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BBC NEWS | Politic

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/uk_politics/3099378.stm

Published: 2004/01/28 16:45:03 GMT
s | Timeline: Hutton report

washingtonpost.com

Probe Focuses on Month Before Leak to Reporters

FBI Agents Tracing Linkage of Envoy to CIA Operative

By Walter Pincus and Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writers

Sunday, October 12, 2003; Page A01

FBI agents investigating the disclosure of a CIA
officer’s identity have begun by examining events in the month before
the leak, when the CIA, the White House and Vice President Cheney’s
office first were asked about former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV’s
CIA-sponsored trip to Niger,
 according to sources familiar with the
probe….. (irony alert)

The name of Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, a clandestine case
officer, was revealed in a July 14 column by Robert D. Novak that
quoted two unidentified senior administration officials.

In their interviews, FBI agents are asking questions about events
going back to at least early June, the sources said. That indicates
investigators are examining not just who passed the information to
Novak and other reporters but also how Plame’s name may have first
become linked with Wilson and his mission, who did it and how the
information made its way around the government.

Administration sources said they believe that the officials who
discussed Plame were not trying to expose her, but were using the
information as a tool to try to persuade reporters to ignore Wilson.
The officials wanted to convince the reporters that he had benefited
from nepotism in being chosen for the mission.

What started as political gossip and damage control has become a
major criminal investigation that has already harmed the administration
and could be a problem for President Bush for months to come.

One reason investigators are looking back is that even before
Novak’s column appeared, government officials had been trying for more
than a month to convince journalists that Wilson’s mission was not as
important as it was being portrayed. Wilson concluded during the 2002
mission that there was no solid evidence for the administration’s
assertion that Iraq was trying to acquire uranium in Niger to develop
nuclear weapons, and he angered the White House when he became an
outspoken critic of the war.

The FBI is trying to determine when White House officials and
members of the vice president’s staff first focused on Wilson and
learned about his wife’s employment at the agency. One group that may
have known of the connection before that time is the handful of CIA
officers detailed to the White House, where they work primarily on the
National Security Council staff. A former NSC staff member said one or
more of those officers may have been aware of the Plame-Wilson
relationship.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan said in response to a
query for this article: “I think it would be counterproductive during
an ongoing investigation for me to chase rumors and speculation. The
president has directed the White House to cooperate fully, and that is
exactly what we are doing.”

Investigators are trying to establish the chain of events leading to
the leak because, for a successful prosecution under the law
prohibiting unauthorized disclosure of a covert U.S. officer’s name,
the disclosure must have been intentional, the accused must have known
the person was a covert officer and the identity must not have been
disclosed earlier.

The first public mention of Wilson’s mission to Niger, albeit
without identifying him by name, was in the New York Times on May 6, in
a column by Nicholas D. Kristof. Kristof had been on a panel with
Wilson four days earlier, when the former ambassador said State
Department officials should know better than to say the United States
had been duped by forged documents that allegedly had proved a deal for
the uranium had been in the works between Iraq and Niger.

Wilson said he told Kristof about his trip to Niger on the condition
that Kristof must keep his name out of the column. When the column
appeared, it created little public stir, though it set a number of
reporters on the trail of the anonymous former ambassador. Kristof
confirmed that account.

The column mentioned the alleged role of the vice president’s office
for the first time. That was when Cheney aides became aware of Wilson’s
mission and they began asking questions about him within the
government, according to an administration official.

In the meantime, Wilson was pressing his case. He briefed two
congressional committees conducting inquiries into why the president
had mentioned the uranium allegation in his Jan. 28 State of the Union
address. He also began making frequent television appearances.

In early June, Wilson told his story to The Washington Post on the
condition that his name be withheld. On June 12, The Post published a
more complete account than Kristof’s of Wilson’s trip. Wilson has now
given permission to The Post to identify him as one source for that
article.

By that time, officials in the White House, Cheney’s office, the CIA
and the State Department were familiar with Wilson and his mission to
Niger.

