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Prelude to a Leak
Gang fight: How Cheney and his tight-knit team launched the Iraq
war, chased their critics—and set the stage for a special
prosecutor's dramatic probe.
By John Barry, Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
10/24/05 "Newsweek"
-- -- Oct. 31, 2005 issue - It is the nature of
bureaucracies that reports are ordered up and then ignored. In
February 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney received a CIA briefing
that touched on Saddam Hussein's attempts to build nuclear bombs.
Cheney, who was looking for evidence to support an Iraq invasion,
was especially interested in one detail: a report that claimed
Saddam attempted to purchase uranium from Niger. At the end of the
briefing, Cheney or an aide told the CIA man that the vice president
wanted to know more about the subject. It was a common enough
request. "Principals" often ask briefers for this sort of thing. But
when the vice president of the United States makes a request,
underlings jump. Midlevel officials in the CIA's clandestine service
quickly arranged to send Ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger to
investigate the uranium claims. A seasoned diplomat, Wilson had good
connections in the region. He would later say his week in Africa
convinced him that the story was bogus, and said so to his CIA
debriefers. The agency handed the information up the chain, but
there is no record that it ever reached Cheney. Like hundreds of
other reports that slosh through the bureaucracy each day, Wilson's
findings likely made their way to the middle of a pile. The vice
president has said he never knew about Wilson's trip, and never saw
any report.
If he had, Cheney might not have been inclined to believe a word of
it anyway. At the time of Wilson's debunking, the vice president was
the Bush administration's leading advocate of war with Iraq. Cheney
had long distrusted the apparatchiks who sat in offices at the CIA,
FBI and Pentagon. He regarded them as dim, timid timeservers who
would always choose inaction over action. Instead, the vice
president relied on the counsel of a small number of advisers. The
group included Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and two Wolfowitz proteges: I. Lewis
(Scooter) Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, and Douglas Feith,
Rumsfeld's under secretary for policy. Together, the group largely
despised the on-the-one-hand/on-the-other analyses handed up by the
intelligence bureaucracy. Instead, they went in search of intel that
helped to advance their case for war.
Central to that case was the belief that Saddam was determined to
get nukes—a claim helped by the Niger story, which the White House
doggedly pushed. A prideful man who enjoys the spotlight, Joseph
Wilson grew increasingly agitated that the White House had not come
clean about how the African-uranium claim made it into George W.
Bush's 2003 State of the Union address. In June, Condoleezza Rice
went on TV and denied she knew that documents underlying the uranium
story were, in fact, crude forgeries: "Maybe somebody in the bowels
of the agency knew something about this," she said, "but nobody in
my circles." For Wilson, that was it. "That was a slap in the face,"
he told NEWSWEEK. "She was saying 'F--- you, Washington, we don't
care.' Or rather 'F--- you, America'." On July 6, Wilson went public
about his Niger trip in his landmark New York Times op-ed piece.
From there, as we now know, things got a bit out of hand. Within the
White House inner circle, Wilson's op-ed was seen as an act of
aggression against Bush and Cheney. Someone, perhaps to punish the
loose-lipped diplomat, let it be known to columnist Robert Novak and
other reporters that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was an undercover
CIA operative, a revelation that is a possible violation of laws
protecting classified information. This week the two-year-long
investigation of that leak could finally end. It is widely expected
that Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor appointed in the
case, may issue indictments of one or more top administration
officials, possibly including Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.
Of course, Fitzgerald could always pack up without issuing a single
indictment, or even an explanation why. Tight-lipped, Fitzgerald has
not said a word about his intentions. That has left Washington
breathlessly reading into the flimsiest clues. Last week bloggers
seized on the discovery that Fitzgerald had set up a Web site, which
was taken as a sure sign that indictments were around the corner.
Lawyers who have had dealings with Fitzgerald's office, who spoke
anonymously because the investigation is ongoing, say the prosecutor
appears to be exploring the option of bringing broad conspiracy
charges against Libby, Rove and perhaps others, though it's still
unclear whether Fitzgerald can prove an underlying crime.
Some lawyers close to the case are convinced Fitzgerald has a
mysterious "Mr. X"—a yet unknown principal target or cooperating
witness. Some press reports identified John Hannah, Cheney's deputy
national-security adviser, as a potentially key figure in the
investigation. Hannah played a central policymaking role on Iraq and
was known to be particularly close to Ahmad Chalabi, whose Iraqi
National Congress supplied some of the faulty intelligence about WMD
embraced by the vice president in the run-up to the invasion.
