Author: Jonathan Schwarz

Here’s Ron Suskind on NPR’s Fresh Air today, starting at about 29:00:

SUSKIND: Ultimately you feel a kind of humbleness as a reporter. There are some things books can take you up to the gates of, the precipice of, but can’t go all the way, just in terms of these issues of people having to testify under oath, hopefully with immunity and also the threat of perjury…And some people in Congress of course are getting ready to do that at this point.

NPR: One person that people are going to want to talk to is you. Are you prepared to play recordings which substantiate what you have in this book?

SUSKIND: If it comes to that, of course. I would hope it wouldn’t, frankly. And my estimation is that everything in this book is true, and findable. And other reporters are out on the hunt right now. There are other sources that, uh, are near to the surface, let’s just say. And I think lots of these things will be moot fairly quickly. I have not a shadow of a doubt, having spent hours with Maguire and Richer and others—Buzzy Krongard, the number three guy at CIA, talks also about some of these issues of Habbush—other people in the know know bits about it…

NPR: …As a journalist—and you’re not some hack who’s come up with a scoop here, you have a long record, you’ve won a Pulitzer Prize—but if in one of the most controversial parts of the book—one which, as you say, could have grave legal implications—two of the most prominent on the record sources are saying, it’s just not true, what do you say to those who say, why should believe other parts of the book?

SUSKIND: Sadly, this is the way the world works. These guys are under stress, this sometimes happens when that’s the case, and I think people are looking at it in terms of the context of the situation. I’ve been at this for a long time, and I have sources who spend a long time with me, we tape their conversations, I put it in a book or a magazine piece. And then the heat comes, of public attention. And it’s startling for them, especially at the beginning. It’s quite jarring. I’m used to it. But for private citizens, even tough guys, like both of these are—and both of them, frankly, are big believers in the truth process. And I’ve talked to both of them: “You’re never going to feel heat quite like this.” And they said, both of them, Richer and Maguire, I’m ready to go in front of Senate committees, and House committees, I’m ready to have my moment. They knew everything that was in the book. Once they get there and the moment arrives, sometimes their knees buckle. And then you say, all right, let’s take a deep breath, and you get them upright, and they tend to often then walk forward…They’re reacting to that first blast.

Philip Giraldi:

An extremely reliable and well placed source in the intelligence community has informed me that Ron Suskind’s revelation that the White House ordered the preparation of a forged letter linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda and also to attempts made to obtain yellowcake uranium is correct but that a number of details are wrong.

The Suskind account states that two senior CIA officers Robert Richer and John Maguire supervised the preparation of the document under direct orders coming from Director George Tenet. Not so, says my source. Tenet is for once telling the truth when he states that he would not have undermined himself by preparing such a document while at the same time insisting publicly that there was no connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda. Richer and Maguire have both denied that they were involved with the forgery and it should also be noted that preparation of such a document to mislead the media is illegal and they could have wound up in jail.

My source also notes that Dick Cheney, who was behind the forgery, hated and mistrusted the Agency and would not have used it for such a sensitive assignment. Instead, he went to Doug Feith’s Office of Special Plans and asked them to do the job. The Pentagon has its own false documents center, primarily used to produce fake papers for Delta Force and other special ops officers traveling under cover as businessmen. It was Feith’s office that produced the letter and then surfaced it to the media in Iraq. Unlike the Agency, the Pentagon had no restrictions on it regarding the production of false information to mislead the public. Indeed, one might argue that Doug Feith’s office specialized in such activity.

Last night Countdown read statements from Ron Suskind’s two main named sources for the charge in his new book that the White House ordered the CIA to forge a letter from Iraq’s intelligence chief to Saddam Hussein. Rob Richer, the former head of the CIA’s Near East Division, spoke for both himself and John Maguire:

“I never received direction from George Tenet or anyone else in my chain of command to fabricate a document from Habbush as outlined in Mr. Suskind‘s book.

