After he was reassigned to Baghdad, Nizar Hamdoon received a cancer diagnosis. It was non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Saddam soon permitted him to undergo chemotherapy at Memorial Sloan Kettering, the well-regarded cancer center in Manhattan. By the time of 9/11, he was back in Iraq, in remission and preparing to retire.
As war with the United States approached, Hamdoon’s cancer returned. He was now in his late fifties. Saddam granted him permission to travel to the U.S. alone. He also sent $5,000 in cash as “a personal gift” to pay for medical treatment. Hamdoon remained “part of the group of people in which I had personal trust and knowledge,” Saddam recalled. In New York, the envoy moved in with Mohammed Aldouri at the Iraqi mission’s Upper East Side and rested there between hospital stays.[1]
Early in March, he met twice with Charles Duelfer. They had lunch at their old haunt, the Peninsula Hotel, on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Fifth Street. Saddam saw “war as his destiny,” Hamdoon observed. The Iraqi president believed that he could survive and rebound, as he had after the 1991 war. Hamdoon was realistic about what lay ahead, however, and he was thinking forward to a post-Saddam Iraq.
“There are many good people who will continue to operate the ministries if they have guidance,” he said. “There cannot be a vacuum. . . . They will expect order.” President Bush had recently said that the U.S. would deliver food after an invasion. “The Iraqi people will not want to be fed by the United States,” Hamdoon said. “It is symbolic of being subservient.”
He offered another word of advice: “You must avoid the tone that you are ruling Iraq. There must be a quick shift to a new Iraqi leadership mechanism. If you do not do this, the United States will be blamed for all that follows.”
Duelfer knew that Hamdoon was worried about his wife and daughters back in Baghdad. He asked the envoy to identify his family home in an aerial photograph so that Duelfer could try to put the residence on the Pentagon’s no-target list—a list that included places protected by international law, such as foreign embassies. Duelfer did not have “particular faith” in this targeting system, but it was “better than nothing.” Hamdoon was able to pick out his house, identifiable because it had a white trailer parked outside.
At the Peninsula, the two men parted. Duelfer never saw Hamdoon again.[2]
In successive actions on February 28 and during the first week of March, the Bush administration expelled three Iraqi intelligence officers working at the New York mission—two posing as diplomats and one as a journalist. That left Mohammed Aldouri and about half a dozen other authentic diplomats and administrative personnel in place. They had to navigate uncertain futures. Officially, of course, Baghdad expected the New York team to serve Saddam as he led Iraq to glorious victory in the coming showdown. As a practical matter, Aldouri and each of his colleagues had to decide among difficult options: defect and seek asylum in the U.S.; seek haven in another country; or remain on duty to see what developed.
Aldouri paid the remaining staff six months’ wages in advance, in cash. He gathered them together. “We all have our worries,” he said, a participant in the meeting recalled. “I have no wife or children, so I have no reason to go back to Baghdad. But each of you will do what you think is best.”[3]
As the denouement neared, Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti reflected bitterly on Iraq’s fate under his half brother’s reign. Following his return from Geneva, he was now effectively confined to Baghdad. He had never fully recovered from his break with Saddam in 1983.
Over dinner, he told Ala Bashir, the artist and physician, that Saddam’s fatal flaw had turned out to be his inability to recognize that Israel had become a fact of life in the Middle East. Saddam’s dated strategy of uncompromising opposition to Zionism was no longer a practical one. “The problem is Israel’s security,” Barzan said, as Bashir recalled it. “I’ve tried time and again to get my brother to understand that the world has changed and that we will be internationally completely sidelined if we can’t find a solution that we, the Americans, and the Israelis can live with. But I might as well be talking to the wall.”
