Only Nixon could go to China. And maybe only Colin Powell can persuade the world of the wisdom of invading Iraq. It sometimes takes a hawk to make peace, and a dove to deliver the best case for war. The secretary of state, long seen as the Bush administration’s house moderate, will offer the most compelling indictment yet against Saddam Hussein before the U.N. Security Council this week, in what could be the most dramatic moment of Powell’s tenure.
Recognizing the stakes, the secretary is going in armed–at his own insistence–with new evidence that includes super-secret intercepts of conversations showing clear deception by Iraqi officials, NEWSWEEK has learned. One intelligence official said it amounts to the most significant release of such sensitive information since Ronald Reagan revealed intercepts linking Libyan leader Muammar Kaddafi to the 1986 La Belle disco bombing in West Berlin.
The just-declassified transcripts are the centerpiece of a U.S. effort to put before the court of world opinion a compelling “narrative” of Saddam’s obstruction of inspectors, attempts to buy weapons materials and links to terrorists. These overheard conversations will demonstrate that Iraqi officials have repeatedly lied to the United Nations, plotted among themselves about how to conceal weapons material and appeared to boast afterward at their success in doing so, intelligence officials said. “They’re saying things like, ‘Move that,’ ‘Don’t be reporting that’ and ‘Ha! Can you believe they missed that’,” one official said. “It’s that kind of stuff.”
Powell’s fresh intel comes courtesy of the shadowy National Security Agency, which uses a vast network of satellites, surveillance planes and other devices to monitor phones, radio transmissions and other communications around the world. Such “signals intelligence” is almost never disclosed because it can tip off enemies to specific circuits and frequencies that the United States is monitoring.
The decision to declassify it came only after an intense debate inside the administration, which realized it needed far more hard information to win over Security Council members. That was a point driven home last week even by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Bush’s most stalwart ally, who pressed for a second U.N. resolution authorizing war (Bush resisted). The White House is “extraordinarily interested in seeing that there isn’t another speed bump at the Security Council,” says one U.S. official privy to the discussions between Powell and his policy-planning chief Richard Haass, who first proposed holding the special Security Council session on Feb. 5. Bush’s aides say the president decided, just a few days before last week’s State of the Union address, that Powell should go to the United Nations. Indeed, perhaps the surest sign to date that Bush intends to attack Iraq is that his administration agreed to expose its surveillance methods to the Iraqis by declassifying the NSA intercepts, one intelligence analyst said.
Bush officials insist the evidence will nail down a nearly open-and-shut case showing “an active pattern of defiance” by Saddam in direct violation of U.N. Resolution 1441, which requires Iraq to fully cooperate in declaring and relinquishing its weapons of mass destruction. “Hold on to your hat. We’ve got it,” said one U.S. intelligence official familiar with the NSA data. Powell is also expected to cite evidence that Iraq has mobile bioweapons labs and small unmanned vehicles that could be used for such purposes, as well as allegations by defectors that Iraqis have talked about their intentions to use dangerous substances such as ricin, biotoxins and anthrax. And he will point to as many as 25,000 liters of anthrax that, by some calculations, may remain unaccounted for from gulf war days. What will it add up to? One Bush official says: “While they don’t want the public to expect an Adlai Stevenson moment”–referring to the much-cited presentation of photos during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis–“they would be very happy if it turns out to be one.”
But as America heads toward what looks like a countdown to war in March, Powell still has his work cut out for him. He needs to win over skeptics like France, Russia and China, each of which wields a Security Council veto and may challenge even the NSA intercepts. U.S. officials admit it is not entirely clear what the Iraqis are referring to in some of the conversations: part of the material being concealed may be precursors to building weapons, or even documents and computer disks, rather than actual chemical or biological weapons. The transcripts show “deception,” said another official briefed on the evidence. “But does that make the case that you have to go to war?” Some intelligence officials believe, in fact, that much of what Saddam may be trying to conceal these days are “cookbooks” from his weapons of mass destruction programs: blueprints and technical data. An expert on Iraq’s deception program says some of the evidence, including vehicles running out back with documents when the inspectors come in the front, “is stuff about Saddam Hussein’s [personal] security.”
