Hubris

by Michael Isikoff

  Pincus was also still chasing the story of the unnamed ambassador in the Nicholas Kristof column of early May. It hadn’t taken long for Pincus to figure out that the envoy was Wilson. Pincus contacted him, and Wilson spoke at length—on background, meaning that he would be identified only as a former ambassador. Pincus also kept pressing Catherine Martin, Cheney’s chief press spokeswoman, for information. How had the trip of the former ambassador come about? What had Cheney been told about the ambassador’s mission and his findings? Finally, Martin arranged for Pincus to talk with Libby.

  By this point, Libby had learned some things about Wilson. After Cheney’s office first heard from Pincus, Libby had received two oral reports from Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman, who told Libby that Wilson had been the unnamed ambassador who had made the trip to Niger. Then, on June 9, the CIA faxed several classified documents to Cheney’s office, directing them to the personal attention of Libby and another staff member. The faxed documents referred to the former ambassador and his trip to Niger, without naming him. After receiving the documents, Libby wrote the names “Wilson” and “Joe Wilson” on the documents. And on June 10, Grossman—Libby’s key contact at the State Department on this matter—had new information about the incident. It involved Joe Wilson’s wife and was on his desk—in a State Department memo.

  AFTER Libby had first asked Grossman for information on the Niger trip, Grossman had instructed Carl Ford, the State Department’s INR chief, to prepare a memo on the Wilson issue. Ford and the INR were happy to take on this assignment. It gave them a chance to remind their bosses at State that INR had tried to wave the administration off the Niger charge. “We thought it was a travesty that anybody would have believed any of this stuff,” Ford later said. He directed his staff to pull the files.

  The two analysts most familiar with the Niger episode were not at INR at the moment. Doug Rohn, the Africa analyst, had left the office to become the consul general at the U.S. Consulate in Karachi, Pakistan, and Simon Dodge, the specialist on Iraqi nuclear topics, was on leave. Another INR analyst, Neil Silver, was given the job of writing the memo for Grossman. Silver collected the available records and drafted a memo that recapped the INR’s initial skepticism about the Niger charge, its dissent in the NIE, and Dodge’s warning that the documents were forgeries. The memo also noted that the INR had had little to do with the Wilson trip—and had even argued at the time that there was not much point to the mission. In other words, the INR had been right all along, and it was not to blame for the Wilson trip.

  One of the documents Silver was using to draft the memo was Rohn’s one-page account of the February 19, 2002, meeting at the CIA, where Joe Wilson had talked about the Niger deal with intelligence officers and had discussed a possible trip to Niger. Rohn’s notes said that Valerie Wilson had “apparently convened” this meeting with the idea of sending her husband to Niger, and they identified her as “a CIA WMD managerial type.”

  Silver lifted Rohn’s account of the meeting but dropped the word “apparently.” In the memo for Grossman—which had been triggered by Libby’s request—Silver stated as a fact that the meeting at the CIA had been “convened” by Valerie Wilson, whom he described as a “CIA WMD manager.” Because he had not talked to Rohn about Rohn’s notes, Silver didn’t know that Rohn had entered that meeting late and wasn’t really sure about Valerie Wilson’s role. (Silver had no reason to think that such details would later take on significance.) With this memo, Silver had depicted Valerie Wilson as the CIA officer responsible for the meeting that had led to the trip. Inadvertently, Rohn’s uninformed impression (conveyed in a loosely worded line) was now portrayed as a hard-and-fast truth. It would soon become, in the hands of White House spinners, a political charge.

  Rohn’s notes and several other relevant documents were attached to the INR memo, and the memo was stamped “Secret.” The key paragraphs, including the one that mentioned Valerie Wilson, were prefaced with the letters S/NF. This meant Secret/No Foreign: the information was classified and considered too sensitive to share with any foreigners. INR sent copies of the memo and the attachments to Grossman, Powell, and Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state. The memo did not make much of Valerie Wilson’s connection to the Niger trip.

  After Grossman received the INR memo, he briefed Libby again on the Wilson matter. This time, he told Cheney’s chief of staff that Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA and that she had been responsible for sending Wilson to Niger.