Starting that week, the officials repeatedly played down the
importance of Wilson’s trip and its findings, saying it had been
authorized within the CIA’s nonproliferation section at a low level
without requiring the approval of senior agency officials. No one
brought up Wilson’s wife, and her employment at the agency was not
known at the time the article was published.

Wilson’s oral report to a CIA officer had been turned into a routine
one-and-a-half page CIA intelligence memo to the White House and other
agencies. By tradition, his identity as the source, even though he went
under the auspices of the CIA, was not disclosed.

“This gent made a visit to the region and chatted up his friends,”
a senior intelligence official said last June in describing the
agency’s view of the mission. Regarding the allegation about Iraq
seeking uranium, the official said: “He relayed back to us that they
said it was not true and that he believed them.”

The Post article generated little public response. But behind the
scenes, Bush officials were concerned. “After the June story, a lot of
people in government were scurrying around asking who is this envoy and
why is he saying these things,” a senior administration official said.

Wilson said he attempted to increase pressure on the White House
the day after the June 12 article was published by calling some present
and former senior administration officials who know national security
adviser Condoleezza Rice. He wanted them to tell Rice that she was
wrong in her comment on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on June 8 that there may
be some intelligence “in the bowels of the agency,” but that no one
around her had any doubts about the uranium story.

Wilson said those officials told him Rice was not interested and he
should publish his story in his own name if he wanted to attract
attention.

On July 6, Wilson went public. In an interview published in The
Post, Wilson accused the administration of “misrepresenting the facts
on an issue that was a fundamental justification for going to war.” In
an opinion article the same day in the New York Times, he wrote that
“some of the intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was
twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.”

On “Meet the Press” that day, Wilson said: “Either the
administration has some information that it has not shared with the
public or, yes, they were using the selective use of facts and
intelligence to bolster a decision in the case that had already been
made, a decision that had been made to go war.”

On July 7, the White House admitted it had been a mistake to include
the 16 words about uranium in Bush’s State of the Union speech. Four
days later, with the controversy dominating the airwaves and drowning
out the messages Bush intended to send during his trip in Africa, CIA
Director George J. Tenet took public blame for failing to have the
sentence removed.

That same week, two top White House officials disclosed Plame’s
identity to least six Washington journalists, an administration
official told The Post for an article published Sept. 28. The source
elaborated on the conversations last week, saying that officials
brought up Plame as part of their broader case against Wilson.

“It was unsolicited,” the source said. “They were pushing back. They used everything they had.”

Novak has said he began interviewing Bush officials about Wilson
shortly after July 6, asking why such an outspoken Bush policy critic
was picked for the Niger mission. Novak reported that Wilson’s wife
worked at the CIA on weapons of mass destruction and that she was the
person who suggested Wilson for the job.

Officials have said Wilson, a former ambassador to Gabon and
National Security Council senior director for African affairs, was not
chosen because of his wife.

On July 12, two days before Novak’s column, a Post reporter was told
by an administration official that the White House had not paid
attention to the former ambassador’s CIA-sponsored trip to Niger
because it was set up as a boondoggle by his wife, an analyst with the
agency working on weapons of mass destruction. Plame’s name was never
mentioned and the purpose of the disclosure did not appear to be to
generate an article, but rather to undermine Wilson’s report.

After Novak’s column appeared, several high-profile reporters told
Wilson that they had received calls from White House officials drawing
attention to his wife’s role. Andrea Mitchell of NBC News said she
received one of those calls.

Wilson said another reporter called him on July 21 and said he had
just hung up with Bush’s senior adviser, Karl Rove. The reporter quoted
Rove as describing Wilson’s wife as “fair game,” Wilson said. Newsweek
has identified that reporter as MSNBC television host Chris Matthews.
Spokespeople said Matthews was unavailable for comment.

McClellan, the White House spokesman, has denied that Rove was
involved in leaking classified material but has refused to discuss the
possibility of a campaign to call attention to the revelations in
Novak’s column.

