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Breaking Ranks
Retired Army Col. Larry Wilkerson with some of his charges in Macfarland Middle School's Colin L. Powell Leadership Club, the last remnant of his long friendship with Powell.
(Lois Raimondo -- The Washington Post)
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Powell's office on the State Department's sixth floor had a private door that led directly to Wilkerson's office. One particular visit burns brightly in Wilkerson's memory: It was November 2002, after the U.N. Security Council voted 15-0 to order Iraq to admit weapons inspectors, and Powell was in a contemplative mood.
"He walked into my office, and he said to me, musing and looking out across the greenery there toward National Airport -- I wrote it down on my calendar, that's the reason I know what he said -- 'I wonder what will happen if we put half a million troops on the ground, and scour Iraq from one corner to the other, and find no weapons of mass destruction?' And he left that rhetorical question hanging in the air as he went back into his office."
Bad Information
Wilkerson, as it turned out, became the point man for making the case for preemptive war against Hussein. He put together the task force that, during a week at CIA headquarters, vetted all the intelligence reports used for Powell's famous pro-war presentation in February 2003 to the Security Council, where he brandished a vial of fake anthrax, played excerpts of intercepted Iraqi military chatter, and warned of mobile bioweapon "factories" and other doomsday machines, none of which actually existed.
How did it happen?
"Larry thought they had cleaned out the obvious garbage, but it turned out there was more," says James A. Kelly, a former assistant secretary of state who's known Wilkerson for 20 years. "Larry felt that he let down the secretary, but the job was so big in cleaning out the misinformation."
Wilkerson won't say outright that he and Powell were deliberately snowed by intelligence reports tailored to fit a political push for war, but he has edged closer to that view, noting, "I've begun to wonder." It turns out that the administration relied on fabricators' claims about Hussein's illusory WMD programs and, in one case, an al Qaeda suspect whom the CIA turned over to alleged torturers in Egypt.
"I kick myself in the ass," Wilkerson says. "How did we ever get to that place?"
The speech tarnished Powell's gold-plated reputation, but he has never publicly pointed a finger at then-CIA Director George Tenet or the White House.
"Nothing was spun to me," Powell told David Frost in a BBC television interview last month. "What really upset me more than anything else was that there were people in the intelligence community that had doubts about some of this sourcing, but those doubts never surfaced up to us."
Why didn't the doubts reach Powell? Perhaps because then he wouldn't have given the speech at all?
"That's right," Wilkerson says, shooting a hard, solemn stare across the restaurant table. "That's right."
He also says, "I am prepared to entertain the idea that they used him."
