Spouse of outed CIA officer signs on with Kerry

Washington Times ^ | 2/14/04 | Joseph Curl

[kattracks]

Joseph C. Wilson, a former Clinton appointee whose unsubstantiated charge that senior White House officials leaked the identity of his CIA officer wife and prompted a grand jury probe, has taken a prominent role in the presidential campaign of Sen. John Kerry.

[Just mythoughts]

Exactly. The liberals know to just keep muddying the water so they can change the topic of conversation.

This is what I think about JFKerry and his "sex" life stories.

President Bush has turned over his Vietnam Service files and before the media could turn and ask JFKerry where are yours we get a "SEX" story. They are cons.

[Fedora]

> Your posting shows that they were planning on starting their crap in early 2003, before the war even started, and right around the time of the President's SOTU speech. And when their plans went awry and they discovered the people here supported the President overwhelmingly on going into Iraq, they must have decided then, that they would start a campaign to try to turn the people against the way Bush handled the war's aftermath. It will be interesting to see if there is anything about any of this in those computer memos that Frist's aide (Miranda) discovered.

What you say makes sense. It'd also be interesting if there's anything about it in files recovered from Saddam Hussein's regime or from Al Qaeda arrests. If the Democrats had a contingency plan for what to do in case the war effort went forward despite the UN, by a similar line of thought it'd make sense Saddam and Al Qaeda had contingency plans as well. I recall that Saddam expressed a desire to turn Iraq into another Vietnam "quagmire", and I think I've also seen articles about a recovered file describing Al Qaeda collaborating with him on this. This reminds me of Peter Arnett (then working for "National Geographic" under NBC/MSNBC; and after they fired him wasn't he immediately hired by some left-wing paper in another country?) going over there a few days into the war and announcing, "Clearly, the war plan has failed. . ." Was that a contingency Plan B hatched between Iraq and the antiwar movement: in case the effort to stop the war in the UN Security Council fails, then turn Iraq into a quagmire? Is what we're seeing now with the attack on Bush's Iraq intelligence a later phase of the same plan? The more I think about it, the more this seems like the Democrats replaying the strategy they used to undermine the Vietnam War during the Nixon administration.

[Fedora]

Mentioning Peter Arnett in my last post got me wondering about another liberal reporter who tends to turn up around this type of story, Seymour Hersh. Hersh wrote some early attacks on the Afghanistan operation but then dropped off the radar for a while, so I thought I'd check what he's been up to during the recent Iraq debate. Here's one thing that turned up which seems relevant to what we're discussing:

---
http://www.liberalslant.com/dh110303.htm

Seymour Hersh’s Pipedream:
Niger-forgeries scoop in New Yorker article “The Stovepipe” merits a pooper scooper

---

By: Dennis Hans - 11/03/03



Seymour Hersh has been had by a CIA has-been. A “former senior CIA officer” has gotten him to credit and peddle a preposterous tale about the Niger-uranium forgeries.

Much of Hersh’s latest New Yorker article, “The Stovepipe”
(http://newyorker.com/printable/?fact/031027fa_fact), is a first-rate explication of how the Bush administration politicized and at times circumvented established intelligence processes to create an alarmist picture of the purported Iraqi “threat,” so as to win public support for an invasion President Bush had all but decided on more than a year before he launched the war.

But the big “revelation,” the bombshell that makes the story special, is Hersh’s account of the forging of Nigerien and Iraqi documents that purportedly proved that Iraq and Niger had agreed on the sale of as much as 500 tons of yellowcake uranium. Here’s Hersh:


He [the former senior CIA officer] had begun talking to me about the Niger papers in March, when I first wrote about the forgery, and said, “Somebody deliberately let something false get in there.” He became more forthcoming in subsequent months, eventually saying that a small group of disgruntled retired C.I.A. clandestine operators had banded together in the late summer of last year and drafted the fraudulent documents
themselves.

