Falling on His Sword

They settled into a routine over the next few days. The CIA turned over the office suite of the National Intelligence Council -- the internal organization that coordinated with other members of the intelligence community to write National Intelligence Estimates -- to Wilkerson and the others engaged in the nitty-gritty of composing the speech and providing material to the graphic designers lodged in the agency's basement. At around 5 p.m., the writing and research team would move to Tenet's conference room with senior officials, eventually including Rice and Armitage, to spend hours going over the new text and verifying the sourcing for Powell.

Powell insisted that they eliminate any intelligence that had come from Ahmed Chalabi, an Iraqi exile favored by the Pentagon and the vice president's office, but widely mistrusted as a charlatan within the State Department. Powell was told by the CIA that evidence that Hussein had built mobile laboratories to conceal his biological weapons programs -- one of the most damning charges -- had been corroborated by four separate sources, including an Iraqi chemical engineer, a civil engineer and an Iraqi military defector. It was, Tenet said, "totally reliable information."

They argued over how to interpret intercepted communications about Iraq's weapons between Iraqi military officers. None seemed definitive, and Wilkerson was worried that they might not mean what the analysts said they meant. But amid the scant information the CIA officials were willing to declassify for public consumption, they said this was the best they had.

The team examined satellite imagery said to reveal prohibited items. Powell was shown, and rejected, a grainy picture of what analysts said was an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) site near Basra. It was impossible to tell where it was or even what it was, he argued. Instead, he approved a U.N. photograph of a generic Iraqi UAV, taken years earlier, to illustrate charges that Hussein was developing drones that could spray deadly weapons of mass destruction on population centers.

CIA analysts showed the team additional photographs they said conclusively revealed chemical weapons production and storage facilities, but then insisted that the pictures were too sensitive to be used in a public presentation. Those they were willing to release often appeared -- at least to the uninitiated in the room -- to illustrate nothing more than trucks parked beside buildings. "Don't you have a picture of chemical weapons canisters being moved around?" Boucher later recalled asking Tenet. "Something we can point to and say: 'That's a chemical weapon.' " Tenet replied that no country had left prohibited weapons "out on the lawn" since the Cuban missile crisis. "They know we're looking at them. So we have to go with other things that tell us what they're doing."

They spent hours discussing the aluminum tubes Hussein had tried to import. The Energy and State departments continued to disagree with the CIA's assessment that the tubes were designed for nuclear enrichment. McLaughlin, who had brought one of the intercepted tubes to the table and rolled it back and forth as they argued, insisted that the CIA analysis was correct. The agency, Powell later recalled, "pulled in their experts and swore on a stack of Bibles that they'd done every analysis imaginable, and [the tubes] simply were not for rockets, but for [uranium] centrifuges." The tubes stayed in the speech, although with a brief mention of the disagreement among U.S. government agencies as to their purpose. (U.S. investigators in Iraq after the war later concluded they were meant for rockets.)

Bush had referred in his State of the Union address to Iraqi efforts to obtain uranium from Africa -- the same information the CIA had successfully argued should be excised from a speech he gave the previous October because of questionable sources. No one suggested that it be included in Powell's presentation.

The White House document detailing Hussein's ties to terrorism was, if anything, even more problematic than the portion on weapons of mass destruction.

Powell retreated with Tenet to the director's private office to talk through "what we really know" about the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda. Powell was shown the transcript of an interrogation of a captured Osama bin Laden aide who swore that al-Qaeda operatives had received biological and chemical weapons training from Iraq, and the charge became a lengthy portion of the speech. (A year after the invasion, the agency acknowledged that the information had come from a single source who had been branded a liar by U.S. intelligence officials long before Powell's presentation.)