Further, today, I talked with John Maguire, who has given me the permission to state the following on his behalf, ‘I never receive any instruction from then Chief/NE Rob Richer or any other officer in my chain of command instructing me to fabricate such a letter. Further, I have no knowledge to the origins of the letter and as to how it circulated in Iraq.”

And here’s some of Suskind’s response:

OLBERMANN: Why do you believe they‘re backtracking now?…

SUSKIND: You know, I‘m sympathetic in a way to all these guys. They‘re under acute pressure. They‘re individuals. They‘ve got to feed their families. They really survive off the government, both of them, they‘re contractors and whatnot…

[T]hey may still stand up—and Maguire, I think, will still stand up in daylight…

You know, these guys, though, are feeling now great pressure. And, you know, what you realize in this process is that there is a limit to what a journalist can do even with taped interviews, people talking for hours at a time, when they can be brought into a moment of crisis by the government saying, “You‘ll never work again, you‘ll never earn a living.” That‘s the kind of thing that mostly happens in terms of what congressional hearings do testimony under subpoena with threat of perjury.

OLBERMANN: Well—and that‘s what we need. But in the interview, I presume the Maguire and Richer interviews are on tape, is that right?

SUSKIND: You bet, yes. And there‘s a lot of them. They‘re very detailed.

The obvious questions now are whether Suskind will release any of his interview tapes, and whether there will be any congressional investigation with witnesses testifying under oath.

In Ron Suskind’s interview on NPR today (and also in his new book), he names CIA operative John Maguire as one of the people allegedly involved in the Iraq letter forging. This is from Suskind’s NPR appearance:

SUSKIND: In the fall [of 2003]…the White House, they decide that a letter should be fabricated, dated July 2001, a handwritten letter from [Iraqi intelligence chief] Habbush to Saddam Hussein. And the letter should say that in fact Mohammed Atta, the 9/11 hijacker, trained in Iraq prior to 9/11, showing a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, and the letter should say Iraq was buying yellowcake uranium from Niger with the help of al-Qaeda…

NPR: Are you saying the White House ordered the CIA to fabricate evidence, even after the invasion of Iraq, fabricate evidence linking Iraq to 9/11, in effect.

SUSKIND: Absolutely. George Tenet comes back from a White House briefing…folks at CIA remember seeing the creamy White House stationery. Tenet says, we want a letter fabricated, and we want this letter to essentially emerge, this handwritten letter from Habbush, to Saddam, which is essentially a checking of the box on all the controversies on WMD that are unfolding that the United States may have been taken to war under false pretenses…

NPR: Are you saying George Tenet told you, I was given this order to lie, and I fulfilled that?

SUSKIND: There are off the record sources in the book, but there are on the record sources who are right in the thick of this operation: Rob Richer, the head of the Near East Division, just a notch or two below Tenet. Richer turns to Tenet, as [Richer] remembers it, and says, “Listen, Marine”—Richer’s a former Marine—”you’re not going to like this, but here goes.” Richer then takes it, he turns to John Maguire, who runs Iraq for the CIA, another senior manager. And Richer talks to Maguire, old intelligence hands, and they say, goodness gracious, all right, well, an order’s an order. And it goes down the chain.

This is the description, in Hubris by Michael Isikoff and David Corn, of part of a pre-war covert CIA plan named Anabasis and run by John Maguire. It had been authorized by George Bush in February, 2002:

Who needed evidence of weapons of mass destruction? John Maguire, the deputy chief of the CIA’s Iraq Operations Group, and the agency officers working the Anabasis project had their own plan for starting the war, and it had nothing to do with the WMD debate. They also had a small army of Iraqi commandoes—led by a former Iraqi war hero—willing to put the plan into action…

The plan was a core element of the original Anabasis program. These were the CIA-backed commandoes who would seize control of an Iraqi case at Nukhaib, near the Saudi border. Then they would go on the radio, announce a coup was underway, call on military units within Iraq to join them, and request that other nations support their bid to topple Saddam. Saddam, the thinking went, would be compelled to send troops to regain the base. But that would require him to violate the no-fly zone. The United States and Britain would then have a reason to attack Saddam’s forces, and the war would be on. The Bush administration, Maguire later said, “was too wedded” to the WMD argument for war. “The idea was to create an incident in which Saddam lashes out.” If all went as planned, “you’d have a premise for war: we’ve been invited in.”