His observations were insightful. Saddam steered Iraq as if the clock had stopped. Through all kinds of post–Cold War political weather—periods of accommodation between Arab states and Israel, as well as the conflagrations of the intifadas—other pro-Palestinian Sunni nations, such as Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, had managed their interests so as to stoke economic growth and avoid isolation.[4]
In his diary, Barzan wrote, “I have said that President Saddam does not care what happens after him. Yes, this is true to a great extent; but what I want to say, for the sake of accuracy, is that the President in his public or private life uses the edge-of-the-abyss policy. The method is similar to playing Russian roulette. . . . This is his mentality and his management style.”[5]
Saddam continued to deliver rousing speeches. He proclaimed a new benefit of three million dinars for wounded soldiers and five million for martyrs. By mid-March he had finalized a plan for Iraq’s defense. He divided the country into four regions and appointed loyalists—not military professionals—to command each one. His cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid would take charge of the southern region. The veteran Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri would command the northern region. Mizban Khadr al-Hadi, another Revolutionary Command Council stalwart, would oversee the center of the country. And Qusay would command the defense of Baghdad. But as with the earlier plan for the ringed defense of the capital, there was no operational blueprint.[6]
Saddam’s distractedness and fatalism may explain some of his conduct. He may have also distrusted his generals. On March 9, Iraqi intelligence sent a “Top Secret and Urgent” note to Saddam’s office reporting from “trusted sources” that America “has intensified both its intelligence and technical efforts to identify the movements and whereabouts of the President-leader. . . . The aim of such activities is either to target him or to capture him alive.”[7]
Such reporting only confirmed what Saddam already presumed: the C.I.A. would again be seeking coupmakers among his generals to terminate the war as quickly as possible. Agency operatives did continue to cold-call military leaders to urge revolt or passive cooperation with invading forces. (Lieutenant General Raad Majid al-Hamdani, now commander of the Second Republican Guard Corps, took a robocall at home: “There is no way to oppose the United States! Stay in your home, where you will be safe!” The general hung up.) If Saddam engaged with commanders in detailed war planning that provided insights into his own movements, he might unwittingly aid a treasonous general. The regional command structure he devised ensured that only trusted Baathists and family members would be inside his day-to-day communications loop.[8]
Meanwhile, Saddam’s aides brainstormed ideas about how to thwart the Americans and suppress internal threats. A circular from the General Military Intelligence Directorate—citing plans of Al-Quds, a paramilitary force—reported that Iraq would shower the American forces with the same kind of psyop leaflets the U.S. had dropped from its planes, except that the Iraqi ones “will contain anthrax.” They also planned to dig trenches around the capital and fill them with oil barrels, “for the purpose of burning and causing mayhem.” These were fanciful plans but reflected the sorts of things that Al-Quds leaders were expected to boast about in memoranda. The note also described a dispiriting reality: “Diplomats are leaving Iraq,” including Russian ones, and “there is a rumor that some of the children of ministers and high-ranking [businessmen] left Iraq for Russia.”[9]
At the U.N., the standoff over a second resolution that would effectively authorize war remained bitterly unresolved. By the end of February, José María Aznar, the center-right prime minister of Spain, had emerged as a critical ally of Bush and Blair. The supporting role of Spain’s military during any invasion would be marginal, but Aznar’s backing added the endorsement of a major European nation to the Anglo-American partnership.
Blair visited Aznar in Madrid and blew off steam in private about Hans Blix. The Swede “was supposed to be a civil servant but had decided to behave like a politician,” Blair fumed, as an aide summarized his remarks. “He is just desperate not to be seen as the person who allowed a war to start.” Blair also felt that Blix was “being bullied successfully by the French,” whose real purpose in opposing the Iraq invasion was to “build Europe as a power rival to the U.S.” and to “shaft” him and Britain.[10]
Blair had secretly agreed with Bush that the invasion could begin on March 17, come what may at the U.N., and regardless of whether or not Britain could join the initial hostilities. Politically, Blair had no choice but to present a war-or-no-war motion before the House of Commons. Labour held a comfortable majority, but if enough Labour members of Parliament opposed the motion, they might then join with the Tory minority in a no-confidence vote to oust Blair from office. The clock was ticking down, and the reports of the U.N.’s chief weapons inspectors were not helping Blair’s position.