“The agency guys were so pissed at Cheney,” the former officer said. “They said, ‘O.K, we’re going to put the bite on these guys.’” My source said that he was first told of the fabrication late last year, at one of the many holiday gatherings in the Washington area of past and present C.I.A. officials. “Everyone was bragging about it — ‘Here’s what we did. It was cool, cool, cool.’” These retirees, he said, had superb contacts among current officers in the agency and were informed in detail of the SISMI intelligence. [SISMI is Italy’s military-intelligence agency.]

“They thought that, with this crowd, it was the only way to go — to nail these guys who were not practicing good tradecraft and vetting intelligence,” my source said. “They thought it’d be bought at lower levels — a big bluff.” The thinking, he said, was that the documents would be endorsed by Iraq hawks at the top of the Bush Administration, who would be unable to resist flaunting them at a press conference or an interagency government meeting. They would then look foolish when intelligence officials pointed out that they were obvious fakes. But the tactic backfired, he said, when the papers won widespread acceptance within the Administration. “It got out of control.”


Why This Tale Sounds Tall

In an online companion piece to the article, the New Yorker presents a conversation with Hersh
(http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?online/031027on_onlineonly01), where he describes his source’s story as “one of the most compelling theories” as to how, why and by whom the documents were fabricated.

Alas, what the article reveals is that Hersh is as prone to believing absurd, illogical tales as Cheney himself (assuming Cheney actually believes the stuff he says he believes). I cannot say with 100 percent certainty that Hersh was sold a bill of goods, but I’ll lay out some of the reasons why I’m 99.99 percent sure.

Hersh, in my view, is guilty of the same poor tradecraft and failure to vet intelligence as the villains of his story. His vulnerability stems from his seeming unfamiliarity with much of the public record, a vulnerability that is compounded because it afflicts the New Yorker editors and fact checkers who round out his vetting team.

Consider the alleged date of the forging: “late summer” 2002.

A report published in September 2003 by Britain’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), based on extensive interviews with senior Brit intelligence officials and a careful review of intelligence assessments on Iraq, revealed that Brit intelligence had two sources for the African-uranium claim in the dossier. Information from the first source was acquired in June 2002 and, unlike the second source, was “based on documentary evidence.” The ISC report does not go into details, nor does it name the provider, but this almost certainly refers to “summaries” provided by the Italians of the information contained in the forged documents (which in June 2002 the Italians may or may not have known were forgeries). The point is that the Brits received summaries of the info in the forged documents well before Hersh’s source says the documents were forged! (The ISC report is available in PDF format via this link: http://www.cabinet-office.gov.uk/reports/isc/. You can avoid the PDF hassle by reading my October 20 essay “Recent Dossier-Related Revelations Blow Up in Faces of Blair and Bush” — http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0310/S00168.htm — where I reproduce the ISC section on “Uranium from Africa” and present a great deal of additional evidence bearing on the present discussion.)

Or consider the U.S. investigations completed several months before the Brits received their summaries, conducted by Joe Wilson and, before him, the U.S. Ambassador to Niger and a four-star general. They were investigating reports of a sale, laid out in a “memorandum of agreement” that U.S. officials had not seen but had reporting on. That is, the Italians, in late 2001 or early 2002, passed along to U.S. intelligence not the documents themselves, but information about the transaction laid out in documents that the Italians possessed but which they were not, at that time, sharing with anyone.

Is it possible the Italians were merely pretending to have documents when all they really had was hearsay intelligence about documents they themselves hadn’t seen and had no way of knowing even existed? Yes, it is extremely, remotely possible. One-in-ten-thousand possible. If true, it would contradict what has already been widely reported about the Italians acquiring those documents in late 2001. See, for example, the fine reports by Michael Duffy and James Carney in Time (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101030721-464405,00.html)
and Brian Ross on ABC (http://abcnews.go.com/sections/wnt/US/uranium030714_docs.html).