Above all, the administration needs to counter the widespread belief that its case, at best, has been mainly circumstantial. And as officials scrambled to pull Powell’s case together, the effort touched off a fight inside the intelligence community last week, NEWSWEEK has learned. The CIA said it could not confirm some of the material that the most hawkish Pentagon officials insisted would be killer points for Powell’s presentation. (Much of it is provided by Iraqi defectors the Pentagon has decided to adopt, but who are considered unreliable by intelligence professionals.)
The Bush team knows it needs to speak with one voice, not least because it is suffering from a credibility gap on Iraq. Last fall senior officials often asserted that, if America didn’t take on Saddam, “the smoking gun” might be a “mushroom cloud.” In recent months, however, the administration has drastically played down nuclear weapons as a threat, and chief U.N. nuclear inspector Mohamed El Baradei said last week he had found “no evidence that Iraq has revived its nuclear weapons program.” Baradei and U.S. officials disagree over the significance of one key piece of information: an order of intercepted aluminum tubes discovered last year. The Bush team believes they are intended for uranium enrichment, but Baradei says they fit the exact specs of conventional rocket launchers, which Iraq is permitted to possess. Some U.S. officials now contend that Iraq purchased the tubes at “50 times or more the cost of a tube for a rocket launcher,” a level of quality required for a nuclear program. But Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, appearing before a Senate committee last week, acknowledged there is a genuine difference of opinion about the purpose of the tubes, saying, “perhaps we miscalculated.”
Powell may also have a tough time making the case that Iraq represents an imminent danger, requiring a decision to go to war within weeks, as Bush has promised. That’s especially true as another member of the Bush Axis of Evil–North Korea–begins to look more worrisome, some national-security experts say. North Korea may recently have been moving fuel rods to begin making plutonium bombs, officials said last week. Yet some Bush hawks, even as they attempted again to play down North Korea, said the dangerous escalation by its leader, Kim Jong Il, only makes war with Iraq more certain. “We’ve got to do Iraq,” said one, “because if we don’t, we’re in the situation we’re in with North Korea”–in other words, too late to deter proliferation.
Then there’s the case linking Iraq to Al Qaeda and its terror campaign, which may be the most problematic. Vice President Cheney and others, for example, once made much of a supposed meeting in Prague between hijacker Muhammad Atta and an Iraqi official. But Bush, asked Friday about a 9-11 connection to Saddam, admitted, “I cannot make that claim.” From terrorist detainees captured in Afghanistan and Pakistan, U.S. officials say they have reports of the Iraqi regime’s training Qaeda terrorists before and after the 9-11 attacks. “We are talking about channels, contacts, communications,” says one senior administration official. “We are not talking 9-11 or joint operational planning.”
Yet the alleged Qaeda leader who may be exhibit A in the administration’s case linking Saddam to the terror group seems to get more help from Iran than from Iraq, some intelligence officials tell NEWSWEEK. The suspect, Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, is connected to the alleged activities of an Islamist rebel group in northern Iraq called Ansar al-Islam. Last summer, U.S. intelligence sources say, Zarqawi traveled to Baghdad, where a leg injured in Afghan fighting was amputated and he was fitted with a prosthesis. But according to German police documents obtained by NEWSWEEK, Zarqawi in the past has worked out of Afghanistan and more recently has been based in Iran. Until late last week, there were bitter fights within the administration over these links.
Still, some Iraq experts say the fact that all the evidence hasn’t panned out is beside the point. Saddam has clearly shown he’s trying to build WMD. “My nostrils are choked by a dozen years of smoking guns,” says Terry Taylor, a former U.N. inspector in Iraq. “There’s a mountain of evidence.” The real test will be making the political, not the legal, case to the United Nations, he says. Or as one administration official puts it: “It’s hard to convince people who don’t want to be convinced.”
Powell, knowing his personal prestige is on the line (as he persuaded Bush to go to the United Nations to begin with), is making sure he comes armed with the best of the evidence. Associates say the secretary is confident, telling one dinner partner recently that “we have a stronger case than many people realize.” Now is his moment to make it.
