KS). In a stunning and unprecedented rebuke from the chairman of a congressional intelligence committee, Roberts cited Drumheller’s media appearances and said it was necessary to correct the record. His staff had gone back to review the original source reports and other operational documents relating to Iraqi foreign minister Naji Sabri. They even called back for renewed questioning CIA officers who were involved in the operation. “We can say that there is not a single document related to this case which indicates that the source said Iraq had no WMD programs. On the contrary, all of the information about this case so far indicates that the information from this source was that Iraq did have WMD programs,” Roberts said.

“Both the operations cable and the intelligence report prepared for high-level policymakers said that while Saddam Hussein did not have a nuclear weapon, ‘he was aggressively and covertly developing such a weapon.’ Both documents said ‘Iraq was producing and stockpiling chemical weapons’ and they both said Iraq’s weapon of last resort was mobile launched chemical weapons, which would be fired at enemy forces and Israel.”

Rather than contradicting the conclusions presented in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, the information from Naji Sabri was totally consistent with it, Roberts concluded. “The only program not described as fully active [by Sabri] was the biological weapons program, which the source described as ‘amateur,’ and not constituting a real weapons program.”

And Roberts wasn’t speaking just for himself. In July 2006, he revealed, Tenet told a closed meeting of the Senate intelligence committee that Drumheller “had mischaracterized [Sabri’s] information.” Going after Drumheller by name, Tenet said that the former Chief/EUR “never expressed a view to him, as the former Chief/EUR has claimed publicly, that the source’s information meant Iraq did not have WMD programs.” Roberts concluded, “The committee is still exploring why the former Chief/EUR’s public remarks differ so markedly from the documentation.”³

It was a stunning disavowal that got absolutely no attention in the elite media. Besides myself, the only reporter to pick up on this remarkable airing of the CIA’s dirty laundry was my colleague at NewsMax.com, Ronald Kessler.⁴

In his self-serving memoir, George Tenet devotes seven pages to debunking Drumheller’s account. He says that he could find no trace of the warnings Drumheller claimed to have disseminated about CURVEBALL, and insists that the issue was never brought to his attention. “In fact, I’ve been told that subsequent investigations have produced not a single piece of paper anywhere at the CIA documenting Drumheller’s meeting” with the German intelligence officer he claims warned him over lunch that CURVEBALL was unreliable. “Drumheller insisted that the news of the German lunch hit Langley like a small bombshell,” Tenet writes. But when CIA officers went back to the German intelligence officer to ask him about the lunch with Drumheller, “[h]e denied ever having called CURVEBALL a ‘fabricator,’” as Drumheller alleged.

If Drumheller had been so concerned about CURVEBALL or the Sabri story he “had dozens of opportunities before and after the Powell speech [at the UN] to raise the alarm with me, yet he failed to do so.” A search of his records showed that Drumheller “was in my office twenty-two times” during that period, Tenet added.

Tenet left the most damning piece of evidence for last. Far from having sought to warn the CIA about CURVEBALL, Drumheller drafted and signed a memo to prepare Tenet for a May 27, 2003, meeting with the head of German intelligence, Dr. August Hanning. The third of five items in the memo was all in bold. It suggested that Tenet, “Thank Dr. Hanning for the Iraqi WMD information provided by the [German intelligence] asset ‘Curve Ball.’”

Tenet concluded: “If the chief of the European division believed that it was a mistake for us to use the Curve Ball material and knew that the Germans had warned us off it, why was he asking me to thank the Germans?”⁵

THE FIRING OF PORTER GOSS

George W. Bush didn’t know that he was going to fire Porter Goss when he came down from the White House residence for his morning briefing at 7:30 A.M. on Friday, May 5, 2006.

The president liked the former Florida congressman. He thought Goss was making progress in transforming the Agency to more aggressively pursue the hard targets confronting America. He was expanding the clandestine service and had recruited a whole new generation of young, diverse Americans. These were long-term strides, performed quietly out of the limelight. That was the type of progress this president liked.

