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It was September 2002, and then-National
Security Advisor, now-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was
fastening on CNN perhaps the most memorable and frightening single
link in the Bush regime's chain of lies propagandizing the war
on Iraq. Behind her carefully planted one-liner with its grim
imagery was the whole larger hoax about Saddam Hussein possessing
or about to acquire weapons of mass destruction, a deception
as blatant and inflammatory as claims of the Iraqi dictator's
ties to Al Qaeda.
Rice's demagogic scare tactic
was also very much part of the tangled history of alleged Iraqi
purchases of uranium from Niger, the fabrication leading to ex-Ambassador
Joseph Wilson's now famous exposé of the fraud, the administration's
immediate retaliatory "outing" of Wilson's wife Valerie
Plame as a CIA operative, and now the revelation that the President's
supreme political strategist Karl Rove and Vice President Dick
Cheney's Chief of Staff Lewis Libby were involved in that potentially
criminal leak-altogether the most serious political crisis Bush
has faced. In fact, though her pivotal role has been missed entirely
or deliberately ignored-in both the media feeding frenzy
and the rising political clamor, Condoleezza Rice was also deeply
embroiled in the Niger uranium-Plame scandal, arguably as much
as or more so than either Rove or Libby.
For those who know the invariably
central role of the NSC Advisor in sensitive political subjects
in foreign policy and in White House leaks to the media as well
as tending of policy, especially in George W. Bush's rigidly
disciplined, relentlessly political regime, Rice by both commission
and omission was integral in perpetrating the original fraud
of Niger, and then inevitably in the vengeful betrayal of Plame's
identity. None of that spilling of secrets for crass political
retribution could have gone on without her knowledge and approval,
and thus complicity. Little of it could have happened without
her participation, if not as a leaker herself, at least with
her direction and with her scripting.
* * *
The evidence of Rice's complicity
is increasingly damning as it gathers over a six-year twisting
chronology of the Nigerien uranium-Wilson-Plame affair, particularly
when set beside what we also know very well about the inside
operations of the NSC and Rice's unique closeness to Bush, her
tight grip on her staff, and the power and reach that went with
it all. What follows isn't simple. These machinations in government
never are, especially in foreign policy. But follow the bouncing
ball of Rice's deceptions, folly, fraud and culpability. Slowly,
relentlessly, despite the evidence, the hoax of the Iraq-Niger
uranium emerges as a central thread in the fabricated justification
for war, and thus in the President's, Rice's, and the regime's
inseparable credibility. The discrediting of Wilson, in which
the outing his CIA wife is irresistible, becomes as imperative
for Rice as for Rove and Libby, Bush and Cheney. And when that
moment comes, she has the unique authority, and is in a position,
to do the deed. Motive, means, opportunity-in the classic terms
of prosecution, Rice had them all.
* * *
1995: Saddam Hussein's son-in-law
Hussein Kamel, in charge of Iraq's strategic weaponry, defects
to the West. He tells CIA debriefers that at his command after
the Gulf War, "All weapons, biological, chemical, missile,
nuclear, were destroyed." His claim is supported by continuing
reports of UN inspectors and US intelligence, including sophisticated
imagery analysis by both the CIA and Pentagon.
1999: The first rumors begin
to circulate in Europe that the Iraqis may be trying to buy "yellow
cake" weapons grade uranium from Niger, a poor West African
country that earns more than half its export income from the
strategic ore. Since Iraq is known to have used only amply available
Iraqi uranium in nuclear research until its disbanding in 1991,
and because Niger's yellow cake is produced solely at two mines
owned by a French consortium and the entire output strictly controlled
and committed to sale to France, European intelligence agencies
and UN officials soon discount the story-though the rumors persist
along with other alarming allegations by Iraqi exile groups long
working to incite the US Government to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
Meanwhile, American embassies and CIA stations in Europe routinely
report the rumors in repeated, widely circulated cable traffic
to Washington over the summer and fall of 1999. Among the recipients
is the nuclear non-proliferation section of the Clinton Presidency's
NSC staff, whose files on Iraq, a "red flag" country,
are turned over to Rice and her staff when she assumes office
eighteen months later
January 2001: Parties unknown
burgle the Nigerien embassy in Rome. Stolen from the torn-up
offices are various valuables along with stationery and official
seals, which the Italian police warn might be used to forge documents.
