CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

THE MISSING WMDs

Bill Tierney was a former military intelligence officer and Arabic linguist with extensive experience in Iraq and the war on terror. From 1996 to 1998, he was detailed to the UN Special Commission for the Disarmament of Iraq (UNSCOM) and witnessed at first hand the “denial and deception” operations run by Saddam’s Special Security Organization to keep UNSCOM from discovering ongoing WMD programs.

That experience left him with a gut conviction that Saddam Hussein was not merely continuing his WMD programs but was laughing at the inability of the UN inspectors and especially the United States to do anything about it.

After President Clinton ordered the four-day Desert Fox bombing raids on Iraqi military facilities in December 1998, Saddam concluded the United States just wasn’t serious. “Who would be so stupid as to start a bombing campaign and just stop?” Tierney said. To the Iraqis, it showed a lack of U.S. resolve.

It was after Desert Fox that Saddam realized that “the doors were wide open for him to continue his weapons programs” with no real opposition from the United States. This also is when Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s right-hand man, succeeded in changing the meaning of the phrase “smoking gun,” Tierney said.

Until then, the phrase was used in Iraq to describe circumstantial evidence—the smoke trail that would lead investigators to conclude that a bullet had just been fired. A smoking gun document discovered by nuclear inspector David Kay in 1993, for example, provided a situation report on PC-3, Iraq’s secret procurement-and-development program to build a nuclear weapon. Another “smoking gun” was found when UN inspectors discovered eighteen-wheel trucks hauling uranium-enrichment calutrons out the rear gate of a military base. The inspectors never found the weapons-grade material or the weapon itself, and through most of the 1990s, no one ever expected that they would. Saddam was too clever for that.

Bit by bit, Tariq Aziz succeeded in transforming “smoking gun” to mean the actual bullet—the physical stockpiles of WMD—“knowing that as long as there were armed guards between us and the weapons, we would never be able to ‘find,’ as in ‘put our hands on,’ the weapons of mass destruction,” Tierney says.¹

It was a brilliant shift of perception, not just words—an extreme makeover that today has become the implacable standard adopted by Bush foes for judging the evidence the administration used to determine the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

PROJECT HARMONY

In 2004, after spending time in Guantánamo Bay as an interpreter for the interrogation of al Qaeda prisoners, Tierney was sent back to Iraq as part of a counterinfiltration team. He was there as the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) completed its investigation into Saddam’s weapons programs, and he spoke to ISG officers frequently.

“During my eight months of counterinfiltration duty, we had fifty local Iraqis working on our post who were murdered for collaborating,” Tierney said “This was just one post, yet the DIA believes no one was afraid to talk, even though scientists who were cooperating with ISG were murdered.”

Tierney’s experience led him to conclude that “the arrogance and hubris of the intelligence community is such that they can’t entertain the possibility that they just failed to find the weapons because the Iraqis did a good job cleaning up prior to their arrival.”

During their initial triage of documents, computer disks, hard drives, audiotapes, CDs, and other materials seized at hundreds of sites as the fighting waned in April 2003, the Defense Intelligence Agency translated only what appeared immediately relevant to the work of the Iraq Study Group. Forty-two pages of those documents, which were not U.S. government classified, were made available to Cybercast News Service, a conservative website, in October 2004. They included purchase orders for anthrax vials (apparently for use by terrorists), decontamination equipment, and large quantities of gas masks and chemical weapons protection gear, all dating from 1999 and 2000. The ISG (and the elite media) treated this as just an average day in Saddam’s Iraq.

Another document, dated January 18, 1993, transmitted Saddam Hussein’s order, delivered through his personal secretary, “to hunt the Americans that are in Arab lands, especially in Somalia, by using Arab elements or Asian [Muslims] or friends.”

In response, the head of the Iraqi Intelligence Service informed Hussein that Iraq already had ties with a large number of international terrorist groups, including “the Islamist Arab elements that were fighting in Afghanistan and [currently] have no place to base and are physically present in Somalia, Sudan, and Egypt.” In other words, al Qaeda.²

Was nobody awake when that story ran? Because there was little pickup, no blaring headlines saying the United States now had proof that Saddam had been working with al Qaeda before the September 11 attacks—indeed, right at the time of the Mogadishu debacle portrayed in Black Hawk Down. (Remember, bin Laden says the Mogadishu attacks, which now are recognized as the first anti-U.S. strike by al Qaeda, convinced him that his men could beat the Americans just as the Afghan mujahideen had beaten the Soviets in Afghanistan.)

