Hubris

by Michael Isikoff

  During the Clinton years, Armitage was an ally of the neoconservatives. In 1998, he joined Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Perle in signing the Project for the New American Century letter calling on Clinton to overthrow Saddam. But in the George W. Bush administration, Armitage ended up battling his former neoconservative friends and came to view them with disdain. He routinely returned to Foggy Bottom from meetings at the White House shaking his head in amazement at the armchair warriors. “One day,” said Powell’s chief of staff, Larry Wilkerson, “we were walking into his office and Rich turned to me and said, ‘Larry, these guys never heard a bullet go by their ears in anger. These guys never heard a bullet! None of them ever served. They’re a bunch of jerks.’ ” Among his colleagues at the State Department, Armitage often referred derisively to the lack of military service or combat experience of the hawks at the White House and the Pentagon. “Those remarks were aimed at everybody,” Wilkerson said, “including the president.”

  Armitage had a weakness: he enjoyed spreading juicy tidbits about Washington intrigue. This was no secret. In grand jury testimony during the Iran-contra investigation, he admitted he was “a terrible gossip” and a trader of information regarding political, policy, and bureaucratic developments. In a deposition, he told Iran-contra investigators, “I am pretty nosy and frankly think I’ve learned the lesson in a bureaucracy that the more you know, the more you can put things together.” And he had recently come across one source of interesting information: the June 10 INR memo that claimed that Valerie Wilson had “convened” the meeting that had triggered Joseph Wilson’s trip to Niger. (This was the memo that had been written at Libby’s request.)

  Toward the end of Woodward’s long interview with Armitage about the road to war—in which Armitage recounted for Woodward details of the prewar tussles that had pitted Powell against Cheney and Rumsfeld—Woodward asked about Joseph Wilson. (Walter Pincus’s story on the Niger mission had just been published, and Woodward had learned the unnamed envoy was Wilson.) Woodward would later recount that his source had told him that “everybody knows” Wilson was the anonymous ex-diplomat dispatched to Niger; the source also said that Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA as an analyst on weapons of mass destruction and had apparently played a role in sending him to Niger. According to Woodward, his source referred to Valerie Wilson in a “casual and offhand” manner. “It was gossip,” Woodward later said.

  It may well have been that the first leak about Valerie Wilson was perceived by leaker (Armitage) and reporter (Woodward) as nothing more than chitchat. The initial leaker was not a White House hawk trying to discredit or harm Joe Wilson and his wife. Armitage had seemingly mentioned her either to distance his department from the Wilson mission or, simply, to share a piece of hot gossip.

  Woodward wrote nothing about the Wilson affair in the Post. And in Plan of Attack, he made only one passing reference to Wilson and the yellowcake dispute. As he later explained, he didn’t consider the Wilson matter important. But Armitage would soon mention Wilson’s wife again to another prominent journalist, who would find it far more interesting.

  THE mounting debate over the war didn’t intrude on the festivities when a crowd of the capital’s powerful political figures and journalists assembled on the evening of June 18 at the Army-Navy Club to honor one of its own: Robert Novak, the crusty conservative columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times. It was the fortieth anniversary of Novak’s syndicated column, which he had originally begun writing with the late Rowland Evans. The crowd was Novak’s A-list journalist pals: NBC’s Tim Russert and Novak’s compatriots on CNN’s Capital Gang show, Al Hunt, Mark Shields, and Margaret Carlson. Also celebrating with Novak were a few of his high-placed sources, such as Ken Mehlman, who had just vacated his post as White House political director to manage the Bush reelection campaign. “It was a room full of old friends, a jovial back-slapping affair,” recalled Carlson.