On March 7, Mohamed ElBaradei of the I.A.E.A. told the Security Council there were no indications that Iraq had restarted its nuclear-weapons program since the departure of inspectors in 1998. Moreover, the much-publicized intelligence reporting about Iraq’s attempt to buy uranium from Niger was based on fraudulent documents originating in Italy. He also declared there was no evidence that Iraq’s imports of aluminum tubes had been intended for anything “other than . . . rockets,” just as Iraq had claimed. ElBaradei’s report was as full a confirmation that Iraq had no active atomic-bomb program as the I.A.E.A. had provided since 9/11, and it was a direct repudiation of the Bush administration’s warnings.
Two days later, Blair spoke again with Bush. The president was “clearly very irritated” by the negotiations to win over an adequate number of swing votes for a second resolution at the Security Council. And yet he told the prime minister that he would support his backing out if a resolution were unobtainable. “My last choice is for your government to go down,” Bush said. “I would rather go it alone than have your government fall.”
“I appreciate that,” Blair replied.
“I really mean that.”
Blair said he wanted Bush to understand that he “really believed in what they were trying to do.”
“I know that, but I am not going to see your government fall on this.”[11]
Several days later, Blair met with Jack Straw, his foreign secretary, and David Manning, his national security adviser. Straw said that they had become “victims of hopeless bullying and arrogant diplomacy” by the Bush administration, as a colleague summarized his comments. He noted that Bush, on the telephone call, had offered Blair an exit ramp. “Why don’t you take it?”
Blair said he did not want a way out. As he explained his thinking later, “If we backed away now, it would have disastrous consequences for a tough stance on WMD and its proliferation, and for our strategic relationship with the U.S., our key ally.”[12]
The C.I.A.’s Iraq Operations Group had set up platoon-size bases in Iraqi Kurdistan in the summer of 2002. Their main mission was to work with the intelligence services and militia of the two major Kurdish parties to run agents across the “green line,” the informal demarcation between semiautonomous Kurdistan and Saddam-ruled Iraq. The C.I.A. set up an intelligence center in Sulaymaniyah to funnel source reports through one pipeline.
The Operations Group’s total personnel had swollen to about three hundred by March 2003. This was still tiny in comparison to the U.S. military ground force of about 140,000 that President Bush had by now dispatched to Iraq’s borders. In Afghanistan, after 9/11, small C.I.A. teams had been first on the ground and had played a major role in guerrilla operations that overthrew the Taliban. In Iraq, by March, the agency had taken on a more traditional wartime role of supporting the Pentagon’s main effort: gathering intelligence; training, equipping, and advising auxiliary militias; and running propaganda or influence operations to soften up Iraqi resistance when the shooting started.[13]
For a decade, Iraq had been a “denied area” for C.I.A. intelligence collectors. Now the impending war opened the gates. Iraqi Army officers crossed into Kurdistan by the dozen to volunteer as C.I.A. agents—often on condition that they be resettled in America immediately. But the C.I.A. wanted active agents who would continue to report from inside Baathist Iraq, not defectors looking to emigrate. Ultimately, between the Kurdish spy networks and new recruits willing to go back in, the C.I.A. was generating ninety to one hundred intelligence reports a month—as many as the Operations Group had earlier generated in a full year. By March, it “had recruited or debriefed literally hundreds of individuals,” according to Charles “Sam” Faddis, a C.I.A. team leader in Kurdistan.[14]
The agency set up other forward teams in Jordan and Kuwait. The unit based in Amman built a clandestine base in the desert near the Iraq frontier. But the best intelligence came out of Iraqi Kurdistan, and most of that was derived from work with Jalal Talabani.