Besides the willingness of the elite media to dismiss any story that might reflect favorably on the Bush administration, especially right before the presidential elections, the conventional wisdom still prevailing within the U.S. intelligence community when CNS first published these documents was that Saddam’s secular Baathist regime was bitterly opposed to bin Laden and the Islamists. That continued even as the CIA was forced to face facts on the ground in Iraq of intimate cooperation between the Baathist “stay-behind” networks and the Islamist insurgent groups, both Sunni and Shiite.

“It is almost an article of religious faith among opponents of the Iraq War that Iraq became a terrorist destination only after the U.S. toppled Saddam Hussein,” the Wall Street Journal opined in a lead editorial fifteen months later. “But what if that’s false, and documents from Saddam’s own regime show that his government trained thousands of Islamic terrorists at camps inside Iraq before the war?”³

The new documents becoming available made Tierney see his pre-9/11 experience as an Iraq intelligence analyst at CENTCOM Headquarters in Tampa, Florida, in a new light. Back then, the Iraq “shop” was focused on detecting signs of another Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the no-fly zones, and WMD. “Like many others, I bought into the idea that UBL was too devout to have a relationship with a mushrik, idolator, like Saddam,” Tierney said. “I had made an unwarranted projection that the more devout the jihadists were, the more principled they were.”

Tierney recalls bringing a report on terrorist training being conducted at a facility just off Canal Sreet in Baghdad to the terrorism section at CENTCOM. “They treated me like I was from another planet,” he said. “The terrorism shop was joined at the hip with the Iranian section, but there was no synergy with the Iraq intelligence section.” And they were dead wrong, he now realized.

Bit by bit, more documents were finding their way to conservative publications, including a report that “elite Iraqi military units” had trained some 8,000 terrorists, mainly from other Arab countries, before Operation Iraqi Freedom. These documents were drawn from the HARMONY database, where everything exploitable that had been collected in Afghanistan and Iraq was now being catalogued and centralized.

It was a vast treasure trove of information. Representative Pete Hoekstra told reporters there were more than 35,000 boxes of HARMONY documents that the U.S. government hadn’t translated or analyzed that should be examined—several million pages in all. He had been trying for months to get Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte to release just forty documents, whose titles and HARMONY record identifier he had obtained from officials with access to the system. The titles were consistent with the 42 pages released in October 2004 and clearly suggested ongoing WMD programs in Iraq, as well as extensive ties between Iraqi intelligence and al Qaeda. But it was impossible to know how much hard information they contained without seeing them.⁴

DIA analyst Michael Tanji, who had managed the captured-document project before leaving government service in 2005, was bemused at the way the press, Congress, and even some within the intelligence community were politicizing the whole question of standards of evidence. “Critics of the war often complain about the lack of ‘proof’—a term that I had never heard used in the intelligence lexicon until we ousted Saddam—for going to war. There is really only one way to obtain ‘proof’ and that is to carry out a thorough and detailed examination of what we’ve captured,” he said.

But that didn’t seem to be the goal of his former bosses. Work was progressing at such a slow pace that unless something radical was done and more resources were committed to the task, “our great-grandchildren will still be sorting through this stuff,” Tanji said.⁵

THE SADDAM TAPES

In late 2005, Tierney was asked by an outside translation service to examine twelve hours of audiotapes that had been discovered at Saddam’s main presidential palace in Baghdad and set aside as part of Project HARMONY for future review. The tapes were all unclassified.

When Tierney popped the first tape into his cassette recorder, he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. It was the distinctive reedlike voice of the Iraqi dictator himself. Saddam was alternately ebullient, sarcastic, commanding, disdaining, or magnanimous as he listened to subordinates report on their confrontations with UN inspectors or as he discussed strategy with his top deputies.

It was like Richard Nixon and the White House tapes. “Saddam had a special librarian in charge of taping all of his meetings and keeping track of them, so Saddam could ask him who he talked to about a particular subject three months earlier and find that particular tape. It completely floored me,”^*27 Tierney said.

Among the revelations that immediately leapt out: details of a secret uranium-enrichment program that Iraqi scientists told Charles Duelfer and his CIA-sponsored Iraq Survey Group had been shut down in 1988.

That revelation was contained on a tape Tierney examined dating from 2000, two years after Iraq expelled UN arms inspectors. Saddam had summoned two top nuclear scientists to the presidential palace in Baghdad to brief him on their progress in enriching uranium using plasma separation. It was clear that Saddam had great expectations. It was equally clear that the scientists were nervous, Tierney said. If successful, their efforts could have given Saddam the fissile material he was seeking to make a bomb.

“One of them is telling Saddam all these wonderful things they can do with the plasma process, which they had developed in the 1980s for the nuclear weapons program,” Tierney said.

The scientist tried to convince Saddam to use the technology for other, purely peaceful purposes, but the Iraqi dictator just listened politely. “You can imagine him nodding his head as you listen to the tape,” Tierney said.

