Shadow Warriors The Astonishing Story of Who Is Really Subverting America's War on Terror

Chapter ONE A Battle Royal Frank Ricciardone was a career diplomat, but he had no illusions to whom he owed his allegiance. Two years earlier, in 1999, he had been appointed as the secretary of state's special coordinator for the transition of Iraq. It was a new position, with no real precedent in U.S. history. Although Ricciardone owed his title to the Iraq Liberation Act (ILA), an overwhelmingly bipartisan piece of legislation passed by Congress in 1998, he owed his job to President Bill Clinton's secretary of state, Madeleine Albright. Now, in January 2001, he began to ingratiate himself with his new political masters at the Bush White House and the State Department over long lunches and private meetings. An Arabist by training (I first met Ricciardone in Jordan, where he was posted in the early 1990s), he overwhelmed them with his detailed knowledge of Iraq and the Iraqi opposition. "I was sitting at the Turkish border counting refugees," he said, referring to a period the Republicans called "the debacle." This was August 1996, when Clinton abandoned the Iraqi opposition and allowed Saddam Hussein to smash their safe haven in northern Iraq, murdering hundreds of fighters and forcing tens of thousands more to flee across the border. Because he had seen the sufferings of Iraqis up close, he told Bush administration officials, "this is a mission I believe in." But in fact, Ricciardone's mission from the very start had been something quite different. He ensured that no viable Iraqi opposition would emerge to lay claim on U.S. government support, because that is what Secretary Albright and President Clinton secretly wanted. In other words, his job was to make sure the Clinton administration could break the law, with no one the wiser. Clinton and Albright believed they could keep Saddam Hussein "in his box" through United Nations sanctions, which they saw as a cost-free policy. As long as U.S. forces in the region encircled Iraq, and the U.S. Air Force enforced "no-fly zones" in the north and the south of Iraq, Saddam Hussein posed no strategic threat to the United States, they argued. He might massacre his own people, send $25,000 checks to encourage suicide bombings by Palestinians, and dabble with al Qaeda operatives, but those were mere "nuisances" the U.S. could handle. The real threat to the United States, they felt, was Ahmad Chalabi, an Iraqi political genius who chaired the Iraqi National Congress (INC), a coalition of opposition groups based in northern Iraq. Chalabi and the INC were seeking to enlist U.S. help in overthrowing Saddam Hussein. Dr. Chalabi was many things. He came from a family of prominent Iraqi politicians who had held office in democratically elected governments before the takeover by Saddam Hussein's Baath Party in 1958. He had a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Chicago, but early on went into business and made a fortune introducing Visa card services to the Middle East in the 1970s. Yet Chalabi was also a master lobbyist, who understood the American political system better than most American politicians. Almost single-handedly, he convinced an overwhelming majority of the House and Senate to approve the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, which authorized the U.S. government to spend $97 million per year to train and equip an Iraqi Liberation Army, and to spend additional funds to support the INC and other opponents of Saddam. Frank Ricciardone's mission was to stop Ahmad Chalabi at all costs, because he could drag the United States into a war. With the change of administrations, Ricciardone knew that his new political masters were divided. Some, such as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of State John Bolton, were strong ChalTimmerman, Kenneth R. is the author of 'Shadow Warriors The Astonishing Story of Who Is Really Subverting America's War on Terror', published 2007 under ISBN 9780307352095 and ISBN 0307352099.