Bush was certainly aware of the growing flap over Goss’s executive director, Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, now the target of a Justice Department investigation for alleged bribery in relation to disgraced Republican congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham. Lurid stories in the drive-by media described mysterious late-night poker games with hookers at a suite in the Watergate Hotel attended by Foggo, Cunningham, and a shadowy defense contractor named Brent Wilkes. But so far, no one was reporting that Goss had any knowledge of Foggo’s moonlighting. Until such information emerged, Bush felt confident Goss could weather the storm.

But there are many things the president of the United States doesn’t know. For one, he has little awareness of the petty scheming carried out behind his back by rival members of his own administration—until they erupt into public disputes, as did Colin Powell’s disagreements with Donald Rumsfeld over Iraq.

For months, Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte had been sharpening his knives, looking for a way to get rid of his old rival from Psi Upsilon at Yale. In December 2005, he had argued inside the administration that Goss was “not a team player” because he was cooperating with Senator John McCain and congressional Democrats in their effort to impose new legal guidelines on CIA interrogators.

Goss’s reasoning for working with McCain was simple: he saw his operations guys and paramilitaries “lawyering up,” because they felt they had entered a legal no-man’s-land as a result of the rendition program. How many of them were going to suffer the same indignity as Bob Lady, who had been forced to abandon his retirement plans (including his house) in northern Italy, in order to avoid arrest? “We knew we were going to get hung out to dry,” former Agency officer Michael Scheuer said later.⁶ Goss agreed with McCain that they needed clear legal guidelines that defined torture (and banned it), so he suspended the interrogations quietly in December 2005 until the Justice Department could draw them up.

When he heard what Goss had done, Negroponte told his own supporters in Congress and at the White House that the CIA director was “disloyal.” Once, he even used the word “unpatriotic.” They were strong terms and they didn’t go unnoticed. It was just a matter of time before the DNI found his opening.

That spring, Washington was awash in rumors of a “malaise” that had gripped the Bush White House. Bush’s staff were dispirited with the lack of progress in Iraq, racked by internal policy disputes, and destabilized by the ongoing investigation by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald. Just days after Mary McCarthy was forced to resign at CIA, Karl Rove was hauled in for the fifth time by Fitzgerald to give sworn grand jury testimony about when he first learned that CIA analyst Valerie Plame had recommended her husband, Joe Wilson, for the Niger trip. Left-wing bloggers, including former CIA analyst Larry Johnson, were cackling that Fitzgerald had sent Rove’s lawyer a “target letter,” saying that Rove could soon be indicted.

Sally Quinn, a glorified gossip columnist for the Washington Post (and wife of former Post executive editor Ben Bradlee), published a catty Style piece on Bush’s woes that called on his wife to use her influence to prevent the wholesale collapse of her husband’s second term. “Dear Laura,” it began. “It’s time for you to act. Nancy Reagan did it. You can too. Things are falling apart….” Quinn described a White House that was closed to outside advice, “incompetent, unrealistic, and insincere.” They weren’t listening to anybody, not even to Papa Bush. It was time for a major shake-up, she urged.⁷

In Washington, there is rarely smoke without a hidden fire, and Quinn was right that Chief of Staff Andy Card looked wan and exhausted. He’d been in the saddle for six years, running himself ragged with sixteen-hour and even twenty-hour days. So when Bush announced a staff shake-up just four days later, bringing in former budget director Josh Bolten to replace Card, no one was really surprised. The shift had been in the works for some time.

Bush gave Bolten carte blanche to make whatever staff changes he felt were necessary, but he wanted them done right away. He didn’t want people drifting out of his administration in the last year or eighteen months. If anyone was thinking of leaving, say, after the midterm elections that November, the time for them to walk through that door was now.

“Porter had always said he would stay at the Agency for two years, then retire,” a close advisor told me. “He was always talking about retirement. It was not a secret.” But he made the mistake of talking about it with Negroponte, perhaps during a shared weekend when the two saw each other on Fisher’s Island in Florida, where they both had vacation property. If we lose the elections, I’ll go longer, Goss said. But otherwise, he was ready to head home after November.