The plasma-enrichment program was so well protected that its very existence remained a secret until after the fall of Saddam’s regime. “This not only shows the capabilities the Iraqis had, but also the weakness of international arms inspection,” Tierney believes. “There were never any defectors with knowledge of this program, so neither UNSCOM, UNMOVIC, or the ISG learned about it. Arms inspection regimes just don’t work.”

Iraq’s plasma research got a brief mention in the 2004 final report of CIA arms inspector Charles Duelfer, but only as a legacy program the Iraqis claimed they had abandoned in 1988.⁶ Saddam’s secret presidential palace tapes were the first concrete evidence that Iraq had continued clandestine uranium plasma-enrichment work at least until 2000, right under the noses of UN inspectors.

Another exchange that revealed Saddam’s continued efforts to conceal his WMD programs took place in April or May 1995. Saddam’s son-in-law, Hussein Kamil al-Majid, came to brief the Iraqi dictator and his top advisors on his sparring with UN inspectors.

“We did not reveal all that we have…. [T]hey don’t know about our work in the domain of missiles. Sir, this is my work and I know it very well. I started it a long time ago, and it is not easy,” Hussein Kamil said on the tape.

None of the information Iraq had provided the UNSCOM inspectors was accurate or complete, Saddam’s top weapons’ advisor said. “Not the type of the weapons, not the volume of the materials we imported, not the volume of the production we told them about, not the volume of use. None of this was correct. They don’t know any of this,” he said.

But as far as the president’s critics were concerned, the UN inspectors were on the verge of completely disarming Iraq in March 2003, when George W. Bush led the nation in a “rush to war.”

Other tapes Tierney translated dealt with Saddam’s support for international terrorist groups, and specifically his desire to give terrorists chemical or biological weapons to attack the United States.

One terror tape was so dramatic that ABC News producer Rhonda Schwartz convinced her editors to use a 20-second sound bite in Arabic with English subtitles, in a piece that aired on February 15, 2006, on World News Tonight and on ABC’s Nightline.

“Terrorism is coming,” Saddam tells Tariq Aziz on the tape, which dated from 1996.

The idea appealed to the Iraqi dictator, and he began to toy with the possibilities. “In the future, what would prevent a booby-trapped car, or causing a nuclear explosion in Washington or a germ or a chemical one?” He let the thought dangle. They had been talking about getting revenge against the United States ever since the Gulf War. Then he added, “But Iraq would not be involved. This story is coming, but not from Iraq.”

As Tierney told the ABC news producers, Saddam frequently used irony in this way when talking with his subordinates. No one in his inner circle doubted his meaning: he was planning to use his intelligence services to hand off a chemical or biological weapon to terrorist groups, while instructing them to keep it free of Iraqi fingerprints.

But that is not how ABC decided to spin it. Instead, they took Saddam’s words literally and portrayed the Iraqi dictator as some kind of clairvoyant, who foresaw the day when unknown terrorists would attack the United States.

“The biological is very easy to make…. An American living near the White House could do it,” Tariq Aziz said. Saddam agreed. For ABC, however, these statements proved that Iraq no longer had biological weapons, not that they still had them and were looking for ways they could use them.^*28

NEGROPONTE’S RAVEN

Tierney may not have realized it, but he had stumbled into a minefield. The discovery of the Saddam tapes was a tremendous embarrassment to the intelligence community, and specifically to the Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte.

The twelve hours of audiotapes Tierney translated were only a fraction of hundreds of similar tapes in the vast HARMONY database. Up until that point, barely 50,000 items from Project HARMONY had been rendered into English. According to Weekly Standard reporter Stephen F. Hayes, “[f ]ew of those translated documents have been circulated to policymakers in the Bush administration.”⁷

Why hadn’t the documents been circulated? Because the Defense Intelligence Agency, which now took orders from Negroponte, was sitting on them, Hayes said. Even worse, the DIA wanted to shut down its translation warehouse, based in Doha, Qatar, where 700 Arabic linguists were working in three shifts on Document Exploitation (DOCEX) for Project HARMONY. “The Bush administration seems remarkably uninterested in discovering, now that we have reams of material from Saddam’s regime, what the actual terror-related and WMD-related activities of that regime were,” Hayes wrote.

It was to get around the DIA/DNI logjam that the twelve hours of audiotapes wound up in Bill Tierney’s cassette player. And why, once they had been translated and checked by other UNSCOM inspectors, they ultimately found their way to former federal prosecutor John Loftus.

Tierney had gone on to other assignments after he translated the tapes, gratified that finally the truth would come out on Iraq’s programs. But two months later, when he heard National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley state publicly that the administration had been wrong in their WMD assessments, he went to Loftus.