The C.I.A. had endured costly failures in agent communication during the 1990s. Even in the best of circumstances, passing messages through intermediaries—smugglers, truckers, businessmen—often resulted in confusion. Direct communication with agents would avoid that, but first-rate encrypted communication gear was too sensitive to be entrusted to the lightly vetted ad hoc informants that the C.I.A. was now taking on board. The C.I.A.’s Kurdistan teams took to handing out prepaid commercial satellite phones, mainly Thurayas, to Iraqi agents.
“We flooded Iraq with satellite phones, giving us real-time communications from Kurdistan with sources across the length and breadth of Iraq,” Faddis recalled. The operational risks were diverse. Some Iraqi agents telephoned relatives in America more often than they called their C.I.A. handlers. Others were “sloppy and got caught by Iraqi security with a phone for which they had no possible legitimate use,” according to Faddis. “That ended badly for them.” Iraqi forces arrested one C.I.A. asset, tortured him, paraded him on state TV, and warned that anyone caught with a Thuraya would be executed. After that, one C.I.A. team in Kurdistan never heard from about a third of the phones it had distributed. These high-risk wartime “cases,” or agent recruitments, were a far cry from the patient, meticulous Cold War espionage tradecraft romanticized in fiction and film.[15]
The C.I.A. did act boldly. The Czech Republic agreed to provide diplomatic cover in its Baghdad embassy for a career C.I.A. operations officer of Czech descent. The officer did not risk trying to recruit Iraqi agents but made observations about Iraqi preparations to defend Baghdad.[16]
The agency’s propaganda operations against Saddam’s regime—exile radio stations, leaflets, and the like—had never been effective. Saddam’s control of Iraqi airwaves, newspapers, public art, and publishing houses overwhelmed outside broadcasts. Nonetheless, the C.I.A. teams again set up radio stations and even loudspeakers that broadcast the Eagles and Sheryl Crow into Baathist territory. The idea, as Faddis put it, was to signal to Iraqi Army officers and civilians alike that “the Americans were here; they weren’t afraid, and they weren’t leaving until they had Saddam’s head on a platter.”[17]
The spam dialing of Iraqi phone numbers could seem ineffectual, too, but overall, this aspect of the C.I.A.’s influence operations appears to have worked, at least as a complement to the available public news reporting about the coming war, which on its own may have led many Iraqi officers and civil servants to think twice about dying in another of Saddam’s doomed causes. Because CENTCOM did not have enough troops to manage thousands of Iraqi prisoners of war, the C.I.A. pivoted to a leaflet and robocall operation that sought to persuade Iraqi officers and soldiers to “get out of your uniform and go home” rather than surrender. Ultimately, many Iraqi soldiers and civil servants did just that. Whatever their motivations, they could feel relatively safe staying home or visiting relatives in the Iraqi countryside, since this behavior would be consistent with the guerrilla strategy that Saddam had pressed upon Iraq in his orders and speeches that winter.
The Bush administration’s plan was riddled with bad assumptions, but one of the largest blind spots involved Iran. Even though Tehran’s ayatollahs had been seeking Saddam’s overthrow for more than two decades, the president and his advisers failed to think through how Iran would exploit this outcome. For its part, the C.I.A. had never prepared to challenge the ambitious plans of Iran’s security services to influence post-Saddam politics and to oppose an American occupation. The agency had been directed away from postwar planning and the focus was on the conventional war that was about to erupt.
