CHAPTER FIVE

THE NIGER CAPER

The Bush administration’s enemies stepped up their attacks on U.S. policy even as coalition troops were staging to march toward Baghdad.

International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei joined the assault, flying across the Atlantic from Vienna specially to deliver testimony at the UN Security Council on March 7, 2003. It was a moment in the spotlight he intended to relish. His agency, the UN’s “nuclear watchdog,” was going to take a bite out of the britches of George W. Bush. He might not prevent the United States from toppling Saddam, but he would make the effort more painful.

This is the same Mohamed ElBaradei who stunned fellow UN inspectors in the spring of 1991, just after Saddam’s defeat in the Gulf War, by telling them he was sure that Iraq had no clandestine nuclear weapons program and was hiding nothing from them.

I know this for a fact, he said, after his inspection team had emerged from a frustrating encounter with the Iraqis. They have sworn this to me as brother Arabs. They would not lie to me! he insisted.

If ElBaradei had realized one of the inspectors had a portable tape recorder and was taping his words as they traveled in the UN bus back to their Baghdad hotel, he might have been more careful about what he said. As it was, his willingness to be conned by his “brother Arabs” became legendary among the inspectors and among U.S. officials who were hoping the brand-new UN inspection process could be tweaked into something that could become a model to use in other hard-case countries, such as Iran or North Korea.

Like Hans Blix, his former boss at the IAEA who was now the overall UN arms inspector in Iraq, ElBaradei was not a nuclear scientist but an international lawyer by training. For sixteen years he worked as an Egyptian diplomat, then “graduated” in 1980 to become an international bureaucrat. He moved to Vienna in 1984 to work for the IAEA, one of the cushiest of all UN agencies.

Like Blix, too, ElBaradei always appeared eager to find an excuse for the proliferators. After all, they almost always came from Third World countries, which looked at the United States, with its vast arsenal of nuclear weapons, as the enemy. Of course they wanted to have nuclear weapons! He believed that the real goal of the IAEA, the agency he now headed, ought to be to convince the Americans to reduce their arsenal, end their nuclear hegemony, and allow Third World countries equal access to nuclear technology.

Saddam Hussein didn’t present a clear and present danger to the United States—or to anyone else, ElBaradei believed. If the world was facing a danger, it was from the attitude of people like George W. Bush, who preferred action to negotiations.

UN VERSUS BUSH

ElBaradei knew that most of his listeners—not just within the Security Council chamber but also on international television—looked up to his agency as the ultimate authority on all things nuclear. They were endowed with tremendous prestige, because their inspectors were the only ones on the ground who actually had physical access to Saddam’s nuclear facilities.

He also knew that his analysis of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear intentions was based almost solely on what those inspectors reported, whereas the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment of Iraq’s WMD programs, released in part in October 2002, used all the data at ElBaradei’s disposal plus a huge amount of other information, including NSA intercepts of Iraqi military communications, defector reports, and satellite imagery the United States was not willing to share with the IAEA.

In reality, ElBaradei was just presenting a point of view, an opinion. But he saw no reason to dwell on that. His goal was to cast doubt on the claims presented to the Council just one month earlier by Secretary of State Colin Powell, that Saddam Hussein had resumed his WMD programs.

Powell had boiled it down to just three items that he argued provided fresh confirmation that Saddam Hussein “remains determined to acquire nuclear weapons.”

The first involved “repeated covert attempts to acquire high-specification aluminum tubes from eleven different countries.” Powell was well aware that some analysts doubted that the tubes were intended to be used as uranium-enrichment centrifuges. The skeptics were more inclined to accept Saddam’s cover story that these expensive, high-strength tubes made of a corrosion-proof alloy were being imported to make 81mm artillery rockets. As “an old Army trooper,” Powell said, he found it odd that the tubes were “manufactured to a tolerance that far exceeds U.S. requirements for comparable rockets. Maybe Iraqis just manufacture their conventional weapons to a higher standard than we do, but I don’t think so.” Even the skeptics agreed that the aluminum tubes could be used to make centrifuges, he added.

