Despite all its hiccups, Dark Winter was an extraordinary success. It foreshadowed the real bioweapons incidents occurring less than three months later, inflamed public germophobia, and fortified the official narrative after the first September 18 anthrax attack letters, which pointed fingers at Saddam Hussein and/or al-Qaeda as the probable culprits. Several Dark Winter participants displayed extraordinary prescience in the weeks leading up to the anthrax attacks, along with a relentless determination to pin the caper on Saddam. The anthrax attack’s first casualty, Robert Stevens, was hospitalized and diagnosed with anthrax on October 2. Highly publicized and laudatory Senate hearings on the Dark Winter simulation that began on October 1, 2001—three days before the anthrax attacks became public knowledge—functioned to imbue US government officials, the national press, and the public with Dark Winter’s paranoid assumptions and to assign the blame to Saddam.
Another Dark Winter planner, Jerome Hauer, along with spymaster James Woolsey and New York Times reporter Judith Miller, spent the three weeks between 9/11 and 10/4 banging the gong about imminent anthrax attacks, carpet-bombing the television talk shows, kibitzing on the nightly news, and gabbing up the Sunday morning TV gasbags. Judith Miller received special assistance in this task from her employer, the New York Times, which published her numerous alarmist reports and warnings about coming biological attacks on American soil. Incredibly, the attack arrived exactly as Miller, Hauer, and Woolsey predicted and with exquisite timing— smack in the middle of the US Senate hearings over America’s vulnerability to an anthrax attack. Hauer, a bioterrorism expert and pharmaceutical industry operative, is currently an executive with Teneo, a consulting firm that counsels corporations on security matters and is one of the leading advocates of mandatory vaccines for employees as a condition for employment.42
Members of the think tank the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) also played a key role in sounding the alarm that a biological weapons attack was certain to follow on the heels of 9/11 and then simultaneously amplified the panic and blamed Iraq following the anthrax letter attacks. PNAC’s core doctrine was that, as the Cold War victor, America and US-based multinationals—particularly petroleum and pharmaceutical companies—had earned the right to rule the world for a century or so. PNAC members populated virtually all of the key foreign policy posts in the Bush White House. The warmongering cabal called themselves “The Vulcans” in honor of their belligerent brand of US imperialism. Their members included Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith, Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, and Rumsfeld’s advisers Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz. Critics called them the “Chicken Hawks” because ironically, each one of them had draft-dodged the Vietnam War.43
Osama bin Laden, the author of the World Trade Center attacks, supposedly directed that operation from an Afghan cave. But Donald Rumsfeld complained, “There aren’t any good targets in Afghanistan.”44 The PNAC chicken hawks were determined to use 9/11 as a pretext for a war against Iraq, beneath which God had mischievously stockpiled so much of America’s oil. Anthrax provided that provocation. Control of global oil resources was, for PNAC, a key stepping-stone for the coming century of American imperialism, and a bioweapon attack against America became the ideal provocation for preemptive invasion.
It’s noteworthy that Judith Miller not only covered the Dark Winter exercise for the New York Times, she was also an active planner and participant in the simulation, playing the part of a reporter.45 Miller was an O.G. germaphobe and veteran biosecurity booster.
On September 4, 2001, exactly one week before the 9/11 attacks, Miller, excerpting from a paranoid book, Germs, she had written with Times reporters William Broad and Steve Engelberg, reported approvingly in the New York Times that the Pentagon had green-lighted “a project to make a potentially more potent form of anthrax bacteria.”46 Miller did not explain why this response seemed rational or even sane.
Miller’s articles repeating Pentagon and CIA claims about Saddam’s bioweapons cache and his probable involvement with the anthrax attacks helped fuel the US invasion of Iraq. According to New York Magazine:
During the winter of 2001 and throughout 2002, Miller produced a series of stunning stories about Saddam Hussein’s ambition and capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction . . . almost all of which have turned out to be stunningly inaccurate.47
Miller’s jingoistic reporting—New York Magazine dubbed her “Chicken Little”— played such a decisive role in validating the White House warmongers’ Iraq invasion agenda that the New York Times afterward made an unprecedented apology for its role in what then was, arguably, the worst foreign policy decision in United States history.
Miller was so keen to facilitate an Iraq invasion that she illegally leaked the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame, to punish Plame’s husband, State Department diplomat Joseph Wilson, who had publicly challenged White House and CIA narratives about Iraq obtaining yellowcake uranium from Niger.
The CIA, at that time, was aggressively pushing for war. George W. Bush later said that his worst mistake during his White House years was swallowing the CIA’s guarantees: “The biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq. A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein.”48 In 2003, during the run-up to the war, CIA Director George Tenet assured President Bush that Saddam had a secret arsenal of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs): “Don’t worry, it’s a slam dunk.”49