Wilsongate: Motive, Means, and Opportunity

Original FReeper research | 11/21/2005 | Fedora

[Fedora]

Wilsongate: Motive, Means, and Opportunity

The Buried Story Behind Plamegate

By Fedora

Introduction

Since Robert Novak mentioned Valerie Plame’s CIA background in July 2003, the media has focused on trying to trace the leak of Plame’s name to the White House, but has devoted less follow-up to another newsworthy angle in Novak’s original story. Novak wrote:

The CIA's decision to send retired diplomat Joseph C. Wilson to Africa in February 2002 to investigate possible Iraqi purchases of uranium was made routinely at a low level without Director George Tenet's knowledge. . . Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him. . . After eight days in the Niger capital of Niamey (where he once served), Wilson made an oral report in Langley that an Iraqi uranium purchase was "highly unlikely," though he also mentioned in passing that a 1988 Iraqi delegation tried to establish commercial contacts. CIA officials did not regard Wilson's intelligence as definitive, being based primarily on what the Niger officials told him and probably would have claimed under any circumstances. . . All this was forgotten until reporter Walter Pincus revealed in the Washington Post June 12 that an unnamed retired diplomat had given the CIA a negative report. Not until Wilson went public on July 6, however, did his finding ignite the firestorm.¹

In Novak’s original context, the point of mentioning Plame’s CIA background was to help answer the question, why did the CIA decide to assign its Iraq-Niger uranium investigation to Wilson? As Novak explained in a follow-up article:

I was curious why a high-ranking official in President Bill Clinton's National Security Council (NSC) was given this assignment. Wilson had become a vocal opponent of President Bush's policies in Iraq after contributing to Al Gore in the last election cycle and John Kerry in this one. During a long conversation with a senior administration official, I asked why Wilson was assigned the mission to Niger. He said Wilson had been sent by the CIA's counterproliferation section at the suggestion of one of its employees, his wife.²

In other words Novak stumbled across Plame’s CIA background in the process of investigating why the CIA assigned a critic of Bush’s Iraq policy to its Iraq-Niger uranium investigation and whether there was a partisan motive involved.

Further pursuit of this line of investigation points beyond “Plamegate”--the scandal of Novak leaking Plame’s name--to an underlying scandal that may be more properly called “Wilsongate”: the scandal of Joseph Wilson misusing his wife’s CIA access for partisan purposes. The investigation of Wilsongate may be organized into three parts: motive, means, and opportunity.

Motive

Novak’s questioning of why the CIA sent Wilson to Niger serves as a bridge to a more general inquiry into Wilson’s motive for publicizing his claims about the CIA’s Niger investigation. Novak’s initial investigation into Wilson’s Niger trip raises broader questions about Wilson’s financial interests, foreign policy agenda, and political allegiances.

Motive: Introduction: A Tale of Two Stories

Novak’s article actually records two conflicting accounts of who initiated Wilson’s involvement in the CIA’s Niger investigation, one coming from two Bush administration sources (the first still unknown, the second now known to be Karl Rove) and one coming from a CIA source (now identified as CIA spokesman Bill Harlow, who presumably got his information from either written records or checking verbally with one of the CIA Counterproliferation Division [CPD] personnel handling Wilson’s trip):

Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him.³

In Wilson’s book, his version of the story is closer to what Novak reports the CIA told him:

Apart from being the conduit of a message from a colleague in her office asking if I would be willing to have a conversation about Niger’s uranium industry, Valerie had had nothing to do with the matter. She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip. The suggestion that Valerie might have improperly influenced the decision to send me to Niger was easy to disprove.⁴

However, a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) review of prewar intelligence on Iraq found evidence contradicting both Wilson’s version and what Novak was told by the CIA. The SSCI report mentions that the CIA had previously sent Wilson to Niger in 1999 “after his wife mentioned to her supervisors that her husband was planning a business trip to Niger in the near future and might be willing to use his contacts in the region”. In relation to Wilson’s 2002 trip to Niger, a CPD reports officer told Senate investigators that Wilson’s wife “offered up his name”. Consistent with this officer’s statement is a memo Valerie Plame sent the CPD’s Deputy Chief on February 12, 2002, the day before CPD sent a cable to a CIA overseas station requesting concurrence with the idea of sending Wilson to Niger. In the memo Plame says her husband

has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity.⁵

In response to criticisms arising from the SSCI’s findings, Wilson published an article in the Los Angeles Times defending himself:

In the last two weeks, since the Senate Intelligence Committee released its report on intelligence failures, the smear attacks have intensified. . .The primary new charge from the Republicans is that I lied when I said Valerie had nothing to do with my being assigned to go to Niger. That's important to the administration because there's a criminal investigation underway, and if she did play a role, divulging her CIA status may be defendable. In fact, though the Senate committee cites a CIA source saying Valerie had a role in the assignment, it ignores what the agency told Newsday reporters as early as July 2003, long before I ever acknowledged Valerie's CIA employment. "A senior intelligence officer," the reporters wrote, "confirmed that Plame was a Directorate of Operations undercover officer who worked 'alongside' the operations officers who asked her husband to travel to Niger. "But he said she did not recommend her husband to undertake the Niger assignment. 'They [the officers who did ask Wilson to check the uranium story] were aware of who she was married to, which is not surprising,' he said. 'There are people elsewhere in government who are trying to make her look like she was the one who was cooking this up, for some reason,' he said. 'I can't figure out what it could be.' " Last week, a CIA source repeated this to CNN and the Los Angeles Times.⁶

Wilson elaborated his defense in a letter published online and addressed to SSCI Chairman Pat Roberts and Vice-Chairman John D. (Jay) Rockefeller IV:

First conclusion: "The plan to send the former ambassador to Niger was suggested by the former ambassador's wife, a CIA employee."

That is not true. The conclusion is apparently based on one anodyne quote from a memo Valerie Plame, my wife sent to her superiors that says "my husband has good relations with the PM (prime minister) and the former Minister of Mines, (not to mention lots of French contacts) both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity." There is no suggestion or recommendation in that statement that I be sent on the trip. Indeed it is little more than a recitation of my contacts and bona fides. The conclusion is reinforced by comments in the body of the report that a CPD reports officer stated the "the former ambassador's wife offered up his name'" (page 39) and a State Department Intelligence and Research officer that the "meeting was apparently convened by [the former ambassador's wife] who had the idea to dispatch him to use his contacts to sort out the Iraq-Niger uranium issue."

In fact, Valerie was not in the meeting at which the subject of my trip was raised. Neither was the CPD Reports officer. After having escorted me into the room, she departed the meeting to avoid even the appearance of conflict of interest. It was at that meeting where the question of my traveling to Niger was broached with me for the first time and came only after a thorough discussion of what the participants did and did not know about the subject. My bona fides justifying the invitation to the meeting were the trip I had previously taken to Niger to look at other uranium related questions as well as 20 years living and working in Africa, and personal contacts throughout the Niger government. Neither the CPD reports officer nor the State analyst were in the chain of command to know who, or how, the decision was made. The interpretations attributed to them are not the full story. In fact, it is my understanding that the Reports Officer has a different conclusion about Valerie's role than the one offered in the "additional comments". I urge the committee to reinterview the officer and publicly publish his statement.

It is unfortunate that the report failed to include the CIA's position on this matter. If the staff had done so it would undoubtedly have been given the same evidence as provided to Newsday reporters Tim Phelps and Knut Royce in July, 2003. They reported on July 22 that:

"A senior intelligence officer confirmed that Plame was a Directorate of Operations undercover officer who worked 'alongside' the operations officers who asked her husband to travel to Niger.

"But he said she did not recommend her husband to undertake the Niger assignment. 'They (the officers who did ask Wilson to check the uranium story) were aware of who she was married to, which is not surprising,'" he said. 'There are people elsewhere in government who are trying to make her look like she was the one who was cooking this up, for some reason,' he said. 'I can't figure out what it could be.'

"We paid his (Wilson's) airfare. But to go to Niger is not exactly a benefit. Most people you'd have to pay big bucks to go there,' the senior intelligence official said. Wilson said he was reimbursed only for expenses." (Newsday article Columnist blows CIA Agent's cover, dated July 22, 2003).

In fact, on July 13 of this year, David Ensor, the CNN correspondent, did call the CIA for a statement of its position and reported that a senior CIA official confirmed my account that Valerie did not propose me for the trip:

"'She did not propose me," he [Wilson] said--others at the CIA did so. A senior CIA official said that is his understanding too."⁷

Several things are noteworthy about Wilson’s defense.

First, Wilson misleadingly portrays the source contradicting his story as “Republicans”, when in fact he is being contradicted by CIA witnesses and documents cited in the body of a bipartisan SSCI report coauthored by three Democrats sympathetic to Wilson: Jay Rockefeller, Carl Levin, and Richard Durbin. Additional comments attached to the report by Republicans on the SSCI mention that their Democratic colleagues on the committee would not allow the body of the report to include the conclusion, “The plan to send the former ambassador to Niger was suggested by the former ambassador’s wife, a CIA employee.” However, despite this conclusion not being included, the body of the report still includes mention of the interview, memo, and cable which form the basis of the conclusion--as the additional comments to the report put it, “there was no dispute with the underlying facts”. Wilson’s dispute is with the underlying facts agreed upon by all members of the SSCI, not merely with the Republican commentary on those facts. Even Wilson’s Democratic supporters on the SSCI did not attempt to dispute the facts Wilson finds objectionable, the best they could do in his defense was to suppress the body of the report from mentioning what was logically implied by the undisputed facts.

Second, Wilson performs a sleight-of-hand when he dismisses the CPD reports officer’s statement on the grounds that the officer and Valerie Plame were out of the room when the CIA asked Wilson to take the assignment. Obviously both Plame and the officer could have discussed the matter with other CIA personnel on other occasions when Wilson was not present and would have no knowledge of the discussion, which is the significance of the memo from Plame predating the CPD cable requesting an overseas CIA station’s concurrence with the idea of sending Wilson to Niger. Wilson’s dismissal distracts from the CPD officer’s testimony without answering it.

Third, Wilson distorts the memo he quotes in his attempt to explain it away. Wilson attempts to reduce the phrase he quotes to a recitation of his credentials and insists, “There is no suggestion or recommendation in that statement that I be sent on the trip.” But when the actual quote is read in full and in context there is in fact a recommendation that Wilson be sent on the trip, explicitly indicated as the purpose of the credentials being recited: "my husband has good relations with the PM (prime minister) and the former Minister of Mines, (not to mention lots of French contacts) both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity." The end of this phrase indicates explicitly that the purpose of reciting Wilson’s credentials is to recommend his qualifications for shedding light on “this sort of activity”, i.e., on Iraq’s alleged attempts to acquire uranium from Niger, the subject that prompted Plame to recite Wilson’s credentials in the first place. Furthermore, Wilson’s commentary on the memo fails to note its historical context: it was written a day before CPD sent a cable to a CIA overseas station seeking concurrence with the idea of sending him to Niger.