Also troubling were the negotiations in 1999 and 2000 with firms in Romania, India, Russia, and Slovenia to purchase a plant to produce special magnets, similar to those used in uranium gas centrifuges.

The third disturbing item was an Iraqi effort to buy machines used to balance gas centrifuge rotors—the six-foot-high tubes that must be “tuned” so they can spin at speeds up to 1,000 revolutions per second. Any imperfection and the centrifuge will spin off its axis and crash—with the impact of a 2,000-pound bomb. If by chance the rotor is loaded with nuclear material, a centrifuge crash can be catastrophic.

In all the confusion and hype of the past few years, most people forget just how cautious was the U.S. case that Saddam was continuing to pursue nuclear weapons work. Powell concluded that while people would continue to debate the issue, “there is no doubt in my mind, these illicit procurement efforts show that Saddam Hussein is very much focused on putting in place the key missing piece from his nuclear weapons program, the ability to produce fissile material.”¹

But to ElBaradei, Powell’s briefing was just intelligence, based on supersecret stuff whose sources the United States would never reveal, whereas his update to the Council was based on information.

The UN nuclear chief began his presentation by demonstrating the breadth and extent of his database. Since Saddam was forced to reopen his weapons plants to UN inspections three months earlier, the IAEA had conducted 218 nuclear inspections at 141 sites, “including 21 that have not been inspected before,” ElBaradei said. Agency inspectors had deployed a mobile radiation detector across 2,000 kilometers of Iraq, visiting 75 facilities, including military garrisons and camps, truck parks, and residential areas, not just declared weapons plants, looking for signs of undeclared nuclear activity.

Agency inspectors had also begun to conduct interviews with Iraqi nuclear scientists, although progress there was more modest. The Iraqis had turned over “a considerable volume of documentation” on issues of particular concern, including the aluminum tubes, the attempts to procure magnets, and Iraq’s “reported attempt” to import uranium from Africa, he said.

That last item caught Powell’s attention. He knew exactly where ElBaradei was going. The alleged import of uranium from Niger was one of the items the CIA had briefed him on in February when he was prepping to address the UN. Thankfully, his briefer at the Agency—Deputy Director John McLaughlin—told him “there were doubts about the Niger report,” so he cut it from his presentation.² ElBaradei was trying to sandbag him, just as French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin had done in January.^*7

ElBaradei went on to minimize U.S. concerns over the aluminum tubes, while virtually dismissing the whole issue of the centrifuge magnets and the balancing machines as too minor to merit serious attention. At any rate, they were technical issues. And Mohamed ElBaradei was content to leave technical issues to the specialists. He wanted to get into the politics—the one area supposed to be off-limits to the IAEA.

The IAEA chief was well aware of the controversy brewing over the alleged purchase by Saddam of uranium yellowcake from the central African republic of Niger. An impoverished former French colony, Niger had two large uranium mines, both managed by the French, and was actively seeking new clients. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte, first mentioned the Iraqi attempt on December 19, 2002. President Bush referred to it in his January 28, 2003, State of the Union speech, carefully basing himself on British intelligence reports.

But ElBaradei knew better.

In his determination to slow the American war machine, ElBaradei had secretly diverted resources from the task of investigating WMD sites in Iraq to pursue a case he believed could become a political embarrassment for the U.S. president. Today, he was ready to drop the bombshell.

The whole Niger story was a sham, he said. For starters, Iraq had provided a “comprehensive explanation of its relations with Niger,” and described to IAEA satisfaction the visit by an Iraqi official to Niger in February 1999. (ElBaradei declined to mention that the Iraqi official in question, Wissam al-Zahawie, was a well-known figure in Iraq’s nuclear weapons establishment and had been Iraq’s representative to the IAEA in the late 1980s.³ Minor detail.)