If anyone could get the story out, it was John Loftus. A pugnacious investigator with a nose for the sensational, Loftus had broken stories based on hard-to-acquire information and witnesses, and had a track record with the media. More important, as far as the elite media was concerned, he had gone after Republicans as well as Democrats.

In the 1980s, he had investigated the Reagan administration’s arms-for-hostages deal with Iran, tracking down travel voucher and expense account claims of participants to show that they had met with international arms dealers a full year before the official account. In 2002, he filed a civil lawsuit in South Florida that accused the Saudi government of backing Islamic charities in Virginia and Florida that he alleged were laundering money for Palestinian Islamic Jihad. As part of his claim, Loftus revealed that the Clinton administration had shut down a federal grand jury looking at Islamic charities in 1995, “concerned that a public probe would expose Saudi Arabia’s suspected ties to a global money-laundering operation that raised millions for anti-Israel terrorists,” federal officials said.⁸

Loftus told the press that he planned to release the Saddam tapes at the upcoming Intelligence Summit he was organizing in Arlington, Virginia, on February 18, 2006. Tierney would play segments of the tapes, present his translations, and provide extensive commentary and context at a special “pre-briefing” for the press.

As the date of the “Summit” approached, Tierney was putting the finishing touches on a 160-page PowerPoint presentation he planned to use as a backdrop for his talk. There was a great deal of nuance he wanted to present—he called it “granularity”—things like Saddam’s speech habits, his sense of humor, the inside jokes that were familiar to fellow clansmen from Tikrit. These were things that didn’t come across easily in a straightforward English rendering and that allowed reporters and intelligence analysts seeking a benign explanation for Saddam’s behavior to misconstrue his true meaning.

As Tierney was preparing, John Negroponte was desperately fishing for a way to shut down the conference. At the very least, he sought to prevent the appearance of heavyweights such as former CIA director R. James Woolsey, who was a scheduled speaker. Beyond that, he wanted to curtail the participation of active-duty law-enforcement and intelligence-community personnel, paying participants who were Loftus’s bread and butter.

Working through an outside consultant, Negroponte spread the rumor that “the” financial backer of the Loftus summit was a Jewish Russian “mobster” who was about to be indicted in Israel. The file on this man, Michael Cherney, was so thick that he couldn’t come to the United States for fear of being arrested, Negroponte’s graveyard-whisperer told me in a hush-hush telephone call. As a scheduled speaker at the conference, I was curious and mildly concerned. I had never heard of Cherney, let alone had dealings with him. But neither did I want to have any association with the Russian mob. “Jim Woolsey has already announced that he’s pulling out. So is everybody else,” the Raven croaked, mentioning the names of several friends. “If you take part in this conference, Ken, you will be tainted forever. But please, don’t tell anyone that I told you this.”

That last bit was the tip-off. I found the Raven’s assertions a bit too intense, a bit too last-minute, a bit too deniable to be credible. I called the Justice Department to see if they were aware of the allegations about Cherney. They refused to comment. I phoned other participants, who confirmed that they had received similar phone calls. Some took the allegations seriously; others dismissed them as fabricated.

As it turned out, Cherney was being slandered by a rival in the Israeli police, who himself was later indicted. But Negroponte’s strategy worked up to a point. Thanks to the lies spread by the Raven, a number of prominent speakers, including Woolsey, withdrew from the conference at the last minute. So did many paying participants from government, who were simply ordered to stay away.^*29

Instead of addressing a standing-room-only crowd in the huge ballroom at the Hyatt Regency in Crystal City, Virginia, that Saturday morning, Loftus and Tierney spoke to rows and rows of empty seats.

“They had a plasma program,” Tierney said, summing up the tapes he had just presented. “We’ve seen that they rebuilt an electrical power station in Basra so they could divert the energy for uranium enrichment. How long is it going to take them to get nuclear material, folks? Simply because we don’t have the evidence sitting in our face? That’s pathetic! We’ve got to have a little more respect for our enemies.”

Press coverage of Tierney’s presentation of the Saddam tapes was minimal. But Negroponte’s Raven didn’t stop there. He apparently had access to Tierney’s personnel file, and told a reporter from a network news channel that Tierney was psychologically unstable. “Ask him why he was fired by the DIA,” the Raven suggested.

And so the reporter did. He had no interest in doing a story on Tierney or on Saddam’s WMD programs, and had not come with a camera crew. But when Roger Simon of the upstart Pajamas Media was interviewing Tierney in the hallway outside the ballroom shortly after his presentation, he popped the Raven’s question.

Bingo! Tierney almost did a double take. After a pause, he launched into the story. He wasn’t fired, he said. He had resigned.