I’m the first to acknowledge that just because something appears in our mainstream news media doesn’t make it true. And certainly much remains unclear about those documents. Did the underpaid Nigerien diplomat in Rome who allegedly sold them to SISMI also produce them? Or was he merely the middle man for the actual forgers? If not produced by the Nigerien, were the documents the work of a con man? An intelligence service? Italian and U.S. intelligence working together? An independent forger in the direct or indirect pay of an intelligence agency, a faction thereof, or a neocon cabal? There are all sorts of juicy possibilities, but the remotest by far is the notion that the forgeries weren’t forged until late summer 2002 — and then bydisgruntled retired American spooks.

I’ll also grant that it is widely assumed, but not proved, that Italian intelligence had physical possession in 2001 and 2002 of the documents the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) would expose as forgeries in March 2003. But for me to believe that that assumption is false will require far more than an unsupported and illogical story that made the rounds at CIA holiday parties and wound up in the October 27, 2003 New Yorker.

Hersh’s Dossier Confusion

As we know, the State of the Union brouhaha was over a single sentence, where Bush relayed what the “British government has learned” about Iraq’s alleged pursuit of uranium from Africa.

Hersh writes that “the British government issued a dossier dramatizing the W.M.D. threat posed by Iraq. . . . The dossier noted that intelligence — based, again, largely on the SISMI report — showed that Iraq had ‘sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.’ A subsequent parliamentary inquiry determined that the published statement had been significantly toned down after the C.I.A. warned its British counterpart not to include the claim in the dossier, and in the final version Niger was not named, nor was SISMI.”

Among the problems with that passage is that it leaves a clear impression that an earlier version of the dossier named both Niger and SISMI. But the first draft, dated “10/11 September,” and each subsequent draft right through to the published dossier, used the term “Africa,” and none of the drafts identified the provider of the “intelligence.”

Also, Hersh’s account of the toning down is (unintentionally) misleading. He’s right that the statement was toned down, but he leaves out the most important point, which is what was toned down: The first draft twice stated that Iraq had recently “purchased” uranium from Africa. That was based on the Brits’ reading of the documentary-based summaries they received from the Italians in June 2002. (Again, that’s before the forgeries had, in Hersh’s account, even been forged.) The “purchased” statement is presumably what the CIA objected to, though the agency didn’t explain to the Brits why it objected.

I say “presumedly” because CIA director George Tenet, in his July 11 statement
(http://www.odci.gov/cia/public_affairs/press_release/2003/pr07112003.html), indicates that the agency told the Brits that it didn’t have confidence even in the assertion that Iraq had recently sought, let alone bought, African uranium. I say “indicates” because Tenet likes to write sentences that are open to interpretation.

By the time of the next draft, September 16, the Brits had removed all references to a purchase, but it’s not clear what role, if any, the CIA warning played. It’s possible the CIA warning led the Brits to contact the Italians, but the Brits may have already done so, given that a third reference to uranium in the 10/11 September draft employs the toned-down language: “there is compelling evidence that Iraq has sought the supply of significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

Alastair Campbell, Blair’s director of communications and strategy, noticed that the “purchased” assertion had been abandoned. He commented on the change in a September 17 memo to John Scarlett, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, which was responsible for compiling and writing the dossier. “Can we say he has secured uranium from Africa,” asked Campbell, underlining the word “secured” for emphasis and leaving off the question mark in his question.

Scarlett wrote back the next day with bad news: “on the uranium from Africa, the agreed interpretation of the intelligence, brokered with some difficulty with the originators and owners of the reporting) allows us only to say that he has ‘sought’ uranium from Africa.” (Single parenthesis in the original. To read the exchange, first click here: http://www.the-hutton-inquiry.org.uk/content/evidence_260803.htm. The actual memos, in PDF format, are numbered CAB/11/0067 and CAB/11/0071. To follow the twists and turns in the dossier lingo, see my essay “African Uranium and the Scarlett Dossier” here: http://democraticunderground.com/articles/03/08/26_uranium.html. To read the different dossier drafts in PDF format, follow the links from here: http://www.the-hutton-inquiry.org.uk/content/evidence_dos.htm.)

So there you have it. The wording wasn’t brokered with the CIA. It wasn’t fine-tuned over tea by senior British spies. Rather, Italian intelligence, the “originators and owners of the reporting,” essentially said “We’ll let you say this, but you can’t say that.”