The Niger story was based on documents that described an agreement between Niger and Iraq for the sale of 500 tons of uranium, allegedly concluded in July 2000. IAEA investigators had acquired copies of these documents and, with the help of “outside experts,” had determined that they were forgeries.

“[T]here is no indication that Iraq has attempted to import uranium since 1990,” ElBaradei concluded.⁴

There it was. The United States had been duped by “forged documents,” and the entire case against Saddam Hussein was a hoax.

When it was Colin Powell’s turn to respond to ElBaradei’s presentation, the U.S. secretary of state recalled the UN agency’s less-than-sterling track record. “As we all know,” he said, “in 1991, the IAEA was just days away from determining that Iraq did not have a nuclear program. We soon found out otherwise. IAEA is now reaching a similar conclusion, but we have to be very cautious.”

But Powell knew the damage was done. What he didn’t know was just how hard ElBaradei had worked and would keep on working to counter the U.S. effort to oust Saddam.

The next day, ElBaradei met with New York Times reporter Felicity Barringer to reinforce his message. He revealed that the IAEA had hired outside forensic experts, who “found anomalies in the signatures, the letterhead and the format” of the Niger documents, which made it clear they were forgeries.

Asked to speculate who might have had an interest in creating such forgeries, ElBaradei said there were “a lot of people who would be delighted to malign Iraq. It could range from Iraqi dissidents to all sorts of other sources,” he said.

Malign Iraq: Saddam himself couldn’t have put it better.

The Times was so pleased with ElBaradei’s story, they ran it on the front page of the Sunday edition.⁵ What ElBaradei didn’t tell the New York Times—or anyone else, for that matter—was that his “investigation” of the forged Niger documents had been helped along by the State Department, by the CIA, and by U.S. senator Carl Levin, the Democrats’ top gun on the Senate Select intelligence committee.

AN INSIDE JOB

Tipped off that the CIA recently had acquired actual copies of the Niger documents and that they were probably forgeries, ElBaradei had a top deputy, a former French nuclear weapons designer, Jacques Baute, request copies through State Department channels on January 6, 2003.

On January 13, 2003, an analyst with the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) sent an e-mail to several colleagues outlining why he thought “the uranium purchase agreement probably is a hoax.” He indicated that one of the documents purporting to be an agreement for a joint military campaign by Iraq and Iran was so ridiculous that it was “clearly a forgery.”

But those analysts never shared their doubts with Powell or the White House. In an address to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on January 26, 2003, Powell asked rhetorically, “Why is Iraq still trying to procure uranium and the special equipment to transform it into material for nuclear weapons?” His own State Department analysts were now sandbagging him.

Unbeknownst to Powell or the White House, Senator Levin was hovering in the wings, just waiting for the president to fall into the trap. Through his intelligence committee staff, Levin kept in regular contact with “dissenters” at INR and at CIA, who kept him apprised of what they were learning about the Niger forgeries and how they had been handled within the intelligence community. Levin knew this was the potential weak point in the administration’s case against Iraq, and he prepared to exploit it to the hilt.

The morning after President Bush included a reference to Iraq’s attempts to purchase uranium in his State of the Union speech on January 28, Levin shot off a letter to the CIA asking them to detail “what the U.S. intelligence community knows about Saddam Hussein seeking significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

Levin has since made a cottage industry out of the president’s “sixteen words” referring to the Niger uranium deal, and used them as the pretext for a four-year investigation by the Senate Select intelligence committee of the Bush administration’s use of prewar intelligence.⁶

As Tenet notes in his book, “Later some would allege that this handful of words was critical to the decision that led the nation to war. Contemporaneous evidence doesn’t support that, but just try convincing people of that today.”⁷