Lawyers for Rove and Libby have said their clients did nothing wrong
and broke no laws. Last week Hannah's lawyer Thomas Green told
NEWSWEEK his client "knew nothing" about the leak and is not a
target of Fitzgerald's probe. "This is craziness," he said. Whatever
news Fitzgerald makes this week, however, the case has shed light on
how Cheney and his clique of advisers cleared the way to war, and
how they obsessed over critics who got in the way.
The Cheney group isn't a new fraternity. Separately and together,
they've been fighting the same battle with the intelligence
bureaucracy for decades. Libby first worked for Cheney during the
gulf war, when W's father was president and Cheney was Defense
secretary. Libby was brought into the Pentagon by Wolfowitz, his
former Yale professor, who was an under secretary of Defense. The
arguments of the time seem familiar today. Cheney backed the elder
Bush's vow to oust Saddam from Kuwait by force, over the objections
of Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who favored
negotiations, and over dire predictions of disaster from the CIA.
Cheney emerged with a low opinion of his senior military and of the
intelligence community, believing both to be risk averse and too
comfortable with conventional wisdom.
When Bush was elected in 2000, Cheney—who had been impressed with
Libby's political savvy and mastery of detail—tapped him as his No.
2. Libby was perhaps the group's most relentless digger. An intense
former litigator, he acted as a conduit for Cheney's obsessions.
Soon after 9/11, Libby began routinely calling intelligence
officials, high and low, to pump them for any scraps of information
on Iraq. He would read obscure, unvetted intelligence reports and
grill analysts about them, but always in a courtly manner. The intel
officials were often more than a little surprised. It was unusual
for the vice president's office to step so far outside of channels
and make personal appeals to mere analysts. "He was deep into the
raw intel," says one government official who didn't want to be named
for fear of retribution. (Cheney's office declined to comment on
specific questions for this story, beyond saying that the vice
president and his staff are cooperating with Fitzgerald's probe.)
Behind their backs, their detractors dubbed Cheney and his minions
"the commissars." The vice president and Libby made three or four
trips to CIA headquarters, where they questioned analysts about
their findings. Agency officials say they welcomed the visits, and
insist that no one felt pressured, though some analysts complained
that they suspected Cheney was subtly sending them the message to
get in line or keep their mouths shut.
Cheney and the commissars seemed especially determined to prove a
now discredited claim: that Muhammad Atta, the lead 9/11 hijacker,
had secretly met in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence officer in
April 2001. If true, it would have backed administration assertions
of a link between Saddam and Al Qaeda, one of Bush and Cheney's
arguments justifying an invasion. The story fell apart on serious
examination by the FBI and CIA—Atta was apparently in the United
States at the time of the alleged visit. But Cheney continued to
repeat the story in speeches and interviews, even after the 9/11
Commission found no evidence to support it.
Behind the scenes, no one pushed the terror link harder than Libby.
He urged Colin Powell's staff to include the Prague meeting in the
secretary of State's speech to the United Nations. But Powell wanted
no part of it. After one long session debating the evidence before
the speech, Libby turned to a Powell aide. "Don't worry about any of
this," he said, according to someone who was in the room. "We'll get
back in what you take out." They didn't. Powell refused to use the
line, but Libby's audacity stunned everyone at the table. "The
notion that they've become a gang has some merit," says a longtime
colleague of Libby's who requested anonymity to preserve the
friendship. "A small group who only talk to each other ... You pay a
price for that."
Libby seemed to bring the same kind of intensity when it came to
Wilson. The timing of the diplomat's fiery op-ed couldn't have been
worse for the administration. It was July 2003, two months after
Saddam's statue fell, and still no WMD had been found. The
administration's primary sales pitch was being called into doubt.
Libby and other administration officials were quick to denounce
Wilson's claims, and to allege that it was his wife who had chosen
him for the African trip. (Wilson and Plame say she merely
recommended him to her supervisor when asked.) According to the Los
Angeles Times, Libby began keeping close track of Wilson's
interviews and television appearances, and pushed for an aggressive
PR campaign against him. He also began chatting up reporters on his
own. An outgoing schmoozer who's been known to trade shots of
tequila with reporters until the wee hours, at the very least he
reached out to members of the press. The New York Times's Judith
Miller, one of the reporters caught up in the investigation, wrote
last week that she had three conversations with Libby before Plame's
name became public. And Rove, who talked to Time magazine's Matthew
Cooper about the case, reportedly told the grand jury that he may
have also spoken to Libby about Plame. It's now up to Fitzgerald to
decide if those conversations were more than just talk.
With Richard Wolffe and Daniel Klaidman
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
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