February 24, 2001: "Saddam
Hussein has not developed any significant capacity with respect
to weapons of mass destruction," says Secretary of State
Colin Powell. "He is unable to project conventional power
against his neighbors."
July 29, 2001: "We are
able to keep his [Saddam's] arms from him," NSC advisor
Rice tells the media. "His military forces have not been
rebuilt."
August 2001: An African informant
reportedly hands Italian intelligence what are purported to be
official Nigerien documents of "great importance."
Among them are letters apparently dealing with Niger's sale of
uranium to Iraq, including an alleged transaction in 2000 for
some 500 tons of uranium oxide, telltale in a weapons program.
The Italians routinely pass the letters on through NATO channels
to the US, where by the fall of 2001 both State Department and
Department of Energy nuclear intelligence analysts doubt the
genuineness of the documents, and duly report their findings
to Rice's NSC staff.
January 2002: In cables cleared
by both Secretary of State Colin Powell and Rice, the first high-level
reference to the subject after 9/11, Washington asks the US ambassador
to Niger to uncover any possible Iraqi purchases of uranium.
After talks with senior Nigerien officials and French executives
in the uranium mining operations, along with a still wider investigation
by the embassy, including the CIA, the ambassador reports back
that there is no evidence of such dealings, and no reason to
suspect them.
February 2002: Vice President
Cheney hears "about the possibility of Iraq trying to acquire
uranium from Niger," according to what his chief of staff
Libby later tells Time. In his daily intelligence briefing
by the CIA, as Libby relates, Cheney asks about "the implication
of the [Niger] report." CIA briefing officers tell Cheney
and Libby of the documents passed on months before by the Italians,
including the State and Energy Department judgment that the papers
are probable forgeries.
A few days later, with the
routine concurrence of Rice and her staff, Cheney through Libby
asks the CIA to look into the matter further. The Agency has
no ready experts in Niger suitable to assign the Vice President's
requested inquiry. After routinely canvassing the relevant offices
and relatively brief discussion, they seize on the suggestion
of one of their operatives working on nuclear proliferation issues,
a mid-level CIA veteran named Valerie Plame who has worked abroad
and in Washington under "NOC" non-official cover
in private business in contact with several foreign sources.
Her pertinent if personal recommendation for the assignment is
her husband, then-fifty-three year-old Joseph Wilson IV, a retired
Foreign Service Officer who has served briefly as Charge d'Affairs
in Baghdad in 1990 and then from 1992-1993 as US Ambassador to
Gabon, a seasoned diplomat with experience in both Iraq and West
Africa, and even some specialization in African strategic minerals.
February 19, 2002: A meeting
at the CIA discusses sending Wilson to Niger. Attending is an
analyst from the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and
Research who says the trip is unnecessary, since the US embassy
in Niger and European intelligence agencies have already disproved
the story of an Iraqi purchase-and whose notes of the meeting,
including the facts of Valerie Plame's CIA identity as an NOC
operative on WMD and her role in recommending her husband, will
be the basis for later crucial memos in the scandal.
Despite State Department objection,
the CIA decides to go ahead with the Wilson mission to satisfy
the Vice President's request, and the former ambassador is "invited
out [to CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia] to meet with a
group of people at the CIA who were interested in this subject,"
as he will remember it. Wilson is introduced to the gathering
by his wife, who then leaves the room.
In late February, with the
concurrence of CIA Director George Tenet as well as Rice and
Powell, Wilson flies to Niger.