“I resigned in protest because I was interviewing somebody who was a Christian, and I prayed with him. He was wrapped up tight, so I prayed with him to calm him down. The government tried to say that I was proselytizing a Muslim, when they knew very well and it was on record that he was a Christian. I couldn’t let that be a precedent. I had to stay true to what I believed”—Tierney choked up at this point, and Roger Simon’s camera closed in on his face—“when I took my oath to defend the Constitution of this country. So I resigned rather than let it be a precedent. I had to stand up for what I believe…. I am so glad you asked that question.”

There it was. Tierney was unstable, breaking down on camera. He was a kook, a fanatic. Not only was he a patriot, who believed in his oath to the Constitution. He was a Christian!

Also revealing his story for the first time at the Intelligence Summit that weekend was former deputy undersecretary of defense Jack Shaw. He provided the outline of how Russian Spetsnaz units, working for several months before the war began, cleaned out WMD materials from Iraqi factories and warehouses and shipped usable material to Syria (see Chapter 9).

Like Tierney, he too was now the subject of a smear campaign, in his case aimed at showing that he was somehow corrupt, and helping private contractors to win cellphone contracts in Iraq.⁹

It was part of the old Washington playbook that John Negroponte knew well: If you can’t kill the story, kill the messenger.

GENERAL SADA’S STORY

General Georges Sada had been deputy commander of the Iraqi air force when Saddam Hussein threw him in jail during the Gulf War in 1991. Although Sada, an Assyrian Christian, was known for speaking truth even to Saddam, his crime was not lèse-majesté. It was far worse.

“Qusay came to me during the war,” he said, referring to Saddam’s younger son, who had begun to play a major role in the intelligence apparatus of the regime. “He gave me orders to kill the six British and thirty American pilots who had been shot down [during Operation Desert Storm]. I told him I wasn’t going to do that, that we had to treat them as POWs in accordance with the Geneva conventions. I told him, ‘If you kill them, the Americans will declare another war—on you and your family. And none of you will survive.’”

The next day, Republican Guards soldiers arrested him at his office and threw him in jail. “I was waiting to be hanged,” Sada says. “But Saddam knew I was right and finally gave the orders to release me two weeks later.”

For the next eleven years, Georges Sada lay low. Retired from the air force, he remained in Iraq but stayed away from politics. He never revealed his confrontation with Qusay until much later.

In 2002, he left Iraq and went to work for the International Centre for Reconciliation, an Anglican group working out of Coventry Cathedral in Britain. As international pressure on Iraq grew, Sada sought to use his contacts within Saddam Hussein’s inner circle to convince the Iraqi dictator to find a peaceful way out of the impasse with the UN inspectors and the United States. “I took a delegation from the International Centre for Reconciliation to Baghdad, where we met for hours with Tariq Aziz,” he told me. “We asked him to allow international inspectors back into Iraq by October 1. The Brits who were with us told him, ‘If you don’t do this, Iraq will be flattened.’”

To Sada’s surprise, Tariq Aziz agreed to the demand—but insisted that inspectors not return to Iraq until after November 1. “Later, I learned why,” Sada says. “They needed the extra time to transfer WMD stockpiles and materials to Syria.”

After the liberation of Iraq, Sada returned to Iraq and spoke to a number of former colleagues from the Iraqi air force, some of whom had gone to work for Iraqi Airways. The story they began to tell him was extraordinary, and yet it fit entirely with everything Georges Sada knew about Saddam Hussein and his method of operating.

“These were people I had known for thirty years. They were my friends. They knew my connection to Saddam Hussein and to the Americans, and were worried that the weapons would fall into terrorist hands.”

The pilots told him that they’d been ordered to fly the weapons to Damascus on board two Iraqi Airways passenger planes—a Boeing 747 and a Boeing 727—that had been converted to freighters. “They were surprised the first time when they got to the planes and found the cabins stripped and set up to haul cargo,” Sada says. “Republican Guards troops were loading the planes with yellow drums stamped with the skull and crossbones. These were sarin 1, sarin 2, and tabun”—deadly nerve gases Saddam had produced in German-built factories.

Also on board the flights were stockpiles of biological weapons, the pilots told him. (The UN inspection teams that eventually came to Iraq in December 2002 confirmed that Iraq had produced more than 8,000 liters of deadly anthrax but could not account for why or how they had gone “missing.” The whereabouts of Saddam’s bioweapon stockpiles remains a mystery to this day.)

All together, the pilots flew fifty-six sorties from Baghdad to Damascus. “The cover story was that the flights were bringing humanitarian aid to Syria after the collapse of a dam in June 2002,” Sada says. Iraq used a front company, SES, for the transfers, he added. The pilots told him they were aware that additional material was being sent to Syria in convoys of eighteen-wheel trucks.

