I did not come here to fuck you," the man began. "I should hope not," the woman replied, sitting in her downtown Washington office in August 2005, astonished. "I don't need you to be fucking me."
It certainly was an odd way for Xavier Coll, the lanky Spanish physician serving as the World Bank's vice president for human resources, to begin a conversation with Shaha Ali Riza, a 51-year-old single mother and the acting communications manager for the bank's Middle East and North Africa bureau. Not only was Coll expected, as the bank's top HR official, to exhibit more chivalrous behavior, but Riza was, as he certainly knew, well connected. The very reason for his visit was to help resolve the thorny conflict-of-interest problem that had arisen five months earlier when Riza's lover, Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy defense secretary under Donald Rumsfeld, was selected by President Bush to serve as president of the World Bank.
Neither Coll nor the angry Riza ever specified which kind of "fuck" each had in mind: straightforward physical intercourse or the two-faced, arm's-length backstabbing that is, frankly, more common in Washington. It hardly mattered; sex never strayed far from the agenda during the ensuing controversy, which ended this past June with Wolfowitz's spectacular fall from power amid a swirl of ethics charges and cries of a smear campaign.
Those who campaigned most vocally for Wolfowitz's ouster have portrayed their success as a simple story of crime and punishment, a case of gross and greedy favoritism exposed and redressed: The system, designed to protect a prestigious multinational lending institution that spends $20 billion a year to combat poverty worldwide, worked.
The reality was far different. What happened to Wolfowitz was more akin to a putsch, the work of entrenched enemies who seized on a false pretext to engineer the overthrow of a flawed and mistake-prone leader closely identified with an unpopular war. Perhaps Wolfowitz himself, who had found orderly regime change in Iraq so elusive, could look back in moments of reflection with some admiration for the swift, clean way it was achieved at the World Bank.
For the timing, which was roughly coincident with the excommunication of Rumsfeld and the trial and conviction of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, suggested more broadly a season of retribution against the very ideological class in American political life -- neoconservatives -- that had most ardently promoted that concept.
Intellect was never the problem. Born in Brooklyn in 1943 and raised in Manhattan, Wolfowitz came from a Polish immigrant family largely decimated by the Holocaust. He majored in mathematics at Cornell and earned his Ph.D. in political science at the highly competitive -- and conservative -- University of Chicago, where his doctoral dissertation examined water-desalination programs in the Middle East. Over the next 30 years Wolfowitz attained proficiency in five languages, including Hebrew and Arabic, and served six presidents in a series of increasingly impressive posts in the diplomatic and defense establishments. He rode out the Clinton years, a grim Siberian exile for neoconservative intellectuals, as dean of the Johns Hopkins University's School for Advanced International Studies. In congressional testimony, he advocated missile defense and preemptive strikes against Saddam Hussein. The New Yorker conceded his ability "to recognize threatening patterns and capabilities that others had been unable to see."
If his brilliance went undisputed, Wolfowitz's personality sometimes left colleagues scratching their head or, worse still, questioning his judgment. "Paul is so virtuous," said one Washington think-tank director, "I think he is sometimes" -- a struggle for words -- "naive." This perception of Wolfowitz as deeply principled but not always sensible persisted in the Bush administration. In high-level councils preceding the September 11 attacks, Wolfowitz reportedly argued that Al Qaeda posed less of a danger to the United States than Saddam. He urged fellow deputies at the State Department and the CIA to use American military might to establish a beachhead in Basra, in southern Iraq, where, under his scenario, disaffected Iraqi generals would surrender, defect and launch their own anti-Saddam insurgency. Secretary of State Colin Powell sarcastically imagined the Iraqis embracing Wolfowitz's plan: "'Ah, the Americans have taken 14 acres of southern Basra. Let's go turn ourselves in!'"
In his memoir, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA, George Tenet, the former CIA director, writes that "Wolfowitz in particular was fixated on the question of including Saddam in any U.S. response" to 9/11. Tenet recalls the deputy defense secretary being more adamant than either Bush or Rumsfeld about Iraqi complicity in the attacks and pressing the CIA to "check, recheck and recheck" the issue after analysts concluded there was none. Likewise, as Karen DeYoung reports in Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell, Richard Clarke, the Clinton holdover and White House counterterrorism czar, grew "increasingly testy with Wolfowitz's fixation on Baghdad."