  Among those having a grand time—and sitting prominently at Novak’s table—was the celebrity guest of the evening, Karl Rove. In a chipper mood, Rove was wearing a large button that read, “I’m a source not a target.” Rove, Carlson recalled, “ thought it was really funny. He was flashing [the button] boldly and brazenly.” The button’s message was clear: it was better to be a source for Novak than a target. It was also an allusion to a thinly kept secret among the political cognoscenti: Rove had been feeding Novak political tidbits for more than two decades. In 1992, Rove, then an up-and-coming GOP political consultant, was fired from the reelection campaign of the first President Bush after there were complaints he had leaked damaging information to Novak about the Texas state campaign chairman, Robert Mosbacher.

  Rove and Novak were “intimately close” and occasionally socialized together, according to Al Hunt. But neither spoke about it publicly. Rove was rarely mentioned in Novak’s columns (although when he was, it was in a positive light). “I can’t tell anything I ever talked to Karl Rove about, because I don’t think I ever talked to him about any subject, even the time of day, on the record,” Novak later said in a television interview. Novak and Rove did disagree on one thing: the Iraq War. Prior to the invasion of Iraq, Novak had written columns skeptical of the coming war. He had called it an “imperial mission” and had appeared to be rooting for Powell’s diplomacy. Eleven days before the invasion, Novak had said on CNN that the nuclear weapons case was weak and that the White House was pushing the WMD threat to cover its real agenda: getting rid of Saddam. “A lot of conservatives,” Novak declared, were “heartsick about this prospect” of war in Iraq. But none of his remarks had caused a break with the White House.

  Adam Levine, the Bush press aide, had gotten his own insight into how the Novak-Rove relationship worked months earlier when he had told Rove that he had heard John Weaver, John McCain’s chief political strategist, trashing Rove at a Washington bar and accusing him of having circumvented campaign finance laws during the 2000 election. “Karl went rip-shit,” according to Levine. Soon afterward, Levine got a call from Novak, who repeated the story Levine had just told Rove. Novak then used Levine’s confirmation of the tale as the basis for a column taking a swipe at Weaver, portraying him as a sore loser who hadn’t gotten over his 2000 loss to the Bush campaign and who was spreading derogatory information about Rove to the news media. The incident illustrated how Rove used Novak to play political brushback without leaving any fingerprints.

  THE run of stories about the unnamed ambassador and his trip to Niger was not over. On June 19, The New Republic posted online an article that yet again cited the unidentified former diplomat—and presented a muddled version of what had happened. The magazine reported, “Cheney’s office had received from the British, via the Italians, documents purporting to show Iraq’s purchase of uranium from Niger. Cheney had given the information to the CIA, which in turn asked a prominent diplomat, who had served as ambassador to three African countries, to investigate.” If Pincus’s account had understated Cheney’s role, the New Republic piece exaggerated it. Cheney hadn’t been the recipient of the documents. They had not come from the British. And Cheney hadn’t passed them on to the CIA. The article contained yet another in-your-face quote from the still anonymous retired ambassador: “They knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie…. They were unpersuasive about aluminum tubes and added this to make their case more persuasive.”

  Inside Cheney’s office, the story hit another raw nerve. Libby spoke on the phone with his principal deputy, Eric Edelman, who asked him if the vice president’s office could release information to rebut the claim that Cheney had sent Wilson to Niger. None of the articles had claimed Cheney had ordered that an envoy go to Niamey. But the various stories were creating the impression that Cheney was a bigger player in the episode than he had been. By now, Libby knew that Valerie Wilson worked at the CIA, and he thought she had been involved in the trip. He understood this was a sensitive matter and told Edelman that he couldn’t discuss it on a nonsecure phone. Then he added something revealing: if
Cheney’s office started slipping information to reporters about the Wilson trip, there would be complications at the CIA. Libby apparently was worried that this could create even more problems between the White House and the agency.

  JUDY MILLER was on the outs—with both her paper and the U.S. military.