Fourth, Wilson attempts to defend himself against the SSCI’s findings by quoting Newsday, CNN, and the Los Angeles Times citing anonymous CIA sources, which raises the question of why these anonymous sources contradict the version of events attested to by CIA witnesses before a Senate committee and recorded in CIA internal memos and cables.

A final item of interest is Wilson’s quotation of an anonymous CIA source defending him by arguing, “to go to Niger is not exactly a benefit. Most people you'd have to pay big bucks to go there.” This becomes especially interesting when juxtaposed with other facts. On another occasion when Wilson was denying his wife played any role in his Niger trip, while he was delivering a lecture to the Middle East Institute on May 13, 2004, Wilson’s self-defense included this comment:

There are nepotism rules in the United States government that ensure that my wife would not be involved in any decision sending me. . .⁸

This is an intriguing comment when coupled with the fact that the CIA had previously sent Wilson to Niger in 1999 “after his wife mentioned to her supervisors that her husband was planning a business trip to Niger in the near future”. Deepening curiosity are the facts that federal nepotism laws seem to exclude people hired for intelligence purposes⁹ and that Wilson always insists he received no financial compensation from the CIA for his trip. If Wilson didn’t get paid anyway, why does he associate denying his wife’s role in his trip with defending himself against violation of nepotism rules? This unexplained puzzle invites inquiry into possible financial motives involved in Wilson’s trip.

Motive Part 1: Wilson’s Financial Interests in Niger

Wilson’s finances are a complex and murky subject, but his financial interests can be summed up under three headings:

1) His ex-wife Jacqueline’s lobbying for French African interests;¹⁰

2) His own consulting ventures for investors in African oil, telecommunications, and gold;¹¹

3) Valerie Plame’s employment with the CIA and cover as an “energy analyst” for the front company Brewster-Jennings & Associates.¹²

For present purposes, the third item can be reduced to noting that Brewster-Jennings was linked to Saudi Aramco (aka Aramco), historically linked to both Saudi royal family and Rockefeller family interests, and that Plame listed Brewster Jennings & Associates as her employer while filling out tax return forms listing a 1999 contribution to Al Gore, whose family’s financial interests were linked to Occidental Petroleum (aka Oxy). To indicate the potential significance of these oil industry connections, the first two items require more elaboration. But first for background it will be useful to summarize Wilson’s activity in Africa.

Background: Joseph Wilson in Africa

Wilson began his State Department career in Niger from 1976 to 1978 and later served at various African posts, notably Congo (aka Republic of the Congo, Congo-Brazzaville) from 1986 to 1988 and Gabon from 1992 to 1995. He left the State Department in 1997 to serve a year as National Security Council (NSC) Senior Director for African Affairs, where his duties included organizing a visit by President Clinton to Africa in March 1998 to promote a bill which would increase US investment in Africa, the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). Wilson retired from government service in July 1998 and opened J.C.Wilson International Ventures Corporation, which advised American and foreign companies seeking to invest in African oil, telecommunications, and gold.

Wilson’s activity in Africa involved interaction between US and French interests on both a personal and a political level. Wilson had entered diplomatic service partly because he was interested in France and was hoping for a job that would take him to Paris, and most of his State Department assignments were in French-speaking parts of Africa. While stationed in Burundi from 1982 to 1985 he met a Frenchwoman named Jacqueline Marylene Giorgi.¹³ Giorgi had been raised in Africa and had returned there to work with the French Ministry of Cooperation (Ministere de la Cooperation aka MINCOOP), the equivalent of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which handles nonmilitary aid to foreign countries.¹⁴ In Burundi she worked with the French embassy as a “cultural counselor”,¹⁵ a position often used as a cover by France’s equivalent to the CIA, the Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieur (DGSE).¹⁶ Jacqueline M. Giorgi became Wilson’s second wife on July 1, 1986,¹⁷ just as he was beginning his assignment in Congo, where she would work at the World Health Organization while he worked with the US State Department.¹⁸

Congo’s economy was dominated by the influence of the French oil company Elf Aquitaine (aka Elf, a successor to a series of French oil companies and in turn succeeded by TotalFinaElf in 2000 and Total in 2003). In 1979 France had installed Congo’s President Denis Sassou-Nguesso, a cousin of Gabon’s ruler Omar Bongo, who had risen to power in the 1960s while in the pay of French intelligence and had since then supported French intelligence operations in Africa and secured Elf access to one of its major oilfields.¹⁹ Sassou-Nguesso was a Marxist and received Soviet military support, but Wilson decided that Sassou-Nguesso’s government was not “the rigidly Communist regime that the American right wing liked to set up as a bogeyman” and that “his acumen and wisdom outweighed his communist background”. Against the reservations of more conservative members of the State Department, Wilson encouraged Washington to involve Sassou-Nguesso in negotiating peace in nearby Angola, where a Soviet-backed regime was fighting an insurgency backed by the CIA and French intelligence. Wilson felt that the insurgency was the main barrier to peace in Angola, and he worked with Sassou-Nguesso and later with Bongo and the Clinton administration to facilitate a peace process which had the effect of entrenching Angola’s regime against its opposition.²⁰ Meanwhile Angola emerged as one of the fastest-growing oil producers in Africa, spurring both competition and partnership between US companies--particularly Chevron, a partner of Saudi Aramco--and Elf.²¹

Interaction between US oil companies and Elf also figured into Wilson’s assignment in Gabon from 1992 to 1995. In Gabon one of Wilson’s priorities was to encourage President Bongo to support increased investment by US oil companies in Gabon’s oil industry, up to then dominated by France via Elf.²² Occidental Petroleum, linked to the financial interests of then-Vice President Al Gore, soon won several contracts in Gabon, and Occidental and other US oil companies also began increasing their influence in other parts of Africa. This increased US presence in Africa’s oil industry provoked rivalry with Elf in Gabon and elsewhere.²³ The French ambassador to Gabon Louis Dominici began encouraging the press to report that Wilson was an agent of US interests and an enemy of Gabon’s regime, which Wilson countered by cultivating closer ties with Bongo.²⁴ Wilson worked with Bongo to advance the peace process in Angola and to press for human rights reforms in Equatorial Guinea,²⁵ another emerging oil producer where France was competing for influence with Spain.²⁶

Meanwhile Bongo was also active in events in Congo involving Elf interests. In August 1992, just as Wilson began his assignment in Gabon, there was a regime change in Congo. With Soviet influence retreating from the region, Congo’s population was calling for Bongo’s cousin Sassou-Nguesso to allow free elections. Bongo and the French, seeking to give the appearance of allowing reforms without actually losing control, decided to play both sides by financing the Presidential campaign of Sassou-Nguesso’s rival Pascal Lissouba. But in a move unanticipated by the French, Lissouba, short on cash to pay his civil servants and troops, cut a deal with Occidental for funding in exchange for granting Occidental $150 million in future production rights. Alarmed at the prospect of Occidental competing for one of Elf’s most vital oil supplies, the French pressured Lissouba to cancel the deal with Occidental. After Lissouba cancelled the deal, Elf and French intelligence continued providing him ostensible support against Sassou-Nguesso’s forces, using La French Intercontinental Bank for Africa (FIBA), which was jointly owned by Bongo, to help Belgian arms dealer Jacques Monsieur launder payments for weapons sales from Russia and Iran to Lissouba’s supporters. However at the same time Elf was arming Lissouba, it was also secretly arming Sassou-Nguesso for a return to power. With assistance from Angola, supported by the French and the Clinton administration, Sassou-Nguesso overthrew Lissouba and became President again in 1997, during Wilson’s term as NSC Senior Director of African Affairs.²⁷

At the NSC, Wilson capped off his career of government service by organizing Clinton’s historic visit to Africa in March 1998. Clinton’s trip was intended partly to encourage a policy of increasing US imports of African oil, a policy encouraged by State Department spokesman James Rubin’s announcement that “Angola will soon be supplying 10 percent of U.S. oil imports, which is considerably more than Kuwait before the Gulf war.”²⁸ Clinton’s policy was also being promoted by the Corporate Council on Africa (CCA), a group whose events were heavily financed by oil interests.²⁹ Wilson was highly active in promoting the investment policies favored by the Clinton administration and the CCA, as one observer recalls:

During the Clinton administration, this editor operated a web site about Africa and Wilson served on the National Security Council as a senior director for African affairs, for one year, June 1997-July 1998. As a result, this editor, at the time also a member of the Corporate Council on Africa (CCA), got to observe Wilson playing out his National Security Council role. In all candor, this editor was skeptical about his motives then, and remains so. The CCA at the time was dominated by oil interests. It still is.

Wilson's service on the National Security Council happened during a period when the Clinton administration was urging American businesses to get more deeply involved in Africa and was urging Congress to push forward legislation known as the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), which ultimately passed, but during the Bush administration. It was also a period when it was becoming patently clear to the Clinton administration that coastal Africa, especially Atlantic coast Africa, was awash in oil. One need only go back through the archives to see how many times Secretary of State Albright pointed this out to the Congress and the American people to validate how excited the Clinton administration was about African oil. Clearly they saw an alternative building to Mideast oil. My memory says Madam Albright and her team bragged with excited breath how Africa's oil exports to the US were at seven percent and would increase to 13-15 percent within the foreseeable future.

The problem was the Clinton team was dealing with rogues, such as those who ran Nigeria, Angola, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, and the Congo Republic. Nigeria had a ruthless military dictator, and while the Clinton administration took certain actions against Nigeria, it refused to place an embargo on its oil. Angola was run by a former Soviet ally and well-known ruthless and corrupt Marxist-Leninist dictator, Eduardo dos Santos. In 1993, while Wilson was ambassador to Gabon, an oil rich country run by a French puppet, Omar Bongo, Clinton declared dos Santos the legitimate president of Angola even though he had not won a run-off election against Dr. Jonas Savimbi, an election required by Angolan law. Angola is arguably as oil rich or more oil rich than Nigeria. In 1997, during Wilson’s tour of duty at the Africa desk in the National Security Council, Angola invaded the Congo Republic and, supported by France, overthrew the democratically elected government of President Pascal Lissouba and replaced him with Denis Sassou-Nguesso, a friend and relative through marriage of President Omar Bongo of Gabon.

Throughout all this, Wilson pranced about Washington telling Americans in business that Africa is the next great "Coming" in business and that they should hasten there to invest. You might recall that Clinton visited Africa, the first sitting president to do so. On Clinton’s return to the US, a gala extravaganza was thrown at a swanky Washington hotel to celebrate the great achievements of the trip, and Wilson paraded about the stage like a high school cheerleader at a championship basketball game singing the praise of Africa as a haven for investment. I recall standing there in amazement, am[a]zed that a nation of the stature of the US would have people like this acting so childishly and so unprofessionally on their stage. African diplomats in the audience did all they could to hold in their omlets.

Just after Wilson played “Madison Avenue Mister” building up Africa as a place to invest, from his perch in the National Security Council, he resigned and nearly instantly started a firm known as JC Wilson International Ventures, Corp., a firm specializing in Strategic Management and International Business Development.³⁰

As this quote indicates, after Wilson retired from his career of government service in Africa in July 1998, he began profiting from increased US interest in Africa. So did Jacqueline Wilson.

