On April 26, 2002, Jafar Dhia Jafar rode down the wide, palm-lined highway to Baghdad’s Saddam International Airport. He was on his way to New York, and Saddam’s inescapable visage gazed down from billboards. Since he had taken charge of Iraq’s clandestine nuclear program in 1981, Jafar had been given permission to travel abroad only three times: to the Soviet Union, Jordan, and France. He had not visited the United States since 1976. Saddam’s office had approved this trip just two days before, after Jafar was added to an official delegation headed for negotiations at the United Nations—another round in the seemingly quixotic attempt to resolve Iraq’s disarmament. At the airport, the physicist passed through immigration and boarded a flight to Amman.
Two days later, Jafar traveled to the U.S. embassy there to attend a visa appointment. Two Iraqi colleagues escorted him.
Jafar cleared security and found a “friendly-looking man in his fifties” waiting for him. The man flipped through the pages of Jafar’s diplomatic passport.
“You don’t travel much,” he remarked.
“I travel from time to time,” Jafar said laconically.[1]
Soon he was on his way, visa in hand. The next morning, he boarded a K.L.M. Royal Dutch Airlines jet for Amsterdam, where he would connect to New York. He took a window seat in first class. Just as the doors were shutting, a large, young, clean-shaven American boarded and took the seat next to Jafar. The doors closed, and they had the cabin to themselves.
A few minutes after takeoff, the man introduced himself as “John.” He displayed a U.S. government passport. Jafar assumed he was C.I.A.
“I’m here to speak to you in private, as there was no opportunity when you were at the U.S. embassy,” John said. “You are the leading Iraqi nuclear scientist, and you are not affiliated with the Baath Party,” he continued, as Jafar recalled. “We would like you to cooperate with us.”
The man went on with his pitch: “War is going to begin soon between the United States and Iraq,” he said. “The American government has already made its decision.” Jafar should protect himself while he still could, John said. “The United States is concerned for your personal safety and that of your family.”
“Maybe it is true that I was a leader in the Iraqi nuclear program,” Jafar eventually replied. “But this program was halted in 1991 and destroyed that same year. I may not be a Baathist, but I am not willing to cooperate with the C.I.A. I have been a government employee in Iraq since 1967 and cannot betray my country.”
As they talked, Jafar tried out his own pitch, in the hope he might get through to the Bush administration: “You can rest assured—and inform your government—that Iraq does not possess weapons of mass destruction,” he said. The nuclear program had been terminated. “All these weapons that Iraq possessed were destroyed during the year 1991,” Jafar continued. Nothing had changed since the inspectors left Iraq in 1998, he emphasized. “If someone tells you otherwise, they are lying,” he insisted.
John dropped his recruiting attempt. He handed Jafar a card with a phone number on it. He said the phone was answered around the clock, and he urged the physicist to call.[2]
For the rest of the flight, they talked only about personal and commonplace subjects, as if they were ordinary strangers on a plane. At Schiphol Airport, they parted. Jafar boarded a Northwest Airlines flight to New York. On this leg, he had no solicitous neighbor. But at John F. Kennedy Airport, a uniformed police officer met him and a colleague in the jetway and took them to an area where several men in civilian dress waited. The Americans separated Jafar from his colleague and directed them to interview rooms.
“I have diplomatic immunity,” Jafar protested. His mild bemusement about the pitch from John had yielded to anger. “You don’t have the right to interrogate me.” He assumed these men were C.I.A., too.
Once Jafar was seated, these Americans also sought to recruit him and professed concern for his safety. Their questions included, among others: “How long does Iraq need to produce a nuclear bomb?”
The scientist repeated the answers he had given to “John.” The nuclear program had been dead since 1991. Iraq currently had no chemical or biological weapons, either. No illicit weapons programs had been restarted.
After half an hour, he was released into the baggage hall, where he reunited with his colleague. They discovered that their luggage was missing. They filed a complaint with Northwest Airlines. En route to the Carlyle Hotel in Manhattan, Jafar stopped at a drugstore to buy shaving gear and other necessities. Fuming, he made his way to U.N. headquarters in travel clothes unsuitable for a formal diplomatic meeting.[3]
That spring, the C.I.A.’s Iraq Operations Group quietly ramped up for war. The handful of staff Luis Rueda and John Maguire had inherited in August 2001 now swelled week by week toward an eventual roster of several hundred. Among other initiatives, to make up for the C.I.A.’s almost complete lack of reporting agents inside Saddam’s regime, the group launched a worldwide “bump” operation, dispatching case officers to approach Iraqi diplomats, intelligence officers, and scientists wherever they could find them to pitch them on helping the United States. Jafar had run into this surge of quasi-espionage, although he would have been a prime target for approach at any time.[4]
Iraq operated about seventy-five embassies worldwide, staffed by both intelligence officers and diplomats. The embassies offered a lot of opportunities to “bump”—a technique similar to door-to-door sales, or what journalists call “doorstepping.” A case officer trailed an Iraqi diplomat or spy in Jakarta or Rome or Cairo, approached the subject on the street, and hurriedly pitched him on cooperating with the C.I.A., perhaps handing over a card with a phone number. It was a far cry from the prolonged process of classical spy recruitment: spotting a potential agent, assessing them, cultivating the individual, and then pitching when the chances for success seemed strong. But what bumping lacked in elegance, it made up for in volume.
