by Lou Dubose
In a courtroom on the second floor of the E. Barrett Prettyman Courthouse, Vice President Cheney will be confronted by the consequences of a failed military adventure in Iraq. More precisely, he will confront the consequences of his distortion of the intelligence used to sell that war to the American people. The trial will focus on the evidence for a cover-up by Cheney and his staff to deal with the allegation that he fabricated the central pretext for a war that by summer 2006 had killed more than twenty-five hundred American soldiers, injured some twenty-five thousand, and killed more than thirty thousand Iraqi civilians. If the vice president avoids the ride to the courthouse and testifies by closed-circuit television—as Ronald Reagan did in Iran-Contra—he will be answering questions under an oath administered by a no-nonsense federal judge. Cheney will be called to testify as a fact witness to a crime allegedly committed by a colleague and friend. The trial of Cheney's former chief of staff, Scooter Libby, will hinge not only on how the vice president answers the questions. In a very real sense, the largest legacy of the Bush-Cheney administration—the Iraq War—will be on trial in Judge Reggie Walton's courtroom.
The Scooter Libby affair began immediately after retired diplomat Joseph Wilson refuted President Bush's claim that Iraq was purchasing uranium from Niger. Bush had made the sixteen-word claim in his January 2003 State of the Union address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Wilson, who had traveled to Niger at the CIA's request, found that the claim was false and tried to inform the White House and the State Department. Getting no response, he published a July 2003 op-ed piece in The New York Times, under the headline "What I Didn't Find in Africa." On the following day, says Wilson, "the White House admitted that the sixteen words did not rise to the level of inclusion in the State of the Union." Having backed away from the false claim, the administration should have moved on. "That would have been the end of it," Wilson says. His fifteen-hundred-word op-ed piece would have been a "two- or three-day news story."
But to Cheney and Libby, Wilson's talking to reporters and then challenging the administration in The New York Times was an attack on the vice presidency. So Libby, White House senior adviser Karl Rove, and others began quietly plotting to discredit Wilson. It is for lying about his role in that scheme, and obstructing a federal investigation, that Dick Cheney's friend, adviser, and chief of staff, Scooter Libby, was indicted.
It wasn't that Wilson's article specifically attacked Cheney; but the facts he marshaled undermined the closed foreign policy operation run out of Cheney's office. Wilson's account of his trip to Niger put to rest the fabrication Cheney and Bush used to send 220,000 Americans to war in Iraq. It challenged the near absolute right to secrecy Cheney and other advocates of the "unitary presidency" claim for the executive branch—in particular in time of war. It confronted Cheney's ideas about the authority of the executive branch to "create" its own intelligence, to direct its own foreign policy, to wage war. It was an affront to everything Dick Cheney has fought for since he was a thirty-five-year-old chief of staff for President Gerald Ford. At that time, Cheney saw "the presidency at its nadir" as Congress reclaimed its power after Watergate. His entire career has been dedicated to the restoration of the executive branch. He wasn't going to let some retired ambassador get in his way.
Wilson wryly observed that at some point in the summer of 2003, Dick Cheney must have turned to his staff and whispered: "Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?" If appropriating the martyr's mantle of Thomas à Becket was over the top, Wilson was closer to the truth than was the administration. Joe Wilson had to be silenced in a way that demonstrated the consequences of challenging the administration. Yet Wilson's op-ed piece was unassailable. Its truth had already been borne out early in the summer of 2003, by the fact that American troops found no nuclear weapons program (indeed, no weapons of mass destruction) in Iraq.
Cheney understands that the White House is a court, and courtiers can be manipulated to eliminate adversaries. As a young chief of staff for Gerald Ford, Cheney, as consort to Donald Rumsfeld, undermined the power Henry Kissinger held in the Ford administration and ended the career of Ford vice president Nelson Rockefeller. Joe Wilson was smaller game. Cheney moved with the same methodical efficiency he employed when he took out Nelson Rockefeller. "On or about June 12, 2003, Libby was advised by the Vice President that Wilson's wife worked for the Central Intelligence Agency in the Counterproliferation Division," reads one line from the five-page chronology that sets up Libby's indictment. The troublesome priest would be silenced by an attack on his wife.