The Greatest Flaw of All

As was widely reported this summer (see, for example, this Washington Post story: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A17407-2003Jul19?language=printer ), in October 2002 the State Department obtained copies of the dubious documents and promptly distributed copies to various national-security bureaucracies. The department’s spokesman, Richard Boucher, said “they were shared widely within the U.S. government, with all the appropriate agencies.” One such agency, the CIA, reportedly declined initially to accept them, presumably because it had long ago discounted the allegations stemming from the unseen documents and thus had no reason to think they might be authentic. The CIA apparently didn’t obtain copies until February 2003.

The State Department had received its copies from the U.S. Embassy in Rome, which received them from an Italian journalist, who got them from, in Hersh’s words, “an Italian businessman and security consultant whom she [the journalist] believed to have once been connected to Italian intelligence.” Her editor had told her, Hersh reports, “to turn the documents over to the American Embassy for authentication.”

So far, so good. But here’s where Hersh’s story turns ludicrous: According to the former senior CIA officer (as paraphrased by Hersh), “the papers won widespread acceptance within the Administration.” But if that was the case, the subsequent behavior of administration hawks defies common sense and everything we know about them. Here they were in the fall of 2002, with the pro-war marketing campaign in full swing, and no one was doing a thing with those damning documents.

In late November — mere weeks after the documents had supposedly won “widespread acceptance” among the Bushies — the U.N. inspectors returned to Iraq and immediately undermined much of the U.S.-British case.

Inspectors visited a host of sites that supposedly were humming with proscribed WMD activity and found long-abandoned buildings at some sites and legitimate activity at others. This was widely reported in the media. For the Bushies, what better way to wipe the egg off their faces and nail the “cheat and retreat” Iraqis to the wall than by presenting to the world incontrovertible evidence that Iraq has been doing something it swears it hasn’t — seeking and buying uranium like it was going out of style?

For goodness sake, the Bushies had documents — official Iraqi and Nigerien documents — about uranium. Uranium! Sure, it’s not yet enriched to weapons-grade, but a little detail like that wouldn’t stand in the way of a frighteningly successful propaganda-and-scare campaign. If those documents had been widely or even narrowly perceived within the administration as genuine, the whole world would have seen those documents. Repeatedly. In every venue imaginable. Instead, the documents were kept under lock and key. Heck, they weren’t even leaked to the two most gullible or pretend-gullible reporters in the world: Jeffrey Goldberg of the New Yorker and Judith Miller of the New York Times, who along with their editors stood ready, willing and able to spread most any preposterous story that would build public support for war. (I just realized I may have offended the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward. He, too, would be near the top of the list for such a leak.)

Instead, U.S. officials very gingerly exploited the documents — or I should say the “information” in the documents. Rather than a concerted campaign we had occasional statements — a State Department “fact sheet,” a Powell speech overseas, a Condi Rice op ed in the “liberal” New York Times — none of which cited, let alone presented, supporting documentation in the form of official Iraqi and Nigerien papers. From what we know of the deliberations preceding Bush’s State of the Union address, not one single soul suggested that Bush buttress the uranium claim by citing or brandishing those documents.

If the documents had been believed in October, why weren’t the Pentagon, DIA, NSC, State Department and Cheney’s staff in a mad dash to see who would be first to present the documents to the International Atomic Energy Agency? Imagine the propaganda value in having the IAEA — widely respected and trusted throughout the world, particularly among populations most inclined to distrust Bush — evaluate and publicly confirm the authenticity of the documents. Instead, it took several months for the IAEA to pry the documents from the State Department, which sheepishly included a cover letter saying it really wasn’t all that sure about their authenticity.

What Hersh Needs To Do

It’s good that Hersh has scores of sources who work or formerly worked in the national-security bureaucracies. But Hersh needs a little bit more of the I.F. Stone approach — a willingness to put on his glasses and read, read, read. The more Hersh knows, the less likely he’ll be spun, whether by a deliberate spinner or an old coot who believes the fairy tale he’s passing along. One or the other seems to have happened here, though it bears repeating that most of the article is solid and contributes to our understanding of the cynical machinations of the Bush administration.