1. Jacqueline Wilson’s African interests

In the wake of Clinton’s trip Gabon’s President Omar Bongo prepared to visit the United States, hiring as lobbyists the French-American politician Pierre Salinger of the public relation firm Shandwick Public Affairs, along with Jacqueline Wilson.³¹ According to records filed with the US Department of Justice in compliance with the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), on June 17, 1998, while Joseph was in his last month of service as NSC Senior Director for African Affairs, Jacqueline registered as a lobbyist for Bongo. FARA records show that Jacqueline received at least $790,000 from Gabon for lobbying services related to AIDS policy and other issues from 1998 to 2002, including $100,000 received prior to her registration in June 1998 and $250,000 in the first half of 1999. Meanwhile, in July 1998 Joseph Wilson retired from government service early at the age of 48, leaving behind an estimated $125,000-a-year job for a reduced pension of approximately $50,000 a year,³² minus any alimony and child support payments, plus income from Plame’s CIA salary and from a new business Wilson launched at that time, J.C. Wilson International Ventures Corporation. The financial terms of the Wilsons’ divorce settlement are unknown. A curious fact is that in one public record posted on a genealogy website the name “Jacqueline C. Wilson” is listed with a phone number [(202) 342-9888] associated with 4612 Charleston Terrace NW in Washington, DC,³³ a home the October 8, 1998 Washington Post records as recently being purchased from Barry Zuckerman Properties for $735,000 by Joseph Wilson and “Valerie E. Wilson”.³⁴ Wilson’s book states that he and Plame purchased this home in May 1998 after being married for one month.³⁵

2. Joseph Wilson’s African interests

At the time Jacqueline divorced him and began lobbying for Gabon, Joseph Wilson retired from government service and launched J.C. Wilson International Ventures Corporation, a business development and management company that aimed to capitalize on Wilson’s diplomatic contacts by advising companies seeking to invest African gold, oil, and telecommunications. As Wilson described it:

I opened a “boutique” consulting business to help American and international companies invest in Africa. Risk assessment, project development, and strategic management were my focus, as I wanted to take the lessons of my foreign service years and put them to use managing businesses in an international setting. . .My list of clients was small. . .my geographical reach extended into Africa, Western Europe, and Turkey. . .I had become involved in gold mining in West Africa--including in Niger, which was just opening up some fields--as well as telecommunications and the petroleum sector. Oil from Africa was emerging as an alternative to oil from the Persian Gulf, with new discoveries in Angola and Equatorial Guinea fueling a surge of interest.³⁶

Elsewhere a profile article on Wilson added:

. . .Wilson decided to retire and go into the private sector because "we wanted to have kids, and felt that it had become very difficult to live off two government salaries." He set up a consultancy, J. C. Wilson International Ventures, with an office in downtown Washington at the headquarters of the Rock Creek Corporation, an investment firm of which little is known. Wilson's right-wing critics have been quick to condemn the affiliation as "murky," though Wilson does not work for Rock Creek and merely rents space and facilities there.

"I have a number of clients, and basically we help them with their sort of investments in countries like Niger," explains Wilson. "Niger was of some interest because it has some gold deposits coming onstream. We had some clients who were interested in gold. . .We were looking to set up a gold-mine company out of London."³⁷

Some clarification of Wilson’s “murky” affiliation with Rock Creek Corporation has been offered at greater length elsewhere,³⁸ but it will suit present purposes to highlight how Rock Creek’s interests coincided with Wilson’s African investment interests. Rock Creek was controlled by Mohammed Alamoudi, whom Wilson had met in 1997 through a reception organized for the World Bank by Westar Group, a Westar Energy affiliate which managed Alamoudi’s interests in Washington and like Wilson was involved with the Corporate Council on Africa.³⁹ Alamoudi was a member of the Saudi-Ethiopian Alamoudi dynasty, which was heavily invested in the segments of the African economy Wilson was seeking to penetrate. The Alamoudi oil empire, centered around the Saudi-based company Delta Oil, included African ventures such as Arab-African Petroleum Company (ARAPCO), created in 2002 to buy oil concessions in Africa and develop them with foreign partners.⁴⁰ Alamoudi investments in African telecommunications included a Pan-African telecommunications project launched in 2001 by Pan African Communications Network (PACONET) with financing from a fund chaired by former South African President Nelson Mandela and cofinanced by the International Finance Corporation (IFG), the American International Group (AIG, a group including the Houston-based company El Paso Energy Corporation), and the African Development Bank (ADB).⁴¹ Alamoudi investments in African gold included MIDROC Gold Mine Private Limited Company, a subsidiary of the Alamoudi company MIDROC (Mohammed International Development Research Organization & Companies) launched in 2003.⁴² Under Alamoudi’s direction Rock Creek was chaired by Elias Aburdene, an Arab-American international banking advisor and lobbyist who had previously advised banks linked to organized crime and intelligence community figures involved in the S&L Scam.

As Rock Creek illustrates, Middle Eastern investors were interested in African investments, which sheds light on Wilson’s comment that “my geographical reach extended into Africa, Western Europe, and Turkey”. Besides sharing office space with Saudi investors at Rock Creek, Wilson also served as an adjunct scholar to the Middle East Institute, a think tank partly financed by Saudi Arabia, presided over by Wilson’s long-time friend Edward Walker, Jr., and chaired by former Clinton administration ambassador to Saudi Arabia Wyche Fowler.⁴³ Additionally, Wilson advised American-Turkish investment groups, making use of Turkish contacts he had cultivated while stationed at the US embassy in Iraq from 1988 to 1991 and while advising joint US-UK-Turkish covert operations in northern Iraq as part of his duties as political advisor to the United States European Command from 1995 to 1997. Wilson’s Turkish clients notably included the American-Turkish Council (ATC), which is the US counterpart of the Turkey-based Turkish-U.S. Business Council (Turk-Amerikan IS Konseyi aka TAIK). TAIK operates under the secretariat of a group formed by leading Turkish corporations (Dis Ekonomik Iliskiler Kurulu aka DEIK, the Foreign Economics Relations Board) and supported by the Turkish government in an effort to advance Turkey’s international economic relations. Towards this end the ATC has cultivated relations with US political figures through means such as an annual conference in Washington where board members visit members of Congress and the Administration. Former FBI agent Sibel Edmonds has recently alleged that while she was with the FBI the ATC was a target of corruption, criminal, and counterintelligence investigations, a charge the ATC denies.⁴⁴ It was while accepting an ATC award during a reception at the Turkish embassy in Washington in early 1997 that Wilson met his future wife Valerie Plame.⁴⁵

Motive Part 1: Conclusion: Nepotism in Niger?

Plame’s initiation of Wilson’s trips to Niger in 1999 and 2002 takes on a new significance in light of Wilson’s business interests in Africa. Specifically of interest are Wilson’s pair of comments about his business interests in Niger quoted above:

I had become involved in gold mining in West Africa--including in Niger, which was just opening up some fields--as well as telecommunications and the petroleum sector. Oil from Africa was emerging as an alternative to oil from the Persian Gulf, with new discoveries in Angola and Equatorial Guinea fueling a surge of interest.

"I have a number of clients, and basically we help them with their sort of investments in countries like Niger," explains Wilson. "Niger was of some interest because it has some gold deposits coming onstream. We had some clients who were interested in gold. . .We were looking to set up a gold-mine company out of London."

Although Wilson does not identify his clients who had an interest in Niger gold investments, it may be observed that during the time frame referenced by his comments, the first gold mine in Niger, known as the Samira Hill Gold Project, was being developed by a pair of Canadian-based companies, Etruscan Resources and Semafo.⁴⁶

Now there is no implication here of any wrongdoing on the part of any companies investing in Nigerien gold, which is in itself a legitimate business. Nor is there necessarily anything wrong with Wilson profiting from his diplomatic experience by advising clients on Niger gold investments. But what raises an eyebrow is when Wilson mentions “I had become involved in gold mining in West Africa--including in Niger, which was just opening up some fields”, and then he proceeds to try to dismiss the notion that nepotism may have been involved in his wife sending him to Niger by invoking defenders who scoff, “to go to Niger is not exactly a benefit”. Well, perhaps going to Niger would not be a benefit for most people; but most people aren’t Nigerien gold mining consultants who share office space with Saudi billionaires who invest in gold mining in Africa. Nor does Wilson help dispel an appearance of impropriety when he tells us that during the time he was in Niger conducting an investigation for the CIA:

Not all of the conversations focused on the uranium industry; some of my callers were interested in discussing the business climate. . .⁴⁷

Again, this does not in itself demonstrate any actual wrongdoing on Wilson’s part. What it does demonstrate is that he had a vested interest in travelling to Niger at taxpayer expense, and thus that his wife had a vested interest in recommending him for the trip. It thus demonstrates a motive that might explain why Wilson persists in denying against the evidence of witnesses and documents that his wife played any role in his trip to Niger.

Motive Part 2: From African business to Iraqi politics

At this point the reader may be thinking, “Well, maybe Wilson had a hidden motive to go to Niger, but what does that have to do with his motive for what he said about Bush’s speech on Iraq?” The answer is nothing--yet. But within the same set of business associations that Wilson cultivated in the interests of his African investment pursuits, a motive for his interest in influencing Iraq-related foreign policy and domestic politics may also be detected.

Background: Wilson, Iraq, and the war within the CIA

Wilson’s involvement in Iraq-related issues traces from his post at the US embassy in Iraq from 1988 to 1991 and from his assignment as political advisor to the United States European Command from 1995 to 1997. In the latter capacity he politically advised joint US-UK-Turkish covert operations in northern Iraq, Operation Provide Comfort and Operation Northern Watch.