The real question is not whether the administration “lied” about the prewar intelligence. The Robb-Silberman Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, which delivered a 610-page report on the subject in March 2005, stated categorically that the CIA continued to believe in the authenticity of the Niger documents when Bush made the speech, and that “no one in the Intelligence Community had asked that the line [the famous sixteen words] be removed.” The CIA continued to claim that it never actually looked at the documents until after the scandal broke, because they had other sources for the conclusion that Saddam Hussein was seeking significant quantities of uranium from Africa.⁸

A later Senate Select intelligence committee report, issued on May 25, 2007, revealed that “the Intelligence community used or cleared the Niger-Iraq uranium intelligence fifteen times before the president’s State of the Union address and four times after, saying in several papers that Iraq was “vigorously pursuing uranium from Africa” [emphasis in the original].⁹ According to Richard Perle, Sir Richard Dearlove, who was head of British intelligence at the time, insisted over breakfast in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in early 2007 that he still stood by the original story. “Dearlove told me that the basis he used for the assessment that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger had nothing to do with the bogus documents,” Perle told me.

The real question was whether the Niger documents were a plant, an elaborate sting operation by the president’s enemies aimed at leading him into an error they would later claim he had known about all along; and whether certain elements at the CIA knew about the forgeries from the start but conveniently refused to inform their superiors until it was too late.

ITALIAN CON MAN, FRENCH SPIES

His French intelligence handlers gave him the code name Giacomo. They provided him with a regular stipend, a secret rendezvous point in Belgium, and a business front in Luxembourg. In exchange, he helped the French discover how their partners in the Niger uranium mines were cheating them.

Rocco Martino, aka Giacomo, had served many masters. A former Italian policeman, he had worked for Egyptian intelligence and the Italian military, and in 1996 became a paid informer for the French Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieur (DGSE). In 1999, he provided his French intelligence clients with genuine documents that revealed how Niger planned to expand trade with Iraq, apparently through clandestine uranium sales.

“I have the honor to inform you that the Iraqi Embassy to the Holy See in the person of His Excellency Wissam Al Zahawie, Iraq Ambassador to the Holy See, will set out on an official mission to our country as the representative of Saddam Hussein, President of the Republic of Iraq,” Niger’s ambassador to Rome, Adamou Chekou, informed the foreign ministry in Niamey on February 1, 1999. “His Excellency will arrive in Niamey on Friday 5 February 1999 at approximately 18:25 aboard Air France Flight 730 originating in Paris.”

The DGSE paid Giacomo handsomely for this batch of authentic Niger government documents, and asked for more. “That’s my job,” Martino said later. “I sell information.”¹⁰

The French continued to express interest in Niger, so Martino looked for more documents. Through an old contact at Italy’s military intelligence agency, Colonel Antonia Nucera, he hooked up with a sixty-year-old Italian secretary at the Niger embassy. She was on the books of SISMI (Servizio per le Informazione e la Sicurezza Militare) as a paid informer, code-named La Signora. Colonel Nucera introduced the two in February 2000 at a Rome café. Martino, who at sixty-two was tall and slim and sported a silver mustache, knew exactly how to appeal to her. He brought her a box of chocolates for her birthday, turned on the charm, and reportedly offered her money. La Signora soon became his informant.

“I limited myself to supplying Martino with copies of embassy documents in which there were traces of Niger agreements, in particular with Iraq,” she later told Rome judge Franco Ionta.

Over the New Year’s holiday in 2001, burglars broke through the reinforced steel door of the fifth-floor apartment in Rome’s Mazzini Quarter that housed the Niger embassy and ransacked the place. When he reported the break-in to the police on January 2, 2001, Second Secretary Arfou Mounkaila said the burglars must have been drunk. Papers were strewn everywhere. File cabinets stood open. But nothing of value had been stolen. Whoever the burglars were, they had taken only a steel Breil watch and three small vials of perfume.

At least, so he thought.