Hersh also needs a far better support team at the New Yorker. If he was unearthing the hidden truth about baseball, he could, prior to publication, run his findings by the very knowledgeable Roger Angell. But when it comes to foreign policy, covert operations and disinformation campaigns, who does Hersh turn to? Top dog David Remnick? Veteran editor Hendrick Hertzberg? Neither seems up to the
task.

I don’t know who reviews and edits Hersh’s copy, but it could well be the same staffers who reviewed and green-lighted Jeffrey Goldberg’s pre-war writings, which exhibited the very problem Hersh describes in the sane portions of his article: non-vetting of dubious sources who tell stories that they think their listener would love to hear. The dubious sources count on their listener to be too ignorant, too gullible, or too willing to knowingly participate in the hoodwinking of the American people to see the obvious holes and ask the obvious questions.

So my advice to Hersh is to get a new pair of reading glasses, retract those portions of the article that require retraction, tell the New Yorker publisher to hire competent vetters and editors, and get back to doing what you generally do so well: exposing the seamier aspects of U.S. government actions and policies.



Dennis Hans is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, National Post (Canada) and online at TomPaine.com, Slate and The Black World Today (tbwt.com), among other outlets. He has taught courses in mass communications and American foreign policy at the University of South Florida-St. Petersburg. Dennis is a contributing writer for Liberal Slant and can be reached at HANS_D@popmail.firn.edu



You can read his stunning essay “Lying Us Into War: Exposing Bush and His ‘Techniques of Deceit’” — published several weeks before the start of the recent war — at http://www.yourmailinglistprovider.com/pubarchive.php?haney+1557



Find more articles by Dennis Hans in the Liberal Slant Archives

[Mo1]

Not only is Mr. Wilson tied to the Kerry Campaign .. but he is also tied to Moveon.org and a documentary he was in of theirs

Gee I wounder of Soros paid for that???

[Mo1]

Here we go again. I heard Mr. Wilson say I do not know who sent me, I would not know them if I met them on the street.

I wonder .. does Mr. Wilson have a habit of going on trips asked by people he doesn't know?

[Fledermaus]

Wilson is an idiot! Period.

[kcvl]

Joe Wilson, Valerie Plame

[Mo1]

and a fraud

[Just mythoughts]

LOL

I think it is a liberal thing. We find that answer and a whole lot of questions will be answered.

[Straight Vermonter]

This is Mr Wilson's political contributions over the last several campaigns.

14 records found in 0.2031 seconds.
 

Search Criteria: Donor name: wilson, joseph Donor State: DC Cycle(s) selected: 2004, 2002, 2000 Start another search