On July 17, the Time magazine Web site reported that “some
government officials have noted to Time in interviews, (as well as to
syndicated columnist Robert Novak) that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame,
is a CIA official who monitors the proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction.” On July 22, Wilson appeared on NBC’s “Today” show and
said that disclosing the name of a U.S. intelligence officer would be
“a breach of national security,” could compromise that officer’s entire
network of contacts and could be a violation of federal law.

Wilson said that brought an immediate halt to the reports he had
been getting of anonymous attacks on him by White House officials.

An administration source said, “One of the greatest mysteries in all
this is what was really the rationale for doing it and doing it this
way.”

© 2003 washingtonpost.com

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Useless Account

HOW IT BEGAN::Now, besides the Nicolas Kristof piece, this is the marrow of the beast:::
washingtonpost.com

CIA Did Not Share Doubt on Iraq Data

Bush Used Report Of Uranium Bid

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, June 12, 2003; Page A01

A key component of President Bush’s claim in his State
of the Union address last January that Iraq had an active nuclear
weapons program — its alleged attempt to buy uranium in Niger — was
disputed by a CIA-directed mission to the central African nation in
early 2002, according to senior administration officials and a former
government official. But the CIA did not pass on the detailed results
of its investigation to the White House or other government agencies,
the officials said.

The CIA’s failure to share what it knew, which has not been
disclosed previously, was one of a number of steps in the Bush
administration that helped keep the uranium story alive until the eve
of the war in Iraq, when the United Nations’ chief nuclear inspector
told the Security Council that the claim was based on fabricated
evidence.

A senior intelligence official said the CIA’s action was the result
of “extremely sloppy” handling of a central piece of evidence in the
administration’s case against then-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. But,
the official added, “It is only one fact and not the reason we went to
war. There was a lot more.”

However, a senior CIA analyst said the case “is indicative of larger
problems” involving the handling of intelligence about Iraq’s alleged
chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs and its links to al
Qaeda, which the administration cited as justification for war.
“Information not consistent with the administration agenda was
discarded and information that was [consistent] was not seriously
scrutinized,” the analyst said.

As the controversy over Iraq intelligence has expanded with the
failure so far of U.S. teams in Iraq to uncover proscribed weapons,
intelligence officials have accused senior administration policymakers
of pressuring the CIA or exaggerating intelligence information to make
the case for war. The story involving the CIA’s uranium-purchase probe,
however, suggests that the agency also was shaping intelligence on Iraq
to meet the administration’s policy goals.

Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), former chairman of the Select Committee on
Intelligence and a candidate for president, yesterday described the
case as “part of the agency’s standard operating procedure when it
wants to advance the information that supported their [the
administration’s] position and bury that which didn’t.”

Armed with information purportedly showing that Iraqi officials had
been seeking to buy uranium in Niger one or two years earlier, the CIA
in early February 2002 dispatched a retired U.S. ambassador to the
country to investigate the claims, according to the senior U.S.
officials and the former government official, who is familiar with the
event. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity and on condition
that the name of the former ambassador not be disclosed.

During his trip, the CIA’s envoy spoke with the president of Niger
and other Niger officials mentioned as being involved in the Iraqi
effort, some of whose signatures purportedly appeared on the documents.

After returning to the United States, the envoy reported to the CIA
that the uranium-purchase story was false, the sources said. Among the
envoy’s conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because
the “dates were wrong and the names were wrong,” the former U.S.
government official said.

However, the CIA did not include details of the former ambassador’s
report and his identity as the source, which would have added to the
credibility of his findings, in its intelligence reports that were
shared with other government agencies. Instead, the CIA only said that
Niger government officials had denied the attempted deal had taken
place, a senior administration said.

“This gent made a visit to the region and chatted up his friends,” a
senior intelligence official said, describing the agency’s view of the
mission. “He relayed back to us that they said it was not true and that
he believed them.”

Thirteen months later, on March 8, Mohamed ElBaradei, director
general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, informed the U.N.
Security Council that after careful scrutiny of the Niger documents,
his agency had reached the same conclusion as the CIA’s envoy.
ElBaradei deemed the documents “not authentic,” an assessment that U.S.
officials did not dispute.