  In recent weeks, she had gone from being one of her paper’s star reporters to virtually persona non grata—as the Times experienced a veritable meltdown. In late April, Times correspondent Jayson Blair had been exposed as a plagiarist and fabricator. What might have been a midlevel controversy boiled over into the biggest scandal to rock the nation’s most influential paper. And it had threatened the reign of Howell Raines, who had become widely unpopular within the newsroom for his imperious manner and other reasons unrelated to the Blair mess.

  After returning to the United States in late May, Miller found her e-mail in-box flooded with eight thousand e-mails. Most were angry complaints about her prewar articles on Iraq’s WMDs. On Web sites and blogs, she was being assailed for having carried the Bush White House’s water. She had become the symbol of national media that had enabled the Bush administration to launch a war on the basis of a WMD threat that might not have existed.

  Still, Miller wanted to go back to Iraq, but Roger Cohen, the foreign editor of the paper, told her, as he later said, that “there was unease, discomfort, unhappiness” over her WMD coverage. Raines and Boyd overruled Cohen, and she returned to Iraq in early June, producing little copy (though she did cowrite a piece reporting that some intelligence analysts were disputing the findings on the purported mobile bioweapons labs).

  About this time, she clashed with Jim Wilkinson, the former White House deputy communications director who was now chief of public affairs for Central Command at its headquarters in Doha, Qatar. Late one night, while he was sleeping, his cell phone went off. It was Miller, and she lit into him about the agreement that permitted military commanders to review her copy before she filed it. Now that major combat operations were over, she no longer thought it was necessary. Wilkinson viewed it differently: a deal was a deal.

  As a member of the White House Iraq Group, Wilkinson, the previous September, had written the white paper for Bush’s UN speech that relied in part on the flawed Miller story about the dubious INC defector Adnan al-Haideri. But now he was less appreciative of her. She was, according to Wilkinson, in a state of “hysteria.” She screamed at Wilkinson that she would send her story back to New York anyway, by regular, unclassified e-mail. “What she was trying to do was use her diva status to roll me,” Wilkinson later said. Wilkinson ordered her evicted from the unit. “I kicked her ass out of Iraq,” he boasted.

  That was it for Miller in Iraq. By mid-June, she was back in the United States. And Raines and Boyd, her supporters, were gone; both had resigned in the aftermath of the Jayson Blair scandal.*53 And the Times’ Washington bureau had launched a major project to investigate what had gone wrong with the WMD intelligence. A team of reporters was assigned to the subject, and Miller joined in. But she wasn’t fully with the project. Rather than figure out how faulty intelligence had been used to justify a war, she was interested in a different subject: whether the search for the WMDs had been so bungled that had there been any unconventional weapons in Iraq the military wouldn’t have found them. With this notion in mind, she pursued sources who could be helpful—and soon she would be sitting across from Scooter Libby in his office.

  BY NOW, some—but not all—White House aides had concluded that the administration’s position on the Niger charge was untenable. In mid-June, the CIA produced a report that was unambiguous. “[S]ince learning that the Iraq-Niger uranium deal was based on false documents earlier this spring,” agency analysts wrote in a memo to Tenet, “we no longer believe that there is sufficient other reporting to conclude that Iraq pursued uranium from abroad.” It was a white flag on the yellowcake issue—and the end of the story. At the same time, David Sanger, a White House correspondent for The New York Times who was working on the paper’s Iraq project, was pressing National Security Council officials for answers to basic, if awkward, questions: Did the White House still stand by the sixteen words in the State of the Union address about yellowcake? Did the White House have other credible evidence to support the claim beyond the Niger documents, which had now been exposed as a forgery?

  The CIA memo and Sanger’s queries prompted a series of internal White House discussions. Some officials, especially Robert Joseph, the hawkish NSC official in charge of proliferation issues, were resistant to any public retreat. After all, hadn’t the CIA endorsed the uranium claim by including it in the NIE? “They can’t walk away from the NIE, can they?” Condoleezza Rice herself asked, according to a NSC official. But Tenet had warned the NSC not to use the yellowcake charge in the Cincinnati speech. There was plenty of blame to go around. “We’re all going to have to eat a little bit of this,” Tenet told Rice, according to the NSC official.

