Hubris

by Michael Isikoff

  The day after the media reported that Rove was in the clear, Bush said, “I’ve made the comments I’m going to make about this incident, and I’m going to put this part of the situation behind us and move forward.” But, in fact, Bush had never addressed the situation. Since the disclosure of the Cooper e-mail—which proved that Rove had leaked Valerie Wilson’s CIA identity—nearly a year earlier, the president had declined to say anything about Rove’s conduct. Nor had he said anything about the White House’s previous false claim that Rove (and Libby) had had nothing to do with the leak. Bush had also declined to reveal what he had known—if anything—about the matter. The president and his press secretary had repeatedly claimed they couldn’t comment on the investigation (or anything related to it) while the inquiry was under way. Now that the Rove investigation was completed, Bush would say nothing more. “I obviously, along with others in the White House, took a sigh of relief when he [Fitzgerald] made the decision he made,” the president said at a June 14, 2006, press conference, when asked if he approved of Rove’s actions in the leak episode. As for his onetime pledge to fire anyone who had been involved in the leak, Bush also made it clear that that was now off the table, at least as far as his closest adviser was concerned. “I trust Karl Rove, and he’s an integral part of my team,” he said.

  The stonewall strategy had worked.

  THE original leaker in the case also got off, but only after Fitzgerald had intensely investigated his conduct—twice.

  Richard Armitage had contacted investigators early on and confessed that he had talked to Novak about Wilson’s wife. He felt terrible about it, he told friends. It had been, he told them, a stupid mistake. Still, the investigators had questions about whether Armitage had been completely candid. Was it truly pure happenstance that Novak’s meeting with Armitage—facilitated by Washington power broker Ken Duberstein and encouraged by Colin Powell—had occurred just as the Wilson affair was blowing up in the second week of July 2003? Had Armitage not realized the information he was sharing with Novak had come from a classified memo—the same memo Armitage had asked Carl Ford to fax to Colin Powell after Joe Wilson’s appearance on Meet the Press? Had Armitage merely slipped a piece of gossip to the columnist in a casual manner while chatting about other topics, as Novak had claimed? Or had he purposefully disclosed what he believed was Valerie Wilson’s role in her husband’s controversial trip to distance the State Department from this mess and, in a way, blame the CIA?

  Armitage’s truthfulness had been an issue during the Iran-contra investigation, a fact surely known to Fitzgerald. But when Fitzgerald was seeking to wrap up the investigation in October 2005, he didn’t have proof that Armitage had testified falsely in this case. As with Rove and Libby, Fitzgerald never contemplated bringing a case against Armitage under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. He also decided not to seek charges against him under the Espionage Act, even though, as the original leaker to Novak, the former deputy secretary of state was the closest candidate for prosecution under the law. Fitzgerald figured he was done with Armitage. But that was not the case.

  After Fitzgerald unveiled his indictment of Libby, Armitage again contacted the prosecutor, according to two knowledgeable sources familiar with the events. There was something, he said, that he hadn’t told the prosecutor about: his earlier conversation with Bob Woodward of The Washington Post.

  Armitage’s belated confession was awkward for both himself and others. It placed Armitage in a difficult spot. He was admitting he had not told Fitzgerald the whole story. And this meant that Fitzgerald had misstated a fact of the case. At the press conference announcing the Libby indictment, Fitzgerald had stated that the vice president’s chief of staff “was the first official known to have told a reporter” about Valerie Wilson when he had talked to Judy Miller on June 23, 2003. But Armitage had already spoken to Woodward about her more than a week earlier. Armitage’s last-minute admission to Fitzgerald thus ensnared yet another journalist in the case. Fitzgerald had to bring Armitage back before the grand jury. But he also needed to hear from the famed Watergate reporter about what he knew and when he knew it.