When Negroponte heard that, he knew he had his hook. Coupled to the growing flap over Dusty Foggo, it was enough to hang Porter Goss.

BACK TO THE FUTURE

On the afternoon of Thursday, May 4, 2006, Goss picked up the message as he returned from a meeting to his seventh-floor office suite overlooking the old-growth forest on the CIA campus in Langley, Virginia. It said, Bolten—WH—tomorrow 9 AM w/DNI. He inquired if the caller had left any additional details. Was there a particular file the president wanted to discuss? His secretary said no, that was it.

Goss mentioned the White House summons when he met with his staff late that afternoon. He wasn’t even sure which Bolten it was—John Bolton, or Josh?

Probably Josh, they told him. (Bolten had officially assumed his new duties, replacing Card, just two weeks earlier.) And if he didn’t give you a subject, it can only be one of two things. Either they’re going to tell you that you’re leaving, or they’re going to ask you how much longer you intend to stay. As a precaution, Goss’s staff suggested he draft a statement and have it ready for the next afternoon.

The following morning when Goss arrived at the White House, he was surprised to find that Negroponte had already arrived.

Porter has indicated to me that he was intending to leave by the end of the year, the DNI began, formally addressing the president’s new chief of staff.

Goss nearly fell off his chair. What are we talking about here? he said. Are you saying you want me to leave now?

Bolten nodded. Yes, he said. He repeated what he had been telling the press, that the president wanted any personnel changes that were going to take place to happen now.

Okay, Goss said. Then let’s do it today. I’ll have a statement ready by 3 P.M. this afternoon.

Now it was the turn of Negroponte and Bolten to show their surprise. They hadn’t expected Goss to take it like this, to move so precipitately. Bolten realized that he hadn’t prepared the president for Goss’s resignation, so he tried to stall for time, but Goss remained adamant. He would announce his departure that afternoon.

Twenty minutes later, he was back in the Langely woods, drafting his resignation letter. He knew all too well how Washington worked. If he allowed them to let it drag out over the weekend, the news would leak out in dribs and drabs and he would be made to look like a liability to the president. This way, he would go out the door with his head high.

Bolten phoned back at 11 A.M., and asked him to come to the Oval Office to meet with the president at 1:15 P.M. The president wanted to give him a proper send-off from the Oval. It was the least he could do to show his appreciation for Goss’s loyalty and his service.

Both men were awkward as they made small talk in front of the television cameras that Friday afternoon. The reason was simple: neither one was prepared for the kabuki dance they now had to act out for the public. Neither Bush nor Goss gave any reason for his departure. Their meeting appeared to be unscripted and unplanned because it was.

In the meantime, sources from Negroponte’s office were calling the ranking minority member on the House intelligence committee, California Democrat Jane Harman, to bring her up to speed. Within minutes of the public announcement, Harman released a statement blasting Goss for his stewardship of the Agency. “In the last year and a half, more than 300 years of experience has either been pushed out or walked out the door in frustration,” she said. “This has left the Agency in free fall.”

For John Negroponte, it was sweet revenge. He and Josh Bolten had already decided that General Michael Hayden, then serving as Negroponte’s deputy, would move over to replace Goss at the CIA. But they also had another surprise up their sleeve. As deputy director, they were bringing back Stephen Kappes, whose noisy resignation in November 2004 had provoked the insurrection at the Agency by the DO old-timers.

Representative Pete Hoekstra thought Goss’s firing was outrageous. “Here’s someone who went in when you asked him, knowing that it was going to be hard, and then you cut him off at the knees,” he said. All the flap about Dusty Foggo and the alleged bribery scandal was a distraction. “This was not about staff, but about getting results. And Porter was getting results.”

He had no doubt that Goss had ruffled feathers during his tenure at the CIA. “But when you ask someone to do a tough job like this, you can’t expect him to be Mr. Nice Guy.”

While Hoekstra had been closely following Negroponte’s efforts to grab as much turf from the CIA as possible, he saw something equally important at work. “This was pushback,” he told me. “Bringing back Steve Kappes is a huge win for the CIA bureaucracy. They felt they were bringing back one of their own, and that they had succeeded in purging the foreign object in the blood—that they had purged the body of the intelligence community of the infection caused by the agent of change, Porter Goss.”