It did not take long for Iraqi intelligence to figure out what was happening: “There is the possibility that members of the American administration worldwide will attempt to approach the diplomats of our embassies overseas to influence them, taking advantage of the vicious campaign that was launched by the evil administration,” warned one alert sent out that summer. “Take precautionary measures and be wary.”[5]
Yet the Americans were all but impossible to avoid. That summer, Jafar’s colleague Fadhil al-Janabi traveled to Amman, on his way to official meetings in Vienna. Soon after checking in with his wife at the Intercontinental Hotel, he heard a knock on the door. He opened it to find a young blond man. “I’m from the American embassy,” the man said, “and I’d like to speak with you.” He asked to come inside, but Janabi refused.
“We’re going to change the regime in Iraq, and we don’t want to harm you,” the man went on. “I can save you.” Janabi sent him away.
The hounding, which continued in Austria, only reinforced Janabi’s assumption, widely shared among Iraqi scientists, that the C.I.A. already knew “that we did not have weapons of mass destruction.” The Americans weren’t looking for the truth; they were looking for scientists to affirm their lies.[6]
Early in 2002, the Bush White House held discussions about what the C.I.A. might do to pressure Saddam, taking into account the many failures of the 1990s. Director George Tenet and his deputy, John McLaughlin, staffed by Luis Rueda, avoided advocating for any policy but said that if a U.S. military invasion occurred, any C.I.A. covert action should complement that effort. If they got lucky, agency influence operations designed to sow doubts among Iraqi elites might spare them a war by triggering a coup d’état or an assassination, but the White House should not consider this very likely.
That winter, Rueda drafted a new “finding” for the White House. As an old hand at covert-action management, he loaded the document with as many permissions as he thought he might need. He asked for authority to conduct sabotage operations inside Iraq—blowing up depots and the like, primarily to spook Saddam and his generals, and to spread distrust among them. Rueda got a lot of what he sought—a covert budget of nearly $200 million a year, vastly more than the C.I.A. had received during the 1990s, as well as authorities for propaganda and operations to disrupt Baghdad’s international banking. Rueda also received permission to back opposition groups in preparation for war. But the White House turned down his request to plan for a postwar Iraqi government. (Postwar planning by the State Department was sidelined, too; Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon took charge.)
After sending the C.I.A. survey team to Kurdistan (the visitors Saddam heard about from a Barzani interlocutor), Rueda invited Kurdistan Democratic Party leader Masoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan to visit “the Farm” for consultations. From Frankfurt, Barzani and Talabani boarded a “black” C.I.A. flight for Virginia. There, Rueda and other C.I.A. leaders showered the Kurds with promises—money, guns, political support. The overall message was: This time, we mean it. Of course, Rueda knew that Bush had not firmly decided on war—the public certainly had no indication that war was inevitable—but he and C.I.A. colleagues felt they had to come on strong. Barzani “was skeptical and very hard to convince,” Rueda recalled, because “he didn’t believe we were serious, and he’d gotten burned before.” Talabani, however, judged that Bush likely intended to invade Iraq, and that it would be in the P.U.K.’s best interests to cooperate. In April, John Maguire flew covertly into Kurdistan to prepare for the full-time return of C.I.A. officers.[7]
Rueda was spared one assignment: the Iraq Operations Group did not get involved with the effort to find Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. That detective work required scientific expertise that lay elsewhere at the C.I.A., in its arms-control and science sections. Rueda assumed that Iraq possessed hidden WMD because everyone did, including the Germans and the British. But the hunt was “tangential” to his covert-action mission. Maguire thought Iraq’s weapons were well hidden and that it was a mistake to sell the war on a promise that they would be found quickly. There were plenty of other justifications for overthrowing Saddam, he thought, given the Iraqi leader’s record of aggression and atrocities. Yet President Bush repeatedly cited the danger that Saddam might pass WMD to terrorists as the reason why it was no longer acceptable to merely contain him. As the Bush administration’s intentions to invade became more visible during the summer of 2002, the White House doubled down on that casus belli.[8]
At U.N. headquarters on the afternoon of May 3, Jafar met Hans Blix, the bespectacled, even-tempered Swedish diplomat. It was a rare encounter between the world’s longtime top nuclear watchdog and the physicist whose work during the 1980s had caused the I.A.E.A. such embarrassment. Blix regarded Jafar as a “high-class intellectual” and a “brilliant nuclear scientist.” If the Iraqi was an adversary, he was a worthy one.