  After Woodward obtained a waiver from Armitage, the Post lawyers worked out an arrangement with Fitzgerald, and Woodward provided a sworn deposition to Fitzgerald on November 14, 2005, that focused narrowly on his Armitage conversation. (“I was astounded that we were able to do this,” Woodward subsequently said, “because other people got in this confrontation with [Fitzgerald]. He was quite respectful of the First Amendment.”) Then late the next day, Woodward and the Post revealed that Woodward had cooperated with Fitzgerald—without identifying Armitage. Woodward released a statement acknowledging he had been told about Joe Wilson’s wife by a confidential source while conducting interviews for his book Plan of Attack in mid-June 2003. He had not told his editors about this conversation until October 2005, fearing that if any reference to this conversation appeared in the Post he could be subpoenaed. Woodward did say he had mentioned to a fellow Post reporter, Walter Pincus, that Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA. But Pincus told the Post that he didn’t recall that: “Are you kidding? I certainly would have remembered that.”*92

  Woodward’s late cameo role in the scandal prompted criticism of the Post reporter. He had long been disdainful of Fitzgerald’s investigation. In an appearance on Larry King’s cable show the night before the Libby indictment was issued, Woodward had discounted the leak as innocent “gossip” and “chatter” and dismissed the notion of charging any officials, even with perjury. Months earlier, on National Public Radio, he had called the leak case “laughable because the consequences are not that great.” But Woodward had known that one of his sources had told him the same information at issue in the investigation—and he had good reason to believe the source was a prime subject of Fitzgerald’s probe. “I had long suspected my source was Novak’s source,” Woodward said in a 2006 interview. But, he said, he hadn’t learned it for sure until days before Fitzgerald’s press conference.

  As a reporter, Woodward certainly had well-founded concerns about Fitzgerald’s investigation and the prosecutor’s pursuit of journalists. But he had opined on the case publicly without disclosing he had a keen personal interest in the matter. Woodward apologized to the Post’s editors about the matter. Len Downie, the paper’s executive editor, said that Woodward had “made a mistake” but that this error ought to be balanced against the journalist’s long record of “outstanding reporting.”

  For Fitzgerald, the important question was, what had prompted Armitage to come forward? According to Woodward, he himself had been the trigger.

  Appearing again on Larry King Live, this time a week after his deposition with Fitzgerald, Woodward explained what had happened. When he had watched the Fitzgerald press conference, Woodward said, he had been surprised to hear the prosecutor say that Libby was the first administration official to have passed information on Valerie Wilson to a reporter. “I went, ‘Whoa,’ ” Woodward said. He realized that Armitage had told him about Valerie Wilson ten days before Libby had told Judy Miller. Woodward then went into what he termed an “incredibly aggressive reporting mode.” He immediately called his source—meaning Armitage (whom Woodward was not naming publicly)—and asked, “Do you realize when we talked about this and exactly what was said?” His source replied, “I have to go to the prosecutor. I have to tell the truth.” And he did, and he released Woodward to testify about it. But Armitage wouldn’t allow Woodward to identify him publicly.

  Here was yet another matter for Fitzgerald to investigate. Had Armitage merely forgotten that he had also given information about Valerie Wilson to Woodward until he was reminded by Woodward following the Fitzgerald press conference? In his interview with Larry King, Woodward said, “I made efforts to get the source, this year, earlier, and last year, to give me some information about this so I could put something in the newspaper or a book. So, I could get information out, and totally failed.” Woodward’s remark was in
criminating for Armitage. It strongly suggested that if Armitage had forgotten about his conversation with Woodward, the Post reporter had reminded him about it at least twice. Each time Woodward brought up the subject, the reporter later said, his source had quickly cut him off after one sentence. Woodward had asked questions along the lines of, “What about the Fitzgerald investigation? I heard you testified before the grand jury.” But the response from his source, he said, was abrupt: “It was, Boom. End of conversation. Not going there.” If Woodward’s account was accurate, Armitage hadn’t come clean on this leak until after the Libby indictment and after Woodward had pressed him yet again. Had he been hiding his conversation with Woodward from the prosecutor?

  Once the Woodward disclosure occurred, Armitage was “very depressed,” according to one friend. Another friend said, “A lot of us were worried about Rich.” But Fitzgerald chose once again not to charge him—and the prosecutor, following standard grand jury rules, never disclosed anything about Armitage’s role in the leak.