The criminal case styled United States of America v. I. Lewis Libby, also known as "Scooter Libby" is one chapter of a story much larger than the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson. "It was Dick Cheney's contempt for the CIA," says Mel Goodman, who spent twenty-five years at the agency. "For him the CIA just gets in the way." Valerie Plame Wilson was another casualty of Dick Cheney's lifelong campaign to weaken the agency.
Cheney's contempt for the Central Intelligence Agency has its roots in the Ford administration. Cheney believed the agency, like Dr. Kissinger, was soft on the Soviet Union. So Cheney and Rumsfeld colluded with a clique of right-wing academics—which would grow into the neocon movement that did the big thinking on the war in Iraq—to prove how bad the agency was. They proposed that a group of foreign policy experts—"Team B "—would match wits and skills with the agency, "Team A." The "comparative intelligence analysis" would ensure that the agency wasn't missing the mark. CIA director William Colby wouldn't buy it. He insisted that no "ad hoc independent group of analysts could prepare a more thorough analysis of the Soviet strategic capabilities." Colby's commitment to truth in intelligence became a liability, and the president asked for his resignation. Ford replaced Colby with George H. W. Bush, a perennial team player who eagerly embraced Team B. Harvard historian Richard Pipes directed the group, which included Paul Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, and other disciples of Cold War theorist Albert Wohlstetter. Cheney and Rumsfeld provided White House backing for the enterprise. (They even brought in Edward Teller for tech support.) "They wanted to toughen up the agency's estimates," Goodman says. "Cheney wanted to drive it so far to the right it would never say no to the generals."
The game was rigged. It was hard for CIA analysts to stand up to someone like Pipes, a Harvard professor and prominent policy intellectual. Team B looked at the same raw intelligence agency analysts used and arrived at conclusions consistent with their ideology:
The Soviet Union's military capacity was far greater than what the CIA reported;
Russian military spending was far beyond CIA estimates;
Advances in Soviet submarine warfare technology made first-strike capacity against the United States far more likely;
The Soviets were quietly accelerating the arms race, in a calculated attempt to surpass the United States.
Most of Team B's findings would ultimately prove to be hyperbole and way off the mark. But their "intelligence" was leaked to The New York Times and laid out in a December 26, 1976, front page story. The timing of the leak, less than a month before Jimmy Carter's inauguration, was aimed at the former governor of Georgia, who had little foreign policy experience. Cheney's flawed decisions in the Ford campaign contributed to Ford's loss to Carter. But with a cooked intelligence document leaked to a Times reporter, he won the foreign policy debate. Carter was locked into military spending defined by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and their intelligence B team.
And the CIA was housebroken.
But not sufficiently housebroken.
Almost thirty years later, as a vice president resolved to topple Saddam Hussein, Cheney was again frustrated by what he believed to be timid CIA analysts. He and Bush began considering regime change in Iraq before the September 11 terrorist attacks. But even after 9/11, the hard intelligence got in the way. The CIA had understated Hussein's WMD ten years earlier in the run-up to the firs
t Gulf War. To make a war happen, Cheney would again have to neutralize the Central Intelligence Agency.
The CIA is the only federal agency that makes regular house calls to the White House. It delivers the President's Daily Briefing, a closely guarded report made available to six or seven people at the top of the administration. The principals who get the PDB are assigned briefers. The briefers are sometimes sent back to the "raw traffic" at the agency to provide additional information, or a different interpretation of information. They often develop a close relationship with their principals, based on daily contact and the sharing of classified information. In the run-up to the Iraq War, Cheney's briefer got a workout as the vice president demanded intelligence to justify attacking Iraq. When the intelligence wasn't there, Cheney took an unprecedented step: He fired his briefer. "I've never heard of anyone firing a briefer in all the time I've been associated with the agency," says Mel Goodman, who maintains contacts with CIA staffers. "It is absolutely unprecedented." But Cheney has never been a slave to precedent. In fact, he is so liberated from precedent that he fired the second briefer the CIA sent over. "Cheney was hard as nails," Goodman says. "He knew the kind of intelligence he wanted on these issues. And he couldn't get that information from them." The firings sent a chilling signal to CIA employees.