These operations involved the CIA and, more generally, the intelligence community, which at this time was embroiled in political infighting that stemmed from Vietnam-era conflicts and foreshadowed Wilson’s conflict with the Bush White House. At the upper level of the intelligence community hierarchy, in the wake of the Aldrich Ames scandal, the Clinton administration’s first CIA Director, R. James Woolsey, Jr., had gotten into bureaucratic conflicts with, on the one hand, FBI Director Louis Freeh, and on the other, Clinton’s first NSC Advisor Anthony Lake. In 1970 Lake, along with Morton Halperin, had resigned from the Nixon NSC after Halperin came under suspicion of involvement in leaking The Pentagon Papers and other classified information about US military operations in Vietnam to the New York Times. He and Halperin had subsequently become associated with the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a far-left think tank linked to the KGB and Cuban intelligence that was active in the post-Watergate campaign to undermine US counterintelligence capability. When Lake became Clinton’s NSC Advisor he proposed resolving bureaucratic friction between the FBI and CIA by increasing the NSC’s role in coordinating the other two agencies, a proposal which received a cool reception from Woolsey. Woolsey resigned as CIA Director in early 1995 and was replaced by John Deutch, who would resign in late 1996 after carelessly handling classified information stored on his computer. President Clinton then attempted to install Lake as CIA Director, but was forced to withdraw the nomination in the face of conservative objections to Lake’s background. Instead Lake and Deutch’s former assistant George Tenet became CIA Director, while Lake was replaced at NSC by Sandy Berger, who thus became Joseph Wilson’s boss when Wilson went to NSC in 1997.⁴⁸ In summer 2003 Wilson, Lake, and Halperin all advised the Secure America Project of the Fourth Freedom Forum, a group founded by antinuclear activist Howard Brembeck and presided over by David Cortright, a veteran of the IPS-linked antinuclear group SANE/Freeze now working with the MoveOn.org-affiliated Win Without War coalition.⁴⁹

The controversy over Clinton’s nomination of Lake epitomized management-level tensions in the Clinton-era intelligence community which were reflected on the operational level by disputes over the CIA’s Iraq operations. While planning how to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime in the early 1990s, the CIA and its foreign allies had debated two different plans involving two different resistance groups. The Saudis, Britain’s MI6, and elements of US intelligence associated with Arabists in the State Department favored a coup to replace Saddam with a Sunni government of ex-Ba’athists and former members of Saddam’s regime, to be led by MI6 asset Iyad Allawi through a London-based resistance group called the Iraqi National Accord (INA). As an alternative to the INA coup plan, Shi’ite resistance leader Ahmed Chalabi favored overthrowing Saddam through an armed uprising by a popular coalition including Kurdish groups united under an umbrella called the Iraqi National Congress (INC). With support from certain Congressmen and the first Bush administration, the INC began developing a plan for a popular uprising, but the incoming Clinton administration became opposed to this policy. This led to a division between supporters of the INC, who included Woolsey and Pentagon advisor Richard Perle, and supporters of the INA, who included the NSC’s Lake and Tenet, along with Secretary of State Warren Christopher and CIA Near Eastern Division chief Steve Richter. The INC’s scheduled plans for an uprising in early1995 floundered after a promise of support from CIA agent Bob Baer went unfulfilled. The following year an INA coup attempt coordinated by CIA Jordanian station chief David Manners also failed, after the CIA ignored a warning from the INC that Iraqi intelligence agents had penetrated Jordanian intelligence units involved in the operation and forewarned Saddam Hussein. Following the unsuccessful 1995 coup, Lake ordered an FBI investigation of Baer for conspiring to assassinate Hussein, and Lake’s former assistant Tenet replaced Deutch as CIA Director.⁵⁰ Relations between Tenet’s CIA and Chalabi grew tense, and flared into open hostility as the Iraq War approached. The conflict culminated with Chalabi being investigated on suspicion of spying for Iran, Tenet resigning, and Chalabi subsequently claiming that Tenet had led a smear campaign against him.

⁵¹ For outside observers it is difficult to evaluate the charges from either side with any degree of certainty, but it is at least clear that during the transition from the Clinton administration to the second Bush administration, Allawi’s supporters at CIA and MI6 fell on one side of a bureaucratic divide in the intelligence community and Chalabi’s supporters fell on the other.

After the second Bush administration came into office, the Vice President’s office and Pentagon set up their own intelligence channel “stovepipe” which connected with Chalabi by flowing around the Clinton-era intelligence channels centered in the CIA and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR). This move prompted a chorus of protests from far-left opponents of Bush like IPS, as well as anti-Bush outlets marketing to far-right anti-Semitic groups like Lyndon LaRouche’s Executive Intelligence Review (EIR).⁵² Both extremes united in their hatred of Bush’s Middle Eastern policy and found a lowest common denominator in conspiracy theories alleging that the Bush administration’s foreign policy was controlled by a cabal of pro-Israeli “neoconservatives”. These extremist allegations were mediated to the mainstream media by a group of former intelligence agents founded in January 2003 calling themselves Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), founded by retired CIA agent Ray McGovern. Following his retirement in 1990 McGovern, who holds a certificate in Theological Studies from Georgetown University, took leadership positions in the left-wing religious charities Bread for the City (descended from the Vietnam-era antiwar group Community for Creative Non-Violence) and Servant Leadership School. In 1993 he disrupted services at Georgetown’s Holy Trinity Parish by standing during Mass every week to protest the Catholic Church’s policy on women’s ordination. Within a week of 9/11 McGovern publicly blamed Israel for terrorism in a Christian Science Monitor editorial, and when the Iraq War arrived he elaborated conspiracy theories attributing the war to “Oil, Israel, and Logistics”, which embarrassed a meeting of House Democrats on June 16, 2005 when he told them that "Israel is not allowed to be brought up in polite conversation. . .The last time I did this, the previous director of Central Intelligence called me anti-Semitic."⁵³ Joining McGovern on the original VIPS Steering Group was former CIA agent David MacMichael, who had been investigated by the FBI for his contact with the IPS-linked pro-Sandinista groups the Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA, tied to the Soviet front the World Peace Council and Communist agent Orlando Letelier) and the Center for Development Policy (CDP, cofounded by Letelier) in the 1980s before going on in 1989 to found the Association of National Security Alumni (ANSA), which partnered at a January 1993 Moscow conference with longtime CIA critic Victor Marchetti and retired KGB agents from the Association of Foreign Intelligence Veterans Association (aka Foreign Intelligence Veterans Association, FIVA) in calling for intelligence “reforms”.⁵⁴ Other VIPS charter members were Bill and Kathleen Christison (who announced their resignation from VIPS on July 15, 2003), longtime apologists for the Palestinian cause whose articles are regularly posted on websites with an anti-Zionist slant such as Alexander Cockburn’s Counterpunch, the Holocaust revisionist site Institute for Historical Review, and the white supremacist site Stormfront.org.⁵⁵ VIPS’ email address and articles were initially hosted in early 2003 at Counterpunch by Cockburn, whose was simultaneously a columnist for the relatively more mainstream The Nation and The Los Angeles Times. Articles by VIPS and McGovern also appeared in LaRouche’s Executive Intelligence Review starting in February 2003.⁵⁶ VIPS’ extremist views were broadcast to a mainstream audience from March 2003 on by sources such as AP writer John Lumpkin, longtime IPS associate Seymour Hersh, Agence France Presse, New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof, and Reuters writer Jim Wolf. Particularly noteworthy was a full-length Hersh piece in the October 2003 The New Yorker echoing VIPS complaints about the Pentagon’s intelligence “stovepipe”.⁵⁷

Over the course of 2003 Wilson became increasingly associated with VIPS, which shared his general views on Middle Eastern policy. Wilson’s own account and his public statements indicate that he shared the views of some of his business associates who sided against what they saw as neoconservative influence on Bush’s Iraq and Middle Eastern policy.

1. Wilson worries about Neocons

According to Wilson’s account, his negative views on neoconservative Iraq policy were shared by two fellow associates of the American-Turkish Council. The first was ATC chairman Brent Scowcroft, former National Security Advisor to the Ford administration and the first Bush administration. Scowcroft had numerous links to the intelligence community and private enterprises associated with upper-echelon intelligence community figures, including enterprises with interests in Iraq and the surrounding region. His affiliations have included Kissinger Associates (KA), whose board member William Simon also consulted for Bechtel Corporation, a major contractor for Saudi Aramco. KA itself consulted for the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL) while BNL’s Atlanta branch was using $4 billion in unreported government-funded loans to illegally arm Iraq prior to the Gulf War. While consulting for KA prior to the Gulf War, Scowcroft had sat on the board of KA’s client Santa Fe International Corporation (now GlobalSantaFe Corporation), a subsidiary of the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation (KPC). Scowcroft has also sat on the board of Pennzoil-Quaker State, acquired in 2002 by Royal Dutch/Shell, which held a contract with Saddam Hussein’s regime to explore oil fields after UN sanctions were lifted, and which while sanctions were still in place bought 6.4 million barrels of Iraqi crude oil from Oil-for-Food-implicated company African Middle East Petroleum (AMEP), allegedly without knowledge of AMEP’s illegal kickbacks to Iraq. Scowcroft has lobbied for Pennzoil in relation to a project of interest to the ATC involving the Azerbaijan International Operating Company (AIOC), a consortium of oil companies seeking to develop $8 billion of Caspian oil fields in the region north of Iraq near Turkey. Scowcroft has recently chaired the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) U.S. Middle East Project, directed by Palestinian advocate Henry Siegman, with Saudi Arabian Prince Bandar bin Sultan serving as Honorary Chair. In his capacity as U.S. Middle East Project Chair Scowcroft joined Odeh Aburdene and other Middle Eastern business figures in participating in a 2002 CFR study group on “Harnessing Trade for Development and Growth in the Middle East” which was funded by Lebanese businessman and politician Fouad Makhzoumi.⁵⁸ According to FARA records Makhzoumi’s Future Millennium Foundation has employed as a lobbyist former Defense Intelligence Administration (DIA) officers W. Patrick Lang, a VIPS member with links to Lyndon LaRouche’s propaganda apparatus at Executive Intelligence Review, whom Joseph Wilson has described as “a longtime colleague of mine”.⁵⁹

According to Wilson, he and Scowcroft became close through their work on the ATC, developing a relationship intimate enough that Wilson’s book mentions Plame having a crush on Scowcroft. Wilson records that in the days following 9/11 he and Scrowcroft privately shared their concerns about what they perceived as increasing neoconservative influence on Bush’s Middle Eastern and Iraq policy:

One of my professional activities during this period led to a seat on the Defense subcommittee of the board of the American Turkish Council. . .Its chairman was retired General Brent Scowcroft. . .To my great pleasure, our work with the American Turkish Council threw us together from time to time. We fell into an easy relationship. . .After board meetings or other events, we often Metroed back across town together. As the obsession with Iraq overtook many influential members of the Bush administration, our conversations turned more frequently to the emerging debate on Iraq and the merits of the approach being advanced by the prowar crowd. . .When Brent Scowcroft and I would talk about the strident tone of the neoconservatives, he was dismissive. “Right-wing nuts” he called them. I was more alarmed, but he reassured me that they did not enjoy senior administration support. . .I listened and wanted to believe him. . .Brent Scowcroft was becoming increasingly concerned that perhaps his earlier optimism had been misplaced. No longer certain that the administration would shun the neoconservative path, he wrote a piece that appeared in the Wall Street Journal on August 15, 2002.⁶⁰

Wilson mentions that his and Scowcroft’s views were also shared by another ATC associate, Turkish general Cevik Bir. Wilson had worked with Bir while he was advising the United States European Command on joint US-UK-Turkish operations in Iraq, and like the Turkish government Bir had been critical of US policy towards Iraq at that time. In May 2002 Bir and Wilson attended the ATC’s annual conference and cochaired a symposium where they joined in opposing views on Iraq put forth by Richard Perle.⁶¹

2. Wilson becomes an antiwar spokesman

According to Wilson’s account, his comments to the ATC in May 2002 were his first public comments on Iraq since the Gulf War and the beginning of his path towards becoming an antiwar spokesman. Up to approximately October 2002 his opposition to the war was expressed in close coordination with Scowcroft, who brought Wilson’s first article on Iraq to the attention of the Bush administration after it was published in the San Jose Mercury News on October 13, 2002. During this period Wilson also worked with the Alliance for American Leadership, a Democratic foreign policy advisory group headed by Clinton’s former ambassador to Morocco Marc Ginsberg. Ginsberg appeared frequently on FOX News and arranged Wilson’s earliest TV appearances on FOX, opening the door to TV appearances on other networks.

