Libby agreed. On the morning of July 7, Cheney’s office sent talking points to Fleischer about Wilson’s op-ed, noting that Cheney hadn’t known anything about Wilson’s trip to Niger. Hours later, Libby had lunch with Fleischer. The conversation, as Fleischer later recounted, was “kind of weird.” Libby, the press secretary recalled, usually operated “in a very closed-lip fashion.” But this day, Libby wanted to dish. He told Fleischer that Cheney hadn’t sent Wilson to Niger. “He was sent by his wife,” Libby said, according to Fleischer’s subsequent testimony to a grand jury. “She works in…the Counterproliferation area of the CIA.” Libby, Fleischer testified, also said “something along the lines of, you know, this is hush-hush, nobody knows about this. This is on the q.t.” Cheney’s chief of staff appeared to recognize the information he was sharing with Fleischer was significant—and classified. (Libby later would say he remembered the lunch but denied discussing Wilson’s wife at it.)
That day, Armitage was pestering Ford to get the new INR memo on the Wilson trip to Powell. “Is it there yet?” he asked the State Department intelligence chief in a brusque phone call. After Bush and his entourage had left for Africa, according to Ford, the memo was faxed to Powell on the presidential jet. It was a significant moment. A secret memo reporting that Valerie Wilson had “convened” the CIA meeting that Wilson had attended was now aboard Air Force One. Any Bush administration official who read it would have had cause to wonder if there had been something odd about how the Wilson trip had come to be. Powell later recalled sharing the memo with Rice. A copy was also sent to Armitage.
Once Air Force One was in the air—and after the network news shows had wrapped up their evening broadcasts—Fleischer threw in the towel on the sixteen words. He called reporters for The New York Times and The Washington Post and engaged in a rare act: he admitted a White House mistake. “White House Backs Off Claim on Iraqi Buy,” read the headline on Pincus’s front-page piece in the Post the next morning. “Knowing all that we know now,” a senior Bush administration official was quoted as saying, “the reference to Iraq’s attempt to acquire uranium from Africa should not have been included in the State of the Union speech.” Sanger’s story in the Times had a senior official saying essentially the same thing about the sixteen words: “We couldn’t prove it, and it might in fact be wrong.”
This was a concession, albeit a limited one. Yet the Niger story was far from over.
THE next morning, Libby had another get-together with Judy Miller, this one a two-hour breakfast at the St. Regis Hotel, blocks away from the White House. Once again, Cheney had given his chief of staff the green light to disclose information from the classified National Intelligence Estimate. The idea was to strike back—at Wilson, at the critics—with the CIA’s own words. Libby had also consulted David Addington, Cheney’s longtime chief counsel and perhaps the White House’s most notorious proponent of unbridled presidential power. Addington, according to Libby’s later testimony, had reassured Libby that if Bush had authorized the disclosure of this classified information, that amounted to declassification of the material. This was the first time Libby had seen secret information declassified only on the say-so of a president. And now he was going to go further with Miller than he had with Woodward in revealing the contents of the NIE. He would be feeding sensitive information to a reporter whose stories had bolstered the WMD case for war—and who had an interest in defending the prewar claims. It was, one senior administration official later said, “Scooter’s black op.”
At breakfast, Miller started the conversation by asking Libby about the Wilson op-ed—a subject that, she later wrote, “agitated” Libby. Cheney’s top aide insisted that the op-ed was inaccurate. And he was prepared to explain why. But first he wanted to discuss the ground rules. During their previous conversation, Libby had told Miller she could quote him in any story she might write as a “senior administration official.” Now—with Wilson the subject—he insisted he be identified as a “former Hill staffer.” This was technically true but disingenuous; Libby hadn’t worked on Capitol Hill since the late 1990s. It was a sign that he didn’t want White House fingerprints (or his own) on any article that emerged. Miller accepted these unusual conditions.*55
Now cloaked with a deceptive layer of anonymity, Libby began what Miller later described as a “lengthy and sharp critique” of both Wilson and the CIA. He criticized Wilson’s op-ed as part of the CIA’s backpedaling on the prewar intelligence. He cited classified intelligence reports from 2002 on the Niger charge. He claimed, according to Miller’s subsequent account, that an agency cable based on Wilson’s trip had “barely made it out of the bowels of the CIA.” He noted that the cable showed Wilson had actually returned with information indicating that in 1999 Iraq had pursued expanding commercial relations with Niger, which included (or so one Niger official thought) uranium purchases. He said George Tenet had never heard of Wilson.