Resentment burned inside Wolfowitz for years. At a black-tie dinner in March 2004 he gloomily swore to a reporter that the publication of Clarke's memoir, Against All Enemies, which claims President Bush blindly ignored the Al Qaeda threat, would cost Bush reelection. "I seriously doubt most voters know who the hell Dick Clarke is," the reporter countered. "I also doubt eight months from now they're going to walk into the ballot booth and say to themselves, 'Well, gee, there was Dick Clarke's book....'"
"No," Wolfowitz frowned. "This is acid on the face of the president. Acid, I tell you!"
There was also -- how else to put it? -- the "ick" factor. Viewers of Fahrenheit 9/11 are treated to outtake footage of the deputy prepping for a TV interview, running his comb through his mouth like Dylan playing "Mr. Tambourine Man" on a harmonica, then mashing down his hair with spit on his hand, an embarrassed grin plastered across his elfin face. He left a similar impression after a visit, as World Bank president, to a Turkish mosque. Asked to remove his shoes, Wolfowitz revealed worn gray socks with identical holes through which his two big toes protruded like Daisy and Mozart popping their heads up from the burrow in an episode of Meerkat Manor. The photographs made him an object of ridicule. "Would you take fiscal advice," asked The Washington Post, "from a man who won't spend $3 for new socks?"
He seemed to rub people the wrong way. "Obviously I ruffled some feathers," he admitted of his January 2006 decision to suspend World Bank loans worth $124 million to the African country of Chad. The move was a logical response to the refusal of corrupt Chadian officials to abide by previous lending agreements, but inside the bank the decision darkened Wolfowitz's reputation and foreshadowed his later troubles. Up to that point the new president had worked hard -- with some success -- to establish what even a skeptical employee had described as a "collegial" relationship with the bank's staff. Now the Chad incident awakened all the latent discomfort the bankers harbored about one of the primary authors of the war in Iraq, and it gave Wolfowitz's most dogged internal enemies their first opportunity to brand him an unreconstructed Bush-style unilateralist.
Speaking after his ouster, Wolfowitz seemed ready to admit the Chad episode had damaged his standing. "Maybe some members of the [bank's executive] board felt they were inadequately consulted," he said. "Yes, I may have, you know, maybe I took it on, they would probably say, in too confrontational a way." Most striking about these remarks is their miserliness with the currency of remorse. What begins as Wolfowitz's qualified attempt at self-examination ("Yes, I may have, you know, maybe I took it on") quickly morphs into an exercise in dispassionate and thus wholly unapologetic reportage of his critics' views ("they would probably say, in 'too confrontational a way'").
In the battle over his image, Wolfowitz was ill equipped to compete. "He was nerdy, like the geeky boy in high school," said one bank staffer. "He had trouble looking you in the eye," an associate said, and was prone, when kidded, to "chuckle in a nervous way." "I could see," said a female subordinate, "how he would respond to a strong-minded woman who'd wear the pants."
Which brings us to Shaha Riza. Born in Tripoli and raised in Saudi Arabia, Riza studied international relations at Oxford. She joined the bank in 1997 and rose through its ranks despite an aggressive personality that endeared her to feminist fellow travelers but often left others -- especially American men -- cold. "I'm a Muslim Arab woman who dares to question the status quo," she once proudly declared, "both in the work of the World Bank and within the institution itself." For this she was rewarded, she believed, with "open hostility against me by at least one member of the board of directors." Xavier Coll testified that Riza "felt the institution owed her because she had been mistreated and discriminated against by her managers."
A female staffer who worked alongside Riza in Washington and the Middle East recalled her as "not a talker, very quiet," someone who would speak up only at the end of meetings, but also as "a bit of a ballbuster. She wasn't someone to be messed with. She was a strong woman. Men didn't get along with her. Feminists loved her." The few published photographs of Riza show a middle-aged woman with dyed blondish-amber hair and pronounced rings beneath kindly eyes.
Wolfowitz and Riza, in short, were hardly Brangelina, but they had each other. And as they prepared for Wolfowitz to assume the World Bank presidency, a position that carries a five-year term and may be renewed by the bank's executive board, they likely envisioned themselves spending the next decade working together -- individually but under the same roof -- to advance the passionately pro-democracy agenda that bound their love.
Up till then the romance between Wolfowitz, a New York Jew, and Riza, the child of a Libyan father and Syrian-Saudi mother, was one of Washington's open secrets. "Wolfowitz regularly spends the night at Riza's home," The Washington Post's gossip column, The Reliable Source, reported in March 2005, when he was still the number two official in Rumsfeld's Pentagon. "Wolfowitz's guards wait in a car outside until he departs early in the morning." A neighbor chortled, "I don't know if it could be more public if it were on 16th and K streets." Separated from Clare, his wife of 30 years, Wolfowitz spoke of divorce, but it remains unclear whether the split was ever finalized.