Sada kept silent on what he had learned until April 17, 2004. That was when King Abdullah II of Jordan announced that Jordanian intelligence had just arrested an al Qaeda cell that was planning a massive terrorist attack using chemical weapons in Amman. “The Jordanians intercepted twenty tons of sarin gas coming into the country from Syria,” Sada says. “These were Iraqi weapons.”

Here were some of the weapons the pilots had been telling him about, Sada realized. And now their worst fear had been realized and they had fallen into the hand of terrorists.

General Sada knew that the former Baathist networks were working hand in glove with the al Qaeda–backed insurgent groups, and was worried of reprisals if he went public with the story precipitately. “My family was still in Iraq, my children, my grandchildren,” he says. After talking it over with them and with a newfound friend in Phoenix, Arizona—Dr. Terry Law—Sada decided in February 2005 to inform the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelliegnce, Representative Pete Hoekstra, and to write a book about what he had learned.¹⁰

THE CONGRESSMAN

Hoekstra sat with General Sada for over two hours and made sure his staff from the intelligence committee took careful notes. He planned to send them to Iraq to interview the pilots. He wanted as much detail as the retired general could provide.

The evidence was all pointing in one direction, Hoekstra believed. General Sada was only the latest in a series of witnesses who had provided verifiable information that revealed bits and pieces of Saddam’s plan to evacuate his WMD stockpiles and key materials to Syria before the war.

Just two months earlier, Lieutenant General Moshe Yaalon, chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces from July 2002 until June 2005, had gone public with what he knew. Saddam Hussein “transferred the chemical agents from Iraq to Syria,” Yaalon said. “No one went to Syria to find it.”¹¹ And there were plenty of other credible witnesses—Jack Shaw; Lieutenant General James Clapper; Lieutenant General Michael DeLong, deputy CENTCOM commander during Operation Iraqi Freedom; and a host of others. In Paris, a Syrian dissident named Nizar Nayouf had even produced a map indicating three burial sites in Syria that he alleged were controlled by Major General Al-Shaleesh, a relative of the Syrian president.¹² Both David Kay and Charles Duelfer, his successor at the Iraq Survey Group, concluded in their reports that there was strong but inconclusive evidence that WMD materials had been evacuated to Syria. “ISG analysts believed there was enough evidence to merit further investigation,” Duelfer wrote.¹³

Hoekstra had also been meeting with former U.S. Air Force investigator David Gaubatz, who said that when he accompanied combat units during the initial thrust into southern Iraq in March 2003, they had come across a number of flooded bunkers, which local sources told him contained artillery rockets filled with poison gas. Neither the Pentagon nor the Iraq Survey Group had shown an interest in investigating the sites, despite his repeated offers to lead a team to the area. Gaubatz was looking for funding to return to those sites and excavate them. Medical records for Gaubatz and his team showed that they had been exposed to high levels of radiation when initially inspecting the sites.

Hoekstra was increasingly frustrated with the way the intelligence community was handling the documents captured in Iraq. Negroponte was stonewalling. Despite promise after promise, he continued to hold back key documents from Project HARMONY—probably because the evidence all tended to implicate Syria in the scheme to hide Saddam’s weapons, Hoekstra believed. For reasons that were beyond him, the State Department continued its decades-long love affair with Syria, and wanted nothing out on the public record that would embarrass the new leader, Bashar al-Assad. And Negroponte was a pure product of Foggy Bottom.

The most intriguing evidence of hidden Iraqi WMD stockpiles, however, did not come from any of these sources. It came from a source that Hoekstra had developed all on his own: a former top CIA operations officer, who had returned to Iraq after the war and stumbled onto information pointing to a vast and previously unknown site, buried deep beneath a hillside north of Baghdad, where former Iraqi officials alleged Saddam had pursued nuclear weapons work in the utmost secrecy.

THE DISCOVERIES OF COMPANY X

After a business trip to Iraq in February 2004, the former operations officer was contacted by an engineer, working for a company in a former Eastern European country, who had worked on infrastructure projects under Saddam. The engineer and his company were hoping to win new contracts in Iraq, and had also traveled to Baghdad. On their way back to Turkey, one of the Eastern Europeans pointed to a hilltop east of the Baghdad-Mosul highway, on the far side of the Jebel Makhoul, along the Tigris. He had always been told that the hilltop disguised an underground weapons plant, he said.

Some of the engineers traveling with them offered that they had worked on a nearby infrastructure project. As they got to talking, they mentioned that they had always whispered among themselves that the underground site housed a secret centrifuge uranium-enrichment plant.

When he first heard this story, the former operations officer felt it had the ring of authenticity. “These guys had been there for thirteen or fourteen years,” he told me. “They would get drunk with the Iraqis and learn things about the WMD programs they were not supposed to know.”