Jafar explained why he had come to the meeting in casual clothes. His luggage had been lost; he also mentioned that he had been approached during his journey by “an intelligence agent” who “asked whether he was ready to defect.” Blix could see that Jafar was angry.[9]
After leading the I.A.E.A. for sixteen years, Blix had retired in 1997, only to be recruited two years later to become chairman of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, or UNMOVIC (“un-movick”), the successor to UNSCOM. The unit operated out of offices on the thirty-first floor of U.N. headquarters. This time, there would be no “inspectors at war,” as Blix put it, and no two-way cooperation between the U.N. and the C.I.A. or other intelligence agencies. Blix believed that the era of “cowboy” inspectors fostered by his Swedish rival, Rolf Ekéus, had been “counterproductive and discrediting.” As one of his first acts, Blix asked Charles Duelfer to resign.[10]
Opinion about Blix within the Bush administration was sharply divided. Paul Wolfowitz and other Iraq hawks feared he was too soft and demanded an investigation of his tenure leading the I.A.E.A. The C.I.A. reported back that Blix had worked honestly within the limits of his agency’s mandate. At the White House, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice concluded that he was acceptable. He was an expert, and realistically, nobody better was likely to pass muster with France, Russia, and China at the U.N. Security Council. Blix found himself in a familiar position—under not-so-subtle pressure from Washington but condemned as an American lackey in Baghdad.
Around his meeting with the Swede, Jafar listened as Iraqi colleagues declared that they had “nothing new” to offer about their country’s weapons programs. It was up to UNMOVIC to explain how a return of inspectors would be helpful. Iraq had already endured hundreds of inspector visits. What more could the U.N. possibly discover?
“Maybe you will find another poultry barn,” Blix quipped, referring to the trove of revelatory documents that Iraq had dumped at Hussein Kamel’s farm, for the benefit of international inspectors, after Kamel’s defection in 1995.[11]
Blix pointed out that in creating UNMOVIC, the Security Council had mandated that if Iraq allowed inspectors to return, they would be given sixty days to look around the country. Only then would Blix recommend what should be done. He needed access, first and foremost.
Jafar understood that it was nearly impossible to prove the absence of weapons or capability beyond all doubt. They had “reached a dead end,” he thought.
The nuclear file remained relatively uncontroversial. Mohamed ElBaradei, an Egyptian diplomat who had succeeded Blix as director general of the I.A.E.A., told the meeting that there were only “a few remaining issues” about Jafar’s historical program to resolve, and that these could be reviewed even as the U.N. shifted from detective work to long-term monitoring.
Jafar erupted. He had heard this tantalizing promise of a clean bill of health many times before. The I.A.E.A. had been “dishonest,” he told Blix and ElBaradei, and the agency’s conduct was “two-faced.” The meeting broke up. Kofi Annan, the U.N.’s secretary-general, told reporters that the discussions had been “useful and frank.”[12]
That evening, Jafar told the head of Iraqi intelligence at the Permanent Mission in New York about his trip from Amman, the cold pitch by “John,” and the interview at Kennedy Airport. The officer called him back the next evening. “I want to relay the greetings of President Saddam Hussein, who asks you to be very careful while you are in New York—for your safety,” he said. He told Jafar not to leave his hotel without an Iraqi intelligence officer in tow. In fact, he added, there appeared to be American spies sitting right now in the Carlyle Hotel’s lobby.
Jafar’s phone soon rang: another American. “Good evening, Dr. Jafar. Would you like to come to the hotel lobby and drink tea?”
He declined and hung up. On his last day in New York, Jafar received his missing suitcase. His clothes had been tossed around, and the lining of the case had been shredded. That night, he flew home to Baghdad.[13]
Desperate intelligence collection creates a marketplace, and when the C.I.A. decides to spend $200 million a year on operations against a single regime, hustlers of all kinds can be expected. Amidst the worldwide bump operations, the C.I.A. station in Paris reported to the Iraq Operations Group about an asset of French intelligence who was claiming that he had access to Naji Sabri, the Iraqi foreign minister. The source claimed he could obtain insight from Sabri about ongoing clandestine Iraqi work on WMD. He wanted $1 million dollars and help getting his family out of Iraq.