There was more shattering of precedent. Cheney made repeated visits to the CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia. Goodman, who is working on his second book on the agency, says that one visit to Langley is beyond what anyone at the agency considers reasonable for a vice president. Cheney made at least eight, perhaps as many as fifteen, according to Goodman and another source with contacts in the intelligence agency. "That's the only time I've ever heard of a principal going to headquarters that way," Goodman says. "When they go it's usually for some ceremonial function. To hand out an award or cut a ribbon. Then they get the hell out."
Cheney wasn't handing out awards. "He wanted them to make a connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda," says the second source interviewed. "He already got them to agree on nuclear weapons. But he wanted the al-Qaeda connection." Accompanying Cheney on some of the trips was Libby, who had muscled CIA employees thirty years earlier when he was a player on Team B. The repeated visits by Cheney and Libby placed enormous pressure on agency analysts. In a report commissioned by the agency, Richard Kerr, a retired CIA officer retained to study intelligence failures, wrote that "questions of weapons of mass destruction and Saddam's links to al-Qa'ida . . . in the months leading up to the war were numerous and intense." Kerr described "overwhelming consumer demand" on agency analysts, which resulted in flawed intelligence. A second source following the vice president's Langley visits was more direct. The pressure Cheney and Libby brought to bear on agency analysts "was brutal."
While he was beating up on CIA analysts, Cheney was also gathering his own intelligence—which would lead to the conflict between his office and Joe Wilson. In early 2002—more than a year before Bush was to make the accusation—Cheney obtained from the British a file of Italian origin that claimed Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from Niger. This "intelligence" provided the underpinnings for the sixteen words in the State of the Union speech.
When Cheney sent the Niger documents to the CIA, analysts in Langley recognized them as crude forgeries. But because of the pressure from the vice president, the CIA initially asked French intelligence to check into the claims that Iraq was buying five hundred metric tons of uranium "yellow cake" from Niger. French intelligence had debunked this rumor once before. In response to this second CIA request, the French sent five investigators to their former colony and again determined there was no merit to the claim. Alain Chouet, director of French intelligence, told the Los Angeles Times that he had no doubt about what his agents found. "We told the Americans, 'Bullshit, it doesn't make any sense.' "
In fact, debunking the Niger yellow cake documents required no travel whatsoever. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspector Jacques Baute had spent months in Iraq and found nothing to suggest that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear weapons program. So Baute had his doubts about the Niger documents. To look into their authenticity, he used a sophisticated tool known outside the intelligence community as Google. In the dozen pages the Bush administration provided him, Baute found glaring errors. The president of Niger referred to "the constitution of 1965," though the country was governed under a constitution ratified in 1999. There was a letter signed by a foreign minister who hadn't been in office for eleven years. There were bogus letterheads, forged signatures, and other evident flaws. The CIA had the same material, because Cheney had sent it to the agency. They also had Google. Cheney's dishonesty in justifying the war in Iraq was becoming painfully evident.
The first three months of 2003 were a race between the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations—both committed to inspections and diplomacy—and an American administration that had already decided to attack Iraq. The Bush-Cheney administration was marching inexorably toward war. On January 28, Bush delivered his "sixteen words" State of the Union speech. On February 5, Secretary of State Colin Powell went to the Security Council to lay out U.S. proof of Iraq's WMD programs. On March 7, IAEA director general Mohamed ElBa-radei responded, delivering Baute's report on the Niger documents to the Security Council. The U.S. representatives at the Security Council privately agreed that there was no evidence that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program. Cheney personally attacked ElBaradei and the IAEA. On March 16, he told NBC's Tim Russert: "I think ElBaradei, frankly, is wrong. I think if you look at the record of the International Atomic Energy Agency on this issue, especially where Iraq is concerned, they have constantly underestimated or missed what it was Saddam Hussein was doing. I don't have any reason to believe they're any more valid at this time than they've been in the past." (Cheney had a legitimate complaint about the IAEA's missing weapons locations in the past, but Iraq had since been bombed and boycotted and IAEA inspectors were on the ground filling the gaps that they and intelligence agencies had missed ten years earlier.)