  I. LEWIS LIBBY was playing a classic Washington role: the fiercely loyal aide determined to defend his boss. And he was well suited to the task, especially if the assignment called for quiet, behind-the-scenes maneuvering.

  Libby, fifty-three years old, was an important player—the hard-line chief of staff to the most influential vice president in U.S. history. But he was not especially high profile. When he attended meetings Cheney held with others, Libby often stood off to the side, deferential but paying close attention. He was known to be a well-practiced secret keeper. Friendly with a number of reporters, he would occasionally talk to them, rarely sharing anything useful or sensitive. “Do you expect me to commit a felony by telling you classified information?” Libby once huffily asked a reporter friend who tried to question him when Libby was staff director for a congressional committee investigating Chinese espionage in the 1990s. He was tight-lipped about personal matters. He would not tell friends what the “I” in his name stood for. (USA Today would report his first name was Irv; other publications would claim it was Irving.) He provided different explanations for his nickname, “Scooter.” He rarely gave speeches or appeared on television. A Washington Post reporter profiling Libby once noted that he embodied a favorite saying of Cheney: “You never get into trouble for something you don’t say.” In one of his only TV appearances, which occurred on CNN’s Larry King Weekend in February 2002, he defended Cheney’s refusal to reveal the names of energy executives with whom the vice president’s energy task force had met.

  Libby, born in Connecticut and raised in Florida, was the son of an investment banker. He attended Phillips Andover prep school and then Yale, where he was taught by Wolfowitz. After graduating from Columbia Law School and working for a Philadelphia law firm, he was recruited by Wolfowitz to work at the State Deparment. Years after that, when Libby was working for Wolfowitz at the Pentagon—at the time of the first Persian Gulf War—he developed a shared interest with Cheney (then the defense secretary) in Saddam’s weapons. And at the end of that war, as he later told an interviewer, both he and Wolfowitz objected to the administration’s decision, urged by Colin Powell, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to accept a cease-fire before the retreating Iraqi Army could be destroyed. “I was floored by the decision,” Libby said. “Neither of us liked it.” In that period, he also advocated building up the U.S. military to such an extent that America would be the lone superpower for decades to come.

  Libby was known by friends to be a sharp, engaging conversationalist. He was married to Harriet Grant, once a lawyer on the Democratic staff of the Senate judiciary committee. He fancied himself an expert—and daring—skier. But he had the reputation of a careful, detail-oriented, cool-headed attorney. For years, Libby had represented Marc Rich, a billionaire fugitive financier who had fled to Switzerland from the United States in 1983 to avoid prosecution on evading more than $48 million in taxes and for illegally trading oil with Iran when Tehran was holding U.S. hostages. After President Bill Clinton, in the last days of his presidency, pardoned Rich, there was an uproar. Libby, who had earlier worked on the case for a Rich pardon, was called before a House committee to testify about Rich. “Did you represent a crook who stole money from the United States government?” a Democratic House member thundered at him. “No, sir,” a calm Libby replied. “There are no facts that I know that support the criminality of the client based on the tax returns.”

  Possessing a dark sense of humor, Libby once told an aide—in the earlier days
of the George W. Bush administration—that he intended to work at the White House until “I get indicted or something.” But his ironic detachment vanished when it came to “the boss,” as he called the vice president. “He was enamored of Cheney, he was almost an acolyte,” said one friend. Libby’s life revolved around Cheney. He took his vacations in Wyoming so he could be near the vice president. He even took up hunting. After September 11, he came to view Cheney as a historical figure who saw the dangers facing his country with greater clarity than anyone. In December 2001, during an interview with journalist James Mann, Libby read aloud a passage from Winston Churchill’s memoir of the years leading up to World War II: “I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.” Libby told Mann these words could be applied to Cheney in the post-9/11 period.