February 24, 2002: Meanwhile,
to further emphasize the importance of the issue and with Washington's
concurrence, the US Ambassador in Niger has invited to the capital
of Niamey Marine four-star General Carlton Fulford, Jr., deputy
commander of the US-European Command, which is responsible for
military relations with sub-Saharan West Africa. Fulford meets
with Niger's president and other senior officials on the 24th,
and afterward confirms the Ambassador's earlier findings, as
he later tells the Washington Post, that there is no evidence
of the sale of yellow cake to Iraq, and that Niger's uranium
supply is "secure." The General's report duly goes
up through the chain of his command to the Joint Chiefs in the
Pentagon and on to Rice at the NSC, Powell at State, the CIA,
the Energy Department and other interested agencies.
March 5, 2002: Having met with
several Nigerien officials and sources over a ten-day visit and
debriefed at length the US Embassy staff and Ambassador (who
promptly cables a report on to Powell and Rice), Wilson returns
from Niger and gives CIA officers, as they request, an oral report
which is the basis for a CIA-written memo on his trip then forwarded
to Rice and Powell, and for a further CIA debriefing for Cheney
in response to his original request. Republicans will later dispute
about how categorical or emphatic Wilson's report and its derivatives
actually are at this point. He refers to "an Algerian-Nigerien
intermediary" for Iraq who had approached Niger about sales
of ore, though adds that Niger "ignored the request."
But the essence of his conclusion is, once again, that there
is no evidence of Iraq procuring uranium from Niger. In de facto
acceptance of this finding, the several Washington agencies involved
in the issue, including Rice and her NSC staff, make no other
effort-beyond the US embassy investigation, General Fulford's
trip, and the Wilson mission-to investigate the matter further
in Niger or anywhere else.
May-June 2002: With the Iraq-Niger
uranium issue apparently laid to rest, Defense Secretary Don
Rumsfeld establishes in the Pentagon, with the full knowledge
of Rice, a new Office of Special Plans, under the direction of
Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and the cabal of neo-conservatives
the Bush regime has assembled at the upper civilian reaches of
the Defense Department. Believing the CIA, FBI and other agencies
in myriad negative reports, including the Wilson mission, have
simply "failed" to find existing evidence of Iraq's
weapons of mass destruction and Saddam's ties to al-Qaeda, Rumsfeld
and Wolfowitz direct "Special Plans" to gather and
interpret its own "intelligence" on Iraq. Meanwhile
Rice takes over coordination of efforts to stymie ongoing arms
inspections of Iraq by the United Nations.
June 26, 2002: In a meeting
with Prime Minister Tony Blair and other senior British officials
at Ten Downing Street, Sir Richard Dearlove, "C," head
of MI6 British intelligence, reports on what he found during
recent Washington conversations at the highest levels of the
CIA, White House and other US official quarters. "Military
action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam
through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism
and WMD," as a summary records his words. "But intelligence
and facts were being fixed around the policy."
July 2002: Concerned at the
potential opposition to the war, and to coordinate policy and
media relations for the coming attack on Iraq, a special White
House Iraq Group (WHIG) is set up, chaired by White House Chief
of Staff Andrew Card, and composed of Rice, Rove, Libby, Rice's
deputy Stephen Hadley, and media strategists Karen Hughes, a
longtime Bush aide, Mary Matalin and others. The WHIG is to plan
and control carefully all high-level leaks and public statements
on Iraq and related issues. "Everything, I mean everything,
was run through them and came out of them," a ranking official
will say of the group. "It was understood, of course, that
Condi or Hadley would clear everything from a policy point of
view, Rove and Libby would do the politics, and the rest would
handle the spin."
August 26, 2002: "Now
we know," Vice President Cheney tells the VFW convention,
"Saddam Hussein has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear
weapons." Rice routinely clears this speech.
September 2002: Several months
earlier, the US and UN embargo of Iraq has seized a shipment
of high strength aluminum tubes, which the International Atomic
Energy Agency (IAEA) and the US State and Energy Departments
duly identify as designed solely for launch tubes for conventional
artillery rockets. Despite those expert findings, Rice now claims
publicly that the tubes are "only really suited for nuclear
weapons programs, centrifuge programs."