Tempers began to fray as the sessions continued into the weekend. Tenet and McLaughlin became irritated with Hadley, who kept pressing to reinsert jettisoned White House language and information. Powell exploded at McLaughlin, who supplied tortured, five-minute answers to seemingly simple questions. Increasingly, the secretary looked to Tenet for reassurance. "George would give the kind of answers the secretary liked," Wilkerson recalled. "Whether you liked that 'slam-dunk' language or not, George, to his credit, would say, 'Absolutely, Mr. Secretary, I stand by that.' "

Powell later recalled that most of their time was spent "trimming the garbage" of the White House's overwrought verbiage and uncorroborated specifics from the speech. Once that was done, Wilkerson concluded long afterward, "what we were all involved in -- groupthink isn't the right word -- it was a process of putting the data to points in the speech rather than challenging the data itself." As they probed for proof of Hussein's lies, no one thought of looking for evidence that might have raised questions about their assumptions that the weapons existed.

WHEN HE ARRIVED IN NEW YORK ON MONDAY AFTERNOON, Powell was as nervous as Wilkerson had ever seen him. He was worried that the language in the speech was still too methodical and technical to win over an audience. Powell's best performances were modeled on what he had learned as a young instructor at Fort Benning and later at the Pentagon: Use a map or some slides, a rough outline or a few key phrases, and then speak naturally. He always knew his material cold, but it was technique that clinched a sale. This time, however, each sentence had been carefully crafted and debated ad nauseam, and he was going to have to read directly from the text.

On Tuesday night, the team had a final, full-dress rehearsal. The cafeteria on the top floor of the U.S. Mission to the United Nations had been reconfigured into a mock-up of the Security Council chamber. Powell used a stopwatch to check his timing, clicking it off every time someone interrupted with a question or comment. The speech was 75 minutes long.

When he finished, the tension of the last several days seemed to dissipate like the air escaping a balloon, leaving him calm and tired. He believed he had done everything he could do. Departing for his room at the Waldorf, where he hoped to get a good night's sleep, he reminded Tenet that "you're going to be there with me tomorrow." He expected the CIA director to sit in full view of the television cameras, just behind him at the Security Council table. Tenet replied, only half-jokingly, that he was the one who would have to face the intelligence committees in Congress if there were any mistakes. Powell told his executive assistant, Craig Kelly, and Boucher to make sure that Tenet was waiting in the side room they would pass through on their way into the Security Council chamber the next morning. Later, he changed his mind and called Tenet to tell him he would swing by the CIA director's hotel and pick him up on the way to the United Nations, just to make sure there were no glitches.

On Wednesday, February 5, Powell entered the chamber just before 10:30 a.m., smiling and stopping to shake hands as he made his way across the floor. With war hanging in the balance, and the power and prestige of the United States on full display, it was a moment of high drama that owed as much to the player as to the play. A nationwide poll released just that morning had found that "when it comes to U.S. policy toward Iraq," Americans trusted Powell more than Bush by 63 to 24 percent.

"I cannot tell you everything that we know," he began after a brief introduction. "But what I can share with you, when combined with what all of us have learned over the years, is deeply troubling." The facts and Iraq's behavior "demonstrate that Saddam Hussein and his regime have made no effort -- no effort -- to disarm as required by the international community."

"My colleagues," Powell said, "every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."

The next day, opinion polls indicated that national opinion had shifted literally overnight; most Americans surveyed said they believed an invasion was justified to protect the nation. Those closest to Powell were relieved, but worried about both him and the nation. His wife, Alma, had a sense of foreboding; her husband, she thought, was being used by the White House. Powell's daughter Linda, who had listened to the speech on the radio, had found his performance unsettling. His voice was strained, she thought, as if he were trying to inject passion into the dry words through the sheer force of his will.

Wilkerson, who had left the United Nations immediately after the speech and returned to his hotel room to fall into a deep sleep, awoke depressed. Later, when it became clear that much of the speech on which he had worked so hard was based on lies, he would come to think of that week as "the lowest moment of my life." Back in Washington, he ordered special plaques with Powell's signature made up for the State Department aides who had worked so hard to make the presentation happen.

When they were handed out, Powell asked Wilkerson why he hadn't ordered one for himself. Wilkerson replied that he didn't want one.

