"I went back and read Wilson's original op-ed. I'll quote it below. It looks to me like he carefully said that questions from the VP's office prompted the trip. From everything I've heard, that's pretty much how it happened."
When reading Wilson you have to distinguish what he rights and what he tells other people as a leaker.
May 6, 2003 New York Times:
"...I'm told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the vice president's office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger. In February 2002, according to someone present at the meetings, that envoy reported to the C.I.A. and State Department that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged.
The envoy reported, for example, that a Niger minister whose signature was on one of the documents had in fact been out of office for more than a decade. In addition, the Niger mining program was structured so that the uranium diversion had been impossible. The envoy's debunking of the forgery was passed around the administration and seemed to be accepted -- except that President Bush and the State Department kept citing it anyway.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-backroom/1119030/posts
Were the bogus docs classified at the time Wilson went to Niger?