When Miller tried to change the subject to Saddam’s supposed chemical and biological stockpile—biochem, as she liked to say, was her specialty, not nukes—Libby kept talking about Wilson and the nuclear issue. He told her the NIE had “firmly concluded that Iraq was seeking uranium.” (Libby at one point read from a piece of paper he pulled from his pocket.) He claimed that the detailed assessments in the NIE “were even stronger” than those in the slick, declassified CIA “white paper” released the previous October. But in making these assertions about the NIE, Libby was again being misleading and highly selective: the NIE hadn’t “firmly concluded” that Iraq was seeking uranium. And he neglected to mention the caveats, qualifiers, and dissents within the NIE that had been left out of the white paper.
Libby once more brought up Wilson’s wife’s employment as a counterproliferation expert at the CIA. Miller wrote in her notebook, “Wife works at Winpac,” referring to the counterproliferation unit in the CIA’s directorate of intelligence. In the same notebook, Miller scribbled the name “Valerie Flame,” clearly a reference to Valerie Wilson’s maiden name, Valerie Plame. Later, Miller would say—somewhat improbably—that she didn’t believe the “Valerie Flame” information had come from Libby, although the entry was in the same notebook as her notes from the Libby meeting. She claimed she had heard the “Valerie Flame” name from another source. She couldn’t, however, recall who that source was.
After the long Miller breakfast, according to a later indictment, Libby encountered Addington in an anteroom outside Cheney’s office. Libby asked a curious question: What paperwork would the CIA have if an employee’s spouse took an overseas trip? He was still looking for more information on Wilson—and his wife.
BOB NOVAK, too, was looking for information that day. He was writing about Fran Fragos Townsend, the new White House counterterrorism chief. The piece he was planning was classic Novak: an insider’s tale of dissension and backstabbing within the administration. Novak had spoken to aides to Attorney General John Ashcroft who were questioning the political sympathies of Townsend, a former Justice Department terrorism prosecutor who had been chief of the department’s unit in charge of national security wiretaps. They were suggesting that she was a closet Democrat who might prove disloyal to Bush. Now Novak wanted to talk to Rove for this story.
But Rove was in a bind. Under normal circumstances, Rove—who zealously screened the political bona fides of administration appointees—might have been sympathetic to such a hit piece. But the president had already selected Townsend. So that morning, Rove was doing something he rarely did: he was ducking Novak’s phone calls.
Novak called Adam Levine, the White House press aide who had become something of a Rove protégé, and complained that Rove wasn’t calling him back. Levine promised to talk to Rove and see what he could do. In the course of the conversation, according to Levine, Novak asked him, “What do you make of the Wilson thing?” Levine replied, “I’m not working on that. You’ve got to talk to Scooter or Karl.” That morning, Levine had run into Rove in the hallway, and Rove had seemed to
have boned up on Wilson. “He’s a Democrat; he’s giving money to John Kerry,” Levine later recalled Rove remarking.*56
NOVAK had a secret source for information on Wilson and his Niger trip. On the afternoon of Tuesday, July 8, the columnist went to the State Department to interview Deputy Secretary of State Armitage, according to three government officials familiar with the meeting. This was the session that Washington power broker Ken Duberstein would say that he had helped arrange. Powell also had thought it was a good idea for his deputy to talk to the columnist. “Powell was encouraging Rich to have this get-together,” a State Department official later said.
One issue Novak asked about was the Wilson trip. He wanted to know why someone who had worked in the Clinton National Security Council and who was now a vocal critic of Bush’s policies in Iraq had been chosen for the Niger assignment. Novak’s line of thinking paralleled Rove’s. “Why in the world did they send Joe Wilson on this?” Novak recalled asking. “Why would they send him?” To answer Novak, Armitage revealed a tantalizing morsel that was in the classified INR memo: that Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA on weapons of mass destruction and had suggested her husband for the mission to Niger. It was the same information Armitage had already shared with Woodward. (Novak, in a column three months later, would maintain that the remark had come from a senior administration official who was “no partisan gunslinger.”)