Meanwhile Wilson increasingly began to interact with left-wing and pro-Muslim media contacts and activists. His October 2002 San Jose Mercury News article was distributed through left-wing antiwar websites such as AlterNet, BuzzFlash.com, CommonDreams News Center, and truthout. Through his TV appearances he met left-wing antiwar spokesmen such as Norman Lear of People for the American Way (along with Warren Beatty and other members of what Wilson describes as “the most committed progressives in Hollywood, that den of iniquity continually being smeared by right-wingers”), Tom Andrews of Win Without War, Mike Farrell of Human Rights Watch, and Katrina van den Heuvel and David Corn of The Nation. He joined Andrews in promoting a Win Without War rally on January 31, 2003. He accepted Corn’s invitation to contribute an article to The Nation and was published by that magazine’s website on February 13, 2003. He also accepted an invitation to become a spokesman for the Middle East Institute.⁶²

Wilson’s February 2003 Nation article, titled “Republic or Empire?”, echoed the concerns about neoconservative influence he and his ATC associates had previously expressed among themselves, but by now Wilson had “by and large. . .come to share” the editorial perspective of The Nation,⁶³ and his language began to incorporate elements from left-wing conspiracy theories combining anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism with anti-Zionism:

Then what's the point of this new American imperialism? The neoconservatives with a stranglehold on the foreign policy of the Republican Party, a party that traditionally eschewed foreign military adventures, want to go beyond expanding US global influence to force revolutionary change on the region. American pre-eminence in the Gulf is necessary but not sufficient for the hawks. Nothing short of conquest, occupation and imposition of handpicked leaders on a vanquished population will suffice. Iraq is the linchpin for this broader assault on the region. The new imperialists will not rest until governments that ape our worldview are implanted throughout the region, a breathtakingly ambitious undertaking, smacking of hubris in the extreme. Arabs who complain about American-supported antidemocratic regimes today will find us in even more direct control tomorrow. The leader of the future in the Arab world will look a lot more like Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf than Thomas Jefferson.⁶⁴

Wilson’s June 14, 2003 comments to the annual Iraq Forum of the Education for Peace in Iraq Center (EPIC), where he gave the joint keynote lecture with VIPS’ Ray McGovern, made the implicit anti-Zionist element in his anti-neocon rhetoric more explicit:

The real agenda in all this, of course, was to redraw the political map of the Middle East. Now that is code, whether you like it or not, but it is code for putting into place the strategy memorandum which was done by Richard Perle and his study group in the mid-90s, which was called “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for the Realm”. And what it is, cut to the quick, is if you take out some of these countries, or some of these governments, that are antagonistic to Israel, then you provide the Israeli government with greater wherewithal to impose its terms and conditions on the Palestinian people. . .But that is the real agenda. . . my fear is that when it becomes increasingly apparent that this was all done to make Sharon's life easier and that American soldiers are dying in order to enable Sharon to impose his terms upon the Palestinians that people will wonder why it is American boys and girls are dying for Israel and that will undercut a strategic relationship and a moral obligation that we've had towards Israel for 55 years.⁶⁵

Thus between September 11, 2001 and June 14, 2003, Wilson had begun publicly echoing his business colleagues’ and VIPS associates’ opposition to what he characterized as Israeli influence on the Bush administration’s Iraq policy.

Motive Part 3: A Motive for Forgery

By June 2003, Wilson’s opposition was not only to the Bush administration’s foreign policy, but to the Bush administration itself. He, like Scowcroft and like the antiwar bloc of the UN Security Council, had tried and failed to influence Bush’s foreign policy through verbal persuasion. He now turned from persuasive to coercive tactics. His words now began to reflect not only a foreign policy motive but also a partisan political motive, and his actions began to suggest coordination with a propaganda campaign that had been launched against President Bush and his foreign allies by French intelligence, other foreign intelligence elements, and partisan elements of the Democratic Party.

Background 1: Operation Nigergate: France & Friends target Bush and his allies

France’s role in creating the Niger forgeries is currently a matter of speculation and debate. It is possible that Rocco Martino, the Italian-French double agent who distributed the forgeries in October 2002, was motivated by profit rather than political goals, which appears to be the current opinion of FBI investigators.⁶⁶ Among theories proposing a political motivation, some have argued that the forgeries were intended to help Italian intelligence support Berlusconi and Bush’s case for war. This theory faces several difficulties, such as explaining why the resources available to Italian intelligence were unable to design a forgery more convincing than one that was immediately suspected by even journalists who viewed it--as one French agent interviewed put it, “Niger is a French-speaking place and we know how things are there. But nobody would have confused one minister with another they way they did in that useless piece of garbage.”⁶⁷ Alternative theories propose that the forgeries were intended to help French intelligence discredit Bush and his allies by making their case for war appear to rest on fabricated evidence.⁶⁸ This theory is plausible as an explanation for how the forgeries were eventually put to use after they were created, a topic which will be discussed more in later paragraphs. But as an explanation for the origin of the forgeries, it faces the issue that according to Martino and intelligence sources interviewed by journalists, he initially tried to sell his forgeries to France, rather than to proponents of war against Iraq. It also faces the chronological issue that Martino first began manufacturing forgeries following a staged break-in to Niger’s embassy in Rome on January 1, 2001, which was significantly before the Iraq debate between the US and France became heated (though it is unclear whether the specific forgeries Martino distributed in October 2002 were created at this time or later, as Martino is known to have distributed a number of different documents at different times, some authentic and some forged). These considerations seem to make the simplest hypothetical scenario one where Martino and his accomplices initially began creating forgeries for profit in early 2001, and someone only decided to use some of his forgeries as a political weapon after the debate over Iraq heated up in late 2002. Again this is only offered as a hypothetical scenario based on what is currently known, which is limited. The FBI’s basis for its position has not yet been shared with the public.

But even if the motive behind the creation of the forgeries remains uncertain, what is more evident is the role that French intelligence played in trying to foist the information in the forgeries off into US intelligence files, an effort that will here be called “Operation Nigergate”. After the French had already become aware that Martino was selling forgeries, Martino tried to pass forged documents to Italian Panorama journalist Elisabetta Burba around October 8, 2002, as the UN was renewing weapons inspections in preparation for debate over whether to pass a second resolution against Iraq authorizing military action. Burba says she was skeptical of the documents’ authenticity. In the process of trying to authenticate them her editor-in-chief Carlo Rossella passed a copy on to the US embassy for fact-checking. After this, on November 22, 2002, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs Director for Nonproliferation told State Department officials that French intelligence had received information about Iraq attempting to acquire uranium from Niger. Then the French waited until March 4, 2003--after Bush’s January 2003 State of the Union speech and Colin Powell’s February 2003 UN speech--to inform the US that the information passed on in November 2002 was based on forgeries, which was something French intelligence had already known prior to sharing the information with the US in the first place.⁶⁹

While Martino and the French were busy trying to pass off the forgeries to Bush, simultaneous propaganda campaigns were underway against two of Bush’s key European allies, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi and Britain’s Tony Blair. Because Martino had worked for Italian intelligence as well as French intelligence and remained in contact with Italian intelligence agents and assets, antiwar propagandists could spread rumors plausibly attributing Martino’s actions to Berlusconi. Martino had also passed forgeries on to MI6 in late 2001, which made an anonymous British official sound plausible when he told BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan that Tony Blair’s government had “sexed up” a September 2002 dossier on Iraq’s WMD (the “September Dossier”). In the wake of Gilligan’s report and a story by Dan Plesch of the Guardian, Blair supporter John Reid complained on June 3, 2003 that “rogue elements” in the intelligence community were out to smear Blair. Australian intelligence veterans and antiwar journalists also tried to implicate John Howard along with Blair.⁷⁰

Active in encouraging speculation against Berlusconi and Blair were former US intelligence agents linked to VIPS who shuttled between the US and European media. Former CIA agent Vince Cannistraro, who in retirement had gone to work as a security advisor for the Vatican and an intelligence consultant for ABC News (where Morton Halperin’s son Mark Halperin served as Political Director) had been serving since the Clinton administration as a frequent source for US correspondents of Britain’s Guardian, which was also quoting Valerie Plame’s former CIA colleague Larry Johnson (later of VIPS) by September 2002. Cannistraro also served as a source for the Italian media. Although during the Clinton administration various articles had quoted Cannistraro linking Iraq to Al Qaeda, from about September 2002 on Cannistraro began telling US and European reporters that there was no evidence of a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. He also began complaining, as he expressed it to the Guardian on October 9, 2002, “Basically, cooked information is working its way into high-level pronouncements and there's a lot of unhappiness about it in intelligence, especially among analysts at the CIA.” Cannistraro elaborated to the Washington Post on October 25, 2002, “they are undertaking a campaign to get George Tenet. . .fired because they can't get him to say what they want on Iraq.” Later Cannistraro would claim that Saddam Hussein used him to make peace overtures to the US via Iraqi agent Tahir Habbush in December 2002, when Hussein was reportedly sending similar messages through channels such as former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter--an antiwar propagandist financed by Iraqi agent Shakir Al-Khafaji--to sympathetic world leaders such as Jimmy Carter, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Nelson Mandela. Meanwhile as Cannistraro was serving as Saddam Hussein’s courier and discrediting Bush’s war effort in the European media, the German TV show Panorama broadcast a similar message from VIPS’ Ray McGovern and David MacMichael, along with Bob Baer and former UN weapons inspector David Albright, in an episode which aired March 6, 2003, a day before Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA, headquartered in Vienna, Austria) first publicized the Niger forgeries. Later Germany’s ZDF Television, which been airing interviews about the forgeries with ElBaradei, Baer, and Seymour Hersh, supplied a video of the Niger forgeries to ABC News for a July 15, 2003 show which quoted Cannistraro blaming the forgeries on Italian intelligence: “The Italians, as a NATO ally, thought they had some valuable information that played into current NATO requirements as well as U.S. and U.K. requirements about Iraq and Saddam Hussein, and they passed it on.”⁷¹

Concurrent with the dissemination of accusations against Bush’s allies, elements of the Democratic Party had begun to form an antiwar coalition against Bush, with an aim towards influencing both the war debate and the 2004 Presidential campaign. This process seems to have begun independently of the French-led Nigergate operation, but as the Iraq debate escalated and the war’s international opponents joined forces, US politics and international intrigues came together.

Background 2: The Rockefeller Plan: Domestic partisans target Bush.