However, the administration continued to rely on the WMD justification, and this plan was never put into effect.

Amusingly, Anabasis was almost a xerox of Saddam Hussein’s scheme for his invasion of Kuwait; while no one on earth remembers this now, Iraq justified their attack in the same way. This is from the New York Times on August 3, 1990:

Iraq said it struck to support a coup by young Kuwaiti revolutionaries against the Sabah family, whom it denounced as ”traitors and agents of Zionist and foreign schemes.”

Ron Suskind was on NPR this morning to discuss his new book The Way of the World, which alleges Iraq’s intelligence chief Tahir Jalil Habbush told the US before the war that Iraq had no WMD.

NPR asked George Tenet and the White House for comment, and, remarkably enough, they both essentially admitted this was true.

SUSKIND: What we now know from this investigation is that a secret mission was conducted in which a British manager, intelligence agent, met with the head of Iraqi intelligence in a secret location in Amman, Jordan. And what the Iraqi intelligence chief told the British—and essentially the Americans, because we’re all in this together—is that there were no WMD in Iraq. And what that meant is that we knew everything that became so obvious by the summer after the invasion. And the president made a decision essentially to ignore that intelligence…

NPR: We have called key players in Ron Suskind’s account…George Tenet says the Iraqi failed to persuade, and a White House spokesman adds that any information the Iraqi may have provided was, quote, “immaterial.”

Further corroboration appears in a November, 2003 New York Times story by James Risen. Risen’s article is about last-minute attempts by Iraq to avert war, using a Lebanese-American intermediary named Imad Hage who knew Richard Perle:

A week [after February, 2003 meetings in Beirut with the Iraqi Intelligence Service’s chief of foreign operations], Mr. Hage said, he agreed to hold further meetings in Baghdad. When he arrived, he was driven to a large, well-guarded compound, where he was met by a gray-haired man in a military uniform. It was Tahir Jalil Habbush, the director of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, who is No. 16 on the United States list of most wanted Iraqi leaders. Mr. Hage said Mr. Habbush asked him if it was true that he knew Mr. Perle. “Have you met him?”

Mr. Hage said Mr. Habbush began to vent his frustration over what the Americans really wanted. He said that to demonstrate the Iraqis’ willingness to help fight terrorism, Mr. Habbush offered to hand over Abdul Rahman Yasin, who has been indicted in United States in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Mr. Yasin fled to Iraq after the bombing, and the United States put up a $25 million reward for his capture.

Mr. Hage said Mr. Habbush offered to turn him over to Mr. Hage, but Mr. Hage said he would pass on the message that Mr. Yasin was available.

Mr. Hage said Mr. Habbush also insisted that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and added, “Let your friends send in people and we will open everything to them.”

Mr. Hage said he asked Mr. Habbush, “Why don’t you tell this to the Bush administration?” He said Mr. Habbush replied cryptically, “We have talks with people.”

Mr. Hage said he later learned that one contact was in Rome between the C.I.A. and representatives of the Iraqi intelligence service. American officials confirm that the meeting took place, but say that the Iraqi representative was not a current intelligence official and that the meeting was not productive.

In addition, there was an attempt to set up a meeting in Morocco between Mr. Habbush and United States officials, but it never took place, according to American officials.

This can be added onto the pile:

• The CIA sent thirty relatives of Iraqi scientists to Iraq to ask them what WMD Iraq had, and they uniformly reported it had nothing.
• Iraq’s foreign minister Nouri Sabri secretly told the US in 2002 that Iraq had no active WMD programs.
• Alan Foley, the head of the CIA’s Weapons Intelligence Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center, told an acquaintance just before the war that he expected we would find “Not much, if anything.”