Shortly after that break-in, the fake Niger documents began to appear. According to some accounts, Martino forged the documents himself, using letterhead and official seals obtained from the Niger embassy. According to others, SISMI forged the documents using stolen letterhead and seals and had Martino peddle them to the French, the Brits, and the Americans. Martino insists he only learned belatedly that the documents were forgeries, and that he had acquired them as part of a legitimate intelligence transaction with La Signora. As for La Signora, she admitted to Judge Ionta that she was working for SISMI as an informer and that she always had provided authentic Niger embassy documents to Martino, not fakes.

It would have been a real comic opera, if the stakes hadn’t been so big.

“I began to have my suspicions about Rocco Martino after the theft in the embassy in 2001,” said La Signora. What tipped her off was Martino’s insistence on having a copy of a Niger-Iraq uranium contract that didn’t exist. “Martino always told me that if ever he got hold of an eventual contract between the two parties he would have gained a considerable sum from a certain intelligence company in Brussels to which he belonged.”¹¹ Everyone understood she was referring to French intelligence, the DGSE.

In the summer of 2001 Martino delivered the forged contract between Niger and Iraq for the purchase of 500 tons of uranium to his DGSE handler in Brussels, Jacques Nadal. (Italian intelligence photographed the handoff and later leaked it to the press.) Even the French foreign ministry weighed in to support the sting, the Senate intelligence committee discovered later. During a November 22, 2002, meeting with State Department officials, “the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs Director for Nonproliferation said that France had information on an Iraqi attempt to buy uranium from Niger,” the report found. “He said that France had determined that no uranium had been shipped, but France believed the reporting was true that Iraq had made a procurement attempt for uranium from Niger.”¹²

Once they realized their fingerprints were all over the fake Niger uranium documents and what appeared to be a sting operation against the U.S. government, the French tried desperately to deny all involvement. In an unusual move, they even sent out former top DGSE counterspy Alain Chouet to claim that the DGSE had never made contact with Martino before 2002.¹³

THE CIA HAND

But while the French probably caused the documents to be forged, they were not alone in perpetuating the fraud that was aimed at undermining President Bush’s credibility, burying the very real information about al-Zahawie’s 1999 trip to Niger, and stopping the war in Iraq. Top CIA officers, Italy’s SISMI, and even Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi also played an active role in perpetuating the Niger-Iraq uranium sting.

Berlusconi mistakenly thought he was helping Bush. The CIA officers I will name below sought to undermine him.

Berlusconi was returned to office in contested elections in May 2001. After the September 11 attacks, the naturally pro-American Berlusconi was eager to show his support for America and for the U.S. president. When French president Jacques Chirac and Tony Blair were received in the Oval Office right after 9/11, Berlusconi became desperate for equal treatment, and his eagerness to please the Americans was felt throughout his administration. “I want to tell President Bush that Italy is ready to do whatever its allies ask,” he told a cabinet meeting before leaving for Washington.¹⁴

On October 15, 2001, the day Berlusconi finally met with Bush in the Oval Office, the new head of SISMI, Nicolò Pollari, briefed the CIA Rome station chief on the alleged Niger-Iraq uranium deal. Pollari knew he had to play his cards close to his vest, because signatures and names had been altered on the Niger documents. So rather than give the doctored documents to CIA station chief Jeff Castelli, he let him look through them and scribble a few hasty notes on their content.

Castelli’s report back to his CIA division chief in Langley later that day formed the basis of the first intelligence report circulated by the Directorate of Operations “indicating that Niger planned to ship several tons of uranium to Iraq.”

The intelligence report said the uranium sales agreement had been in negotiation between the two countries since at least early 1999, and was approved by the State Court of Niger in late 2000. According to the cable, Nigerien President Mamadou Tandja gave his stamp of approval for the agreement and communicated his decision to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. The report also indicated that in October 2000 Nigerien Minister of Foreign Affairs Nassirou Sabo informed one of his ambassadors in Europe that Niger had concluded an accord to provide several tons of uranium to Iraq.¹⁵

Castelli’s division chief, Tyler Drumheller, apparently deemed the report so important that he forwarded it for inclusion in the daily Senior Executive Intelligence Brief, which was widely circulated within the administration. (The Office of the Vice President used articles in the SEIB in drafting initial versions of Colin Powell’s UN presentation.) The item appeared on October 18, 2001, and was titled “Iraq: Nuclear-Related Procurement Efforts.”

