Friday, September 19, 2008

NYT: Reign of Counterterror

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Reign of Counterterror

By MICHAEL CROWLEY

Published: September 12, 2008

"How real is this nuclear terrorism thing?" That is the oddly glib question, according to a top American intelligence official, posed by George W. Bush during a 2006 White House briefing. That the president was still unsure of its answer, fully five years after Sept. 11, is more than a little unsettling.

Patrick Thomas

That's because, in Ron Suskind's account, the threat is very real, but our understanding of it is dangerously limited. "The Way of the World" has commanded headlines with its explosive (and controversial) charges of extreme Bush administration malfeasance — including still more misuse of prewar intelligence and an alleged forgery scheme that Suskind calls possible grounds for impeachment. But these are increasingly matters for the historical record. At the heart of Suskind's story is a potentially existential threat to the United States in the here and now. It is "what may be humanity's last great race," as he puts it — one between civilized governments and radical terrorists, with the prize being a mushroom cloud in an American city, or its merciful absence.

Suskind approaches this terrible theme in distinctly human terms. The rare writer who combines excellent reporting with a knack for novelistic writing about real people, he skillfully traces several interwoven stories of cultural clashes and cross-pollination, all of them pursuing the question of whether America and the Muslim world can ever look past their differences and find understanding.

Toward that end, we follow the story of a troubled Afghan exchange student in Colorado who reels at the sight of buxom cheerleaders and people cohabiting with dogs, which he was raised to consider vermin. We meet an idealistic Pakistani émigré, living in Washington, whose admiration for America is cruelly tested after a misunderstanding involving the presidential motorcade leads to his bruising detention and a sneering interrogation by the Secret Service. There is the dogged American lawyer who represents a Libyan imprisoned at Guantánamo on the basis of evidence first dismissed as feeble and then reclassified, without explanation, as grounds for confinement. And we follow Benazir Bhutto through the final months leading to her assassination in December, as she pleads in vain with the Bush administration to provide her with more support in her fight for democracy in Pakistan.

Each story speaks to the crosswinds of culture and politics that will determine the course of history and the role of America in the world. But none give the book quite as much urgency as Suskind's portrait of Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former C.I.A. case officer and senior Department of Energy official who monitors the global black market in nuclear materials that terrorists might use to fashion a crude device capable of killing tens of thousands. Mowatt-Larssen's tale of government inaction on this score is nothing short of chilling. He's the one who recounts Bush's clueless question about "this nuclear terrorism thing," as well as another White House meeting so unproductive that this grizzled spook left in a state of nausea.

Having concluded that only a shock to the national psyche can force real action, Mowatt-Larssen dreams up a plan befitting a Tom Clancy novel: the "Armageddon Test," a scheme to dispatch undercover teams around the world to purchase enough black-market nuclear material for a working bomb. The teams would then smuggle their terrible bounty onto American soil and unveil it, thereby demonstrating just how real the threat is. (The project never gets off the ground, thanks in part to bureaucratic inertia that leads Mowatt-Larssen to contemplate outsourcing the mission to private contractors.)

Much like Suskind's previous books about the Bush administration, "The Price of Loyalty" and "The One Percent Doctrine," "The Way of the World," though occasionally breathless, is a reportorial feat — particularly when it comes to chronicling the internal machinations of the administration's national security team. For example, Suskind relates how, in the summer of 2006, American officials exposed a terrorist cell apparently plotting to blow up several airliners in midflight. His account suggests that Bush's action was motivated less by fear of an imminent attack (British officials, who opposed the arrests, argued that the plot was far from complete) than by a desire to make headlines before the midterm elections.

More startling are Suskind's revelations about the Iraq war and the handling of prewar intelligence regarding weapons of mass destruction. In one instance, Suskind says that denials by the foreign minister of Iraq, Naji Sabri, that his country possessed W.M.D. were simply rewritten — "almost certainly altered under pressure from Washington," Suskind writes — into a false assertion that Sabri had substantiated suspicions about active Iraqi biological and nuclear programs.

Even more disturbing is the story of a former Iraqi intelligence chief named Tahir Jalil Habbush. Suskind describes in gripping detail secret meetings between Habbush and British intelligence in January and February of 2003. Habbush insisted that Saddam Hussein had abandoned his weapons programs but would not publicly admit it, so as to maintain a facade of deterrence against regional rivals like Iran. Not only did the White House dismiss Habbush's statements, Suskind writes, but an irritated Bush even asked whether the Iraqi could be asked for "something we can use to help us make our case." A subsequent $5 million C.I.A. payment to Habbush, disclosed by Suskind, has the smell of hush money.

Then comes what may be the ultimate bombshell: that the White House instructed the C.I.A. to forge a letter, backdated to July 2001, stating that the 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta had trained in Iraq and, furthermore, that Iraq had received suspicious shipments (presumably of yellowcake) from Niger with Al Qaeda's help. The letter was to be written and signed by Habbush on Iraqi government stationery and addressed to Hussein himself. This preposterously convenient summary of what a perfect case for war might look like almost resembled some wry gag from The Onion. But at the end of 2003 the letter did, in fact, turn up in a British newspaper, before seeping into the American media.

Suskind does not establish who dreamed up this pernicious document. But he says one of his sources, a former senior C.I.A. operative named Robert Richer, recalls being ordered directly by George Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, to have Habbush transcribe it himself from a draft produced by the White House. Richer even remembers "the creamy White House stationery on which the assignment was written," as Suskind puts it. Since the book's release, however, Tenet, Richer himself and another key source have adamantly denied that such a thing occurred. (Tenet also denies that Habbush's prewar claims were muffled.)

Even in the context of the past seven years, the stupid brazenness of a forged letter drafted on White House stationery does test credulity. But any claims made by Suskind, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and a Pulitzer Prize winner, should not be casually dismissed. That no credible challenges have been made to numerous other scoops in his book suggests an attempted covering of exposed derrières. Still, his release of partial transcripts from recorded interviews with Richer has not definitively affirmed his reporting.

Suskind's point isn't about proving liability. Rather, the Habbush episodes, if accurate, illustrate a creeping amorality in the way America has managed its war on terror. As our moral standing suffers, so does our ability to shame other nations into cracking down on their nuclear black markets. And so does our battle for the hearts and minds of people like the Afghan exchange student, the Pakistani émigré, the possibly innocent Guantánamo detainee and the followers of Benazir Bhutto. Their conclusions about America may determine whether Rolf Mowatt-Larssen will have the pleasure of being remembered as a Chicken Little, or will experience the horror of becoming a prophet of atomic disaster.

Michael Crowley is a senior editor at The New Republic.