AS 2004 BEGAN, U.S. TROOPS WERE HEADED TOWARD A SECOND YEAR IN THE IRAQI QUAGMIRE. No weapons of mass destruction had yet been found, and each day's news brought fresh indications that the administration had exaggerated its case against Hussein. Powell's own prominent role came under increasing question. It was now clear that "a lot of probables, a lot of maybes" had been left out of the assessment of Iraq's capabilities, a reporter confronted him. Given a second chance, would he have "rephrased" his U.N. speech?

"No," Powell replied firmly. "I knew exactly the circumstances under which I was presenting that speech . . . The whole world would be watching, and there would be those who would applaud every word, and there would be those who were going to be skeptical of every word." Whatever doubts were now being raised, he said, the basic conclusions had been solid. "I am confident of what I presented last year. The intelligence community is confident of the material they gave me; I was representing them . . . they stand behind it."

But on Friday, January 23, the CIA announced without explanation that David Kay, the head of its Iraq Survey Group hunting for weapons of mass destruction, was being replaced. Later that day, Kay told reporters he doubted the weapons existed. When Congress demanded answers, Kay said the same thing.

As Powell flew the next day to attend a presidential inauguration in the Republic of Georgia, journalists aboard his plane asked him to reconcile his U.N. speech with Kay's conclusions. "You said a year ago that you thought there was between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons [in Iraq]," one reporter said. "Who's right?"

"I think the answer to the question is I don't know yet," Powell replied.

"What is the open question is: how many stocks they had, if any? And if they had any, where did they go? And if they didn't have any, then why wasn't that known beforehand?"

Powell thought there was no sense denying the obvious questions Kay had raised. But it was the first doubt that any senior administration official had publicly expressed about the central justification for the war. The story made headlines around the world, and an agitated Condoleezza Rice called him the next morning in Georgia. Powell was not surprised; it was not the first time that the White House had blown up at him over what he considered honest comment. Rice, he later recalled, was usually the one to make the call. "She'd say, 'Oh, we've got a problem, what are we going to do about this? How are we going to fix this?' "

On this issue, he thought, there was little to be done. "The fact of the matter is, you can't ignore the possibility, since the guy we sent there for eight months as our guy says there's nothing there," he later recalled telling Rice with exasperation. "So, to say there's got to be something there when he, who has been there for eight months, says there's nothing there . . . You can't do that. You've got to at least accept the possibility."

The White House, he advised, should "just be quiet" for now.

ON HIS RETURN, POWELL SPENT THE WEEKEND carefully reading Kay's congressional testimony, highlighting portions with a yellow marker and scribbling notes in the margins. With the first anniversary of his U.N. speech just days away, the Sunday newspapers and television talk shows were filled with comparisons between the charges he had made and Kay's conclusions.

On Monday, February 2, he arrived for an interview at The Washington Post carrying a blue folder with the marked-up testimony inside. He was "absolutely convinced" that the invasion had been the right thing to do, Powell emphatically told the two dozen reporters and editors crowded around a conference table in the newspaper's eighth-floor boardroom.

Would he still have "recommended the invasion" if Tenet had told him a year before "that there are no stockpiles?" one reporter asked.

"I don't know, because it was the stockpiles that presented the final little piece that made it more of a real and present danger and threat to the region and to the world," Powell replied. But there was no point discussing hypotheticals, he said, because "the fact of the matter" was that the CIA, as well as intelligence agencies in Britain and elsewhere, had "suggested the stockpiles were there."

But what if he had known they weren't there? the reporter pressed.

"The absence of a stockpile changes the political calculus," Powell acknowledged. "It changes the answer you get with the little formula I laid out."

To a White House already reeling from the one-two punch of Kay's conclusions and Powell's comments en route to Georgia, it was another worrisome example of the secretary of state's unwillingness to stay "on message." When his remarks appeared in The Post the next morning, "I think the whole White House operation was mad . . . the NSC, the president -- everybody was annoyed," Powell recalled. "White Houses do not respond well to immediate problems in the morning . . . all the white corpuscles race to the source of the infection, so all the white corpuscles raced to me."