Kappes’s appointment was “back to the future. This is a vindication of all those people who didn’t want to change,” he said. “The person Porter saw as the primary obstacle to change is now in charge.”

Hoekstra just shook his head. This was no way to run a railroad.

The night he was fired, Goss received a call from Governor Jeb Bush in Florida, who pressed him to run for the U.S. Senate. Florida Republicans weren’t happy with Katherine Harris, he said. She didn’t have a chance of winning in November. But everyone thinks you do, Bush said.

Goss thought about it long and hard overnight, then turned it down. But at least that phone call told him that he hadn’t been fired in disgrace.

He had been sabotaged, yet one more casualty of the shadow warriors.

TREES FALLING IN THE FOREST

When I spoke to Representative Pete Hoekstra about Goss’s removal in June 2006, he ended the interview by asking if I believed that the discovery of WMDs in Iraq would still be news. I said it all depended on what they found.

The congressman was clearly excited about something, and wanted to do a little test marketing without revealing the full details of what he knew. He had been hearing a number of stories about unexplored Iraqi weapons storage depots, hidden bunkers, and underground sites he felt should be investigated. Remember that the Iraq Survey Group concluded that they could not say with any high degree of certainty that Saddam’s weapons had not been moved before the war, he said. “I suggest you take another look at WMD.”

Then he popped the question: “What would happen if we found a bunker with hundreds of shells filled with sarin?”

We got the answer a few days later, after the Pentagon released the declassified overview of a report produced by the National Ground Intelligence Center, which took over the search for Saddam Hussein’s WMDs where the Iraq Survey Group left off in November 2004. It revealed—ta-da!—that there were WMD stockpiles in Iraq after all.

Since 2003, the report revealed, coalition forces had been finding hundreds of munitions containing degraded mustard or sarin nerve gas in locations all over Iraq. In addition, they were finding stockpiles of specially designed chemical munitions—warheads designed to be filled with chemical weapon agents just before they were used on the battlefield.

This was significant, Hoekstra told reporters when he and Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) released the report, because “the impression that the Iraqi Survey Group left with the American people was they didn’t find anything.”

Coalition forces recently had discovered a bunker with several hundred warheads still filled with sarin, the report revealed. This was in addition to the hundreds of tons of “agricultural chemicals” labeled as pesticides found by coalition troops during the initial phase of the war. These chemicals were, in fact, what remained of the “stockpiles” of chemical weapon agent everyone had been seeking, says former military intelligence officer Douglas Hanson, who worked for an operations intelligence unit in Iraq just after the liberation. The earlier reports were dismissed by the press even though a CNN cameraman, a Knight Ridder reporter, more than a dozen soldiers, and two Iraqi POWs were hastily decontaminated after approaching a storage bunker near Karbara where the first drums of CW agent were found.⁸

The National Ground Intelligence Center report was released just as the Senate was debating an early Democratic proposal to set a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. “This is an incredibly significant finding,” Santorum said. “The idea that, as my colleagues have repeatedly said in this debate on the other side of the aisle, that there are no weapons of mass destruction is in fact false.”

But the report’s findings were dismissed by both Democrats and the press. The New York Times, which had devoted hundreds of articles to debunking administration claims about Saddam’s WMD programs, didn’t report it at all. The Boston Globe devoted two paragraphs to the report, and the Washington Post just five.⁹ For the Left, finding WMDs in Iraq just wasn’t news, because it risked making them look like the petty, foolish partisans that they were.

The left-wing Daily Kos website featured the headline “PA-Sen: Santorum Makes Shit Up.” As proof, it cited the UN inspectors who had failed to find the hidden WMD depots before the war. That prompted a conservative website to comment that it was “rather like the defense calling witnesses who had not seen the accused commit the murder.”¹⁰

Former New York Times executive editor Howell Raines, who had been forced to resign over made-up news stories, leveled that same charge against Fox News, which was the only one to devote significant coverage to the Pentagon report. “The key to understanding Fox News is to grasp the anomalous fact that its consumers know its ‘news’ is made up,” he wrote.¹¹

Encouraging that view was an unnamed “senior Pentagon official,” who inexplicably dismissed the report’s findings in a background briefing right after the Hoekstra and Santorum press conference.