Sort by Name Sort by Date Sort by Amount

Total for this search: $10,750

Contributor	Occupation	Date	Amount	Recipient
WILSON, JOSEPH WASHINGTON,DC 20007	JC WILSON INTERNATIONAL VENTURES C	9/20/2002	$500	Blinken, Alan John
WILSON, JOSEPH WASHINGTON,DC 20007	J C WILSON INT'L VEND	2/10/2000	$500	Rangel, Charles B
WILSON, JOSEPH C WASHINGTON,DC 20007	JC WILSON INTERNATIONAL VENTURES/BU	5/23/2003	$1,000	Kerry, John
WILSON, JOSEPH C WASHINGTON,DC 20007	JC WILSON INTERNATIONAL VENTURES/CE	9/4/2003	$1,000	Kerry, John
WILSON, JOSEPH C WASHINGTON,DC 20007	J. C. WILSON INTL. VENTURES/STRATEG	3/26/1999	$2,000	Gore, Al
WILSON, JOSEPH C IV WASHINGTON,DC 20007	JC WILSON INT. VENTURE/FINANCE	2/13/2002	$1,000	HILLPAC
WILSON, JOSEPH C IV WASHINGTON,DC 20007	J C WILSON INTERNATIONAL	5/13/1999	$1,000	Kennedy, Edward M
WILSON, JOSEPH C IV WASHINGTON,DC 20007	SELF/CONSULTANT	9/25/2002	$250	Rahall, Nick
WILSON, JOSEPH C IV WASHINGTON,DC 20007	CONSULTANT	6/25/2000	$500	Royce, Ed
WILSON, JOSEPH C IV WASHINGTON,DC 20007	JCWILSON INTERNATIONAL VENTURE	5/20/1999	$1,000	Bush, George W
WILSON, JOSEPH C MR IV WASHINGTON,DC 20007	SELF/CONSULTANT	6/12/2002	$500	Royce, Ed
WILSON, JOSEPH C MR IV WASHINGTON,DC 20007	J. C. WILSON INTL. VENTURES/STRATEG	4/22/1999	($1,000)	Gore, Al
WILSON, JOSEPH C MR IV WASHINGTON,DC 20007	SELF/CONSULTANT	6/28/2001	$500	Royce, Ed
WILSON, JOSEPH C MR IV WASHINGTON,DC 20007	J. C. WILSON INTL. VENTURES/STRATEG	3/26/1999	$2,000	Gore, Al

[kcvl]

" Don't leave it to the neoconservatives and evangelical Christians," Mr. Wilson said. "

bttt - let's keep this handy when Kerry tries to get these votes. There are more of us than he thinks. He has NO IDEA how many people are working to make sure he is NOT elected. The same people who are going to make PASSION a hit for Mel Gibson will also be voting. It is NOT a antisemitic film. It is a film that blames each of us INDIVIDUALS (sinners) for the death of Jesus.

[kcvl]

"This article says that VPCheney sent him."

Cheney said that he didn't send him. Who do I believe? Mmmmmmm...okay, I believe Cheney!

[kcvl]

"Democrats plan to undermine public confidence in President George W. Bush by challenging his credibility and raising doubts about America"

[kcvl]

These people don't care what they do to our country as long as they win an election!!! They keep bringing up how many of our soldiers die everyday but everything they do and say is putting them in harm's way. They could care less about them as long as they win an election and power they lost during the Clinton years. They still don't get it. They are making me sick of them every time they open their mouths. It only makes me more determined to work harder to see that they will never be in power again. They are really a sick bunch of people.

[mass55th]

"I’ll also grant that it is widely assumed, but not proved, that Italian intelligence had physical possession in 2001 and 2002 of the documents the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) would expose as forgeries in March 2003."

Don't you think it's rather interesting that Joe Wilson's trip to Niger (Jan. of 2002) coicides with the Italian's alleged possession of these documents. Maybe Mr. Wilson was brewing more than just green tea during his Niger visit. Do you by chance know who that four-star General was who preceded Wilson on the Niger investigation?

[swilhelm73]

Shortly after the Wilson story broke last fall, Plame's immediate superior resigned suddenly and unexpectedly.

The smart money is that he made the decision to send Wilson in conjuction with Plame, probably to specifically damage the President and the case for the war. At the time Wilson was already a vocal war opponent and had close ties to Democrat party.

His story never made it to the VP, or even upper levels in the CIA because they didn't think he had made anything approaching a reasonably competent investigation, as he basically admitted himself.

Oh, and though the press refuses to mention it, Wilson works for a Saudi front organization. I wrote up an article about it on FR a while back. Wilson even lists his wife's name on their website.

As for Ritter, about the time of his Iraq about he face he was arrested for trying to have sex with a minor. Shortly after his about face, he ended up on the payroll of Saddam Hussein. I think the cause of his...change of heart...is rather obvious.

[kcvl]

Win Without War


http://www.winwithoutwarus.org/

[mass55th]

I like WIN WITHOUT WILSON better.