Knowledgeable sources familiar with the forgery investigation have
described the faked evidence as a series of letters between Iraqi
agents and officials in Niger. The documents had been sought by U.N.
inspectors since September 2002 and they were delivered by the United
States and Britain last February.

The President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a panel of
nongovernment experts that is reviewing the handling of Iraq
intelligence, is planning to study the Niger story and how it made its
way into Bush’s State of the Union address on Jan. 28. In making the
case that Iraq had an ongoing nuclear weapons program, Bush declared
that “the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently
sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

That same month, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and national
security adviser Condoleezza Rice also mentioned Iraq’s alleged
attempts to buy uranium, and the story made its way into a State
Department “fact sheet” as well.

Rep. Henry A. Waxman (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the
Government Reform Committee and a leading administration critic, wrote
the president June 2 asking why Bush had included the Niger case as
part of the evidence he cited against Iraq. “Given what the CIA knew at
the time, the implication you intended — that there was credible
evidence that Iraq sought uranium from Africa — was simply false,”
Waxman said.

The CIA’s decision to send an emissary to Niger was triggered by
questions raised by an aide to Vice President Cheney during an agency
briefing on intelligence circulating about the purported Iraqi efforts
to acquire the uranium, according to the senior officials. Cheney’s
staff was not told at the time that its concerns had been the impetus
for a CIA mission and did not learn it occurred or its specific results.

Cheney and his staff continued to get intelligence on the matter,
but the vice president, unlike other senior administration officials,
never mentioned it in a public speech. He and his staff did not learn
of its role in spurring the mission until it was disclosed by New York
Times columnist Nicholas Kristof on May 6, according to an
administration official.

When the British government published an intelligence document on
Iraq in September 2002 claiming that Baghdad had “sought significant
quantities of uranium from Africa,” the former ambassador called the
CIA officers who sent him to Niger and was told they were looking into
new information about the claim, sources said. The former envoy later
called the CIA and State Department after Bush’s State of the Union
speech and was told “not to worry,” according to one U.S. official.

Later it was disclosed that the United States and Britain were
basing their reports on common information that originated with forged
documents provided originally by Italian intelligence officials.

CIA Director George J. Tenet, on Sept. 24, 2002, cited the Niger
evidence in a closed-door briefing to the Senate intelligence committee
on a national intelligence estimate of Iraq’s weapons programs, sources
said. Although Tenet told the panel that some questions had been raised
about the evidence, he did not mention that the agency had sent an
envoy to Niger and that the former ambassador had concluded that the
claims were false.

The Niger evidence was not included in Secretary of State Colin L.
Powell’s Feb. 5 address to the Security Council in which he disclosed
some intelligence on Iraq’s alleged weapons programs and links to al
Qaeda because it was considered inaccurate, sources said.

Even so, the Voice of America on Feb. 20 broadcast a story that
said: “U.S. officials tell VOA [that] Iraq and Niger signed an
agreement in the summer of 2000 to resume shipments for an additional
500 tons of yellow cake,” a reference to the uranium. The VOA, which is
financed by the government but has an official policy of editorial
independence, went on to say that there was no evidence such shipments
had taken place.

© 2003 The Washington Post Company

washingtonpost.com:

It is no secret that Michael Graham hates John Kerry,
France and Susan Sarandon. This, of course, does not require that they
be linked together whenever Kerry makes a statement that Graham
doesn’t agree with (“Mon Dieu! Send Kerry to Paris,”
Jan. 31).

    Kerry
was correct in his criticisms of U.S. foreign policy. It is sad that
Graham, having no coherent rebuttal, resorts to the right wing’s
usual anti-France, anti-Sarandon invective. It is even sadder if one
takes into account that U.S. public opinion has so turned against this
administration’s policies that this childish tactic no longer has
any impact.

    While
there is no doubt that Kerry has made a number of questionable, even
embarrassing public statements, a responsible newspaper would publish a
serious critique of the senator’s position, not the apoplectic
ravings of a third-rate talk radio personality.

    – Jim Sullivan, Boston

BostonHerald.com