It’s bullshit, Luis Rueda thought. Sabri was a former English professor with only passing access to Saddam; he would not know about WMD programs. But when Rueda dragged his heels on engaging the agent, the Paris station made a call to one of his bosses, and word came down that he should proceed. They settled with the informant on an initial payment of $500,000, and in exchange, the insider was to arrange an encounter between Sabri and the Paris station chief. The meeting did not materialize. They eventually discovered that they had been taken.[14]
Problems with unreliable defectors and sources made the C.I.A.’s liaison with the two major Kurdish parties all the more critical. The Iraqi elite often employed Kurds as household staff. The C.I.A. teams now back inside Kurdistan recruited agents who watered gardens, served dinner, or changed bedsheets. The biggest breakthrough came through the team assigned to Jalal Talabani. They recruited a sheikh named Nahro al-Kasnazan, the leader of a Sufi Muslim religious order whose members included soldiers in Saddam’s ringed circles of bodyguards. The network offered the C.I.A. a realistic chance to determine Saddam’s daily whereabouts. Tenet authorized Rueda to pay Kasnazan several million dollars—Kasnazan’s account suggests his total payments may have exceeded $10 million—to work with the Americans against Saddam. The C.I.A. gave Kasnazan’s group a cryptonym for messaging that reflected the agency’s optimism: DB ROCKSTARS.[15]
Charles Duelfer had decided to work with the Iraq Operations Group because Rueda was “results-oriented and willing to take risks as long as they were understood,” and he grasped “the big picture.” Even though the C.I.A. had been formally shut out of planning for a post-Saddam Iraq, Rueda asked Duelfer to develop insights about who might plausibly lead the country after Saddam. Duelfer contacted Iraqis he had known while serving at the Special Commission. He drew up a list of names. These included retired military leaders. He also heard suggestions that Saddam should be succeeded by a council of generals and civilians. He found that although “lots of options” to defect were offered to well-placed Iraqis still working for Saddam, very few were interested: “Senior Iraqis were not particularly loyal to Saddam, but were loyal to their country.”[16]
Saddam Hussein turned sixty-five that spring. His family and the Baath Party staged an exuberant celebration. About a million people poured into the streets of Baghdad. They sang and danced while holding Saddam’s picture aloft. A play based on his novel Zabiba and the King opened to appreciative reviews. A delegation presented a gift of a golden statue of Saladin, the conqueror of Jerusalem.
Saddam did not appear among the crowds, in keeping with his regimen of self-protection, but his cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid presided over a public party in Tikrit attended by diplomats and journalists. Majid cut a huge pink cake and fired a gun in the air. Iraqi TV showed Saddam celebrating with children at an unknown location.[17]
On his birthday, The New York Times published a front-page story, sourced to “senior officials” in Washington, that began: “The Bush administration, in developing a potential approach for toppling President Saddam Hussein of Iraq, is concentrating its attention on a major air campaign and ground invasion, with initial estimates contemplating the use of 70,000 to 250,000 troops.”[18]
Saddam recalled telling his “comrades” around this time that “we ought to get ready for war as if it would happen tomorrow,” yet his actions and private comments that spring did not suggest he was especially worried. He analyzed Washington much less often at cabinet meetings and in conversation with visitors than he had in the months after 9/11. He opened meetings with declarations of support for Palestinians battling Israel in the Second Intifada, which had descended into an exceptional crisis that spring when the Israel Defense Forces shelled Yasser Arafat, the P.L.O.’s chairman, in his compound in Ramallah—a running story on satellite TV that had galvanized the Arab world. Meanwhile, Saddam’s cabinet discussed loans to farmers, flood prevention, and the management of prizes for literature, art, and science.[19]
During this period, Saddam also delivered secular sermons made up of bromides about self-improvement. (“Do not make your enemy hope for your forgiveness, and do not make your friend lose hope in your forgiveness. . . . Do not let anyone who thinks that you despise him get close to you.”) He had offered moral instruction before, but in this reflective season of his life, he devoted notable time to sharing grandfatherly insights, albeit mainly about how to navigate a harsh world teeming with enemies. A compendium of “great lessons provided by the Commanding Comrade” opened with an aphorism that its author might have been advised that summer to reflect on: “Do not aggravate the snake before you get the capability to cut off its head.”
He took solace in his belief that America’s turn as the dominant world power was passing, a notion he expressed to Ram Naik, India’s oil minister, in early July. “The American hand that carries the weapons and the stick while dealing with the world today will weaken in two years, five years, fifteen years, or twenty years,” Saddam told Naik. “And it has started to happen now.”[20]