As President Bush prepared to present his case against Iraq to Congress and the UN, an antiwar turn by the Democratic Party’s left wing was heralded by former President Jimmy Carter in a Washington Post article on September 5, 2002 titled “The Troubling New Face of America”. After accusing the US of abusing human rights at Guantanamo Bay, Carter criticized Bush administration hawks and echoed those members of the UN Security Council then advocating prolonged weapons inspections instead of military action, writing, “We cannot ignore the development of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, but a unilateral war with Iraq is not the answer. There is an urgent need for U.N. action to force unrestricted inspections in Iraq. But perhaps deliberately so, this has become less likely as we alienate our necessary allies.” Carter followed up his comments on Iraq by adding, “Tragically, our government is abandoning any sponsorship of substantive negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis. Our apparent policy is to support almost every Israeli action in the occupied territories and to condemn and isolate the Palestinians as blanket targets of our war on terrorism, while Israeli settlements expand and Palestinian enclaves shrink.”⁷² Carter, who when he was in office had been embarrassed by his brother Billy’s public anti-Israeli statements, had previously been a target of Libyan⁷³ and Saudi⁷⁴ attempts to influence him, and during the Oil-for-Food investigation it would emerge that in 1999 he had entertained complaints about UN sanctions from a delegation of Iraqi religious leaders whose visit had been arranged by Iraqi agent Samir Vincent. Vincent was working to influence political leaders on Iraq’s behalf in conjunction with Tongsun Park,⁷⁵ previously investigated on suspicion of bribing Congressmen on behalf of Korea during the Carter administration.⁷⁶ More recently Park’s associate Maurice Strong, like Carter, had helped enable North Korea’s nuclear program by insisting on rewarding threats with aid.⁷⁷

A week after Carter’s article, on September 11, 2002--the anniversary of 9/11--two Democrats with ties to Arab and Muslim lobbying groups, West Virginia Congressman Nick Rahall and former Senator James Abourezk, left for Iraq leading a US antiwar delegation calling itself “The Mission to Baghdad”.⁷⁸ Mission organizer Rahall, who had worked as an assistant for West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd before being elected to Congress, had been active in legislation involving oil drilling, as well as lobbying for Palestinian rights in conjunction with groups such as the National Association of Arab Americans (NAAA). In 1997 he had travelled to the Middle East on an NAAA fact-finding mission in the company of Rock Creek’s Elias Aburdene, and since the 1996 elections his campaign contributors had included Aburdene, Occidental Petroleum’s Odeh Aburdene, convicted terrorist financier Abdurahman Alamoudi, and--on September 25, 2002--Joseph Wilson.⁷⁹ Rahall extended an invitation to join the mission to Abourezk, who had a similar background. Abourezk had been present in Libya with Billy Carter to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Muammar Qaddafi’s reign in 1979, and the next year he had founded the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), which allied with left-wing groups in providing legal support to advocates of Palestinian rights.⁸⁰ Rahall and Abourezk’s trip to Iraq was sponsored by the Institute for Public Accuracy (IPA), whose communications director Sam Husseini had previously been media director for Abourezk’s ADC. IPA was a left-wing media relations group that had been founded with financing from the Stern Family Fund, a traditional funding source for various Communist Party fronts and fellow-travelling groups such as IPS.⁸¹ IPA founder Norman Solomon joined Rahall and Abourezk on their trip, along with among others IPS cofounder Saul Landau, invited by Abourezk; Landau’s filmmaking associate Sonia Angulo; James Jennings of Conscience International (CI), an Atlanta-based group that had been defying UN sanctions and US travel restrictions by making trips to Iraq to deliver “humanitarian aid” since 2001; and retired Troy, Michigan businessman Harold Samhat, who was cochair of the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services and committee member of the Arab American National Museum. The group’s ostensible mission to encourage Saddam Hussein to accept renewed UN weapons inspections was endorsed by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the Arab League, and former South African President Nelson Mandela. In Baghdad the delegation met with former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who had recently made the antiwar film In Shifting Sands, financed by Iraqi agent Shakir Al-Khafaji with Oil-for-Food vouchers. The delegation also met high-ranking Iraqi officials and attended the Sixth Iraq Solidarity Conference (aka Baghdad Peace Conference) on September 16. The conference was attended by 170 delegates from 80 countries, including Ritter; Vladimir Zhirinovsky of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, an Oil-for-Food beneficiary; George Galloway, a UK politician implicated in the Oil-for-Food scandal; and a delegation from the World Workers Party, the North Korean-linked group behind the antiwar fronts International Action Center (IAC) and ANSWER, headed by longtime Communist fellow traveller Ramsey Clark, who had led anti-sanctions trips to Iraq during the 1990s.⁸² Media contacts listed in IPA press releases for the Mission to Baghdad included former Oil-for-Food program head Denis Halliway; Scott Ritter; IPS’ Phyllis Bennis and Stephen Zunes; Detroit bishop Thomas Gumbleton, an IAC associate who had co-led Ramsey Clark’s trips to Iraq during the 1990s; and Kathy Kelly of Voices in the Wilderness, an anti-sanctions group founded in 1996 which also travelled to Iraq with IAC in the 1990s.⁸³

Abourezk returned to the US on September 16 and started a tour of TV appearances, and other Democrats began making antiwar statements.⁸⁴ Following Bush’s September 19, 2002 warning that if the UN would not disarm Saddam Hussein the US and its allies would, Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, a member of the Socialist International-linked Congressional Progressive Caucus who had been giving press conferences with Denis Halliday and Scott Ritter over the past two months, announced he was forming a Congressional antiwar coalition. Kucinich’s coalition initially consisted of 19 Democrats, notably including Congressional Progressive Caucus and Congressional Black Caucus member Barbara Lee, who had cast the lone vote against military action in Afghanistan after 9/11; and Washington Congressman Jim McDermott, another member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus who had criticized military action against Afghanistan. Concurrent with his announcement, Kucinich issued a statement questioning whether Iraq posed a Weapons of Mass Destruction threat: “There is no credible evidence linking Iraq to Al-Queda [sic]. Nor is there any credible evidence of Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, their capability, or their intent to deliver such weapons.”⁸⁵ On September 20 this sentiment was echoed by West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd, who stated, “Instead of offering compelling evidence that the Iraqi regime had taken steps to advance its weapons program, the president offered the U.N. more of a warning than an appeal for support. . . We must not be hell-bent on an invasion until we have exhausted every other possible option to assess and eliminate Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction program.”⁸⁶ Byrd’s speech was praised by New York Senator Hillary Clinton.⁸⁷ On September 23 former Vice President Al Gore--then still a Presidential contender in the 2004 campaign--made his first antiwar statement, claiming an attack on Iraq would undermine the War on Terror.⁸⁸ On September 25 Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle made a speech on the Senate floor accusing President Bush of politicizing the war debate.⁸⁹ On September 27 Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy jumped on the bandwagon, arguing that the US should keep its focus on Al Qaeda instead of Iraq and also stating, “I have heard no persuasive evidence that Saddam is on the threshold of acquiring the nuclear weapons he has sought for more than 20 years. . .[and] there is no clear and convincing pattern of Iraqi relations with either Al Qaeda or the Taliban.”⁹⁰ It may be observed that most of these statements were made before the British released their September Dossier on September 24, 2002, and also prior to the US publishing its own National Intelligence Estimate on October 1 and prior to the UN releasing any results from the inspections Iraq had just agreed to let resume on September 16, indicating that these speakers’ simultaneously-timed decisions to oppose the war and express skepticism about Iraq’s potential threat were made on some basis other than an objective investigation of the currently-available evidence.

On the same day Kennedy made his statement, a second delegation of US Democratic Congressmen arrived in Iraq, consisting of Kucinich’s antiwar coalition ally McDermott, Michigan Congressman and former Democratic Whip David Bonior, and California Congressman Mike Thompson.⁹¹ McDermott had voted against the Gulf Waf, and had opposed sanctions against Iraq since travelling there in August 1991.⁹² Bonior, who had also voted against the Gulf War, was an early Congressional ally of Vietnam Veterans of America (VVA), cofounded by John Kerry in 1978 as an offshoot of the Communist Party-linked Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). He had become a pro-Muslim lobbyist in the 1990s, sponsoring bills for the repeal of anti-terrorism legislation, advocating the release of accused terrorist Sami Al-Arian’s associate Mazen Al-Najjar, and receiving campaign contributions from Al-Arian, Abdurahman Alamoudi, former Clinton Justice Department figure Jamie Gorelick, and Mission to Baghdad participant Harold Samhat.⁹³ Accompanying the Congressmen to Baghdad was Iraqi agent Shakir Al-Khafaji, who later paid McDermott a check.⁹⁴ Also travelling with the Congreessmen was the Church Council of Greater Seattle, an antiwar religious coalition, and joining them in Baghdad was a delegation led by Bert Sacks of Citizens Concerned for the People of Iraq, a Seattle-based affiliate of Voices in the Wilderness which had begun traveling to Iraq with Ramsey Clark’s IAC in the 1990s.⁹⁵ IPA again handled media relations for the trip, issuing press releases listing media contacts that included Mission to Baghdad participant James Jennings as well as Sacks.⁹⁶ During the trip, McDermott spoke live from Baghdad to ABC’s This Week on September 29 to comment on a statement he had previously made, “The President of the United States will lie to the American people in order to get us into this war.”⁹⁷ After returning to the US McDermott elaborated his statement in an October 10 speech to Congress, in which he listed nine arguments against war, one of which denied evidence of Iraq possessing Weapons of Mass Destruction and included the insinuation that the US was responsible for Iraq’s noncompliance with UN weapons inspections:

There has been no solid information regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction since UNSCOM and IAEA arms inspectors left Iraq in December 1998 in advance of the U.S. Desert Fox bombing operation. . . Since that time, there have been no verifiable reports regarding Iraq's WMD programs. It is important to get inspectors back into Iraq, but U.S. threats for years made that virtually impossible by setting a "negative incentive" in place.”⁹⁸

Within a week of McDermott’s September 29 statement, on October 3, Bonior’s Michigan Senate counterpart Carl Levin, a close associate of the far left and Muslim lobbies,⁹⁹ began a campaign to replace Bush’s proposed war resolution with an alternate resolution that would only authorize the President to use force if the UN authorized military action.¹⁰⁰ This revision would have effectively enabled Russia, China, and France to delay military action indefinitely. Levin’s effort failed, but in January 2003, another opportunity for Bush’s opponents to undermine his war policy arose.