Pollari went back to Castelli three days later with a page-and-a-half note, explaining that the “information comes from a credible source,” a reference to the SISMI informant, La Signora. Later, he provided Castelli with a transcription of the forged Niger-Iraq agreement, which Castelli also sent back to Drumheller. That follow-on report was circulated within the U.S. intelligence community on February 5, 2002.

Castelli forwarded three reports on three separate occasions to Drumheller. After he retired from the Agency in February 2005, Drumheller became an outspoken critic of the Bush administration, and claimed that Castelli considered the Niger reports “bullshit.”

Neither Castelli nor Drumheller ever tried to expose them as forgeries, however. On the contrary: their reporting helped to validate the forged Niger documents, as the Robb-Silberman Commission investigating U.S. intelligence on Iraq’s WMD programs later found.¹⁶

It was an extraordinary accomplishment by the shadow warriors. They had taken the fakes and laundered them through the system, all the while claiming their innocence.¹⁷

Meanwhile, Rocco Martino went to London, where he delivered a copy of the Niger documents to MI6. British intelligence contributed its own reports to Washington based at least in part on the faked documents. These reports also flowed through the CIA’s European division chief, Tyler Drumheller. This created the illusion of multiple, independent reporting streams on the alleged deal. Bush ultimately relied on the British reports, summarized in a public dossier released by Prime Minister Tony Blair’s office in September 2002, for the basis of the sixteen words on Iraq’s uranium procurement efforts that made its way into his State of the Union message in January 2003.

Greg Thielman saw all of these classified intelligence reports as director of the Office of Strategic, Proliferation, and Military Affairs in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR). Once the scandal broke, he told the leftist Italian daily La Repubblica that he had seen through the scam from the start.

“Well, I have an idea for you,” he told reporters Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d’Avanzo, when they asked about SISMI’s role in spreading the doctored documents. “SISMI, like the CIA and the entire Anglo-Saxon intelligence community, is ready and willing to satisfy the hawks in the U.S. administration.”

But Thielman‘s description didn’t fit the likes of CIA officers Jeff Castelli or Tyler Drumheller, who opposed the “hawks of the U.S. administration.” It was another careful piece of subterfuge by the shadow warriors.

After leaving INR in September 2002, Thielman revealed his true colors, going to work for the Democratic staff of the Senate intelligence committee. By this point, Levin was gearing up to spring his trap. And all the while this extraordinary intelligence coup against the president by CIA and State Department intelligence officers and their accomplices in Congress was being set in motion, no one pursued the very real contacts between Saddam’s nuclear advisor, Wissam al-Zahawie, and the Niger government.

DRUMHELLER CAUGHT IN A LIE

On October 7, 2002, as the United Nations began debating in earnest the case for war against Iraq, Rocco Martino tried again to peddle the Niger file, this time to Italian journalist Elisabetta Burba. He had sold documents to her before, so when he phoned her saying he had something “very hot,” she agreed to take him to an expensive restaurant in Rome, where he passed her an envelope with documents he said “proved” that Saddam Hussein had purchased yellowcake from Niger.

Burba’s editors at the newsweekly Panorama were skeptical, and insisted she get the documents vetted before they shelled out Martino’s asking price of 15,000 euros (then worth around $15,000). They arranged for Burba to meet with a press officer at the U.S. embassy in Rome two days later, where they were joined by an unnamed embassy official who worked for CIA station chief Jeff Castelli. The Americans told Burba they were not in the business of verifying documents for journalists, but asked if they could have a copy of the documents. If anything popped up, they’d get back to her.