“This does not reflect a capacity that was built up after 1991,” the official said. These latest finds “are not the WMDs this country and the rest of the world believed Iraq had, and not the WMDs for which this country went to war.” Then he added that the “report does suggest that some of the weapons were likely put on the black market and may have been used outside Iraq…. It turned out the whole country was an ammo dump.”¹²

And that wasn’t news?

The philosopher Wittgenstein once posed this famous conundrum: If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around to hear, does it make any noise? These latest revelations were like trees falling in the forest but with plenty of people around to hear. They just had their fingers in their ears.

EUROPE’S PHILIP AGEE

By mid-June 2006, Claudio Fava had wound up his research and was ready to drop a thick file on the press. His document, titled modestly “Research on the Planes Used by the CIA,” was a bombshell. It exposed the involvement of twenty-one companies and one bank—Wells Fargo—in Air CIA.^*30

Fava was a leading member of Italy’s left-wing Socialist alliance, and he was following a long-standing tradition of the Left. He was naming names, just as former CIA renegade Philip Agee had before him. Agee had exposed the names of hundreds of CIA undercover operatives in the 1970s and 1980s, some of whom were assassinated by left-wing terrorist groups not long afterward. Fava was now naming their operations.

Five of the entities he named were identified as “CIA Operating Companies.” Their role was to manage the aircraft, provide flight crews, and file flight plans with the appropriate authorities. They might or might not have other legitimate commercial activities. Thirteen more were “shell companies”—proprietaries—set up by the CIA to disguise CIA ownership of an entire fleet of aircraft, most of them executive jets. Fava had less information on the other three, but he named them nonetheless. Crystal Jet Aviation owned a Gulfstream III, tail number N50BH, “used in the past for prisoner transports and flights to Guantánamo.” Premier Aircraft Management, incorporated in North Las Vegas, Nevada, owned a Boeing 737-300 that appeared to be used mainly by the U.S. military. United States Aviation Co., of Tulsa, Oklahoma, was an air charter company “working with CIA as with any other private client,” Fava wrote.

Some of the CIA fronts were typical inside jokes. There was Premier Executive Transport Service (PETS), Rapid Air Trans (RAT), and Devon Holding and Leasing (DHL). These were among the “assets” Porter Goss was alluding to when he said the leaks had compromised ongoing CIA operations. Fava supplied abundant footnotes (especially websites) with the report, but remained mum on his actual sources of information.

As a former journalist, Fava knew that most reporters were lazy, and didn’t have the time or the inclination to do this type of research themselves. The 75-page document he released on June 13, 2006, was a huge data dump. In addition to information on the companies themselves, he provided reporters with the tail number and registration history of twenty-five “CIA aircraft,” extensive flight logs he had compiled with help from EUROCONTROL in Brussels, and photographs of the planes taken by a network of plane spotters and other sources around the world. It was an investigative reporter’s wet dream, all the more so because it was an official document, released by the European Parliament. Here was the first hard evidence, provided by a legal authority, of what some journalists were now calling the CIA “torture taxis.”

Fava and his colleagues from the EP investigative committee were traveling extensively to gather information. Before they filed their final report, they had visited Macedonia, Germany, Britain, Romania, Poland, and Portugal in their quest to expose CIA covert operations.

On May 9 to 12, 2006, they made a much-publicized trip to Washington, but were given the cold shoulder by the newly designated CIA director, General Michael Hayden, who was not yet confirmed, and by DNI Negroponte. Former CIA director R. James Woolsey agreed to meet with them—with reporters present—but told them he would not discuss CIA interrogation techniques, special prisons, or related issues. “I refused to talk to them at all on these subjects and would only discuss public intelligence issues,” he said.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sent legal advisor John Bellinger (a former Agency lawyer) to meet with the European parliamentarians, who were seeking confirmation that the CIA had set up “secret prisons” in prospective European Union members Poland and Romania, as had been bruited in the press. While he disappointed them on that score, Bellinger acknowledged that some of the 1,254 “secret” flights Fava and his colleagues had exposed could have involved renditions. “Bellinger didn’t deny there were a large number of CIA flights,” Fava’s Portuguese colleague, Carlos Coelho, told reporters. “That is a positive development and a sign of increased cooperation,” he added. Bellinger’s “admission” of the secret flights was widely reported by U.S. and European media the next day.