[kcvl]

Wilson, wife have tight ties to Democrats


By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES



Joseph C. Wilson IV, the man accusing the White House of a vendetta against him and his wife, is an ex-diplomat turned Democratic partisan.
President Bush, he wrote in an article in the far-left Nation magazine that was published before the Iraq war began, is not interested in democracy in the Middle East but "this new American imperialism."
"The new imperialists will not rest until governments that ape our world view are implanted throughout the region, a breathtakingly ambitious undertaking, smacking of hubris in the extreme."
Like Mr. Bush, he said Saddam Hussein's forces possessed weapons of mass destruction.
"They would use a biological weapon in a battle that we might have," he told ABC in November about Saddam's counterattack. He now criticizes Mr. Bush for relying on the same intelligence. No such weapons have been found, but the search goes on.
His wife is Valerie Plame Wilson, who works for the CIA's directorate of operations, a clandestine service. Her name and spy job, revealed in syndicated columnist Robert Novak's column in July, has become a Democratic campaign issue and triggered a Justice Department investigation of who at the White House leaked that fact, if anyone at the White House did. Federal law prohibits government officials from identifying clandestine CIA employees publicly; it does not prohibit journalists from publishing such information.
Mr. Novak yesterday detailed in his syndicated column the history of how the story came about. "I did not receive a planned leak," he wrote. "Second, the CIA never warned me that the disclosure of Wilson's wife working at the agency would endanger her or anybody else. Third, it was not much of a secret."
The White House yesterday continued to deny its people were responsible for the leak and said it is cooperating fully with the Justice Department.
"There has been no specific information that has come to our attention to suggest — beyond media reports — to suggest that someone in the White House was involved in leaking classified information," said White House spokesman Scott McClellan.
Mr. Wilson told The Washington Post he and his wife are already discussing who will play them in a movie.
He contributed to Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign and is aiding Democratic candidates. Yesterday, Mr. Wilson, a lover of the limelight, was to brief the House Democratic Caucus. But Democrats called off the session for fear they would make the investigation a partisan affair, which Republicans say it already is.
"My political leanings are left of center," Mr. Wilson said on C-SPAN this week.
A person in Mr. Wilson's office yesterday told a reporter that he was in the midst of a press interview, that his voice mail was full, so "call back later."
Mr. Wilson now works at the Middle East Institute as a scholar and frequent Bush critic. He also runs JC Wilson International Ventures. A Senate Republican staffer jokes that he is already on the short list for secretary of state, no matter who the Democratic nominee is.
There was a time when the Bush family thought highly of him. As charge d'affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad during the buildup to the 1991 Gulf war, he acted heroically to protect American citizens and keep Saddam's thugs at bay. The first President Bush rewarded the cigar-chomping Wilson with his first ambassadorship: the tiny African country of Gabon.
During the 1990 crisis leading up the Gulf war, he told the Los Angeles Times: "This is what I spent all those years clinging to the vines of small African countries learning, studying, preparing and waiting for. I've always dreamed of covering a war as a diplomat, and now that I'm here in the middle of it, it's absolutely fascinating."
Mr. Wilson joined President Clinton's National Security Council staff as an African specialist, then retired in 1998. He never reclaimed the national prominence of the Gulf war until his antiwar campaign earlier this year.
This prompted columnist Novak to try to answer the question of why the CIA would pick an ardent Bush knocker as the man to travel to Niger to investigate whether Iraq attempted to buy yellowcake uranium for a nuclear weapons program. The issue of weapons of mass destruction was so central to Mr. Bush's rationale for war that it strikes Republicans as odd that an administration critic would be sent on such a pivotal mission. A CIA spokesman declined to comment.
Mr. Novak wrote that Mrs. Wilson, as a CIA weapons expert, made the recommendation.
While that is in dispute, there is no argument that Mr. Wilson returned from Africa in 2002 and told the CIA that, based on his interviews with Niger officials, he doubted the uranium contact took place.
Mr. Bush still included the charge in his State of the Union address, citing British, not U.S., intelligence. After the war, an irked Mr. Wilson went public by disclosing his secret mission and his findings.
Without much proof, he later named Mr. Novak's leaker as White House political adviser Karl Rove — a charge sure to bring even more media attention. He backed off, then raised the issue again by telling The Post that an unnamed reporter told him that Mr. Rove once said, "Joe Wilson's wife is fair game." The White House calls the accusation "ridiculous."
The 40-year-old Mrs. Wilson is a member of the CIA's clandestine service. As such, the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act makes it a federal crime for a government official to reveal her identity publicly.
After her name appeared in Mr. Novak's column, the CIA was obligated under the law to request an investigation by the Justice Department. In late July, it sent what is called a "crime report" to Justice on the possible violation of federal criminal law concerning an unauthorized disclosure — in this case Mrs. Wilson's name and occupation.
The CIA sends about 50 such referrals per year. Few, if any, such probes ever identify the leaker in a way that results in public criminal charges. The Wilson referral was sent by the CIA's general counsel, not by agency Director George J. Tenet.
The CIA follows up such referrals with a second letter to Justice answering 11 standard questions, such as what damage was none to national security and who in government knew of the information. The CIA sent this letter in mid-September.
Some Democrats in Congress, including Sen. Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat, called for a criminal probe soon after the Novak column. But the story only grew legs — it did not get picked up by other newspapers or magazines — when someone leaked the news of the CIA referral to the Justice Department last week.
Mrs. Wilson, who has worked overseas, is now assigned to CIA headquarters at Langley as an undercover officer working on issues related to weapons of mass destruction. Her husband says the Bush administration leaked her name as retaliation for his Iraq war criticisms.
Days after he wrote about his secret mission to Niger and his findings, in an op-ed commentary in the New York Times, the Novak column appeared.
Mr. Wilson's official biography at the Middle East Institute in Washington lists Valerie Plame, but does not provide her occupation.