  Armitage, who was now running an international consulting firm, rebounded. In June 2006, the day after Fitzgerald ended his investigation of Rove, Armitage appeared on PBS’s Charlie Rose Show and refused to answer the talk-show host’s gentle questions as to whether he had been Woodward’s source. Asked about his role in the leak case, he said, “Oh, I’m not worried about my situation.” Days later, he told The Australian newspaper that the level of violence in Iraq was worsening dramatically, that the attacks were fueled mostly by sectarian conflict, and that he believed the Iraqis would soon ask the United States to leave Iraq.

  SCOOTER LIBBY was the only one of the leakers to remain in jeopardy. Determined to protect Dick Cheney, Libby had told a convoluted story under oath: I knew; I forgot; I learned it again from journalists, not from the vice president. After he was indicted in October 2005, Libby, facing a prison term of up to thirty years and fines of $1.2 million, mounted an aggressive defense. He hired a battery of top-tier defense lawyers, whose fees were covered by the newly formed Libby Legal Defense Trust. The fund’s advisory board was studded with prominent Republicans and neoconservatives, including ex–CIA Director Jim Woolsey, former Senator Fred Thompson, Cheney adviser Mary Matalin, and publisher Steve Forbes. The outfit, which was not a tax-deductible charity, was chaired by Melvin Sembler, the Florida supermarket magnate and GOP fund-raiser who had been the Bush-appointed U.S. ambassador to Italy at the time the Niger documents surfaced. By the spring of 2006, the trust had raised about $2.5 million.

  Libby’s legal team, led by a flamboyant courtroom fighter named Ted Wells and a pit-bull litigator named William Jeffress, Jr., churned out motions seeking access to mountains of highly classified documents, reporters’ notebooks, and the grand jury testimony of various witnesses. The essence of Libby’s defense was that he had been far too busy with matters of war and peace to remember accurately what he had said about such a trivial matter as the employment of Joe Wilson’s wife. (Libby’s problem wasn’t only that he claimed to have forgotten what had happened; he had given the FBI and the grand jury specific recollections contradicted by others.) The early pretrial squabbling did reveal that Cheney had taken a rather direct interest in Wilson’s op-ed piece and trip, and it indicated that the Libby trial could include a dramatic moment: Dick Cheney testifying. The trial was scheduled for early 2007.

  If convicted, Libby could appeal. Beyond that, the ultimate escape for Libby could be a pardon from President George W. Bush.

  THE leak case, notwithstanding the Libby trial, seemed finished. But the same week that Rove got off, the issue that had triggered the leak—the reasons for the Iraq War—was back in the news. While the White House and its prowar allies were talking up Bush’s recent surprise trip to Baghdad and the attack that had killed terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the House of Representatives was having a full-force floor debate on the Iraq War. It was the first time the House had thoroughly debated the war since the vote in October 2002 that had handed Bush the authority to invade Iraq. Looking toward the coming congressional elections, GOP leaders had introduced a resolution that declared that Saddam had “constituted a threat against global peace and security,” that the U.S. military had “scored impressive victories in Iraq,” that the Iraq War was “part of the Global War on Terror,” and that no date should be set for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq. It was all part of Rove’s strategy of taking a potential liability—the war in Iraq—and turning it into an asset. For the White House, the sales campaign was never over.

  For two days, as violent attacks continued unabated in Iraq, the House debated this symbolic resolution, and Republicans and Democrats tangled over whether Saddam had posed such a danger. Representative Lloyd Doggett, a Texas Democrat, said, “This war was launched without an imminent threat to our families…. Radical ‘know it all’ ideologues here in Washington bent facts, distorted intelligence, and perpetrated lies designed to mislead the American people into believing that a third-rate thug had a hand in the 9/11 tragedy and was soon to unleash a mushroom cloud.” Representative Murtha argued that U.S. troops were caught within a deteriorating sectarian conflict and the number of attacks was on the rise. “Every day it gets worse,” Murtha said. Republicans defended the decision to invade Iraq and, as Rove had done, characterized any discussion of withdrawing troops (or setting a timetable for withdrawing troops) as gutless cutting and running. “It is time to stand up and vote,” declared Representative Charles Norwood, Jr., a Georgia Republican. “Is it al-Qaeda, or is it America?”