Apparently reflecting the original
rumors of the Iraq-Niger deal and the subsequent dubious documents
handed the Italians thirteen months before (copies of which have
reportedly been given to MI6 British intelligence by an Italian
journalist), a British Government White Paper on Iraq released
in September mentions that Baghdad "had recently sought
significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Pressed
on the issue by the CIA (on the basis of its now-several reports
debunking the story) to drop that statement as inaccurate, the
British claim they have sources for the assertion "aside
from the discredited [Nigerien] letters," but never identify
them. Rice is fully briefed on all these exchanges.
(Eventually, British intelligence
officials will admit the 2002 White Paper statement on uranium
from Africa was "unfounded." Meanwhile, however, much
of official Washington is aware of the CIA-MI6 squabble over
the Niger uranium and questionable letters. "The Brits,"
a Congressional intelligence committee staffer will later tell
the New Yorker's Sy Hersh in discussing the issue, "placed
more stock in them than we did.")
It's also that September, in
answer to a question in a CNN interview about what evidence the
White House has of Iraqi nuclear weapons, that Rice makes her
infamous quip, a line first authored by Mary Matalin-"We
don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
September 26, 2002: In closed-hearing
testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (with
a transcript closely reviewed by Rice), Powell refers to "reports"
of an Iraqi purchase of Nigerien uranium as "further proof"
of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.
October 2002: Seizing on the
British White Paper, despite the documented disagreement of the
CIA as well as the State and Energy Departments, the Office of
Special Plans inserts in a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE)
on Iraq, apparently one of the few documents Bush reads in this
sequence, a reference to the British report of an Iraq-Niger
uranium transaction. Though the NIE at CIA insistence notes "different
interpretations of the significance of the Niger documents,"
and that the State Department judges them "highly dubious,"
the reference to Nigerien uranium is listed among other reasons
to conclude that Iraq poses a danger to American national security.
"Facing clear evidence
of peril," Bush says in a speech in Cincinnati that October,
"we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that
could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." Behind the
scenes, an earlier draft of the October speech has also contained
a reference to an Iraqi purchase of 500 tons of uranium from
Niger, the now-revived claim from the discredited documents of
fifteen months before. CIA Director Tenet urges that the White
House take out that reference, and though the Pentagon's Special
Plans office is pushing for inclusion of the reference, Rice's
deputy (and eventual successor) Stephen Hadley, after two memoranda
and a phone call from Tenet, finally agrees to drop the passage.
Rice is fully briefed on all this.
December 19, 2002: As preparations
are hurried for the attack on Iraq, a State Department "Fact
Sheet," cleared by Rice, asks ominously, "Why is the
Iraqi regime hiding their uranium procurement?"
The assumption of the Niger-Iraq
uranium connection now begins to appear regularly in the President's
Daily Brief, the CIA intelligence briefing which is now also
drafted under the influence of the Office of Special Plans.
January 23, 2003: In a New
York Times op-ed entitled "Why We Know Iraq is Lying,"
Rice refers prominently to "Iraq's efforts to get uranium
from abroad."
January 28, 2003: "The
British government," Bush says in his State of the Union
litany on the dangers of Iraq, "has [sic] learned
that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of
uranium from Africa."
Rice and her staff, of course,
have as always laboriously worked and reworked the national security
passages of the speech. In readying the address, Rice's NSC Staff
assistant for nonproliferation, Robert Joseph, asks Alan Foley,
a ranking CIA expert on the subject, about the "uranium
from Africa" passage, which obviously refers to the old
Niger issue. Foley says the CIA doubts the Niger letters and
connection, has disputed the British White Paper (as Rice and
Joseph well know), and recommends that the NSC strike the reference.
In typical bureaucratic fashion, however, Foley also says it
would be "technically accurate" to say that the British
had in fact issued such a report on Iraq, however mistaken. With
the approval of Rice and her deputy Hadley, the passage stays,
becoming a major piece of "evidence" in the case for
war.