That is how the fake Niger documents wound up in Thielman’s old State Department office, and how word of them reached Senator Levin’s staff. But while the State Department’s intelligence bureau put out an internal note on the forgeries, they never reported up the food chain to Colin Powell or the White House.

Nor did Jeff Castelli, the CIA station chief in Rome. According to Tyler Drumheller, Castelli paid little attention to the documents when they finally landed on his desk, because he “already knew” they were forgeries. The Rome station chief “was not the most organized guy in the world,” Drumheller explained in his kiss-and-tell anti-Bush memoir.

This is the same CIA station chief who had reported back to CIA headquarters on three separate occasions after being briefed on the Niger file by SISMI, and who was being asked almost daily by headquarters if he had any new information. And yet, if Drumheller is to be believed, he was so incurious that he never even looked at the actual documents when a subordinate dumped the file obtained from the Italian journalist on his desk.

Republicans on the Senate Select intelligence committee felt so strongly about Drumheller’s apparent willingness to play fast and loose with the facts that they took the unprecedented step of correcting several of his public statements in their “Additional Views” to a September 2006 report.¹⁸

Was it just incompetence? Perhaps. There was plenty of that to go around, as both the Senate panel and the Robb-Silberman Commission found.

But one incontrovertible fact stands out: At the center of the two intelligence mistakes concerning Iraq’s WMD programs that were most hyped by the president’s political opponents—the Niger documents, and an Iraqi defector code-named CURVEBALL (whose story I tell in Chapter 19)—sat one man: Tyler Drumheller, who wears his opposition to the Bush agenda as a badge of pride.

LARRY JOHNSON AND VIPS

As U.S. and coalition troops were poised to pour across the border into Iraq from the south, administration opponents redoubled their effort to sabotage the war effort, undermine the troops, and expose highly classified intelligence operations. Aiding their efforts was a former CIA officer named Larry C. Johnson, who joined the Clinton administration after an undistinguished career in the CIA’s clandestine service.

Larry Johnson’s last government job was at the State Department’s Office of Counterterrorism, where he compiled statistics that went into the annual redbook, Patterns of Global Terrorism.

Johnson was best known for an opinion piece that appeared in the New York Times on July 10, 2001, where he claimed that the terror threat against the United States had been blown way out of proportion by “politicians of both parties” and by “bureaucracies in the military and in intelligence agencies that are desperate to find an enemy to justify budget growth.”

The hype had reached such alarming proportions that Americans were “bedeviled by fantasies about terrorism,” he wrote. “They seem to believe that terrorism is the greatest threat to the United States and that it is becoming more widespread and lethal.” Worse: Americans “almost certainly have the impression that extremist Islamic groups cause most terrorism. None of these beliefs are based in fact.”

Larry Johnson couldn’t get over it. Americans actually believed that Muslim fanatics wanted to kill them! How silly. The facts were quite different, and were being swept under the carpet by a new administration of Republican yahoos.

The terrorism redbook for 2001 presented statistics for the final year of the Clinton administration, and the trendlines were all positive, Johnson argued. Attacks were down, and most of those had occurred in places such as Colombia, where the violence was “less about terrorism than about guerrillas’ goal of disrupting oil production to undermine the Colombian economy.”

He ticked off the most significant incidents, which included the bombing of the USS Cole (no mention of bin Laden or al Qaeda as the culprits), attacks on a McDonald’s in France, and attacks against U.S. oil companies.

For Larry Johnson, the conclusion was clear: “If you are drilling for oil in Colombia—or in nations like Ecuador, Nigeria or Indonesia—you should take appropriate precautions; otherwise Americans have little to fear.”

Thank you, Larry, for those great insights. Except for Byron York of National Review,¹⁹ reporters who flocked to Larry Johnson as a terrorism expert in the following years conveniently forgot this extraordinary display of analytic myopia.

On March 14, 2003, Larry Johnson and a band of former colleagues who had a few things to teach Democrats about the fine art of Bush-hating, issued an appeal to active-duty intelligence officers.