http://216.239.51.104/search?q=cache:g-I__j7F0uYJ:www.washtimes.com/national/20031002-122228-5129r.htm+JC+WILSON+INTERNATIONAL+VENTURES&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

[kcvl]

Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, claims someone at the White House sought to destroy his wife's career because of the report he filed after his mission to Africa in 2002. Wilson disputed the administration's statements about Saddam Hussein's efforts to buy uranium from Niger to advance his WMD programs.

The Washington Post cites an unnamed source who says, "The CIA is angry about the circulation of a still-classified document to conservative news outlets." They point to a memo referenced in a Talon News interview of Wilson that suggests his wife was instrumental in his selection for the fact-finding trip to Africa.

Talon News was the only service identified by the Washington Post as having knowledge of the memo's existence. The newspaper goes on to say that CIA officials have challenged the accuracy of the document purportedly written by a State Department official who works for the Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

Jeff Gannon, the White House correspondent and Washington Bureau Chief for Talon News declined to reveal whether he had seen the memo or had its contents described to him.

While he would not disclose his source, Gannon said, "I will tell you that the information did not come from inside the administration."

"For something that is supposed to be classified, it seems that this document is easily accessible," Gannon added. "Washington is leaking like a cheap umbrella. Just look at what's happening over on Capitol Hill."

Gannon was referring to private Senate Intelligence and Judiciary Committee memos that have been leaked to various media outlets in the last few months.

Gannon's exclusive interview with Wilson focused on the many unanswered questions about the "outing" of his wife.

Gannon points out that other possibilities exist which might explain how Plame's name was revealed without the malice that Wilson believes was retribution for his decision to go public with criticism of the White House.

"When Bob Novak asked why a known partisan like Wilson would be sent on a critical mission to help the administration build its case to go to war with Iraq, the answer might have been that his wife got him the job, not realizing her identity was classified," Gannon said. "It's not as if nepotism is unheard of in Washington."

The Talon News reporter added, "Some people out there see a clandestine war going on between the White House and the CIA. It is generally perceived that a substantial amount of blame for intelligence failures that otherwise might have prevented the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 has been laid at the agency's doorstep by the administration. They suggest the agency is fighting back with an allegation of a wrongdoing in the Plame matter."




http://216.239.51.104/search?q=cache:BA1EL-mDr4EJ:209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1049592/posts+Plame