February 5, 2003: In his now
infamous presentation to the United Nations, a factor in silencing
many potential dissenters in Congress, Powell pointedly omits
any reference to the Nigerien uranium. The story "had not
stood the test of time," he says later.
That February, too, British
Prime Minister Tony Blair, as part of his own propaganda for
war, issues a Ten Downing Street paper called "Iraq: Its
Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception, and Intimidation,"
which includes a reference to the Nigerien uranium. Thought to
be drawn from authoritative MI6 intelligence, the paper is soon
widely ridiculed, eleven of its sixteen pages found to be copied
verbatim from an old Israeli magazine.
March 7, 2003: In response
to a request four months before, the State Department finally
hands over to the IAEA copies of the Niger letters, which UN
experts promptly dismiss as "not authentic" and "blatant
forgeries." "These documents are so bad," a senior
IAEA official tells the press, "that I cannot imagine that
they came from a serious intelligence agency. It depresses me,
given the low quality of the documents, that it was not stopped.
At the level it reached, I would have expected more checking."
A former high-level intelligence official tells The New Yorker,
"Somebody deliberately let something false get in there.
It could not have gotten into the system without the agency being
involved. Therefore it was an internal intention. Someone set
someone up."
March 8, 2003: In reply to
questions about the forgery, a State Department spokesman says
the US Government "fell for it." "It was the information
that we had. We provided it," Powell will say lamely on
"Meet the Press." "If that information
is inaccurate, fine."
March 17, 2003: Bush, in a
statement cleared by Rice, repeats that," Iraq continues
to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."
March 19, 2003: Bush orders
the invasion of Iraq.
March 21, 2003: Senator John
D. Rockefeller IV (D. WVa) writes FBI Director Robert Mueller
asking for an investigation of the Niger letters. "There
is a possibility," Rockefeller says, "that the
fabrication of these [Niger] documents may be part of a larger
deception campaign aimed at manipulating public opinion and foreign
policy regarding Iraq,"
May 6, 2003: In an anonymous
interview with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof,
Ambassador Wilson-identified none too subtly as "a former
US Ambassador to [sic] Africa," says about the failure
to find WMDs in Iraq: "It's disingenuous for the State Department
people to say they were bamboozled because they knew about this
[that Saddam had no nuclear program or weapons] for a year."
June 10, 2003: Undersecretary
of State Marc Grossman asks the Bureau of Intelligence and Research
(INR) for a briefing on the Niger uranium issue, and specifically
the State Department's opposition to the continuing White House
view that Iraq had tried to buy yellow cake. The resulting memo
is dated the same day, and drawn from notes on the February 19
meeting at the CIA on the Wilson mission and other sources. Befitting
the sensitivity of the information, the memo is classified "Top
Secret," and contains in one paragraph, separately marked
'(S/NF)" for "Secret/No dissemination to foreign governments
or intelligence agencies, " two sentences describing in
passing Valerie "Wilson's" identity as a CIA operative
and her role in the inception of the Wilson trip to Niger. This
June 10 memo reportedly does not use her maiden name Plame.
June 12, 2003: The Washington
Post reports that an unnamed "former US ambassador"
was sent to Niger to look into the uranium issue and found no
evidence of any Iraqi purchase.
At the State Department, Deputy
Secretary Richard Armitage asks INR to prepare a memorandum on
the background of what the Post is reporting, and INR
sends to Armitage that same day a copy of the June 10 memo to
Grossman. The memo is also sent to Undersecretary for Arms Control
and International Security (and future UN Ambassador-designate)
John Bolton.
July 6, 2003: Outraged by continuing
references to the Nigerien uranium, Wilson breaks his anonymity
with a sensational New York Times op-ed disclosing his
mission to Niger sixteen months before, and the fact that he
found no evidence of an Iraqi purchase of ore. "Based on
my experience with the administration in the months leading up
to the war," Wilson writes, "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."