The C.I.A. teams trained and equipped Kurdish militia to conduct sabotage operations across the green line once hostilities began. As D-Day neared, responsibility for day-to-day C.I.A. operations shifted from headquarters to Charlie Seidel, the agency Arabist who had been designated as the next chief of station in Baghdad. Seidel embedded with CENTCOM’s war command in Kuwait. It would be his second on-the-ground leadership role in a U.S. war against Saddam.[18]
The invasion’s approach brought a measure of closure to the C.I.A.’s entanglement in Saddam-era Iraq. It was a mission that had evolved over two decades from stealthy success to well-publicized failure. In 1982, when Tom Twetten landed in Baghdad on King Hussein’s jet, hoping to help Saddam avoid losing his war with Iran, the C.I.A.’s mission had been well defined and realistically designed. For years, Twetten and his colleagues, followed by the D.I.A., had used secrecy and America’s technological advantages to thwart the expansion of a hostile Iranian revolution. Perhaps the C.I.A. never would have overcome Saddam’s mistrust, but if the Reagan White House hadn’t conceived the foolhardy and criminal scheme that became known as Iran-Contra, the agency might have helped Washington learn how to contain and perhaps even manage Saddam for the sake of regional stability. That was certainly George H. W. Bush’s intention until Saddam invaded Kuwait. Saddam’s missile attacks on Saudi Arabia and Israel during that war, and the discovery of his nuclear-weapons program afterward, led Bush to give up on managing Saddam. He turned to the C.I.A. to accomplish what he had decided not to seek by military force—Saddam’s death or removal from office. As Twetten noted at the time, the resort to C.I.A. coupmaking in Iraq violated the oft-repeated lesson that covert action rarely worked when it was used as a cheap, deniable substitute for whole-of-government foreign and military policy. Still, the C.I.A.’s tragic and embarrassing failures in Iraq during the Clinton years did not cause the invasion of 2003. After 9/11, the only lesson George W. Bush took from the agency’s history in Iraq—a lesson instilled in him by the likes of George Tenet himself—was that there was no easy way to remove Saddam through covert action, and if the president really wanted him gone, he would have to order a full-scale invasion.
The United Nations had failed to prevent war. Renewed inspections, as well as the efforts of Blix and ElBaradei, had not dissuaded the Bush administration. Yet there was one notion about how to avoid or at least shorten armed conflict that refused to die: the hope that Saddam might be induced to voluntarily give up power and perhaps go into exile. The scenario held the same appeal that coup plots had earlier—snap, problem solved.
Early in March, Vladimir Putin wrote a letter to Saddam proposing that he step down as president of Iraq and become chairman of the Baath Party. The formulation was clever—Putin offered Saddam a face-saving outcome that did not require the Iraqi leader to depart his homeland in humiliation. If Saddam accepted, his resignation from the presidency might shake things up enough to delay or complicate a military invasion, expanding Russian influence and undermining the United States. Yevgeny Primakov, Saddam’s longtime acquaintance, carried Putin’s letter to Baghdad. He told Saddam that Russia’s purpose was to persuade the Bush administration not to attack.
Saddam walked out of the room, leaving Primakov to stew, and then returned with Tariq Aziz, Taha Yassin Ramadan, and other Baath Party comrades. He asked Primakov to read Putin’s letter aloud, according to Abid Hamid Mahmud, the presidential secretary. The Baathist leaders then dutifully proclaimed their “extreme displeasure” with Putin’s ideas and their “strong support” for their president-leader’s continuation in office. Primakov left empty-handed.[19]
Apart from Kuwait, Iraq’s Arab neighbors did not want America to invade. They feared (with reason) that Saddam’s overthrow would destabilize the region and empower Iran, which in turn might inflame Shiite minority populations in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. Turkey did not want a war, either, fearing (also with reason) that America’s intervention would further empower independence-minded Kurds, including violent separatists inside Turkey. Leaders in Ankara, Riyadh, Amman, Cairo, and elsewhere brainstormed about how to persuade Saddam to go into exile and thus prevent a chaotic rupture in Baghdad.
