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Iraq, Niger, And The CIA
By Murray Waas, special to National Journal
02/02/06 "National
Journal" -- -- Vice President Cheney and his
then-Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby were personally
informed in June 2003 that the CIA no longer considered credible
the allegations that Saddam Hussein had attempted to procure
uranium from the African nation of Niger, according to
government records and interviews with current and former
officials. The new CIA assessment came just as Libby and other
senior administration officials were embarking on an effort to
discredit an administration critic who had also been saying that
the allegations were untrue.
CIA analysts wrote then-CIA Director George Tenet in a highly
classified memo on June 17, 2003, "We no longer believe there is
sufficient" credible information to "conclude that Iraq pursued
uranium from abroad." The memo was titled: "In Response to Your
Questions for Our Current Assessment and Additional Details on
Iraq's Alleged Pursuits of Uranium From Abroad."
Despite the CIA's findings, Libby attempted to discredit former
Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had been sent on a CIA-sponsored
mission to Niger the previous year to investigate the claims,
which he concluded were baseless.
Previous coverage of the CIA leak investigation from Murray Waas
The campaign against Wilson led to the outing of Wilson's wife,
Valerie Plame, as an undercover CIA officer -- less than a month
after the CIA assessment was completed. Libby resigned as
Cheney's chief of staff and national security adviser on October
28, 2005, after he was indicted by a federal grand jury on five
counts of making false statements, perjury, and obstruction of
justice for concealing his role in leaking Plame's identity to
the media.
Tenet requested the previously undisclosed intelligence
assessment in large part because of repeated inquiries from
Cheney and Libby regarding the Niger matter and Wilson's
mission, although neither Cheney nor Libby specifically asked
that the new review be conducted, according to government
records and to current and former government officials. Tenet
also asked for the assessment because information about Wilson's
mission to Niger had begun to appear in the media, and Tenet
thought that the press or Capitol Hill might raise additional
questions about the matter.
The new disclosures raise questions as to why Libby and other
Bush administration officials continued their efforts to
discredit Wilson -- even as they were told that claims about
Iraq's having procured uranium from Niger were most likely a
hoax.
The answer may lie in part with the already well-known
misgivings about the CIA by Cheney, Libby, and other senior Bush
administration officials. At one point during that period -- the
summer of 2003 -- Libby confronted a senior intelligence analyst
briefing him and the vice president and accused the CIA of
willfully misleading him and the administration on Niger. Libby
was said to be upset that the CIA, in his view, had routinely
minimized the extent to which Iraq was pursuing weapons of mass
destruction and was now prematurely attempting to distance
itself from the Niger allegations.
Libby had also complained about the CIA's Center for Weapons
Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control. WINPAC, as the
center is known, scrutinizes unconventional-weapons threats to
the United States, including the pursuit by both foreign nations
and terrorist groups of nuclear, radiological, chemical, and
biological weapons.
Libby, according to people with knowledge of the events, said
that he and Cheney had come to believe that WINPAC was
presenting Saddam Hussein's pursuit of such weapons in a far
more benign light than Iraq's intents and capabilities
reflected. Libby cited CIA bureaucratic inertia and caution and
his view that many of WINPAC's analysts were aligned with
foreign-policy elites who did not support the war with Iraq.
Libby and others in the office of the vice president apparently
were even more suspicious because they mistakenly believed that
Plame worked for WINPAC, according to these sources. When they
also learned that Plame possibly played a role in Wilson's
selection for the Niger mission, their suspicions only
intensified.
One indication of Cheney's personal interest in the subject was
that some of Libby's earliest and most detailed information
regarding Plame's CIA employment came directly from the vice
president, according to information contained in Libby's grand
jury indictment.
"On or about June 12, 2003," the indictment stated, "Libby was
advised by the Vice President of the United States that Wilson's
wife worked at the Central Intelligence Agency in the
Counterproliferation Division. Libby understood that the Vice
President had learned this information from the CIA."
It would not have been improper or illegal for Cheney to discuss
Plame's CIA employment with Libby or other government officials
with high security clearances. No public evidence has emerged
during the two-year grand jury probe by Special Prosecutor
Patrick Fitzgerald that Libby acted at the vice president's
behest in leaking details of Plame's CIA employment to the
press, or that Cheney even knew that Libby was doing so.
Contemporaneous notes of Libby's that were obtained by federal
investigators in the CIA leak case indicate that Cheney had
originally learned about Plame from then-CIA Director Tenet.
Tenet has confirmed that Fitzgerald interviewed him, but Tenet
has refused to make public any details of what he told
investigators. He declined to comment for this story.
Sources said that Tenet may have discussed Plame with Cheney
because of requests from Cheney, Libby, and other administration
officials for more information about the Niger matter and
Wilson's mission. Cheney's and Libby's interest in Niger was
apparently rekindled after New York Times columnist Nicholas D.
Kristof wrote on May 6, 2003, that the CIA had sent an unnamed
former ambassador to the African nation in February 2002 to
investigate allegations that Iraq had attempted to purchase
uranium from Niger. Kristof wrote that the ex-ambassador
reported back to the CIA and the State Department that the
allegations were "unequivocally wrong" and "based on forged
documents."
The column led Cheney and Libby to inquire about the
then-still-unnamed ambassador and his trip to Niger. On May 29,
2003, Libby asked then-Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman for
information about the mission. Grossman in turn assigned the
State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research to
prepare a report on the matter. Cheney's and Libby's interest in
the issue led Tenet to seek more information as well.