He tells "Meet the Press," "Either the
administration has information that it has not shared with the
public or ... they were using the selective use of facts and
intelligence to bolster a decision that had already been made
to go to war."
Later in the day, Deputy Secretary
of State Richard Armitage calls INR Assistant Secretary Carl
W. Ford at home, and asks him to send a briefing memo to Powell
about the Niger uranium issue. Ford simply pulls out the previous
June 10 memo with its reference to Wilson's wife (her name now
corrected from Wilson to Plame), addresses it to Powell, and
forwards the memo to Rice to be passed on to Powell, who is due
to leave the next day with the Presidential party on a trip to
Africa.
Meanwhile, the WHIG is also
moving that Sunday to deal aggressively with the Wilson op-ed.
They will no longer focus on the too obviously fraudulent claim
of an Iraqi purchase of yellow cake-White House orthodoxy before
the invasion-but will instead discount the issue, discredit Wilson,
and shift blame for the now-embarrassing State of the Union reference.
White House press secretary Ari Fleischer is to try to downplay
and dismiss Wilson's article on-the-record at the next day's
press briefing, while Rice and others begin to make off-the-record
calls to the media to do the same. While pursuing their own contacts
among right-wing reporters and columnists, Rove and Libby are
also to work with CIA Director George Tenet in a statement by
Tenet taking responsibility for any inaccuracy in the State of
the Union passage.
July 7, 2003: Under a barrage
of questions at a 9:30 am press briefing, White House spokesman
Ari Fleischer says of the Wilson claims, "There is zero,
nada, nothing new here,' adding that "Wilson's own report
[shows] that officials in Niger said that Iraq was seeking to
contact officials in Niger about sales." (A reference to
the "Algerian-Nigerian intermediary" in Wilson's debriefings.)
("That then translates into an Iraqi effort to import a
significant quantity of uranium as the President alleged?"
Wilson later that day replies to Fleischer. "These guys
really need to get serious.") But as the briefing wears
on, Fleischer's defense grows "murkier," as the
New York Times reports, and he seems to "concede"
that the State of the Union reference to Niger uranium "might
have been flawed."
That evening, with the White
House scrambling to defend itself against Wilson's resonating
charges, Bush leaves for a trip to Africa, accompanied by Rice
and Powell. Before the party flies out of Andrews, Rice is in
several meetings with Rove, Libby and other senior aides of the
WHIG.
The scene now shifts to the
plush but still relatively close quarters of Air Force One, the
specially configured 747 where the accompanying media are boarded
through a rear door and funneled directly to their mid-level
section closed off from the forward official compartment, and
where Administration VIPs like Rice and Powell are in conference
rooms and adjoining lounge chairs in closer and easier proximity
and informality than in any other official venue. It is in this
setting, soon after takeoff, as the New York Times will
report two years later, that Powell is seen walking around carrying
the INR June 12/July6 memo detailing Wilson's mission and Plame's
identity and role in the "(S/NF)" paragraph. Powell
discusses the memo with Rice and other presidential aides on
board, including press secretary Ari Fleischer. Witnesses later
see Fleischer "perusing" the memo. There are reports,
too, of several calls between the plane and the White House discussing
the Wilson affair. En route over the Atlantic, Rice and Fleischer
both call contacts at the Washington Post and New York
Times "to make it clear," the Times will report,
"that they no longer stood behind Mr. Bush's statement about
the uranium-the first such official concession on the sensitive
issue of the intelligence that led to the war."
It is in these hours of late
July 7 and early July 8 that Rove, Libby and other officials
get word of Plame's identity from Air Force One. Rove and Libby
will hear of Plame in the drafting with Tenet of his mea culpa,
but officials on the plane reading the INR memo cannot know or
be sure of this, and the memo's passages on Wilson, including
his wife, are now relayed back to Washington. Reporters later
speculate that Powell might have called either Rove or Libby
with such information, but as one concludes aptly, "That
was above his pay grade." The President himself might have
read the memo and called the two aides. But given Bush's style
and grasp, that, too, is implausible, though he may well have
been informed of the calls and given his approval. The only official
on board Air Force One with the knowledge and authority-motive,
means and opportunity-to instruct Rove and Libby and so betray
Plame was Condoleezza Rice.