At one point that winter, Gamal Mubarak, a son of the Egyptian president, visited Bush at the White House. He outlined a plan devised by Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Turkey to ease Saddam into exile in Egypt. The Iraqi leader would be accompanied by family members and cushioned by a $2 billion nest egg. Bush initially bristled, saying that the U.S. would not offer protection to Saddam or assurances to his prospective hosts. Later, the White House reconsidered. Donald Rumsfeld supported such a plan. “To the very end” of the run-up to war, the secretary of defense “thought, or at least hoped,” that Saddam might prefer exile over “the risk of capture and death.” Rumsfeld accepted that it “would not be easy to stomach Saddam sipping Campari on the coast of southern France, but if his comfortable exile meant sparing the world—and thousands of American men and women in uniform—a war, I was all for it.”[20]
Luis Rueda at the C.I.A. thought that Saddam was unlikely to go. The Iraqi president had announced plans for a guerrilla war against America that reflected his self-identification as a revolutionary hero. He had survived numerous attempts against his life, real and imagined. “He’s got a bigger set of balls than most world leaders,” as Rueda put it. “He’s not going to walk away.”
As war approached, a “Middle Eastern government” offered to send Saddam to Belarus with $1 billion to $2 billion, Bush recounted later. The idea “looked like it might gain traction.” The details remain obscure, yet it seems all but certain that Saddam never took the proposal seriously.[21]
For Bush, the offer of exile provided a last opportunity to declare publicly that he was willing to forgo war if Saddam gave up power. On March 17, in a national address, the president issued his final ultimatum: “In recent days, some governments in the Middle East have been doing their part. They have delivered public and private messages urging the dictator to leave,” Bush said. “Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within forty-eight hours. Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict.” The invasion now had a definite start date.
The following day, after admitting publicly that a second U.N. resolution had proved impossible to obtain, Tony Blair put his war motion before the House of Commons. It passed comfortably, 412–149. A quarter of Labour M.P.s voted against invasion, well short of the number necessary to threaten Blair’s hold on office.
“Landslide!” Bush exclaimed when he spoke with the prime minister. He recalled the “cojones conference” at Camp David a year earlier. “You showed cojones, you never blinked. A leader who leads will win, and you are a real leader.”
Blair had what he had expended so much effort to achieve: armed action, if necessary, to disarm Iraq of WMD, cementing under pressure Britain’s alliance with America.[22]
At Saddam’s last cabinet meeting before the war began, he told his ministers, “Resist one week and after that I will take over.” He also instructed his generals “to hold the coalition for eight days and leave the rest to him,” recalled Abd al-Tawab Mullah Huwaysh, the deputy prime minister. The clear implication, Huwaysh thought, was that Saddam had a secret weapon that would devastate American-led forces.[23]
Saddam was probably only referring to his plan to go underground and lead a guerrilla war. He had a canny grasp of how to call on national pride to rally his countrymen. Yet he bathed in the delusion that he was beloved. This led him to think that the Iraqi people would now take up arms in his name and hurl themselves into the treads of American tanks. Saddam’s expectation of popular Iraqi resistance to American occupation was in some respects prescient, but it was also premature and distorted by his self-regard.
After Bush issued his forty-eight-hour ultimatum, Saddam finally ordered Qusay to move the boxes of money in the Central Bank’s vault to various ministries for safekeeping and possible dispersal. Qusay appeared at the bank on the night of March 19 and loaded about $1 billion in dollars and euros into vehicles. The Ministry of Trade received eight boxes. All but about $130 million of the boxed cash was eventually recovered.[24]
The last book Saddam requested from his press office was Ho Chi Minh’s Guerrilla Tactics. He published a few poems from underground, but his main literary endeavor that March was the completion of his fourth novel, Get Out, Damned One!, a work of allegory and propaganda aimed at rallying the nation to insurgency. Two days before the bombs fell, Saddam authorized his press aides to move to “an anonymous house in a bourgeois neighborhood” in Baghdad, as Saman Majid described it. Saddam took refuge in a “large house in Mansour,” the upscale enclave he had long frequented. His translator worked during that interval on edits to the new novel. “He was still sending us tens of handwritten pages,” Saman Majid recalled.[25]
Set in ancient Babylon, Get Out, Damned One! tells of a visionary figure named Ibrahim and his three grandsons, who represent Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Hasqil, the Jew, is another vehicle for Saddam’s crude antisemitism. Hasqil is a cheapskate who attempts rape, prays to a bag of gold coins, and profiteers by inciting wars and then selling weapons to the belligerents. His “desperate tribe” is backed by the imperial Romans (read: America), but righteous Arab resisters ultimately defeat them.