  There was, however, a complication. The White House had so far rested its defense on the fact that in the State of the Union address Bush had attributed the yellowcake charge to the British—and the Brits were publicly insisting that they had other reliable reporting supporting the yellowcake assertion. Skeptics inside the U.S. intelligence community were arguing that because the British wouldn’t share this additional intelligence, the U.S. government couldn’t evaluate its credibility. When the CIA formally asked to review the British evidence, it was rebuffed, according to Tyler Drumheller, the CIA’s European Division chief. That was pretty much a tip-off, Drumheller said, that all the Brits had was the same “circular reporting” stemming from the same phony Italian documents.

  While considering what—if anything—to do about those sixteen words in the State of the Union address, White House aides were closely following a political crisis in London. In late May, BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan had broadcast a sensational report claiming that a well-placed intelligence source had told him that the British white paper on Iraqi WMD released the previous September had been “sexed up” by Blair’s Downing Street. The report set off an enormous controversy across the Atlantic. Blair’s critics accused him of having rigged the case for war. Blair demanded a parliamentary inquiry that would put the BBC on trial for relying on an anonymous source to challenge the government’s credibility. White House aides worried that walking away from the yellowcake charge would undermine—if not imperil—Blair. “There was concern,” said a White House official, “that the British government might fall.”

  INSIDE the vice president’s office, Scooter Libby and Cheney had no intention of backpedaling.

  On the afternoon of June 23, Libby received a visitor in his office in the Old Executive Office Building: Judy Miller. In her notebook, Miller had scrawled her first question for Libby: “Was the intell slanted?” Libby took the occasion to gripe about the “selective leaking” of the CIA, according to Miller’s notes of the conversation. He said the agency had a “hedging strategy” to protect itself in case no weapons were found: “If we find it, fine, if not, we hedged.” He was angry about the media reports suggesting that senior Bush officials, including Cheney, had embraced and promoted uncertain intelligence reports about Iraq’s alleged procurement of uranium in Africa. These news reports, Libby insisted, were “highly distorted.” He conceded that Cheney’s office had indeed asked about the supposed Niger deal (without acknowledging it had been Cheney who had asked). He told Miller that the CIA had dispatched a “clandestine guy” to Niger to check out the charge. He denied that Cheney had had anything to do with this trip and referred to Joe Wilson by name. Miller wrote in her notebook, “Veep didn’t know of Joe Wilson.” She also wrote, “Wife works in bureau?” That was a reference to the CIA. Miller years later said that Libby had raised the subject of Wilson’s wife and had either said she was working or might be working at the CIA. (Miller apparently used the word “bureau” because she had received the impression that Wilson’s wife was employed by a
bureau within the CIA that handled WMD issues.)

  Libby was defensive. And he was blaming the CIA, suggesting that if there had been any doubts about the WMD intelligence, the agency hadn’t conveyed those uncertainties to the White House. Miller wrote in her notebook, “No briefer came in and said, ‘You got it wrong, Mr. President.’ ”

  LIBBY was no doubt hoping that Miller would be an ally in his battle with the backstabbing officials of the intelligence community—or, at least, would convey his defense of the White House in the pages of the Times. But no such story appeared. Libby, though, was not done pushing back. Nor was the vice president.

  In late June, Cheney discussed with Bush the steady stream of negative news stories about the administration’s prewar use of the Iraq intelligence, according to a lawyer close to the principals. Cheney and Bush agreed that to refute the criticism they ought to divulge portions of the classified National Intelligence Estimate on weapons of mass destruction that had hastily been prepared prior to the congressional vote on the Iraq War resolution. “The president declassified the information and authorized and directed the vice president to get it out,” the lawyer said. How that would be done—who should leak the information and to which reporters—was left entirely up to Cheney, the lawyer noted.