This was an extraordinary move. Before the war, it could have been a firing offense—if not a federal crime—for a government official to disclose any of the contents of the NIE. But now, with the administration under fierce attack for having manipulated intelligence, Bush was directing the vice president to leak parts of the NIE to protect the White House. Bush aides would later say that Bush possessed the authority to engage in such an act of automatic declassification. But the information would be used selectively—not to inform the public but to buttress a political argument.
On the afternoon of June 27, 2003, Woodward showed up in Libby’s office for an interview for Plan of Attack. He had come with an eighteen-page list of questions for Cheney—including one about Valerie Wilson. He spent some time talking to Libby, and Libby took the opportunity to counter the stories—including the Pincus piece in Woodward’s own newspaper—suggesting the administration had exaggerated the uranium-shopping-in-Africa charge. Libby shared with Woodward some of the NIE. According to Woodward’s notes, Libby told him that the NIE asserted that there had been an “effort by the Iraqis to get [yellowcake] from Africa. It goes back to February ’02.” He even used the word “vigorous” to describe those efforts, just as one sentence of the NIE had said.
But Libby wasn’t exactly revealing the full truth; he was marshaling evidence to defend his client, the vice president. According to Woodward’s account, Libby said nothing about the INR dissent or the qualifiers in the yellowcake section. Nor, apparently, did he tell Woodward about the CIA’s recent conclusion that the Niger claim was unfounded. As for Joe Wilson and his wife, Woodward later said that he could not rule out the possibility that he had brought up the subject with Libby. But there was no reference to Valerie Wilson in his interview notes, and he had no recollection of talking with Libby about her—even though Armitage had already told him about the former ambassador’s wife.
THE administration’s position kept crumbling. The day before Woodward interviewed Libby, The New York Times broke a front-page story disclosing that State’s INR had produced a June 2 classified memo disputing the CIA’s finding that the trailers found in Iraq were mobile bioweapons labs. After more than three months of war, the mobile trailers were still the only find the administration had to show for its WMD hunt, and now that was officially in doubt.
And administration officials were attempting to wiggle out of their definitive prewar statements. Testifying before the House armed services committee, Wolfowitz remarked, “If there’s a problem with intelligence…it doesn’t mean that anybody misled anybody. It means that intelligence is an art not a science.” At a press briefing, General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, noted, “Intelligence doesn’t necessarily mean something is true, it’s just, it’s intelligence, you know, it’s your best estimate of the situation. It doesn’t mean it’s a fact.”
IN LATE June, Robert Novak got word that a senior government official—someone he had been trying to interview for some time—had finally agreed to see him. The official was Armitage, the deputy secretary of state. For all his years in Washington, Novak didn’t have a relationship with Armitage. But he knew that Armitage was the perfect source to talk to about intrigue within the Bush administration, particularly the bitter clashes between Colin Powell’s State Department and the hawks in the Pentagon and the vice president’s office.
In getting his interview request approved, Novak may have received behind-the-scenes help from another well-connected Washington player: Ken Duberstein, former chief of staff in Ronald Reagan’s White House and now one of the capital’s premier power brokers and lobbyists. Duberstein was a confidant of Powell. (The secretary affectionately called him “Duberdog.”) Duberstein would later tell others that, while chatting with Novak about Powell, he had told the columnist, if you really want to know how Colin is doing, you should talk to Rich; he’s running things day to day at the State Department. Duberstein said he would make a phone call and help smooth the way.
Novak would later not remember the conversation with Duberstein and profess to be unaware of his intervention. But he was happy, and a little surprised, when his interview request suddenly came through toward the end of June. It wouldn’t happen right away, however. Novak’s meeting with Armitage was scheduled for a couple of weeks later—right after the July 4 holiday.
AFTER naming a new global AIDS coordinator on July 2, Bush took a few questions from reporters at the White House. The first reporter he called on pointed to the increasing number of attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq and asked what Bush was doing to persuade “larger powers, like France and Germany and Russia, to join the American occupation there.” Bush replied not by explaining what he was doing to coax other countries to send troops to Iraq. Instead, he offered tough talk about the Iraqi insurgents, practically issuing them a dare: “There are some who feel like that if they attack us that we may decide to leave prematurely…. My answer is, bring ’em on.”
FOUR days later, Joe Wilson outed himself within the pages of The New York Times. In the op-ed section of that Sunday’s paper—under the headline “What I Didn’t Find in Africa”—he opened his piece with a question: “Did the Bush administration manipulate intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs to justify an invasion of Iraq?” His answer: “based on my experience…I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.” And that unnamed former envoy sent to Niger? “That’s me,” he wrote.