After Rice's inevitable irate telephone call, presidential aides quickly began contacting the media to counteract the secretary's remarks. Annoyed but not surprised, Powell issued a White House-requested "clarification" insisting that Hussein had had the "capability and intent" to produce the weapons even if none had yet been found. Bush, he repeated, had been right to invade.

Still mulling over the situation a week later with a visitor in his dimly lit office, he criticized a persistent White House machismo that took aim at "anything . . . that suggests any weakness in the [administration's] position," regardless of common sense. That, and what he saw as a never-ending effort to humble him personally.

"There are people who would like to take me down," he said, jerking his thumb in the direction of the White House. "It's been the case since I was appointed. By take down, I mean 'keep him in his place'. . . And there are those who, whether it was me or anyone else, just love somebody getting in trouble, because it's usually to the detriment of the person getting in trouble and to the advantage of someone else."

The episode reinforced his already deep-seated disdain for politics and its practitioners. Political thought and decision-making were often polluted by ideology and the exigencies of the election cycle; soldiers breathed a purer, more rational air. "I was not trained as a politician or a think tank guy or anything else," Powell insisted. "I was trained to consider all possibilities."

"I mean, if you're attacking and suddenly you get attacked from the flank," he continued, using his hands to illustrate a military maneuver, "you don't say, 'I'm going to keep attacking straight ahead [and] ignore this new threat coming at my flank.' " He had been asked whether different information would have changed his assessment of the Iraq situation, and "all of my instincts and all of my background and training at that point said the answer to the question is, 'I'd have to reconsider.' "

He shrugged and brought his hands to rest. "But that's the way it goes."

Powell's irritation at the White House was coupled with a growing anger at the CIA. Right or wrong, at least Bush had willingly shouldered the ultimate responsibility for the decision to go to war. Powell felt he had done his own duty by privately voicing caution even as he gave the president his full support. But it was increasingly apparent that the intelligence community had been careless with the truth and hence with Powell's most precious commodity -- his credibility with the American people.

For a week after Kay's report, the CIA had continued publicly to stand by its prewar weapons assessment. But in a hastily arranged speech at Georgetown University on February 5, Tenet finally admitted the possibility of error. His "provisional bottom line," he said, was that the intelligence community had been "generally on target" in its warnings that Hussein was developing long-range missiles. But the CIA "may have overestimated the progress Hussein was making" on nuclear weapons.

As for biological weapons stockpiles and mobile laboratories, he said, "we are finding discrepancies in some claims made by human sources" to whom the agency "lacked direct access." The CIA, Tenet said, "did not ourselves penetrate the inner sanctum" of Hussein's programs but had "access to emigres and defectors" along with high-level information from "a trusted foreign partner." They were now in the process of "evaluating" questions such as, "Did we clearly tell policymakers what we knew, what we didn't know, what was not clear, and identify the gaps in our knowledge?"

Although Powell had been advised in recent months of problems with some of the intelligence sourcing, Tenet's speech was "the first time I heard that the CIA was no longer sticking behind its story" in public, he later recalled. He had been given no advance copy of the CIA director's remarks and listened in his office to a broadcast of Tenet's acknowledgment of "discrepancies" and uncertainties.

Powell stared silently at Wilkerson after Tenet finished speaking. "But the question is," Wilkerson said, reaching for a joke, "are you still friends?"

"I don't think so," Powell replied.

As the evidence continued to unravel, some in the media suggested that Powell should apologize publicly for peddling false information that had pushed the nation toward war. "Is everyone else going to apologize?" he railed within the four walls of his office. "It's not [just] me getting had. I'm not the only one who was using that intelligence . . . they all stood up in the Senate. The president stood up on this material. [British Prime Minister] Tony Blair stood up on this material . . . The whole global intelligence community bears responsibility."

But there was no denying that he had been the most visible and effective salesman. He already knew that the label would follow him around forever. "I'm the guy who will always be known as the 'Powell Briefing' . . . I'm not being defensive, because I did it. But Powell wasn't the only one."