Speaking to Russert, Cheney even went nuclear on Hussein: "And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons."
That statement was, in a word, bullshit.
Yet on March 16, President Bush gave Hussein an ultimatum to leave Iraq or face attack by U.S. forces. On March 17, Bush declared war on Iraq. On March 20, U.S. airplanes began bombing Baghdad.
By May, U.S. and British forces combing Iraq had found no nuclear weapons or any other weapons of mass destruction. It was becoming evident that the administration had misled Congress and the American people. Joe Wilson was about to become a part of that story.
On May 5, The New York Times's Nicholas Kristof wrote a column about an unnamed ambassador's trip to Niger and Washington Post veteran reporter Walter Pincus then tracked down Wilson. On June 12, Pincus wrote the first news article questioning the administration's pretext for war, citing an unnamed retired ambassador who had gone to Niger for the CIA and found that the uranium story was without merit. When Kristof's column appeared in mid-May, Cheney's office, in concert with Bush senior adviser Karl Rove, began discussing the problem the article presented. When Pincus's hard-news story ran in the Post, the discussions became a coordinated campaign against Joe Wilson and the truth. The vice president played a critical role in that campaign, which seemed to grow in intensity with each news report.
And the news stories continued, The New Republic following the Post with a seven-thousand-word investigative feature. It included a quote from an unnamed ambassador who said administration officials "knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie."
On July 6, Joe Wilson went public with his own account of the trip to Niger, publishing his New York Times op-ed. Wilson immediately got one odd warning of the smear campaign that was about to consume him and his wife. On July 8, a friend told him he had seen right-wing columnist Robert Novak on Pennsylvania Avenue. "He said Novak called me an asshole," Wilson says. "He said 'Wilson is
an asshole. His wife works for the CIA.' "
When Wilson called Novak—at seventy-five, the dark doyen of conservative journalism in Washington—Novak asked whether the call was confirmation that Wilson's wife was a CIA agent. In his July 14 column, Novak, whom Cheney once referred to as "No Facts," outed Valerie Plame Wilson. Because the Intelligence Identities Protection Act makes it illegal to reveal the identity of an undercover CIA agent, the agency requested an investigation. The Department of Justice started the two-year inquiry that resulted in Scooter Libby's indictment and resignation in October 2005. (Cheney took his swipe at "No Facts" Novak in a 1977 Casper Star-Tribune article under the headline "Cheney: Altering Foreign Elections a Possible Option.")
Coincidentally, the entire process was set in motion by Cheney. "Wilson was asked to go to Niger for one specific purpose," Goodman says. "It was the CIAs idea to get Cheney off their backs. Cheney would not get off their backs about the yellow cake documents. They couldn't get Cheney to stop pressing the issue. He insisted that was the proof of reconstitution of their program."
Someone at the agency took the vice president at his word and called Joe Wilson to investigate. Wilson had been an ambassador in Africa, spoke fluent French, and knew many of the players—including the directors of the French uranium consortium. In fact, Wilson had been the last American diplomat in Iraq when the United States invaded it the first time, in 1991; the senior George Bush had commended him for his courage and service to his country. Wilson went to Niger to check out the intelligence that few but the vice president considered anything other than a fraud. In fact, it is hard to believe that Cheney himself believed the Niger documents were anything other than a fraudulent though useful tool to make the case for war. If he initially thought they were legitimate, he also knew that New Yorker reporter Seymour Hersh had thoroughly debunked them soon after they surfaced. Cheney then participated in a plan to discredit Wilson. All will be played out in federal court—and in the court of public opinion—in 2007, unless Bush takes the unlikely step of pardoning Scooter Libby before the trial.