Wilson described his trip, noting that the CIA had been spurred to action by an inquiry from Cheney’s office. He noted that he had spent eight days in Niamey “drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people.” (Wilson’s critics later pounced on the “sweet mint tea” reference and accused him of being a dilettante. That line, though, had been suggested by Wilson’s editor, who was looking to add a touch of local color to the piece.) “It did not take long,” Wilson wrote, “to conclude that it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place.” And he explained how the uranium industry was structured and how that made such a deal unlikely. He also acknowledged that he had never seen the forged documents but said he had been briefed before leaving about a supposed memorandum of agreement detailing the yellowcake transaction. He noted that although he hadn’t filed a written report, his findings should have been documented—and should have been shared with Cheney’s office. So, he asked, why had the White House continued to use the Niger charge to justify an invasion? He suggested that Congress should investigate Bush’s use of the Niger charge. “[Q]uestioning the selective use of intelligence to justify the war in Iraq,” Wilson wrote, “is neither idle sniping nor ‘revisionist history,’ as Mr. Bush has suggested.”
Wilson’s op-ed was the hot news of the day. And it was part of a one-man media blitz. He appeared on Meet the Press and went further in pointing an accusatory finger at Cheney. “The office of the vice president, I am absolutely convinced, received a very specific response to the question it asked [about the Niger deal], and that response was based upon my trip out there,” Wilson said. When guest host Andrea Mitchell pressed him on this point, Wilson said he assumed Cheney had been briefed, because when he worked in the White House it was “standard operating procedure” to provide the vice president answers to questions he had posed. But Wilson was wrong. There was no evidence that Cheney had known about his trip.
The White House was aware “well ahead” of Bush’s State of the Union speech, Wilson charged, that the yellowcake-from-Africa intelligence was “erroneous.” Wilson also noted that the issue was greater than the question of whether Bush and Cheney had abused the prewar intelligence. The administration, he argued, had actually trivialized the WMD problem by exploiting it: “There is no greater threat that we face as a nation going forward than the threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of non-state actors or international terrorists. And if we’ve prosecuted a wa
r for reasons other than that, using weapons of mass destruction as cover for that, then I think we’ve done a grave disservice to the weapons of mass destruction threat. The bar will be set much, much higher internationally, and in Congress, when…another administration has a true WMD problem.”
In a Washington Post profile of Wilson by Walter Pincus and Richard Leiby, which appeared that morning, Wilson summed up what he believed was the bottom line: “It really comes down to the administration misrepresenting the facts on an issue that was a fundamental justification for going to war. It begs the question, what else are they lying about?”
Had Bush misled the country? That question had been percolating for months. Congressional Democrats had raised it; cable talk shows had mulled it over. Bush and the White House had tried to dismiss it as nothing but partisan revisionism—nothing that required a substantive response or any form of concession. Yet Wilson, though overstating his case against Cheney, had changed the equation. His attack on one sliver of the administration’s brief for war had opened up much larger questions about the justification for the invasion of Iraq. “I was really mostly concerned with correcting the record on the State of the Union,” Wilson later said. “I figured the WMD question would sort itself out the longer we were in Iraq.” But with his Times op-ed—and his other media appearances—he had single-handedly intensified the assault on Bush, Cheney, and their aides.
And they would respond.
Or did his wife send him on a junket?
—VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY
14
Seven Days in July
ON SUNDAY morning, July 6, Carl Ford, the State Department’s chief intelligence officer, was doing what many professional Washingtonians do on the day of rest: watching the political talk shows. And there was Joe Wilson on Meet the Press, talking about his op-ed piece in that day’s New York Times and identifying himself as the former ambassador who had gone to Niger for the CIA and exposed the uranium canard. “Oh, shit,” Ford recalled saying to his wife, “this probably is going to cause me to have to work today.”
He was right. No sooner did the show end than his phone rang. Richard Armitage was on the line. “Were you watching TV?” he asked Ford. Powell was due to leave for Africa with Bush the next day. “We need to get him up to speed on this,” Armitage said with urgency. Ford reminded Armitage that he had already sent Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman a memo on the Wilson trip and suggested he could update it. “Fine,” Armitage said. But he wanted it right away. The Wilson matter was now Topic A inside the Beltway.
Ford called one of his analysts at home and told him to get to work. But it turned out that the first memo needed no updating. The new memo was just about word for word the old memo, reminding Powell that INR had had nothing to do with sending Wilson and that it had consistently argued that the Niger charge was absurd. “We basically changed the date” and the addressee, Ford said. Instead of Grossman, the recipient of the memo was now Powell. Like the first memo, this one was stamped secret and the key paragraphs were marked S/NF (Secret/No Foreign distribution). The same attachments were affixed, and the new memo repeated the same sentence about Valerie Wilson’s having “convened” the February 19, 2002, CIA meeting that had led to Joe Wilson’s Africa trip.
The Wilson controversy now struck Ford as more ridiculous than ever. There had never been anything to this stupid yellowcake charge, he thought. But Ford was acutely aware of the larger context. The politics were more volatile than two months earlier, when the anxiety over the missing weapons of mass destruction had started to creep into hallway conversations in the State Department. Now, Ford thought, “the whole underpinning and logic of the war was unraveling.”
And the unraveling would get worse as the week proceeded. It would result in an orchestrated high-level effort to discredit Wilson and culminate in a leak that would be seized on by administration critics as prime evidence of White House desperation and deviousness—even though it was caused partly by an improbable series of accidents and misunderstandings.