On June 11 or 12, according to the grand jury indictment of
Libby, Grossman reported back that "in sum and substance
Wilson's wife worked at the CIA, and the State Department
personnel were saying that Wilson's wife was involved in the
planning of his trip."
Also on June 11, 2003, according to the indictment, "Libby spoke
with a senior officer of the CIA to ask about the origin and
circumstances of Wilson's trip, and was advised by the CIA
officer that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA and was believed to
be responsible for sending Wilson on the trip." On the very next
day, June 12, the indictment said, Cheney more specifically
informed Libby that Plame worked at the CIA's
"Counterproliferation Division."
Tenet received the highly classified memo on Niger from his
analysts on June 17, 2003, five days after Cheney and Libby
spoke with each other about Plame's working for the CIA. Sources
familiar with the matter say that both Cheney and Libby were
informed of the findings in the June 17 memo only days after
Tenet himself read and reviewed it.
In the memo, the CIA analysts wrote: "Since learning that the
Iraqi-Niger uranium deal was based on false documents earlier
this spring, we no longer believe that there is sufficient other
reporting to conclude that Iraq purchased uranium from abroad."
The memo also related that there had been other, earlier claims
that Saddam's regime had attempted to purchase uranium from
private interests in Somalia and Benin; these claims predated
the Niger allegations. It was that past intelligence that had
led CIA analysts, in part, to consider the Niger claims as
plausible.
But the memo said that after a thorough review of those earlier
reports, the CIA had concluded that they were no longer
credible. Indeed, the previous intelligence reports citing those
claims had long since been "recalled" -- meaning that the CIA
had formally repudiated them.
The memo's findings were considered so significant that they
were not only quickly shared with Cheney and Libby but also with
Congress, albeit on a classified basis, according to government
records and interviews.
On June 18, 2003, the day after the new Niger assessment was
sent to Tenet, Robert D. Walpole, the national intelligence
officer for strategic and nuclear programs, briefed members of
the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence regarding the
findings. And on the following day, June 19, 2003, Walpole
briefed members of the House Select Committee on Intelligence as
well.
Six days after the memo was sent to Tenet, on June 23, 2003,
Libby met with then-New York Times reporter Judith Miller and --
as part of an effort to discredit Wilson -- passed along to her
what prosecutors have said was classified information that
Wilson's wife, Plame, worked for the CIA, according to
allegations contained in Libby's indictment.
On July 6, 2003, Wilson himself went public with his allegations
that the Bush administration had misused the Niger claims to
make the case to go to war. Wilson made his arguments in an
op-ed in The New York Times and an appearance that same morning
on NBC's Meet the Press.
On July 8, 2003, Libby and Miller met again. During a two-hour
breakfast at the St. Regis Hotel in Washington, according to
testimony Miller gave to the federal grand jury hearing evidence
in the CIA leak case, Libby first told her that Plame worked for
the CIA's Weapons, Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms
Control Office.
Around the same time, Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl
Rove and at least one other senior Bush administration official
leaked information to a number of journalists about Plame's CIA
employment and her role in recommending her husband for the
Niger mission.
Columnist Robert Novak, on July 14, 2003, published his
now-famous column identifying Plame as a CIA "operative" and
alleging that she had been responsible for sending her husband
to Niger.
The disclosure did little to discredit Wilson. Instead, it had
unintended and unforeseen consequences for Libby and the Bush
administration: A special prosecutor would be named to
investigate the leak; Judith Miller would spend 85 days in jail
for refusing to testify regarding her conversations with Libby
before ultimately relenting; and a federal grand jury would
indict Libby on charges that he obstructed justice and committed
perjury to conceal his own role in the leak of Plame's CIA
status to the press.
As Libby awaits trial, one of the unresolved mysteries is why
Libby insisted in interviews with the FBI and during his grand
jury testimony that he learned about Plame's employment from
journalists, when investigators already had Libby's own copious
notes indicating that he had first learned many of the details
of Plame's CIA employment from Cheney and other senior
government officials.
One possibility examined by investigators is that Libby was
attempting to cover for Cheney because of the political or legal
fallout that might occur if it was determined that the vice
president had been involved in the effort to discredit Wilson.
Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University, said,
"The prosecutor's implicit inference before the jury may well
likely be that Libby lied to protect the vice president. Even in
a plain vanilla case, a prosecutor always wants to be able to
demonstrate a motive."
That Cheney was one of the first people to tell Libby about
Plame, and that Libby had written in his notes that Cheney had
heard the information from the CIA director, Gillers said, might
make it more difficult for Libby to mount a credible defense of
a faulty memory. "From a prosecutor's point of view, and perhaps
a jury's as well, the conversation [during which Libby learned
about Plame] is the more dramatic and the more memorable because
the conversation was with the vice president" and because the
CIA director's name also came up, Gillers said.
The disclosure that Cheney and Libby were told of a CIA
assessment that the agency considered the Niger allegations to
be untrue, and that Tenet requested the assessment as a result
of the personal interest of Cheney and Libby, would "demonstrate
even further that Niger was a central issue for Libby," said
Gillers, and would "make it even harder, although not
impossible, to claim a faulty memory."
-- Murray Waas is a Washington-based journalist.
© National Journal Group Inc.
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