If the Bush administration stonewalled the Europeans, congressional Democrats and others did not. The Europeans shared notes with lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Human Rights First, all of whom were either suing the Bush administration on behalf of former detainees or were otherwise involved in exposing the extraordinary rendition program.

They also acknowledged they had “an extremely useful meeting” with Representative Ed Markey (D-MA), who told them he planned to criticize the Bush administration “for the rendition of his constituent, Mr. Arar,” Fava said.

Maher Arar, a Canadian software engineer born in Syria, was arrested in New York on September 26, 2002, by U.S. immigration officials and sent back to Syria, where he claimed he was tortured for several months before being released. When I pointed out to Fava and Coelho that Arar was a Canadian citizen, they were perplexed, and could not explain why Markey would have called him a “constituent.” (Presumably, Markey considered any “victim” of the Bush administration his constituent.)

Bellinger told the commissioners that Arar’s expulsion was not a rendition but was a decision taken by a U.S. immigration court. Since that fact was inconvenient, the Europeans and their supporters among the Party of Surrender in Washington promptly swept it aside. Arar continues to be held up by Democrats such as Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York as “the most famous case” of rendition, even though it is now widely understood that renditions began in the late 1990s under Clinton.¹³

Similarly, Fava and Coelho took a pass when asked about press reports that they had met with a U.S. reporter who claimed to have received information on the extraordinary renditions and the secret prisons from “active-duty CIA officers” disturbed by the practice. “Commission members have their own contacts with former agents” of various intelligence agencies, Coelho said. “Just as you won’t share your sources, I won’t share mine,” he told me.

President Bush and the CIA could see the writing on the wall. As a precaution, the White House announced on September 6, 2006, that it had ordered the transfer of all remaining “high-value detainees” currently in CIA custody to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where they would face eventual prosecution in military tribunals. There were just fourteen of them—not “scores” or “hundreds,” as the Europeans and the drive-by media asserted. Fourteen. Among them was Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the September 11 attacks.

In his statement before a military tribunal at Guantánamo on March 10, 2007, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed not only confessed that he was “responsible for the 9/11 operation from A to Z,” but boasted that he also had been planning a “second wave” of attacks aimed at destroying the Sears Tower in Chicago, the Library Tower in Los Angeles, the Plaza Bank building in Seattle, and the Empire State Building in New York. He also claimed that he was “responsible for planning, surveying, and financing” a whole series of other attacks, including plans to blow up Heathrow Airport, Canary Wharf, and Big Ben in London, the Israeli city of Eilat, and U.S. embassies in Indonesia, Australia, and Japan.

There were no apologies, no regrets—just a bloodcurdling glorification of murder. “I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi, Pakistan,” he boasted. “For those who would like to confirm, there are pictures of me on the Internet holding his head.”¹⁴

Such were the men the Europeans apparently sought to protect.

TREASON AT THE TIMES

Like the Europeans and congressional Democrats, the New York Times apparently believed that the United States should return to the Clinton era and send lawyers knocking on terrorists’ doors with subpoenas rather than use more forceful tactics. The relentless efforts of the Times to expose highly classified U.S. intelligence programs aimed at diminishing the ability of the terrorists to harm America were not matched by a similar effort to expose the tactics and the networks actively being used by the terrorists to strike us. One might forgive the likes of a Claudio Fava or a Stephen Grey; after all, they weren’t Americans. It was much harder to forgive the New York Times, which apparently had yet to discover a secret U.S. intelligence program it felt should not be revealed to our enemies.