The identity of the administration official who first divulged information about Valerie Wilson to Novak would soon become one of Washington’s biggest mysteries. And months later, Armitage would be questioned by the FBI about this conversation with Novak and testify about it before a federal grand jury. After a grand jury appearance, he spoke about his testimony with his colleague Carl Ford, the INR chief. “I’m afraid I may be the guy that caused this whole thing,” Armitage said, according to Ford.
“You’re kidding,” Ford replied.
“Yes,” the deputy secretary of state said. “I may have been the leaker. I talked to Novak.” Armitage said that he had “slipped up” and had told the columnist more than he should have, Ford recalled: “He was basically beside himself that he was the guy that fucked up. He was mad at himself. My sense from Rich is that it was just chitchat. If you know Rich, he loves to hear rumors, he loves to talk about what the latest rumors are. He was just gossiping. It wasn’t malevolent.” Armitage told Ford that he had confessed to the grand jury. A lawyer representing one of the most senior U.S. officials in the case said Armitage was distraught over his role as the leaker. “He was ashamed and embarrassed,” the attorney said. “He felt foolish.”
The series of events had been bizarre. Doug Rohn, an INR analyst skeptical of the entire yellowcake claim, had taken notes of the Wilson meeting at the CIA’s Counterproliferation Division. Carl Ford, the INR head who had championed his bureau’s dissents in interagency meetings, had passed a memo (based on Rohn’s notes) to Powell and Armitage. And Armitage, who had broken ranks with the neoconservatives, had shared information from the memo with Novak (who actually had opposed the war in Iraq before the invasion). Though Libby and other hawkish White House officials were enraged at Wilson and scheming against him, it had been a leading member of the administration’s small moderate cell who had first slipped Novak the information on Joe Wilson’s wife.*57
NOVAK and Rove talked on July 9. They discussed the selection of Fran Townsend to be Bush’s counterterrorism chief. They also spoke about the Wilson trip. For Rove, this was no matter of gossip. The president’s chief political strategist shared the same goal as Libby and Cheney: to knock Wilson down. Still, his response to Novak was limited—at least according to the narrow accounts Rove and Novak later provided.
Novak told Rove he had learned that Valerie Wilson had been behind Joe Wilson’s trip. “I’ve heard that,” Rove replied, according to his attorney. Novak would later say he “distinctly” recalled Rove saying: “You know that, too.”
And who had told Rove about Valerie Wilson? Years later, Rove would profess not to remember. But a source close to Rove suggested that the White House aide had “probably” learned it from Scooter Libby.
Rove, according to these accounts, hadn’t said much to Novak. But whatever the precise words, Rove had provided his old friend confirmation of what Armitage had told the columnist. Bush’s top adviser was, at the least, corroborating the disclosure of classified information, given that Valerie Wilson’s employment at the CIA was an official secret. Even if this confirmation was indirect, it was enough for Novak. Thanks to Rove, the columnist now had two sources for the story—and a strong column for the following week.
ALL that week, Levine later recalled, “Scooter was going nuts.” Cheney’s chief of staff was incensed over the nonstop press coverage touched off by the Wilson op-ed. He talked about it repeatedly to Levine and Catherine Martin, Cheney’s chief spokesperson. Libby was especially upset over the nightly commentaries of MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, the garrulous host of Hardball. A vocal critic of the Iraq war, Matthews was on a tear over the yellowcake issue, accepting Wilson’s account and hammering Cheney and Libby (by name) at every turn. Libby ordered Levine and Martin to review the transcripts of everything Matthews was saying on the subject. They did and the two press aides underlined for Libby everything they thought Matthews had gotten wrong.
Matthews had gone beyond even what Wilson had charged; he seemed to be suggesting Libby had been primarily responsible for the sixteen words. “It sounds to me,” Matthews had said on his July 8 show, that “a hawk in the vice president’s office, probably from Scooter Libby on down,” had inserted the bogus uranium charge into the State of the Union address and that “the president went along with it without thinking.” Matthews was pushing for a full-scale investigation of the yellowcake fiasco and suggesting possible witnesses from the White House, including Libby.