July 7-8, 2003: Right-wing
Columnist Robert Novak is called by thus far unidentified senior
officials leaking to him that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame (they
use her maiden name), is a CIA operative who instigated her husband's
trip to Niger. "I didn't dig it out, it was given to me,"
Novak tells Newsweek of the leak. "They thought it
was significant. They gave me the name and I used it."
July 9, 2003: Rove discusses
the Wilson imbroglio, including the role of Wilson's CIA wife,
with columnist Robert Novak, who identifies her by her maiden
name, Valerie Plame.
July 11, 2003: Peppered by
questions about Wilson's charges, Bush in a press conference
in Uganda says, "I gave a speech to the nation that was
cleared by the intelligence services." That evening, aboard
Air Force One flying over East Africa, Rice speaks at length
with the media about the "clearances" of the President's
speech. "Now I can tell you," she says, "if the
CIA, the director of central intelligence, had said, 'Take this
out of the speech,' it would have gone without question."
She says nothing about the actual maneuvering behind the now-troublesome
passage, the Joseph-Foley exchange, the controversial British
memorandum US intelligence has disputed, the shadowy history
of the yellow cake fraud.
July 11, 2003: Back in Washington,
working to discredit Wilson, Rove leaks to Time's Matthew
Cooper that "Wilson's wife" is, in fact, in the CIA
"working on WMD" and has been behind his mission to
Niger. Rove "implied strongly," Cooper later emails
his editor, "there's still plenty to implicate Iraqi interest
in acquiring uranium from Niger."
After that conversation, in
evidence of the central role of Rice and her staff in the betrayal
of Plame's identity to discredit Wilson, Rove emails Rice's NSC
deputy Hadley that he has "waved Cooper off" Wilson's
claim, and that he (Rove) "didn't take the bait" when
Cooper offered that Wilson's revelations had damaged the Administration.
Hadley immediately relays this message to Rice in Africa.
That same day, after extensive
deliberations with Rove and Libby, CIA Director Tenet makes a
public statement that the Nigerien uranium allegation should
never have appeared in the Bush 2003 State of the Union. "This
did not rise to the level of certainty which should be required
for presidential speeches," he confesses, "and CIA
should have ensured that it was removed,"
July 12, 2003: When asked by
Cooper about Plame being CIA, Libby confirms the story to the
Time reporter. That same day, in a talk with the Washington
Post's Walt Pincus, an unidentified "senior administration
official" brings up Plame's CIA identity, in what is now
a widely authorized leak approved by Rice as well as Rove.
July 14, 2003: Columnist Robert
Novak, attributing the story to "two senior administration
officials" -neither of which is Rove or Libby-identifies
Plame as a CIA "operative on weapons of mass destruction"
who was behind her husband's mission to Niger.
July 20, 2003: "Senior
White House sources" call NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell to
say, "the real story here is not the 16 words [Bush's reference
to Niger uranium in the State of the Union] but Wilson and his
wife."
July 21, 2003: On MSNBC, host
Chris Mathews tells Wilson, "I just got off the phone with
Karl Rove. He says, and I quote, 'Wilson's wife is fair
game.'"
July 30, 2003: Alarmed about
the impact of the betrayal of Plame's identity on current and
future agents and sources abroad, the CIA asks the Justice Department
to investigate the leak, which leads to the naming of US Attorney
Patrick Fitzgerald as a Special Prosecutor.
September 2003: An unidentified
"White House official" tells the Washington Post that
"at least six reporters" had been told about Plame
before Novak's column appeared. The disclosures, the source says,
were "purely and simply out of revenge."