  Libby was also a novelist who had written one book, The Apprentice, a tale of intrigue set in a Japanese rural inn in 1903. It took him twenty years to finish the book. At one point, Libby told Larry King, he “went out to Colorado, drank tequila and wrote. And sort of [led] the dream life.” But he hadn’t been happy with what he produced and threw away three hundred pages. The book, published in 1996, was sexually graphic. It included a reference to a bear copulating with young girls and a scene that featured the line, “He asked if they should fuck the deer.” (As The New Yorker would later quip, “The answer, reader, is yes.”) In one chapter, the protagonist, the innkeeper’s virgin apprentice, is tortured with a hot coal for refusing to yield a secret. Libby spared few details in describing the action. Rather than reveal the truth, this young man took the pain.

  PINCUS finally got Libby on the phone. Libby wouldn’t say anything on the record. He wouldn’t allow Pincus to refer to him as a vice presidential aide or even a White House official. He could be called only a “government official.” Once granted virtually complete anonymity, Libby answered a few questions—as he tried to spin the Post reporter with a small piece of disinformation so Cheney wouldn’t get prominent play in Pincus’s story.

  Libby said nothing about Valerie Wilson. He insisted that Cheney hadn’t known about Wilson’s trip as the Kristof column had suggested. Libby did acknowledge that the trip might have originated with a question from an aide from Cheney—but not from Cheney himself.

  This was a deflection. It had been Cheney who had first asked the questions that prompted the Wilson trip. There had been nothing improper about this. But now was not the time to say that Cheney’s personal interest in the purported uranim deal had spurred Joe Wilson’s mission to Niger. Pincus and Priest had, days earlier, disclosed Cheney’s prewar visits to the CIA. Other media reports were suggesting that intelligence analysts had been pressured by the White House before the war. Libby didn’t want to see a new story revealing that a request from Cheney had led to a trip that had produced information contradicting Bush’s now-controversial State of the Union claim—information that, according to the Kristof column, the White House had deliberately ignored.

  Libby’s fibbing worked.

  Pincus’s article appeared on the front page on June 12, 2003. It barely mentioned Cheney. The story reported that a “key component of President Bush’s claim in his State of the Union address last January that Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program…was disputed by a CIA-directed mission to the central African nation in early 2002” but that the CIA had not passed on the results of this mission to the White House. Pincus quoted the unnamed ambassador (Wilson) as relating the same story he had told Kristof—how he had gone to Niger to investigate the yellowcake claims, concluded the uranium-deal story was false, and told the CIA that the documents may have been forged because the “dates were wrong and the names were wrong.” Wilson later told the Senate intelligence committee that he may have “misspoken” to Pincus. He had not seen the documents and had not known what names were on them. (Wilson said to the committee that he might have become confused about his own recollections after the IAEA had reported that the names and dates on the documents were wrong and that he might have thought he had seen the names.)

  Only toward the end of Pincus’s story did it mention the request from an “aide” to the vice president for more information about Niger. The story caused no public uproar. The White House didn’t feel compelled to respond. Reporters traveling with Bush on Air Force One didn’t ask press secretary Ari Fleischer about it during a press briefing. “Nobody picked up on it,” Pincus later said, not even The New York Times. “The Times never wrote a fucking word about it after the Kristof column,” Pincus remarked, “and they never wrote about it after my piece.”

  THE story was certainly noticed inside Cheney’s office. The vice president was even doing his own research on the subject.

  On June 12, the day the Pincus story appeared, Cheney told Libby that Wilson’s wife worked in the Counterproliferation Division at the CIA. Libby would later testify that Cheney had learned this directly from the CIA and had mentioned Joe Wilson’s wife to him in a “sort of curiosity sort of fashion.” (Libby’s notes indicated that the vice president had received the information on Valerie Wilson from Tenet. A spokesman for Tenet later said he did not recall this.) But this was no incidental piece of information. As connoisseurs of intelligence, Cheney and Libby would undoubtedly have known that the Counterproliferation Division was part of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, the most secretive part of the agency—and home to undercover officers.*51

  Cheney and Libby felt under siege. Wilson, with his off-the-record comments to journalists, was running a one-man effort to challenge the White House’s credibility. And Libby was convinced that high-level CIA officials, looking to duck responsibility for the apparent WMD failure, were looking to blame Bush and Cheney for having embellished the evidence about Saddam’s weapons. The Pincus story had prominently quoted one unnamed senior CIA analyst as saying, “Information not consistent with the administration agenda was discarded and information that was [consistent] was not seriously scrutinized.”