Following the November 2002 elections, in which Republicans regained control of the Senate, Robert Byrd’s fellow Democratic West Virginia Senator Jay Rockefeller--whose famous family has oil interests linked to Saudi interests as well as long-term political ambitions, it is worth recalling--was slated to ascend in January to Vice-Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, on which Levin also sat. Even before assuming his new position, Rockefeller announced his intention to split the committee along party lines into two separate committees: a Democratic group under himself as Vice Chairman and a Republican group under Republican Chairman Pat Roberts.¹⁰¹ As this was being debated, on January 6, 2003 Capitol Hill Blue reported that a media outlet owned by its parent company had received a memo from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) outlining a strategy to undermine confidence in President Bush in the coming weeks by “[c]laiming the Bush administration has ‘manufactured’ evidence against Saddam Hussein and used that evidence to encourage Britain and other allies to join the American fight against Iraq”.¹⁰² Later in 2003 FOX News reported it had obtained a similar memo being circulated by a staffer for Rockefeller, alleged to be Christopher Mellon. The memo proposed to use classified intelligence gathered by the Senate Select Intelligence Committee against President Bush:

“We have carefully reviewed our options under the rules and believe we have identified the best approach. Our plan is as follows. . .Pull the majority along as far as we can on issues that may lead to major new disclosures regarding improper or questionable conduct by administration officials. We are having some success in that regard. For example, in addition to the president's State of the Union speech, the chairman has agreed to look at the activities of the Office of the Secretary of Defense as well as Secretary Bolton's office at the State Department. The fact that the chairman supports our investigations into these offices and co-signs our requests for information is helpful and potentially crucial. . .[W]e have already compiled all the public statements on Iraq made by senior administration officials. We will identify the most exaggerated claims and contrast them with the intelligence estimates that have since been declassified. . . The Democrats will then be in a strong position to reopen the question of establishing an independent commission. . . Prepare to launch an independent investigation when it becomes clear we have exhausted the opportunity to usefully collaborate with the majority. We can pull the trigger on an independent investigation at any time--but we can only do so once. . .In the meantime, even without a specifically authorized independent investigation, we continue to act independently when we encounter foot-dragging on the part of the majority. For example, the FBI Niger investigation was done solely at the request of the vice chairman; we have independently submitted written questions to DoD; and we are preparing further independent requests for information. . . Intelligence issues are clearly secondary to the public's concern regarding the insurgency in Iraq. Yet, we have an important role to play in the revealing the misleading--if not flagrantly dishonest methods and motives--of the senior administration officials who made the case for a unilateral, preemptive war.”¹⁰³

This memo, laying out what will here be called “the Rockefeller Plan”, refers among other things to Vice Chairman Rockefeller triggering the FBI’s investigation of the Niger forgeries. Rockefeller requested this investigation from the FBI on March 14, 2003, specifying that the Bureau seek to determine “the extent to which the forgeries were part of a disinformation campaign”.¹⁰⁴ Rockefeller’s request had been preceded by a request on January 29 from his Intelligence Committee colleague Levin to the CIA asking for details on what the US intelligence community knew about the Iraqi attempts to acquire uranium from Africa mentioned in President Bush’s January 28 State of the Union address. While awaiting the CIA’s reply, which came on February 27 and did not mention the forgery issue,¹⁰⁵ Levin travelled to New York to meet with UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix on February 1,¹⁰⁶ and then he, Rockefeller, and their Intelligence Committee colleagues Pat Roberts and John Warner went on their own secret fact-finding mission to the Middle East on February 15, stopping along the way in Naples, Italy to be briefed by the head of Allied forces in Southern Europe, and ending their trip in England before returning to the US on February 25.¹⁰⁷

After Levin got back, he and Joseph Wilson appeared together on ABC’s Nightline on March 4, 2003.

Foreground: The Franco-American Axis converges: Wilson turns partisan

On Nightline, Wilson, Levin, and left-wing theologian Susan Thistlethwaite of Chicago Theological Seminary joined together to debate war supporters James Woolsey, John McCain, and Richard Land. Asking questions from the audience were French ambassador Jean-David Levitte and German ambassador Wolfgang Ischinger. Levitte, Levin, and Wilson all called for prolonging UN inspections before war, with Levitte’s call to “Give peace a chance” being echoed by Wilson suggesting, “Give disarmament a chance.”¹⁰⁸

A few days later on March 7, 2003, the IAEA’s ElBaradei made what became the first public reference to the Niger forgeries. ElBaradei, speaking to the UN Security Council, contradicted the British September Dossier’s claims on Iraqi attempts to require uranium from Africa, claiming that the British had based this claim on the Niger uranium forgeries. The next day ElBaradei’s comments were reported by the New York Times and Washington Post.

The Post coverage of ElBaradei’s comments, reported by Joby Warrick, included some follow-up quoting an anonymous “U.S. official”:

Knowledgeable sources familiar with the forgery investigation described the faked evidence as a series of letters between Iraqi agents and officials in the central African nation of Niger. The documents had been given to the U.N. inspectors by Britain and reviewed extensively by U.S. intelligence. The forgers had made relatively crude errors that eventually gave them away--including names and titles that did not match up with the individuals who held office at the time the letters were purportedly written, the officials said. “We fell for it,” said one U.S. official who reviewed the documents.¹⁰⁹

That same day, March 8, 2003, in following up the controversy generated by the Post quote of the anonymous source, CNN’s Renay San Miguel interviewed Joseph Wilson. In the course of the interview, Wilson said:

. . .I think it's safe to say that the U.S. government should have or did know that this report was a fake before Dr. ElBaradei mentioned it in his report at the U.N. yesterday.

The interviewer then asked,

Mr. ElBaradei did tell our Richard Roth today, during an interview, that the intelligence isn't just coming from the U.S., that there were other countries involved. Which other countries do you think, and how is it that all of these intelligence agencies or intelligence agencies from these countries that were involved could be taken in by these forgeries?

Wilson replied:

Well, the report I saw said that the Brits were involved. Maybe it was the British that passed this report on. I don't know who else might have been involved, but I can tell you this: The report in "The Washington Post" today said -- quoted a U.S. official as saying, "we just fell for it." That's just not good enough. Either he's being disingenuous, or he shouldn't be drawing a government paycheck.

The interviewer followed up by asking for Wilson’s advice on damage control, to which he responded:

I would not want to be doing damage control on this. I think you probably just fess up and try to move on and say there's sufficient other evidence to convict Saddam of being involved in the nuclear arms trade. . .¹¹⁰

Wilson later recalled the interview in the following terms:

The next day a State Department spokesman was quoted as saying, “We fell for it.”

I was astounded by the spokesman’s comment. Within days after it made the news, I was on the set of CNN, waiting to do an interview, when David Ensor, a CNN national security reporter, happened by. He was looking at the story with an eye out for the perpetrators of the forgeries and asked me what I knew about the Niger uranium business. I told him that as far as I knew, the State Department spokesman had not spoken accurately.

I could have told him a lot more. I knew that in addition to my report, there were reports in the government files from our ambassador and from a Marine Corps general. I knew that at the State Department African Bureau, nobody in the management chain of command had ever believed there was anything to the story that a spokesman was now claiming they “fell for.”. . .As I sat there in the green room, I concluded that the U.S. government had to be held to account. It was unacceptable to lie about such an important issue.

I told Ensor that I would be helpful in his efforts to ferret out the truth, and offered to answer a question or two on the air and to provide leads to him. While I was not willing at that stage to disclose my own involvement, it was not a difficult decision to make, to point others in the right direction. The essential information--the forged documents--was already in the public domain; the State Department spokesman had purposely deceived the public in his response, or else he himself had been deceived. Whichever the case, in my mind it was essential that the record be corrected.

When I went on the air, the CNN newscaster, prompted by Ensor, asked me about the “We fell for it” line. I replied that if the U.S. government checked its files, it would, I believed, discover that it knew more about the case than the spokesman was letting on. I then added that either the spokesman was being disingenuous, or he was ill-informed. . . .¹¹¹

There are a number of items of interest in Wilson’s comments, the analysis of which will be deferred to later sections of this article. For now in relation to the question of motive, it will only be noted that this was Wilson’s first public comment on the Niger forgeries, and that it came two months after Capitol Hill Blue reported intercepting a DNC plan to accuse Bush of manufacturing evidence against Iraq, and a week before Senator Rockefeller made his March 14, 2003 request for the FBI to investigate whether the forgeries were part of a disinformation campaign.

As the FBI began looking into the forgeries for the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, Wilson’s anonymous leaks to the media began. Around this time Wilson joined the Kerry campaign, influenced according to his own account by his former NSC colleague Rand Beers, who had quit the Bush administration just before the war started in March and had joined Kerry in mid-May 2003.¹¹² On May 2 Wilson mentioned his Niger trip while speaking at a Senate Democratic Policy Committee meeting where another speaker was New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof.¹¹³ Over the next two months, starting on May 6, Wilson would be quoted anonymously by Kristof,¹¹⁴ Walter Pincus of the Washington Post,¹¹⁵ John Judis and Spencer Ackerman of The New Republic,¹¹⁶ and Andrew Buncombe and Raymond Whitaker of Britain’s Independent.¹¹⁷ Wilson first revealed himself as the anonymous source mentioned in this series of articles orally in a June 14, 2003 lecture to the EPIC Iraq Forum.¹¹⁸ He finally revealed himself in print in his July 6, 2003 New York Times editorial, “What I Didn’t Find in Africa”,¹¹⁹ published simultaneously with a feature on him by Richard Leiby and Dana Priest in the Washington Post¹²⁰ and coordinated with national TV appearances. Notably, Wilson appeared with Andrea Mitchell on NBC’s Meet the Press that day, followed by Carl Levin through prearrangement with the producer.¹²¹

The next month in the wake of Wilson’s New York Times article, Dennis Kucinich and Carl Levin both spoke to Congress calling for an investigation into the inclusion of the African uranium claim in Bush’s State of the Union address. As Levin was speaking to the Senate on July 15, Kucinich held a press conference with VIPS’ Ray McGovern and retired Australian intelligence agent Andrew Willkie.¹²² The next day Wilson’s Nation friend David Corn accused the Bush administration of leaking Plame’s name to Novak,¹²³ a charge echoed July 17 by TIME reporter Matthew Cooper.¹²⁴ Two months later at the request of CIA Director George Tenet, the Department of Justice began investigating the Plame leak.¹²⁵

Thus from March 4, 2003 on there is a clear convergence between the French forgery operation, the Rockefeller staffer’s plan to use the Senate Select Intelligence Committee to trigger an investigation of Bush’s case for war, and Wilson’s statements. The French side of the equation is intrinsic in the Niger forgeries underlying Wilson’s claims, and is epitomized in the remarkable phenomenon of Wilson literally mimicking the talking point of a French ambassador by pleading to “give disarmament a chance” during his Nightline appearance with Levin. The Rockefeller Plan side of the equation is evident in the contact between Wilson and Levin, the parallelism between the Senate Select Intelligence Committee’s actions and Wilson’s statements, and Levin’s explicit references to Wilson’s claims about his trip to Niger.