* *
*
The chronology will no doubt
continue to expand in the days and weeks ahead. There may well
be a ticking time-bomb in the Grand Jury investigation of the
Plame leak that goes beyond anything we now envision. In earlier
findings in cases of reporters refusing to testify, DC Circuit
Judge, David Tatel, a distinguished jurist known for his devotion
to civil liberties and especially press freedoms, had stoutly
maintained a federal privilege for the media, shielding it from
being compelled to testify except under the most exceptional
conditions. But in then later joining his colleagues in ordering
Cooper and the New York Times' Judith Miller to testify,
Tatel reviewed extensive secret information from the prosecutor,
devoted eight blacked-out pages of his judgment to the material,
and concluded that the privilege he had upheld throughout his
career as a lawyer and judge had to give way before "the
gravity of the suspected crime." No other element
of the scandal bodes so ill for the Bush regime.
There is also the intriguing
relationship between John Bolton, the regime's stymied appointee
to the UN, and Judith Miller, the New York Times correspondent
sent to jail for contempt in refusing to divulge her sources
on Plame even for a story she never wrote. Bolton's close relationship
to Miller, in which many suspect the right-wing lobbyist handed
the reporter much of the fraudulent accounts of Iraqi weaponry
that ended up on the front page of the Times, may well
have encompassed as well the passing of information from the
INR memo on Plame, which Bolton saw before Powell or even Rice.
Then, too, as the Progressive
Review's Sam Smith and Counterpunch's Alexander Cockburn
have pointed out from their lonely perch of substance and perspective
atop what's left of American journalism, there is, in the end,
much less to the whole story than meets the eye. In their too
obvious relish of celebrity, Wilson and Plame as heroes are as
dubious as the Niger letters. The CIA, and the Presidents who
used it as a private mafia, account for a more than half-century
history far more catastrophic than a legion of seedy Roves and
Libbys or even multiple Bush regimes. Relentlessly corrupt, inept,
anachronistic, if ever an institution deserved to be "outed"
and prosecuted in its numbers, it is our vastly bloodstained
intelligence agency. But as so often in politics, we are left
with the lesser, still needed reckoning at hand.
And in that, of course, the
larger issue beyond Plame is the Bush regime's Big Lie behind
the invasion of Iraq, in which the phantom Nigerien yellowcake
was an important malignant element. No government since World
War II has more blatantly invented the pretext for waging a war
of aggression. The Rove and Libby collusion only begins to peel
away the layers of the crime. Rice is the next skein to be pulled.
Her manifest failures in the
fateful months before 9/11 in meeting the principal responsibilities
of the National Security Advisor-the sheer incompetence and shallowness
that left so much intelligence uncoordinated, so much neglected
or misunderstood-should have been enough to have run her from
public office long ago, of course, were it not for her hold on
this tragically flawed president, and her deplorable immunity
amid the chronic political cowardice of both the Democrats and
the media.
Now, however, her role in the
Plame scandal cannot be ignored or excused. She alone among senior
officials was knowing and complicitous at every successive stage
of the great half-baked yellow cake fraud. She alone was the
White House peer-and in national security matters the superior-to
Rove and Libby, who never could have acted without her collusion
in peddling Plame's identity. She as much as anyone had a stake
in smearing Wilson by any and all means at hand. If Rove and
Libby are to be held criminally or at least politically accountable
for a breach of national security, our "mushroom cloud"
secretary of state should certainly be in the dock with them.
(This article owes a primary
debt to the ground-breaking research of Professor Gary Leupp
of Tufts University in his "Faith-Based
Intelligence," CounterPunch.org, July 26, 2003.)
Roger Morris was Senior Staff on the National Security
Council under both Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon,
until resigning over the invasion of Cambodia. Morris is the
author of Partners
in Power: the Clintons and Their America and with Sally Denton
The
Money and the Power: the Making of Las Vegas. He is completing
Shadows of the Eagle, a history of US policy and covert interventions
in the Middle East and South Asia over the past half-century,
forthcoming from Alfred Knopf. Morris can be reached at: rpmbook@gmail.com
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