Also taking note of the relationship were Wolfowitz's Bush administration colleagues. Shortly after the Iraq war began, Wolfowitz arranged to have Riza appointed as a "subject-matter expert," or consultant, to a special Pentagon office. She provided analysis on her policy specialty, the empowerment of women in Muslim societies, to the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, or ORHA, the Pentagon's first stab at a U.S.-led post-Saddam Iraqi government (succeeded by the better-known Coalition Provisional Authority, or CPA). In the dangerous month of April 2003 Riza took an unpaid leave from the bank to visit Baghdad, where she discussed with Iraqi women's groups how they could enlarge their role in the country's reformation.
Fluent in Arabic and four other languages and immersed for the past two decades in the wonky minutiae of global development issues, Riza was unquestionably qualified for the assignment. Still, Defense Department auditors, their memories triggered by the Reliable Source item, quietly launched an investigation to determine whether Wolfowitz, in choosing her for the job, had "used his public office for [Riza's] private gain." Though they ultimately answered that question in the negative, the probe turned up a series of e-mails indicating that the contracts for Riza and the other consultants were issued "without full and open competition" and that Wolfowitz himself "may have exerted pressure on subordinates to bring [Riza] under contract on an expedited basis." "The E-Ring" -- the Pentagon corridor housing the military's most senior officials, including Wolfowitz at the time -- "is screaming to bring [the consultants] on now," read one e-mail. "Wolfowitz has taken a personal interest in getting this team together," read another. "[Name redacted] gets daily calls from Larry DiRita [a top Rumsfeld aide].... If we don't act soon, we will have lost the confidence of the E-Ring."
Questioned under oath about the episode by Pentagon investigators, Wolfowitz claimed he couldn't remember whether he recommended Riza for the consultancy -- but that if he had, it would have been because of her qualifications, not their personal relationship. A separate investigation, focused more broadly on Pentagon contracting in Iraq, also looked at Riza's consultancy and concluded that officials at ORHA, scrambling to compose the criteria for her position after her selection for it, "neither followed nor tried to learn the acquisition process." "These are the people we need to bring on board," one official was told, "and make the rest of it happen."
Wolfowitz attributed these departures from standard operating procedure to an urgent need for the highly specialized skills of the consultants, including Riza. Yet the deputy secretary -- integrally involved in the conception and execution of the Iraq war and unapologetic about it to this day -- also offered a rare and previously unpublished admission of the Bush administration's deficiencies in planning for and presiding over postwar Iraq. "We got to Baghdad much faster than people anticipated," Wolfowitz testified, adding, "We were already starting to have large meetings of Iraqis debating the constitutional principles of the country, and we had no political team there to advise [ORHA head] Jay Garner and later [CPA chief L. Paul] Bremer on how to do it.''
Here was Wolfowitz admitting the Bush administration had failed to send any Americans to help the Iraqis draft a new constitution even as late as May 12, 2003, the date Bremer took over as head of CPA. This was 11 days after the president's "mission accomplished" appearance on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln and almost five weeks after the fall of Baghdad.
Nor is the ORHA episode unique in offering an insight into how the personal relationship between Wolfowitz and Riza intersected with their professional lives. A high-ranking State Department official remembered the couple's relationship intruding on another national security initiative: Libyan strongman Muammar al-Qaddafi's historic secret agreement to disclose and dismantle all his country's weapons of mass destruction and ballistic-missile programs in exchange for the restoration of diplomatic ties with the United States.
Announced in December 2003, the Libyan deal represented one of the most sensitive and significant projects of the first Bush term. Senior administration officials repeatedly cited the invasion of Iraq, then just nine months old, as a prime factor in Qaddafi's change of heart. During his first debate with Senator John Kerry, at the University of Miami in September 2004, Bush boasted about the war's effects. "By speaking clearly and sending messages that we mean what we say," Bush said, "we've affected the world in a positive way. Look at Libya. Libya was a threat. Libya is now peacefully dismantling its weapons programs. Libya understood that America and others will enforce doctrine, and the world is better for it."
Yet this momentous initiative was almost torpedoed by the Wolfowitz-Riza romance. "When we were doing Libya," the State Department official recalled, "we kept on running into all this resistance at OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense], and I kept wondering, What's the problem over there? Finally someone told me, 'It's Wolfowitz. He has a Libyan American girlfriend who hates Qaddafi.' And Wolfowitz was adamant that there'd be no deal until Qaddafi was dead."