Libby had reasons beyond politics to be obsessed with Matthews. The talk-show host’s comments were getting covered in the Arab world. They had, Libby thought, fueled anti-Semitic diatribes against the architects of the Iraq War. (Libby was of Jewish background, although not religiously observant.) This was a common complaint among the administration’s neoconservatives. When Wolfowitz had run into a Hardball producer at the White House correspondents’ dinner two months earlier, he had said contemptuously that he would never go on Hardball because of what Matthews had been saying. But for Libby, it had become personal. Thanks to Matthews, he was getting international publicity—and not the kind he wanted. At some point, U.S. intelligence picked up “chatter” about possible threats against Libby, according to a close friend of Libby who discussed the matter with him. Libby said he had been forced to adopt security measures. He worried about his family. And he seemed to blame all this on Matthews and his attacks. Matthews “was his bête noire,” the friend said.
Fed up, Libby directed Martin to have Levine call Matthews to complain. Levine had once been a senior producer for Matthews on Hardball. But the resulting phone call, according to Levine, was a disaster. Within minutes, he and Matthews were in a shouting match. Levine upbraided his old boss for having accepted Wilson’s version of events. He pointed out that Matthews had been harping about the role of Libby and other neocons and that they all had Jewish names. “Some of what you’re saying about this sounds anti-Semitic,” Levine later recalled telling the talk-show host.
Levine didn’t believe Matthews was prejudiced. But he was dutifully conveying a message from Libby. (“Scooter thinks the term ‘neoconservative’ is anti-Semitic,” Martin once told Matthews.) Matthews was indignant and made clear that he had no intention of laying off the vice president’s office. Matthews later remembered receiving a phone call from Levine, but he said he didn’t recall any discussion of anti-Semitism.
Levine subsquently ran into Libby. “Have you talked to him?” Libby asked. “We need to get him to stop.” When Levine reported that he had gotten nowhere with Matthews, Libby was “really upset,” according to Levine. �
��I can’t do anything more on this,” the press aide told Libby. He suggested Libby call Tim Russert, who was Washington bureau chief for NBC News, and take it up with him.
Libby called Russert on July 10 to complain about Matthews. For Libby, it would be a fateful call.
According to Russert, Libby was angry. “What the hell is going on?” Libby asked him. Why, he demanded to know, was Matthews constantly mentioning only certain names when he referred to the administration officials behind the Iraq War? “It’s always Libby and Wolfowitz and Perle,” Libby said, according to Russert. The television host immediately assumed that Libby was accusing Matthews of focusing on people with Jewish-sounding names. Russert suggested Libby call the president of MSNBC. Russert promised to call Neal Shapiro, the president of NBC. “I immediately, obviously, called [Shapiro] and shared the complaint, which is why it was memorable in my mind,” Russert said in a subsequent MSNBC interview.
Shapiro would remember the call from Russert. “Hey, I just got a phone call from Scooter Libby, and he’s got real problems with Chris Matthews,” Russert told him, according to Shapiro. Russert also told Shapiro that he viewed Libby’s complaint as an implicit warning: if Matthews didn’t tone it down, the network might find it hard to book White House guests. Shapiro spoke with Matthews’s executive producer and urged him to have the talk-show host throttle back a bit. “Hey,” Shapiro recalled saying, “this guy is still the vice president.”
Months later, when Libby’s phone call to Russert became a critical part of a criminal investigation, Libby would offer a description of this conversation completely different from Russert’s and Shapiro’s account.
IN AFRICA, Bush and the rest of the White House delegation were hopping from one country to the next, trying to talk about AIDS and famine relief. But throughout the week, the White House press corps wouldn’t let go of the Niger scandal. At a press “availability” in South Africa on Tuesday, Bush had dodged questions from reporters trying to get him to affirm what Fleischer had already conceded—that one sentence in the State of the Union speech had been wrong. Asked whether he still believed Saddam Hussein had attempted “to buy nuclear materials in Africa,” Bush responded, “One thing is for certain, he’s not trying to buy anything right now.”
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