The
Times Online is running excerpts of Bob Woodward's latest collection of tasty annecdotes,
State of Denial. The second,
The bomb that never was, is available now. The first extract,
Prisoners of war, was published last week.
One person he writes about is Major General James "Spider" Marks, who was to lead the initial hunt for WMD once the invasion had begun. Marks was nervous about the paucity of good intelligence about the Iraqi sites that should be investigated and was distraught at the lack of coordination about ow each site should be dealt with ("Destroy it? Test it? Guard it? Render it useless?"). He would have had control over MET ALPHA, with which
Judith Miller was embedded, brandishing her double-super-secret clearance from Libby on the hunt for
WMD.
We're also given some insight into the people he was dealing with directly, whether at DIA, the rest of the military planning groups, or on his own team.
Marks selected as his deputy Colonel Steve Rotkoff, a bookish, irreverent New Yorker who summarised his thoughts and emotions with three-line haiku. One of his early observations:
Rumsfeld is a dick
Won't flow the forces we need
We will be too light.
David kay shows up and we learn a bit more about his dealings with the CIA, his time spent in-country later with the Iraq Survey Group.
Now Kay had just returned from Iraq, where he had spent a month for NBC News following Spider Marks's WMD-hunting taskforce.
"What do you think?" George Tenet asked. "Why aren't they finding anything?" "These guys probably couldn't find it if it was in front of them," Kay said bluntly. "They're not organised, equipped or led to do it."
"Okay. If you were king, what would you do?" "You have to treat this like an intelligence operation. You go after people."
Find the generals, the scientists who made the weapons, those who worked at the production facilities, the guards who provided security, the truck drivers who transported the weapons.
No junket, Kay's mission with ISG nevertheless was plagued with terrible data, poor organisation from higher up, and took on a surreal bent with Ceney & Libby playing at "junior analysts." He found himself truely leading the Hunting of the Snark.
AROUND 3am one morning, Kay was asleep in his quarters at Baghdad airport -- an old shipping container -- when someone from his communications shop banged on his door. "The vice-president's office. He's on the phone."
Kay hustled over to the secure phone, where it turned out it wasn't Cheney but a staffer in his office.
"The vice-president wants to know if you've seen this communication intercept," said the staffer, going on to describe information that the NSA had picked up from Syria alleging a location of some chemical weapons. It was a highly classified Executive Signals Intercept that would be circulated only among the most senior officials, and that wouldn't normally be shared with the field in its raw form.
"Honestly, no, I haven't," Kay said, "but I will look at it." Kay located his team's NSA representative, who dug out the intercept. It was innocuous -- particularly innocuous at 3am, Kay thought -- and inconclusive. He was surprised that Cheney or his people were getting down to such detail. Kay didn't think intercepts were going to lead them to WMD because the intercepted conversations were almost always vague. It was rarely clear who was talking, or what the "it" might be they were discussing. Next Kay had a call from Scooter Libby.
"The vice-president wants to know if you've looked at this area," said Cheney's chief of staff. "We have indications -- and here are the geocoordinates -- that something's buried there." Kay went to the mapping and imagery experts on his team. They pulled up the satellite and other surveillance photos of the location. It was in the middle of Lebanon.
"That's where we're going next," joked one of the imagery experts.
There are a few more people who turn up in these several pages, and each is pretty juicy. Kay's reaction to the appearance of Manucher Ghorbanifar's name is illuminating, pointing out his (Kay's) professionalism. And here's an annecdote about Brent Scowcroft and John McCain at a dinner that i found quite interesting:
"Does he ever ask your opinion?" asked Scowcroft, who had been national security adviser to the president's father. "Has he ever said, `John, what do you think about . . ?'" "No, no, he hasn't," McCain said. "As a matter of fact he's not intellectually curious. But one of the things he did say one time is he said, `I don't want to be like my father. I want to be like Ronald Reagan . . .'"
That burnt Scowcroft, who was feeling increasingly hopeless. He concluded that the administration was doing the unthinkable, repeating the mistakes of Vietnam.
(and reveals Woodward being a little clever with the language)
And George H.W. Bush, perhaps misunderestimating Rice's purpose on the Big Team (to keep junior out of trouble while Cheney's office ran things): "Condi is a disappointment, isn't she? She's not up to the job." On second thought, given the piss-poor image Mr Danger! has in he world, perhaps he did understand.
The excerpt concludes with a quote from Henry Kissinger that could be read as a chilling reminder of those people who would bring on the rapture to get their way. But i'll leave y'all to go check it out yourselves.
Where is WMD?
What a kick if he has none
Sorry about that