Judging The Case

On at least one point, Powell's evidence seemed overwhelming: the Iraqi game of deception and cover-up that frustrates the work of inspectors. Intercepted conversations between Iraqi officers were particularly damning. The day before the inspectors arrived in November, a colonel and brigadier talk about evacuating a "modified vehicle." In January, two Republican Guard officers clear out "forbidden ammo." Papers, missiles and computer hard drives have apparently gone missing, dispersed around the country. "One wonders how 200, 300 or 500 inspectors are going to disarm Iraq," said one senior State Department official, dismissing the French proposal to double or treble the number of inspectors in Iraq. At the White House the next day, Bush effectively abandoned U.S. support for the inspectors, saying: "The game is over."

Some U.N. sources criticized Powell for failing to acknowledge the past successes of inspectors in Iraq. Powell claimed that Iraq had kept "up to a few dozen" Scud-type missiles, but U.N. inspectors accounted for 817 of the 819 Scuds after the last gulf war. Powell also detailed "vast amounts of chemical weaponry" from the gulf-war years, while the U.N. inspectors said they verified the destruction of virtually all of Iraq's stocks.

If Powell was convincing about the pattern of Iraqi deception, his assertions about Saddam's terrorist links seemed less watertight. "Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network, headed by Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi," Powell asserted, "an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda lieutenants." Although Baghdad has long supported Palestinian terrorism, claims of an alliance between Iraq and Al Qaeda have been disputed by some CIA officials ever since the administration's hawks first floated the idea in the days and weeks after 9-11.

It was no coincidence that CIA Director George Tenet was sitting directly behind Powell as he made his pitch to the United Nations. For months, some in the CIA had been dismissive of the Bush team's assertions about a Baghdad-bin Laden link. Aware of the tensions, Powell wanted Tenet and his people engaged in writing and staging the speech, to signal that Washington was finally presenting a united front. (For Bush, the director's highly visible support was one of the high points of the presentation.) Tenet and his staff had spent several days helping to redraft Powell's speech in a conference room at the CIA's Langley, Va., headquarters. Much of the speechwriting at the CIA, including a pizza-fueled session that went late into the night on Saturday, concerned which intelligence to declassify for public consumption. For his part, Powell was keen to triple-rivet the accuracy of his claims and to translate the CIA's intel-speak into normal English. On the morning of his U.N. showdown, Powell traveled in his limo from the Waldorf-Astoria to Tenet's hotel to ensure they were photographed walking into the U.N. building together. And yet the agency's support was more tentative than the visuals suggested. While nobody questions the underlying data, like all intelligence assessments, the conclusions are in the eye of the beholder.

U.S. officials now say that what enabled the CIA, Pentagon and State Department to agree on Powell's alarming brief was the accumulation, since early last summer, of intelligence on the travels and activities of Zarqawi, a Palestinian born in Jordan. Zarqawi used to run his own terrorist-training camp in Afghanistan, close to the city of Herat. When the Taliban regime fell, he, like other Qaeda operatives, fled to neighboring Iran. But Zarqawi apparently sustained a serious leg wound while fighting American troops after 9-11. Last May, U.S. intelligence began to receive information that Zarqawi had checked into a Baghdad hospital to have his leg amputated and a prosthesis fitted. While in Baghdad, he apparently was joined by a dozen or more Qaeda "affiliates," as Powell described them in his speech. U.S. officials say the Jordanian government twice asked the Iraqis to extradite Zarqawi, but Baghdad did not respond; he later disappeared. Several of his associates are still in Baghdad, officials say. According to German police documents obtained by NEWSWEEK, Zarqawi's goal is to kill the Jordanian king and replace his regime with an Islamist state. It was Zarqawi who paid and armed the killer of Laurence Foley, a State Department official in Amman, Jordan, in October.

More ugly details were provided by a captured Qaeda operative, according to Powell. The detainee described a web of Zarqawi associates across Europe and in such places as Chechnya and the wild-west Pankisi Gorge region of Georgia. Very recent intelligence tied Zarqawi to alleged plots by Qaeda suspects in Britain, France, Italy and Spain. One suspect arrested in Italy told interrogators the group had purchased toxins from Iraq "that would make Americans die like flies," according to a U.S. intelligence official.