On Thursday, June 23, 2006, James Risen and his reporting partner Eric Lichtblau lifted the veil on yet another secret U.S. intelligence effort. This time, their target was an obscure financial clearinghouse in Belgium.

The privately owned Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication was certainly not a household name in America or indeed anywhere else. Known by the acronym SWIFT, it kept a record of every electronic transfer of funds that occurred among banks around the world. If the government of Germany made a payment to a weapons supplier in Great Britain, chances were the money was wired and tracked by SWIFT. If a retiree in Italy wanted to send money to his daughter in Venezuela, his bank instructions at some point would be handled by the SWIFT network. And if a terrorist planner, such as Ramzi bin al-Shibh or KSM’s nephew in the UAE, wanted to transfer money to the hijackers in the United States, they used the traditional banking system, as the 9/11 Commission report revealed. SWIFT kept a trace on all such transfers.

Not long after the September 11 attacks, the White House authorized the U.S. Department of Treasury to negotiate an arrangement with SWIFT, so the United States could gain access to the entire SWIFT wire transfer system, to monitor it for potential terrorist funds.

It was a highly classified program, very close hold. Information from the SWIFT program helped the United States to thwart several terrorist attacks, administration officials told the Times once it became clear they were going to publish the article. The information also led to the capture in 2003 of the Indonesian Riduan Isamuddin, aka Hambali, believed to be the mastermind of the 2002 al Qaeda bombing of a Bali resort.^*31

U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow personally met with New York Times editors and reporters in an effort to dissuade them from running the story. But Times editor Bill Keller ruled that exposing the secret program was a matter of “public interest.”

The Times was well aware of the sensitivity of the program, and noted in the story that “nearly twenty current and former government officials and industry executives” would only discuss it “on condition of anonymity because the program remains classified.”

Stuart Levey, undersecretary of the treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence, noted, “Until today, we have not discussed this program in public for an obvious reason: the value of the program came from the fact that terrorists didn’t know it existed. They may have heard us talking about ‘following the money,’ but they didn’t know that we were obtaining terrorist-related data from SWIFT. Many may not have even known what SWIFT was. With today’s revelations, this is unfortunately no longer true. This is a grave loss.”

At his noon briefing on Friday, June 23, 2006, the day the story appeared in print, White House press secretary Tony Snow asked reporters, “When did you know about SWIFT before [the Times story appeared]?”

Democrats in Congress said little after this latest exposure of classified national security programs. But New York Republican Representative Peter King called on the Justice Department to prosecute the newspaper. “We’re at war, and for the Times to release information about secret operations and methods is treasonous,” he said. Predictably, the Times buried King’s comments.¹⁵ Former attorney general Ed Meese agreed. He told Rush Limbaugh that the Times was “giving aid and comfort to the enemy”—the classic definition of treason—and pointed out that exposing the terrorist finance tracking operation was the newspaper’s “third offense.”¹⁶

Treasury Secretary John Snow wrote to Times executive editor Bill Keller on June 26, 2006, reminding him of “repeated pleas from high-level officials on both sides of the aisle, including myself,” to keep the SWIFT program secret. Among them were the cochairmen of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, Governor Tom Kean and former Representative Lee Hamilton, he revealed. The Times’s decision to publish was “irresponsible and harmful to the security of Americans and freedom-loving people worldwide,” Secretary Snow said. The Times “undermined a highly successful counterterrorism program and alerted terrorists to the methods and sources used to track their money trails.”

“You have defended your decision to compromise this program by asserting that ‘terror financiers know’ our methods for tracking their funds and have already moved to other methods to send money,” Snow wrote. “The fact that your editors believe themselves to be qualified to assess how terrorists are moving money betrays a breathtaking arrogance and a deep misunderstanding of this program and how it works. While terrorists are relying more heavily than before on cumbersome methods to move money, such as cash couriers, we have continued to see them using the formal financial system, which has made this particular program incredibly valuable.”¹⁷

Thanks to the New York Times, the United States now had lost that window into the shadowy world of terrorist financing.

President Bush called the disclosure “disgraceful” and said it “makes it harder to win this war on terror.” But he did not join the calls to prosecute the Times.