MONDAY morning at the White House, officials were preparing for Bush’s Africa trip. He was to leave later that day, accompanied by Powell, Rice, Fleischer, Card, and communications director Dan Bartlett—and a planeload of reporters. It was to be a five-nation tour. With the war in Iraq not abating, this trip had been designed to emphasize the compassionate side of Bush’s diplomacy. The White House hoped to highlight a major new $15 billion initiative to fight AIDS on the continent and to play up a new antifamine proposal.
But the buzz within the press corps on the morning of July 7 wasn’t about an anti-AIDS initiative; it was about Joe Wilson. Fleischer held a press briefing and faced a barrage of questions. “There is zero, nada, nothing new here,” Fleischer said about the Wilson op-ed. “This is old news.” It was the standard damage control line used by every White House: it’s all been reported before. “We’ve said this repeatedly—that the information on yellowcake did indeed turn out to be incorrect,” Fleischer remarked, maintaining that neither Cheney nor anyone else in the White House had had any reason to suspect the Niger charge prior to the State of the Union speech.
But under persistent questioning from David Sanger of The New York Times, Fleischer became confused on whether or not Bush’s sixteen-word sentence in his State of the Union speech—which had referred to uranium shopping in Africa, not Niger—had been wrong. First, he said, “I see nothing that…would indicate that there was no basis to the president’s broader statement.” That seemed to suggest the White House was standing by the sixteen words. But moments later, Fleischer remarked, “The president’s broader statement was based and predicated on the yellowcake from Niger.”
“So it was wrong?” Sanger asked.
“That’s what we’ve acknowledged,” Fleischer said.
If the White House was admitting that the president had used faulty intelligence to lead the nation to war, that would be news. Sanger reminded Fleischer that White House officials previously had said that Bush’s State of the Union remark had not been based entirely on the Niger charge. Let me get back to you, Fleischer said. “If you don’t hear from me, just assume that there is nothing new that moves the ball today.”
BUT the ball was moving. And not only because of Wilson. That day, in London, the House of Commons foreign affairs committee released a tough report questioning the Blair government’s prewar intelligence on Iraq. The panel, made up mostly of Blair’s Labour Party colleagues, questioned the September 2002 British white paper’s “bald claim” that Iraq had tried to buy “significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” The panel noted that government ministers had insisted there was “other evidence” beyond the forged Niger documents to support the assertion, but the ministers had not disclosed what that evidence was—or whether they stood behind it.*54 The panel concluded that the white paper’s claim about Iraq’s efforts to obtain uranium in Africa at least “should have been qualified to reflect the uncertainty.” Bush’s definitive State of the Union remark—which attributed the yellowcake charge to British intelligence—had lost its foundation.
In Britain, this was not the biggest news about the foreign affairs committee report. The panel found that Blair and his aides generally “did not mislead” Parliament prior to the war but that Blair had misrepresented some of the intelligence on Iraq’s WMDs. The committee reported that another main allegation of the British white paper—that Iraq could deploy chemical or biological weapons within forty-five minutes—“did not warrant the prominence” given to it. But the committee concluded that Alistair Campbell, Blair’s communications chief, had not “sexed up” that section of the white paper, as he had been accused of doing.
With the British report questioning the yellowcake-in-Africa charge, National Security Council officials finally realized they had no defense for the sixteen words. They began crafting a concession statement.
But within the vice president’s office, Libby and Cheney weren’t about to step bac
k from anything. A retreat would be a victory for Wilson—and the president’s critics. And Cheney and Libby were more livid about the former diplomat than ever. Cheney, as Libby later testified to a grand jury, considered Wilson’s op-ed an assault on his credibility.
Cheney had studied the piece carefully. He had a habit of clipping important articles out of the newspapers with a penknife, and he had cut out the op-ed, jotting notes on it and carefully underlining key sections. He fixed on Wilson’s assertion that some of the intelligence about Iraq’s nuclear program had been “twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.” He also underlined two of Wilson’s references to the vice president’s office. Above the headline, Cheney wrote in easily legible script, “Have they done this sort of thing before? Send an Amb. to answer a question?” (In the case of Wilson, the answer was yes; during an earlier trip to Niger he had, on the CIA’s behalf, sought information regarding A. Q. Khan, the notorious nuclear weapons proliferator.) Cheney wondered if something fishy had occurred. He wrote, “Do we ordinarily send people out pro bono to work for us? Or did his wife send him on a junket?” A trip to one of the poorest nations in the world for no money would not normally seem a boondoggle. Yet Cheney—who had learned a month earlier that Valerie Wilson worked in the Counterproliferation Division of the CIA’s clandestine service (and who had shared that specific information with Libby)—was looking for a hidden truth. He wasn’t taking Wilson at his word. As he and Libby were pondering how to respond to the Wilson article, Cheney was trying to discern what really was behind this op-ed. He suspected it might involve Joe Wilson’s wife.
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