Verifying that Wilson shared the partisan agenda against Bush as well as France’s agenda against Bush’s allies, there is evidence in Wilson’s own words in this statement from his EPIC lecture of June 14, 2003:

Let me just start out by saying, as a preface to what I really want to talk about, to those of you who are going out and lobbying tomorrow, I just want to assure you that that American ambassador who has been cited in reports in the New York Times and in the Washington Post, and now in the Guardian over in London, who actually went over to Niger on behalf of the government--not of the CIA but of the government--and came back in February of 2002 and told the government that there was nothing to this story, later called the government after the British white paper was published and said you all need to do some fact-checking and make sure the Brits aren't using bad information in the publication of the white paper, and who called both the CIA and the State Department after the President's State of the Union and said to them you need to worry about the political manipulation of intelligence if, in fact, the President is talking about Niger when he mentions Africa. That person was told by the State Department that, well, you know, there's four countries that export uranium. That person had served in three of those countries, so he knew a little bit about what he was talking about when he said you really need to worry about this. But I can assure you that that retired American ambassador to Africa, as Nick Kristof called him in his article, is also pissed off, and has every intention of ensuring that this story has legs. And I think it does have legs. It may not have legs over the next two or three months, but when you see American casualties moving from one to five or to ten per day, and you see Tony Blair's government fall because in the U.K. it is a big story, there will be some ramifications, I think, here in the United States, so I hope that you will do everything you can to keep the pressure on. Because it is absolutely bogus for us to have gone to war the way we did. . . I think it probably has legs, too, because of the course the press operates on profits, and if they can make a scandal out of this they'll do it, you know, that'll be great. And you already hear people talking about the “i” word.¹²⁶

With this statement, Wilson declares his motive in his own words: his express intent, motivated by a desire to change a foreign policy he finds “bogus”, is to ensure that the Niger forgery story grows “legs” by encouraging lobbyists in his audience and media muckrakers to work towards impeaching (“the ‘i’ word”) the President of the United States and causing the “fall” of the Prime Minister of Great Britain. And from the date of this statement--June 14, 2003--it is evident that this was his intent even before Robert Novak’s July 14, 2003 article mentioning Valerie Plame.

Motive: Conclusion: Nonpartisan Whistleblower or Partisan Propagandist?

In summary, Wilson’s words, actions, and associations suggest three distinct but related motives for his behavior:

1) A business motive for his two trips to Niger.

2) A foreign policy motive, shared by his business associates, for opposing the War on Iraq.

3) A partisan political motive, shared by foreign opponents of the war and elements of the Democratic Party, for trying to unseat Bush and Blair.

Wilson’s defense against allegations regarding the first motive has already been addressed. The second and third motives have already been upheld by the weight of his own words. But to rest the case it will be good to conclude by addressing Wilson’s defense against charges of partisanship:

. . .Libby evidently seized opportunities to rail against me as an “[expletive deleted] playboy” who went on a boondoggle “arranged by his CIA wife”--and was a Democratic Gore supporter to boot.

So what if I’d contributed to the Gore campaign? I had also contributed to the Bush campaign. So what if I’d sat on a Gore foreign policy committee? I had had no political role whatsoever in the campaign. Moreover, my trip to Niger was taken more than two years after the Gore-Bush election, and I had not even been involved in any partisan activities during the campaign. And it was not until the spring of 2003, several months after, the president’s State of the Union address, that I contributed to the Kerry campaign and began to work with his foreign policy committee.

Would a staunch Republican have disregarded the facts and offered findings from Niger that were different than mine? Intelligence collection is not party-specific. Perhaps a Republican would have allowed the lie to pass without comment, but if so, that is a Republican problem.¹²⁷

It would be easy to digress at length to the fallacies in Wilson’s defense. For instance, there have been any number of cases where political partisans financed members of both parties for various tactical reasons (as has already been illustrated by the French backing both sides in the Congo); and Wilson’s insinuation that Republicans are liars, while it may serve as an emotional distraction from the issue, does not help build his case for being nonpartisan. But for the sake of the present argument, it is only necessary to make one main point in rebuttal. The real issue is not whether Wilson had a career as a partisan Democrat prior to the beginning of his nationally-publicized attacks on Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address. The real issue is what motivated Wilson to begin attacking Bush’s State of the Union address at the time he did. Wilson verifies his partisan motives even in the process of trying to dismiss charges of partisanship: “several months after, the president’s State of the Union address. . .I contributed to the Kerry campaign and began to work with his foreign policy committee.” Wilson volunteers elsewhere, “For. . .three months, I privately urged the administration through contacts and third parties to correct the record. I also shared what I knew with Nick Kristof of The New York Times and Walter Pincus of The Washington Post, as well as with several Democratic Senators and I met with the staffs of the House and Senate Intelligence committees.”¹²⁸ During this period when Wilson says he was talking to Democratic Senators and working with the Kerry campaign’s foreign policy committee, Senator Kerry told an audience in Lebanon, New Hampshire on June 18, 2003, as reported by the Associated Press:

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry said Wednesday that President Bush broke his promise to build an international coalition against Iraq's Saddam Hussein and then waged a war based on questionable intelligence.

''He misled every one of us,'' Kerry said. ''That's one reason why I'm running to be president of the United States.''

Kerry said Bush made his case for war based on at least two pieces of U.S. intelligence that now appear to be wrong that Iraq sought nuclear material from Africa and that Saddam's regime had aerial weapons capable of attacking the United States with biological material.¹²⁹

Four days after Kerry’s statement, Howard Dean, then trailing Kerry by 10 points in New Hampshire primary polls, followed his rival’s lead, telling Meet the Press, “We were misled. . .The question is, did the president do that on purpose or was he misled by his own intelligence people?” When asked to comment on Kerry’s statement, Senator Rockefeller--perhaps not yet a Kerry supporter at this early stage in the 2004 campaign, though he would later join Robert Byrd in cochairing Kerry’s West Virginia campaign--dismissed his remarks as politically motivated, saying, “The senator is running for president.”¹³⁰ Indeed. Even to Senator Rockefeller, when he was not denying the obvious to protect his own interests, the partisan motive for using such rhetoric during an election campaign was transparent.

[Wolfstar]

I've wondered if Novak would've worded it differently given the chance to rewrite it.

I think her name, per se, didn't mean anything much to him back then. He mentioned it only as a detail in a larger story. The whole notion that her name was mentioned to "punish" Joseph Wilson is a pure fabrication cooked up by David Corn (and possibly some co-conspirators in setting up President Bush). It quickly became the media's template for the story, and they have never abandoned it.

[Fedora]

So it is Novaks contention or that Tenet didnt know about Wilsons trip until afterward?

Yes. I imagine Novak's reporting what either Rove and/or CIA spokesman Bill Harlow told him there; they in turn probably got their information from either Tenet or someone in CIA who had been assigned to dig up the records on it.

[Fedora]

I agree.

[Gritty]

Kudos for the great research!

[cardinal4]

Oh, I forgot to say good job!

[mosquitobite]

Ping

[BurbankErnie]

Outstanding writing. The folks at AJ Strata's and Mac Ranger have the highest praise for your work, and so do I.

I wonder who will play Joe in the movie?

[Stentor]

B&B

[bvw]

So much detail, you seem like the internet version of J. Bower Bell.

[DrC]

I agree that some relatively minor editing would make this much more readable. There's also some redundancy: it would be better to use quote snippets as they are needed to build an argument rather than regurgitate large swaths of Wilson's lies and then follow up with the more targetted snippets. That said, this is an impressive compilation and I hope Fedora will figure out a way to get it published so that a wider audience than FR can view it. It's the most authoritative piecing together of all the various strands of evidence that I have yet seen and takes care not to overclaim what can be deduced from the available evidence: in particular, the puzzle regarding motivation for the original forgery lies in its essential elements being put into play in January 2001. Elsewhere on FR, sorry I can't remember where, there's a nice riff on how the French might be implicated in an effort to forestall a CLINTON invasion of Iraq--i.e., tracing the genesis of this plot back as far as 1998. I think more could be said about the possibility that Jacquelyn Wilson actually enabled/encouraged her husband to pursue his affair and eventual marriage to Valerie Plame. There certainly was some very odd timing going on in 1997-1998 and this theory is consistent with the curious appearance of the second Mrs. Wilson's phone number at a house bought by the newly married Plame/Wilsons.

I think Wilson had business interests in Niger, but these were inextricably wrapped up in French business interests in uranium: as the Oil-for-Food scandal showed, the French were shameless about enabling Saddam to persist in his defiance of UN resolutions because they profited so heavily from his perfidy. They had means, motive and opportunity to profit from Saddam's nuclear aspirations and Wilson was uniquely positioned to facilitate this by assisting them in covering up what was really going on.

[Fedora]

Elsewhere on FR, sorry I can't remember where, there's a nice riff on how the French might be implicated in an effort to forestall a CLINTON invasion of Iraq--i.e., tracing the genesis of this plot back as far as 1998.

That's interesting--hadn't heard that. Might shed some light on Wilson's first Niger trip and Martino's early forgeries.

[Fedora]

Thanks; glad to hear that kind of feedback from them, as their work has come highly recommended to me, also.

Movie version of Joe, LOL--hmmm. . .I'm recalling this episode of "X-Files" where Mulder's body got switched with that of a really obnoxious agent who was cheating on his wife, selling government secrets, and otherwise making a jerk of himself. I think that actor would have some experience playing the right type of character :-)

[beebuster2000]

btt

[edpc]

...your sarcastic response in post #7 was uncalled for, in my opinion. Sometimes it isn't possible to relate something in a handful of words. The Wilson/Plame saga is one of the most tangled news stories in memory.

I think you'll find when all is said and done, this is one of the biggest NON-stories in history. Fedora knew the comment was tongue-in-cheek. You have obviously had a humorectomy recently. Get well soon.

[marron]

a 1988 Iraqi delegation tried to establish commercial contacts

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Zahawie's trip was in 1998, I think...

[christie]

Bookmark for later read (when I have a lot of time)!!!!

[Fedora]

You're correct that it wasn't 1988 (it was 1999), and that was one thing about Novak's article that struck me, too, but that's what it said, at least in the version I found. Maybe there was a typo somewhere.

[Albertafriend]

Thanks so much for all this work. I just knew you would have something like this eventually. I am definitely saving this one. It's a good thinkg I check on what you have to say from time to time or I would have missed it!

[STARWISE]

Awesome research and compiling ... must've taken months. Great job, Fedora .. thanks for the ping. There's compelling evidence of a coup d'etat and conspiracy by a bunch of arrogant rogue incivil servants of US... the VIPS.

They plot and work in the shadows, like busy little roaches wallowing in their own pridefulness .. and I'll believe to my dying day that it's because their egos were crushed at the revelation of their own incompetence at missing the many attacks. They just couldn't stand the public humiliation in their allegedly lofty and vital positions.

I'm putting my faith in Porter Goss's fumigation machine for at least some level of order to be brought to bear.

[Wolfstar]

I think you'll find when all is said and done, this is one of the biggest NON-stories in history. Fedora knew the comment was tongue-in-cheek. You have obviously had a humorectomy recently. Get well soon.

The leak part of the story is, indeed, a huge non-story. The part about the Niger trip, forged documents, and Wilson's collusion with reporters to damage the Bush administration is big, but it will never get the kind of coverage and investigation it warrants.

As for your comment being tongue-in-cheek, perhaps if it has been accompanied by a wink symbol instead of a end-scarcasm tag, those of us who don't know you would have understood. It helps to bear in mind that the internet is a one-dimensional communications medium and, as such, it increases the potential for misunderstandings between people.