Along with a business partner, he began tracking down the Eastern European engineers who had worked in Iraq and interviewing them. “We found five or six independent sources who all noted that they had seen eighteen-wheel trucks pass through an entrance into the hill area we were looking at,” the former operations officer said. What the trucks did once they entered the hillside, nobody knew. The entire area was a military zone, ringed with several rows of barbed wire.

In his reports to Hoekstra, the former operations officer referred to himself and his partners as “Company X of McLean, Virginia” (where the CIA was located), and encrypted the names of sources in CIA-style diagraphs. He and his associates interviewed thirty-one engineers and workers from a former Soviet-bloc country who had never been debriefed by any U.S. or UN agency before. One of the engineers, identified as LYHUNT/103, had been in Iraq from September 1984 until April 1994 “with a short interruption for the Gulf War.” He returned to Iraq several times a year after that until 2000.

LYHUNT/103 and his colleagues worked directly with TECO, the Technical Corps for Special Projects, project manager for “Iraq’s highest priority weapons projects.” TECO was headquartered within the Ministry of Industry and Military Industrialization, and “reported directly to Saddam’s household,” the former operations officer said. Among TECO’s responsibilities were Iraq’s clandestine nuclear weapons, its long-range ballistic missile programs, and the Super Gun that was being built by the former American ballistics genius Gerald Bull. LYHUNT/103 and other colleagues agreed to talk to the former CIA operations officer on condition that they not be identified in any way. They were well aware that their activities in Iraq after 1991 were in violation of international sanctions, U.S. law, and the laws of their own country. They risked serious jail time if they were identified. But they said they were willing to share their knowledge, because they now understood the full import of the highly compartmented project where they had worked, and it scared them. They referred to it as Site 555.

Site 555, also known as the al-Fajr facility, was “intended to be an electromagnetic isotope separation (EMIS) uranium-enrichment facility,” the former CIA operative told Hoekstra. Bombed and partially destroyed during the Gulf War, it was leveled in accordance with UN Security Council Resolution 687 in 1991. According to Iraq’s declarations to the UN, the al-Fajr facility was a “duplicate” of an EMIS plant in Tarmiya, but uranium-enrichment equipment was never installed. Once the buildings were leveled, the site was no longer inspected.

But there was much more at the site than the UN inspectors ever saw, the Eastern European engineers said. Hidden beneath a nearby hill was an underground structure about 600 meters deep not related to any mineral quarry. Another East European source, LYHUNT/101, commented that it would have taken only minimal effort to level the entry to the shaft and cover it with sand, leaving the deep underground installations hidden, the former CIA operative told Hoekstra.

In April 2004, the Eastern European engineers drove together down from Mosul to Baghdad, and LYHUNT/103 pointed to a series of low hills beyond the road. “That’s where the shaft is,” he said. But upon further questioning, the former agency officer realized that neither LYHUNT/103 or his colleagues had ever seen the actual opening or visited the underground site itself. They had worked on a water-purification plant and other engineering works on the surface.

Bit by bit, as Company X debriefed more of the Eastern Europeans who had worked in the area, they got a better idea of where to look for the underground site.

“The debriefings indicated that the underground facilities had been dug by 2,500 Vietnamese laborers during the mid-1980s, who toiled for $4 per month,” the former CIA officer said. “They dug at night to avoid infrared signatures. It was all done by drill and blast, without heavy machinery.” To the trained eye, these were all telltale signs of Iraq’s intent to camouflage the work from satellite surveillance.

The former operative informed Hoekstra of information he had learned from another of the East European engineers:

Per LYHUNT/105’s knowledge and his recollection of documentation that had been available to him, the factories at Site 555 were installations for the enrichment of uranium and nuclear chemistry, with one production building having a large internal movable horizontal crane for some kind of assembly, and a single airstrip runway at the bottom of the hill near the cave. The cave represented the entry to a major underground structure, with horizontal elements (tunnels or pathways), but LYHUNT/105 did not know how many tunnels or how deep the structure was. The location of the entry to the underground structure was by the end of the airstrip towards the bottom of the hill.

The man running the site was an Iraqi general, identified in the Company X report as PEAIR/13. According to the Eastern Europeans who had worked with him, he was “not young, but looked younger than he was.” He wore a military uniform “with no indication of rank on it; he was also a senior member of the Baath party who often traveled by helicopter.” Later, the Eastern European project manager identified him as “Saddam’s cousin.”

By early June 2004, they were ready to make a foray to the area. Traveling with LYHUNT/101, they drove in through Turkey to Mosul, where they were met by another Company X associate, a number of Iraqi shooters from Baghdad, and a contingent of Kurdish peshmergas. By now, security had become an issue throughout Iraq.