As he prepared to go underground, Saddam raced to the presses against the invasion deadline. Get Out, Damned One! might be abysmal fiction, but it was not a publishing or propaganda failure. Saddam’s aides managed to print forty thousand copies.[26]
There was something about the lure of killing Saddam Hussein—a clean shot, a silver bullet—that repeatedly attracted American decision-makers. On the day Blair won his go-to-war motion in the House of Commons, sources reporting to C.I.A. teams in Kurdistan offered a fresh opportunity. The network of Sufi clansmen operating under the cryptonym DB ROCKSTARS had placed a source on Qusay’s security detail. A second source monitored S.S.O. communications. That source could tell when the elite bodyguard shut off telecommunications in an area to which Saddam was about to travel. The shutdown was designed to prevent prospective coupmakers from calling one another, or so the source believed. On March 18, the source reported that Saddam appeared to be headed for Dora Farms, a family compound southeast of the capital. The source in Qusay’s detail was in touch with a third source at the farm, and this man confirmed that some sort of important gathering seemed to be afoot. The C.I.A. then ordered satellite photography of the farm. The imagery revealed about thirty to forty security vehicles parked amidst palm trees.[27]
George Tenet, Luis Rueda, and two other senior C.I.A. leaders, John McLaughlin and Stephen Kappes, rode to the Pentagon. They briefed Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Myers, a U.S. Air Force general and chairman of the Joint Chiefs. They discussed the uncertainties, Rumsfeld remembered: “Suppose it turned out that Saddam was meeting at the compound to comply with the president’s ultimatum to resign and leave Iraq? What if it turned out to be a civilian target? What if our aircraft accidentally killed innocent Iraqis and Saddam got away?”[28]
Rumsfeld and Tenet nonetheless agreed that the intelligence was solid enough to bring to Bush, so they went to the White House. The president, Rice, Cheney, Powell, and Andrew Card, the chief of staff, met them in the dining room off the Oval Office. Tenet bent over a map as he described the C.I.A.’s sourcing. They again discussed the uncertainties but also the rarity of having real-time evidence of Saddam’s location.
It seemed clear by now that Saddam would not comply with Bush’s ultimatum to leave Iraq. He “had made his choice,” Rumsfeld recalled thinking. The invasion was scheduled to begin within hours anyway. The C.I.A.’s source information included a large amount of inference and hearsay, but the appeal of a clean kill and a shortened war that could save American and Iraqi lives cemented the group’s consensus.
Bush polled his advisers. They all urged him to strike. They would be improvising a jump start to the war, but the planned invasion would go forward without serious disruption, no matter what happened at Dora Farms.
The president cleared the room and asked Cheney what he thought. “I think we ought to go for it,” he said.[29]
Bush gave the order shortly after 7:00 p.m. Washington time, just after 2 a.m. in Iraq. Two American F-117 stealth fighters carrying two-thousand-pound precision-guided bombs lifted off from an airbase in Qatar. General Tommy Franks, the war commander, also launched about forty cruise missiles at the target and Iraqi defenses. He decided not to strike the farm’s main building, however, fearing that women and children might be inside.
Air-raid sirens soon sounded in Baghdad as Iraq’s air defenses detected the incoming missiles. Antiaircraft guns erupted across the capital.
The attack on Dora Farms killed one of the C.I.A. sources on the ground who had helped bring the strike about. Saddam Hussein was not there.
Bush appeared on national television from the Oval Office soon after the F-117 pilots had safely cleared Iraqi airspace. “America faces an enemy who has no regard for conventions of war or rules of morality,” Bush said of Saddam Hussein as he announced the start of America’s invasion and occupation of Iraq. “This will not be a campaign of half measures, and we will accept no outcome but victory.”