  The House voted 256 to 153 for the GOP’s complete-the-mission resolution, with merely three Republicans opposing the party. According to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, only 41 percent of Americans now said Bush had been right to launch the Iraq War.

  Four days after the vote, the American death toll in Iraq reached 2,500.

  WHAT had gone wrong? Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, and other administration officials had set themselves up by using the most drastic and forceful rhetoric in persuading the nation that the war was necessary. They had approached the invasion of Iraq as though it were a political campaign. They pushed aside doubt, they exaggerated, they shared information with the public selectively. Rather than argue that it was prudent to assume the worst about Saddam, they asserted that they knew the worst to be true.

  The intelligence community was both a help and a hindrance to the hawks. It did produce a National Intelligence Estimate that supported the White House’s general line: Saddam had WMDs. But it also produced dissents and caveats on critical components of the WMD argument, even as the intelligence community was often at war with itself. The analysts in the CIA’s WINPAC pushed the aluminum tubes, stuck with the Niger charge, and defended Curveball, while other experts, analysts, and officers challenged them. Why had WINPAC consistently overestimated the threat on the basis of thin evidence? “Iraq and the WMD came hard on the heels of 9/11—after we’re accused of not having enough information and of not connecting dots,” said Stanley Moskowitz, the chief of CIA congressional affairs, shortly before his death in 2006. “It put the agency in the psychology of ‘Oh shit, we can’t be too timid.’ And if you have a predisposition, you have a tendency to raid the data to support that. Also, if you understate the threat, it will be at the peril of American cities. People were scared. You can’t divorce that from the environment in which people looked at Iraqi intelligence.”

  So WINPAC won one tussle after another, as George Tenet and John McLaughlin failed to referee these all-important disputes. They also failed to correct (publicly or privately) Bush, Cheney, and others who overstated the flimsy intelligence. Too many within the intelligence community, as the postmortem reports noted, lost the ability to assess the available intelligence free of assumptions and free of the obvious context: Bush was heading to war with Saddam with or without compelling intelligence. And even though the CIA refused to accept the neoconservatives’ obsessive belief (based more on presumption than ev
idence) that Saddam and bin Laden were partners in terrorism, Tenet, in the days before the vote on the Iraq War resolution, protected the White House on this front by dismissing the significance of his own agency’s skeptical view on this contentious issue. “Tenet led us into a bad place” said a senior CIA official who worked closely with him. He had been concerned more with supporting the president than with informing him. Years later, John McLaughlin still had no clear explanation of how the CIA had failed on the prewar intelligence: “We’re not going to understand all the dimensions of this for some years. We need to get more distance from it.”

  Watching from inside the CIA, Paul Pillar, the national intelligence officer for the Middle East who was tormented by his own role in drafting the misleading CIA white paper on Iraq’s WMDs, came to believe that the main motivation of Bush administration officials was, as he later put it, “to stir up the politics and economics of the Middle East and use regime change in Iraq as a stimulus for regime change and other kinds of changes elsewhere in the region.” The overriding impetus was not a WMD threat but a desire to remake the Middle East. Yet WMD and terrorism had been the dual pitch. “If you want to sell anything,” Pillar explained, “the best way to do it would be to link to what had become after 9/11 the main concern of the American people.” And at that time it was al-Qaeda and September 11. Bush and his aides, Pillar argued, had engaged in the selective use of intelligence to create the “impression of an alliance” between Saddam and bin Laden. There was, he said, a steady flow of “rhetorical coupling” in which Bush administration officials repeatedly mentioned Iraq and 9/11 in the same breath. “The overall judgment of the analysts,” Pillar said, was that “what you had [regarding Baghdad and al-Qaeda] was more in the nature of two organizations that were trying to keep track of each other.” There was no operational alliance, nor was it likely one would emerge.