“Well, I’ll tell you one thing I do know, Merry, one of those pieces of criminal law trivia you learn as a federal prosecutor, which I suspect you know, too: There’s a wartime exception to the federal criminal statute of limitations. Anything that might be regarded as a fraud against the US government will be prosecutable for at least five years after the last troops left Iraq, which means Roger and you remain in the crosshairs until the end of 2016 at least. I don’t know exactly what you guys did, but I’m pretty sure that your mutual anxiety attack isn’t just about face-saving. The efforts you’ve made to hide this have been too sustained and energetic. And nobody grits his teeth through an accusation of war crimes on the front page of the New York Times—especially an accusation that’s untrue—unless silence is required to hide something real.”
I got a very tough look from Merriwell. He was a soldier.
“So, Merry, consider me like many other successful fifty-five-year-old lawyers. I have lots of friends on Capitol Hill, people who’d be happy to see me on short notice, including the senator who named me US Attorney. People in office always enjoy getting their names in the paper as champions of the truth—and American taxpayers. My goal isn’t to embarrass Roger or you. But I’m not going to be stonewalled either. I’ve just wasted six months of my life investigating a crime that didn’t happen, so you guys could avoid an investigation of what did. I’d like some answers. Call them hypothetical if you like. But if I was imagining that 500,000 small arms were going to be shipped to Iraq, should I be thinking they got there?”
Erect in his chair, in a posture he’d probably first assumed by the time he was five, Merriwell drummed his fingers on the tabletop.
“All OTR?” he asked. Off the record.
“Deep dark OTR,” I said.
Nonetheless, he took another instant.
“They were sent in two shipments,” he said then. “My belief is that they all arrived at the airport in Baghdad. What happened after that is somewhat opaque.”
I smiled. That was the same word Roger had used in January when he visited me in my law office.
“And why opaque?”
“There were documents that showed that officials of the Iraqi Ministry of Defense signed for the weapons. But the Iraqis claimed subsequently those signatures were forgeries.”
“So the weapons never got to Iraq?”
“No, they were definitely in Iraq.”
“If the guns were in Iraq, why did the Defense Ministry deny they’d received them?”
Merriwell, cautious by nature, watched me, clearly weighing what to say next.
“Many of the weapons were recovered on the battlefield,” he said at last.
I didn’t get it for a second.
“From the enemy?”
“Yes.”
“He sold them to Al Qaeda in Iraq? The defense minister?”
“Or they were stolen from him. Or they were diverted before reaching Baghdad, which is what the Iraqis claimed.”
“So you shipped hundreds of thousands of weapons to Iraq that were then used to kill US soldiers and Marines?”
Merriwell declined to react. His face was granite.
“It would have been very embarrassing, Boom. No question about that. But there were no witnesses, at least none who would talk to us about seeing the weapons shipments in Baghdad. Ultimately, the White House and DoD decided this had to remain a top-secret matter, because of the lasting damage it would have done to our relationship with the new government of Iraq.
“You must remember the context, Boom. After the invasion in 2003, we disarmed the civilian police and the armed forces because they were Saddam’s proxies—almost all were Sunnis, like Hussein. But they were also the only forces trained to maintain order. By the time we realized we had made a catastrophic mistake and wanted to give those folks their weapons back, a Shia-dominated government was in power, whose members recoiled at that prospect. So if the Iraqi Shia government misdirected a weapon or two for every assault rifle given back to the Sunnis, we had no choice but to accept it. Weapons in this world are like currency. They are in demand everywhere.” Merry hitched a shoulder. “Al Qaeda would have bought arms from someone else.”
It was bribery, of course, of a sophisticated form: Help the defense minister and God knows who else loosen their objections to rearming the Sunnis by allowing him and his cronies to pad their Swiss bank accounts.
“Merry, I doubt the American taxpayers would have been philosophical about the Iraqi defense minister selling the weapons killing our troops. No wonder DoD and the White House didn’t want that story to get out. It would have devastated support for the war.”
Merriwell pulled his lips into his mouth.
“You know that I never favored that war, Boom. But the task that confronted me once I arrived was to salvage the remnants of an entire society. We’d destroyed their government and every public institution. We were stuck, unless we wanted to leave and hand the Iranians title to the whole country.”
As Nara insisted, there were often no good choices once a war begins.
“And why are Roger and you so squeamish if the White House and Defense were onboard originally?”
He displayed a sardonic little smile.
“You probably know how the blame game goes in this town, Boom. Memories fade. Fingers point. You can’t find ten people who were in Congress who’d say they would invade Iraq again today. A lot of this would come down to what was documented, in a situation in which no one ever wanted to put anything in writing. Roger was the top intelligence officer. I was the senior commander. As they say, Shit rolls downhill. And over the years, Boom, there were several congressional briefings and inquiries where someone might say Roger and I chose our words a little too carefully.”
I closed my eyes to think it through. If I was Merry’s lawyer, I’d see the perils very clearly. The people above Merriwell in the chain of command would bob and weave. They’d say they didn’t know in advance that the Iraqi defense minister was going to divert the weapons, and certainly not to Al Qaeda. And in a fluid situation, where the truth moved like quicksilver and calamity was always at hand, it was possible, even likely, that Roger and Merry hadn’t waited for all the right approvals. Even eleven years later, there would be fury, starting with the families of every soldier who died in Iraq in that period. It would get really ugly, really fast.
And Layton Merriwell—who even tried to help me in order to avoid further damage to his name—was clearly not up to another scandal. Or to shredding one more career. Or years of grand juries and lawsuits, or even prosecution. With his government pension, Roger had a special vulnerability. I didn’t need to reread Title 18, the US criminal code, to figure out if arming the enemy was an offense. The second shipment, after Merriwell and Roger knew the guns were likely to go awry, would be very very hard to defend—which was why the officials above them were bound to maintain they never had the complete picture.
“Three years later, in 2007,” Merry said, “the Administration and I were no longer on the same page about the war, as you know. I was just starting to read my name in the papers—”
“As a presidential candidate?”
He nodded. “There was suddenly a flurry of congressional inquiries about the weapons we’d gathered in Bosnia. I understood it was a shot across the bow. Eventually, senior Administration figures intervened to convince a couple of committee chairs that this was Pandora’s box for many people besides me.”
“Is that why you decided not to run? To end that investigation?”
He laughed a little.
“I had many reasons for not running. Florence was completely against it. My chances were slight. For the most part, I couldn’t imagine spending every day begging for money like a monk with a tin cup. But yes, my announcement that I was staying in the military certainly encouraged everyone to let the sleeping dogs lie.
“One odd development, though, was that the compelling Ms. Czarni showed up in Bosnia asking about Barupra at almost exactly the same time. I’ve always assumed that was a coincidence, but I could never convince Attila.”
“Speaking of Attila—she was the one who told you that the people of Barupra were alive?”
“Hypothetically.”
“When?”
“A few days before I first met with you.”
“Did you ask where they were? Or why someone couldn’t just tell the Court that?”
“Attila said they had been promised complete confidentiality concerning their whereabouts. It was like the Witness Protection Program on a large scale.”
“Because?”