The first surprise when they reached the site was the chemical plant in the valley on the far side of the Jebel Makhoul. It didn’t fit with the description of the facilities they had heard from other engineers who had worked in the area in the 1980s, until they realized it had been built later. After the 2003 war, it had been looted right down to the rebar.

When they reached the hillside overlooking the Tigris, they found what appeared to be a large cistern. “It had some interesting features,” the former CIA officer said. “It was fed by a 24-inch pipe that drew water from five miles up the river.”

They thought the cistern might be camouflaging the entry to the underground site, but they had no excavation equipment to test their hypothesis. It was serviced by a double-paved macadam road—the only paved road in the area—thick enough to accommodate 20-ton trucks. Nearby they found a Soviet-designed power station large enough to provide power to a town of 30,000 people, although there was no town of that size nearby. But uranium enrichment required huge amounts of power, and large supplies of fresh water as coolant, to disguise the plant from heat-sensing satellites. The power station had also been looted.

That was when they saw the spoils from the digging. “They weren’t piled, but spread over a very wide area, so satellites wouldn’t pick up signs of excavation,” the former CIA officer said. They later estimated the Vietnamese had hauled up the equivalent of 5,000 truckloads of dirt and ground rock from below the surface. Whatever they had built, it was enormous.

After that unsuccessful attempt to find the entry shaft to the underground site, the former operations officer reported his findings to U.S. military intelligence and to a top-ranking officer at CIA. The CIA was “not responsive,” he said. But the military intelligence officer jumped at the information—at first. He sent representatives to debrief one of the former Eastern European engineers, but then let it drop. When asked, he said he had “no command authority” to pursue the investigation.

The former operations officer had a long-established relationship with Lieutenant General William “Jerry” Boykin, a legendary figure in the special operations community who was now deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence. Boykin also jumped at the information at first, and gave the order to send in a SEAL team specialized in WMD sites to hunt for the hidden access shaft. “Then we got a call from Jacoby”—that would be Admiral Jacoby, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. “He said, ‘Don’t go to Baghdad, it’s too dangerous.’”

This was the same Jacoby who, other Pentagon sources told me, “was too busy working on his third star” through politicking in Washington to take an active interest in what was going on in Iraq.

Finding the entry shaft to a suspected WMD site hidden in a ten square mile area that was covered with rubble and ruined buildings was no mean feat. It was going to require significant excavation work. But before that, they had to narrow down the area to search, and the DIA made it clear they were not going to help.

Not long after this, a left-wing think tank, the Center for Public Integrity, released an “investigation” alleging that the wife of a top Company X executive involved in tracking down Site 555 had improperly used her position as a deputy assistant secretary of defense to steer Iraq reconstruction contracts his way. “She stayed clear of this,” the former operations officer said, referring to their investigation and other operations in Iraq. “This was just a smear aimed at sabotaging our efforts.”

Returning to Baghdad on his own dime in September 2004, the former operations officer decided to brief U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte, whom he had known from Iran-Contra days in Honduras. “His people said we were full of shit,” he told me. “But remember, this was when the ISG was coming out with their final report. They wanted no waves, no loose ends.”

The Iraq Survey Group “inspectors” rarely left their compound near the Baghdad international airport because of the danger of IEDs and insurgent attacks. Their rare sorties mainly involved trips to the airport stockade, where top officials from Saddam’s regime were being held. “The big shots knew about the programs, but they didn’t know the details,” the former operations officer said. Details such as the precise grid coordinates of the underground facility beneath Site 555.

The more Hoekstra learned about Site 555, the angrier he got. He had encouraged the former operations officer to return to Iraq several times in 2005, and again in early 2006. By now, they had narrowed down the area to search for the hidden entry tunnel, and believed they had located what appeared to be ventilation shafts for the underground production halls. But still the DIA refused to help.

Hoekstra pounded on the table, and sent House intelligence committee staff members repeatedly to DIA headquarters. He wanted them to send in a team with handheld underground anomaly detectors, but the DIA refused. So did General Boykin’s boss, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen A. Cambone.

Finally, Hoekstra went to the White House and met with Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington, and suggested that he request a copy of the Company X report from General Boykin’s office at the Pentagon. Boykin eventually sent it over—minus the pictures, site diagrams, and key pages. What you guys are doing is history, one of Boykin’s aides said. We’re not interested in history.

Didn’t anybody get it? If they could locate an underground nuclear weapons site that had eluded the UN investigators and where uranium-enrichment work had continued undetected for years, it would provide dramatic proof that Saddam Hussein had never abandoned his WMD programs, as the CIA, the Democrats, and the United Nations claimed.

Sometimes Hoekstra felt he was the only one who cared any longer to learn the truth about Saddam’s weapons programs.