Curt Weldon: The Troublemaker

By Shane Harris

updated 4:24 p.m. ET Oct. 2, 2006

WASHINGTON - I remember when I lost my mind.
There was something so pleasant about that place. Even your emotions had an echo in so much space. And when you're out there, without care, yeah, I was out of touch.
But it wasn't because I didn't know enough.
I just knew too much.
Does that make me crazy?... Possibly.

- "Crazy," by musical group Gnarls Barkley

The closet in Curt Weldon's congressional office contains many curious things. There's the diplomatic pouch, a worn blue satchel that once shuttled secret missives across oceans and borders before it made its way to Weldon, by the hands of "my friends in the intelligence community," he says. "I think I'm the only member of Congress with one of these."

There's the gyroscope, a Russian model about the size of a can of beans, that was built for the guidance systems of long-range missiles and was intercepted en route to Iraq in 1995. Weldon obtained the missile part -- it came in the pouch from those friends in the intelligence community -- and hung on to it as evidence that Iraq was constructing weapons of mass destruction. "We know Iraq had WMD," he says. "The question is, why haven't we found them?"

And then, along with the pouch and the gyroscope and the untold quantities of political memorabilia from the Republican lawmaker's 20-year career in Congress -- a career that may well come to an end after Election Day -- there's the chart. The one with all the lines and pictures. The one that might have prevented 9/11.

One day last winter, Weldon dragged the chart out of his closet and moved furniture out of the way to accommodate the display. The chart is actually a replica of an organizational diagram of Al Qaeda. Produced years before the 9/11 attacks, the original was a marvel of progressive intelligence analysis. Its creators used sophisticated data-mining software to scour classified government databases and, mostly, the Internet in search of clues and nuggets that linked suspected Qaeda members, as well as operatives in other Islamic terrorist groups. Its designers called it "the global footprint." Weldon was, and still is, the staunchest backer in Congress of the techniques that produced the chart. And whether he would like to admit it or not, Weldon probably knows that if he loses his seat in November, the chart may have a lot to do with it.

At first glance, Al Qaeda's footprint is a convoluted web of photographs, Arabic names, and dates. Each data point is connected to others -- often many others -- by straight lines that scatter across the terrible blueprint like spilled Pick Up Sticks. The human eye cannot sensibly absorb the hundreds of connections all at once. The dozens of "Als" and "Ibns," attached to passport-sized photographs, or to a head-shaped silhouette when there is no known photo, connect to more names, more faces.

But to some trained eyes, and to Weldon, the linkages lead to obvious conclusions. The chart, he said, "could be used to show you patterns that create linkages that create relationships that, in this case, all involved terrorist activities.... This is like the one I gave to Stephen Hadley."

Two weeks after 9/11 -- Weldon recalled it precisely as September 25 -- he was visited in his office by friends in the Army's Information Dominance Center, the intelligence outfit that created the original diagram. They gave it to Weldon, who immediately took it to Hadley, then President Bush's deputy national security adviser.

Weldon said he told Hadley about the data-mining techniques: "This is the process that's been used that I've been trying to convince the government for three years to put into place, but the CIA has refused to accept." Hadley, according to Weldon, told him he would show the chart to "the big man," meaning Bush. That was the last time that Weldon saw the chart, and there is no indication that Bush ever saw it.

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