  Two days after the Pincus article appeared, Libby met with his CIA debriefer and expressed irritation that CIA officials were making comments to reporters that were critical of the vice president’s office. Libby mentioned the Niger trip, Joe Wilson, and—by name—Valerie Wilson.

  WILSON was not going to let this story fade. And the administration’s public response to the Niger controversy was, he later said, pushing him to do more. On June 8, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice appeared on Meet the Press and was asked by Tim Russert if Bush should retract his State of the Union sentence about Iraqi uranium shopping in Africa. She replied, “The president quoted a British paper. We did not know at the time—no one knew at the time, in our circles—maybe someone knew down in the bowels of the agency, but no one in our circles knew that there were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery.” To Wilson, it was inconceivable that nobody at high levels had been aware of his trip and his findings. Wilson called a senior administration official to complain about Rice’s dismissive remarks, and, Wilson later claimed, he was told that he shouldn’t expect the administration to issue any correction of the State of the Union speech. Wilson decided he might have to do so himself. He called David Shipley, the editor of the op-ed page of The New York Times. You can have 1,500 words to tell your story, Shipley said. But Wilson didn’t start writing right away

  On June 14, Wilson spoke at a forum held by the Education for Peace in Iraq Center (EPIC), a group opposed to the war, and he was unrestrained in his criticisms of the administration. He also hinted at his own personal role in the Niger imbroglio:

  I just want to assure you that that American ambassador who has been cited in reports in The New York Times and in The Washington Post, and now in The Guardian over in London, who actually went over to Niger on behalf of the government…. I can assure you that that retired American ambassador to Africa, as Nick Kristof called him in his article, is also pissed off and has every int
ention of ensuring that this story has legs. And I think it does have legs. It may not have legs over the next two or three months, but when you see American casualties moving from one to five or to ten per day, and you see Tony Blair’s government fall because in the U.K. it is a big story, there will be some ramifications, I think, here in the United States…. It is absolutely bogus for us to have gone to war the way we did.

  For anyone listening to Wilson’s remarks, Eric Gustafson, the executive director of EPIC, later said, “it was pretty clear that he was referring to himself as the special envoy who went to Niger.” Wilson was itching to come out and challenge the White House and Cheney head-on.

  IN MID-JUNE, Bob Woodward was working on his next book. His Bush at War, an account of the Bush administration’s response to September 11 and the Afghanistan War, had been a big seller. His new installment, to be called Plan of Attack, was focusing on the run-up to the Iraq War. Around the thirteenth of the month, he had an interview with an important and reliable confidential source in the Bush administration, during which he learned something intriguing about the Wilson mission that no other reporter knew. Woodward would later reluctantly write and talk about this conversation without identifying this official.

  That source was Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, according to three government officials, a lawyer familiar with the case, and an Armitage confidant.

  Armitage and his boss and close friend Powell were the antihawks of the administration (even though Powell had allowed himself to become the administration’s lead spokesman in making the case for war at the United Nations). A bear of a man with a cartoonish squeaky voice, Armitage was a U.S. Naval Academy graduate who had done three tours of duty in Vietnam and volunteered for combat. In the Reagan administration, he was an assistant secretary of defense—and got caught up in the Iran-contra investigations. Armitage (who was then, like Powell, a key aide to Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger) told investigators he did not recall attending a meeting where Oliver North discussed providing covert assistance to the contras. A special counsel later concluded that Armitage had provided “false testimony” to investigators about his participation in the Reagan administration’s missile sales to Iran.*52 In April 1989, the first President Bush nominated Armitage to be secretary of the Army, but the nomination hit trouble—in part due to his role in the Iran-contra affair—and Armitage hired a lawyer to help. That attorney was Scooter Libby. Armitage headed off a potentially nasty confirmation fight by withdrawing.