PRESENTATION WAS NEARLY AS IMPORTANT TO POWELL AS SUBSTANCE, and after his inelegant dismissal as secretary of state, he wanted at least to control the way his departure was announced. After submitting his letter on Friday, he spent the weekend putting together a plan: He would inform his inner-office staff at exactly 8:20 a.m. the following Monday, November 15. He would tell his senior aides at their regular 8:30 staff meeting. At 10:15, he would send an e-mail to his friends and extended family. He called Card and told him he expected the White House would then publicly announce his resignation.

At midmorning Monday, the White House released five separate statements under Bush's name, reporting the resignations of the secretaries of agriculture, energy, education and state, and the head of the Republican National Committee. Each statement was three paragraphs long and titled "President Thanks [official's name]." When White House spokesman Scott McClellan briefed the media shortly after noon, all but one of the resignation questions were about Powell. Had Bush tried to persuade him to stay? Had Powell offered? If so, had the president turned him down? McClellan avoided a direct answer. "I think you saw from Secretary Powell's letter that this is a discussion that they've had for some months now, or over recent months at least . . . And Secretary Powell made a decision for his own reasons that this was now the time to leave."

The next morning, Bush nominated Rice as his new secretary of state.

Powell saw Bush regularly over the next two months, passing through the Oval Office for routine meetings that took place as if nothing had transpired. Eventually, the White House contacted his office to schedule what it described as a "farewell call" with the president. Such calls were being arranged for each departing Cabinet secretary.

When Powell saw the January 13 appointment on his calendar, his staff told him they assumed it was a goodbye photo opportunity with Bush. They suggested that perhaps he should bring his family.

"We've got a houseful of pictures," Powell replied dryly. Was he supposed to talk to the president? Or was the president supposed to talk to him?

"Am I supposed to say: 'This is what I think?' Or what?"

He didn't have to say anything, he was told. It was just a "farewell call."

As the meeting approached, the White House -- which had scheduled it in the first place -- inexplicably called the State Department to ask for "talking points" that aides could use to brief the president.

The appointed time found Powell already in the Oval Office for a routine meeting; when it concluded, he lingered as the others left. As Powell later remembered it, Bush seemed puzzled and called after his departing chief of staff, "Where you going, Andy?"

"Mr. President, I think this is supposed to be our farewell call," Powell prompted.

"Is that why Condi ain't here?" he recalled the president asking.

That was probably the reason, Powell replied.

Card walked back inside, and the three men sat down. Powell had already decided to use the opportunity -- likely his last as secretary of state -- to unload.

The war in Iraq was going south, he said after a few moments of small talk, and the president had little time left to turn it around. The administration's hope was that the upcoming election there would change the dynamics on the ground, and the Iraqi people would finally be ready and able to begin standing up to the insurgents on their own.

But the administration, he pointed out, had entertained such hopes before over the past two years -- when it had set up a new legal framework for Iraq, when it had first turned a modicum of government power over to handpicked Iraqis and when ousted dictator Saddam Hussein had been captured -- and those hopes had been dashed every time. There would be a window of about two months after the election "to start to see progress," he told Bush. "If by the first of April this insurgency is not starting to ameliorate in some way, then I think you really have a problem."

Elections, and talking about democracy, were unlikely to stop the insurgency, he said. Only the fledgling Iraqi army could do that, and it was unclear whether it would ever succeed. Its competence was not just a matter of training, Powell said; it was a question of whether the troops believed in what they were fighting for.

Powell warned about serious internal problems in Bush's own administration, saying that the power he had given the Pentagon to meddle in diplomacy on issues as widespread as North Korea, Iraq and the Arab-Israeli conflict, along with poisoned personal relations between his State and Defense departments, were seriously undermining the president's diplomacy. Bush dismissed his concern. It wasn't any worse, he said, than the legendary battles between State and Defense during the Reagan administration.

The session ended with a cordial handshake, and the secretary returned to the State Department. "That was really strange," he reported to Wilkerson. "The president didn't know why I was there."

Karen DeYoung is an associate editor of The Post. This article is excerpted from Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell, being published October 10 by Knopf. She will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at noon at washingtonpost.com/liveonline.