Calling themselves Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, or VIPS, they knew that many of their former colleagues were hopping mad because Bush administration officials and the press had been bashing the CIA for its failure to “connect the dots” that led up to 9/11. The CIA was being made to take the blame, whereas the real culprits were at the FBI, VIPS argued. After all, the FBI had on their payroll a confidential informant named Abdussattar Shaikh, who turned out to have been the landlord of two of the 9/11 hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hamzi, during their stay in San Diego in 2000. “The terrorists were living under the nose of an FBI informant, and somehow the connection was never made because the right questions weren’t being asked,” Senator Bob Graham (D-FL) wrote later.²⁰

And that was not the only clue the FBI had missed. There was the July 10, 2001, memo from Phoenix, Arizona, FBI agent Kenneth Williams, who suggested the Bureau investigate the high number of Middle Eastern men enrolled in flight schools, and the famous refusal by FBI headquarters to allow FBI field officers to search the computer of Zaccarias Moussaoui, which, it turned out, contained clear indications of the 9/11 plot. The FBI was blind as a bat, and yet the CIA continued to take the rap.²¹

VIPS members proudly evoked Daniel Ellsberg, the Vietnam-era whistleblower who leaked the top-secret Pentagon Papers in 1971 to the New York Times and went on to become a counterculture icon of the Left. They urged intelligence-community employees “to break the law and leak any information they have that could show the Bush administration is engineering the release of evidence to match its penchant for war.” The VIPS appeal was quickly picked up by wacko left-wing websites, who evoked the “Bush crime family” and claimed that the beheading of U.S. citizen Nicholas Berg by al Qaeda terrorist Zarqawi in Iraq was “actually” a conspiracy by the CIA to “send a message” to antiwar elements in the United States that they had better not criticize President Bush, or else they would suffer a similar fate.²² (Psychoanalysts have a word for such fears: paranoia.)

The administration’s intelligence on Iraq “has been cooked to a recipe, and the recipe is high policy,” said VIPS member Ray McGovern, a former CIA Soviet analyst who now worked at Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry. “That’s why a lot of my former colleagues are holding their noses these days.”

McGovern claimed that when he left the Agency in the late 1980s, then CIA director Bill Casey had cooked a similar stew, fueling the fires of the Cold War by refusing to acknowledge McGovern’s prescient view that the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse. In fact, it was Casey and President Reagan who argued forcefully that Communism could be rolled back and that the Soviet Union had feet of clay—against the accommodationist advice of CIA Soviet analysts such as Ray McGovern, who claimed that the Soviet Union was here to stay.

What did Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush have in common? They were both Republicans, and they both held views of America’s strategic enemies than ran directly counter to the conventional wisdom of the U.S. intelligence community. In addition to Larry Johnson and McGovern, other VIPS members included Ray Close, a former CIA station chief in Riyadh, who continued to work as a consultant in Saudi Arabia, and Patrick Eddington, a CIA analyst who resigned in the 1990s after accusing the government of hiding the extent of Saddam’s chemical weapons use during the Gulf War. They regularly published their manifestos at the far-left website CounterPunch.

In a sanctimonious “memo” to President Bush on March 18, 2003, VIPS said the Niger uranium documents were so crudely forged they could not possibly have been the work of the “legendary expertise of CIA technical specialists” or of their British colleagues. “We find ourselves wondering if amateur intelligence operatives in the Pentagon basement and/or at 10 Downing Street were involved and need to be called on the carpet.”

There it was again: the secret office in the basement.²³

At this point, however, the leakers and the naysayers were gaining no traction. The war in Iraq had just begun, and support for the president and the war on terror were high. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal tracking poll conducted from March 29 to March 30, 2003, showed the president’s approval rating stood at 66 percent.²⁴ Democrats had just voted a war-powers resolution on the basis of the National Intelligence Estimate they had asked the CIA to prepare, and were anxious to wrap themselves in the flag.

After all, the nation was at war.