Replies

Means

If Wilson’s motive was to help the perpetrators of Operation Nigergate and the Rockefeller Plan unseat Bush and his allies, the next question to be tackled is, by what means did Wilson and his accomplices attempt to carry out their coup? In the realm of public relations at least the assassination weapon of choice is the poison pen, which is mightier than the sword, so the selected means of attack was a propaganda campaign against Bush, targeting his case for war. For purposes of analysis and discussion, this propaganda campaign can be broken down into four phases:

1. Developing antiwar talking points.

2. Planting the forgery.

3. Publicizing the forgery.

4. Mop-up: Publicizing the alibi.

The first two phases began prior to Wilson’s activation in Phase 3, where he came to center stage.

Phase 1: Developing antiwar talking points.

In the first phase of the campaign, anti-Bush propagandists developed their talking points. These echoed talking points that had been developed by the antiwar movement over the course of late 2002 and early 2003.

Just as the proponents of any war seek to rally public support by providing a list of moral justifications for the war, a casus belli, opponents of any war seek to counter arguments for that war with a list of corresponding antiwar talking points. Over the course of two World Wars and the Cold War, the powers that sit on the UN Security Council have developed antiwar propaganda into an art. During the Cold War the former Soviet Union’s international antiwar umbrella, the World Peace Council (WPC), effectively distributed talking points through means such as international antiwar conferences. After the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein began hosting a similar semi-annual conference, the Baghdad Peace Conference. In September 2002 as the Iraq War approached, Hussein convened a scheduled Baghdad Peace Conference two months early in order to hold an emergency session on strategies for deterring military action against Iraq.¹³¹

It was this emergency conference that Congressman Rahall and Senator Abourezk’s Mission to Baghdad delegation attended on September 16, 2002. As previously mentioned, joining Rahall and Abourezk on their trip to Baghdad was Saul Landau, cofounder of the Institute for Policy Studies. IPS had been one of the WPC’s major US allies during the Cold War, working in cooperation with its European sister the Transnational Institute (TNI). Following historical precedent, IPS and TNI took a leading role in developing the talking points that would be used by the Iraq antiwar movement.

IPS and TNI’s most visible media spokesperson during the buildup to the Iraq War was Phyllis Bennis, who had been part of the Iraq antiwar movement since the Gulf War. Bennis and TNI worked closely with the antiwar coalition United for Peace and Justice (UPJ), a descendant of the Vietnam-era Communist Party front the People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice (PCPJ), affiliated with John Kerry’s Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW).¹³² A year before Joseph Wilson gave the keynote address to the annual Iraq Forum of the Education for Peace in Iraq Center (EPIC), Bennis lectured at the same event on June 15-16, 2002, speaking on “The Iraq Debate Inside the Beltway” and citing UNSCOM weapons inspectors Scott Ritter and Richard Butler to support the statement that “there is no longer any nuclear or long-range missile capacity in Iraq”. Bennis’ lecture preceded a pair of presentations by Ritter himself, who gave a special screening of the film In Shifting Sands, financed by Iraqi agent Shakir Al-Khafaji with Oil-for-Food vouchers.¹³³ The next month, Bennis debated war advocate Richard Perle on the July 1 episode of NewsHour with Jim Lehrer¹³⁴ and wrote a five-point antiwar argument that was read into the record of a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Iraq by longtime Iraq antiwar ally Senator Paul Wellstone on July 31, 2002. Bennis’s antiwar argument included a supplementary point about weapons inspections which addressed both nuclear and biochemical weapons, stating with regards to nuclear weapons,

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. . .The IAEA report was unequivocal that Iraq no longer had a viable nuclear program. The UNSCOM report was less definitive, but months earlier, in March 1998, UNSCOM chief Richard Butler said that his team was satisfied there was no longer any nuclear or long-range missile capability in Iraq. . . 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 have made that virtually impossible by setting a "negative incentive" in place. If Baghdad believes that a U.S. military strike as well as the maintaining of crippling economic sanctions, will take place regardless of their compliance with UN resolutions regarding inspections, they have no reason to implement their own obligations. If the United States refuses to abide by the rule of international law, why are we surprised when an embattled and tyrannical government does so?¹³⁵

Armed with this word-twisting, issue-dodging argument from ignorance, Bennis launched into a campaign of media appearances on behalf of the antiwar cause, with her far-left affiliations typically going unmentioned by such hosts as CBS and CNN.¹³⁶ Meanwhile a list of counterarguments similar to Bennis’ was packaged into a talking-points format in an August 2002 report of the IPS-affiliated think tank Foreign Policy in Focus written by Stephen Zunes and titled “Seven Reasons to Oppose a U.S. Invasion of Iraq”. Zunes’ argument included a full point titled “There Is No Firm Proof that Iraq Is Developing Weapons of Mass Destruction”, echoing Bennis’ point on weapons inspections and elaborating,

In its most recent report, the International Atomic Energy Agency categorically declared that Iraq no longer has a nuclear program. . . Although Iraq’s potential for developing weapons of mass destruction should not be totally discounted, Saddam Hussein’s refusal to allow UN inspectors to return and his lack of full cooperation prior to their departure do not necessarily mean he is hiding something, as President Bush alleges. More likely, the Iraqi opposition to the inspections program is based on Washington’s abuse of UNSCOM for intelligence gathering operations and represents a desperate effort by Saddam Hussein to increase his standing with Arab nationalists by defying Western efforts to intrude on Iraqi sovereignty. Indeed, the Iraqi defiance of the inspections regime may be designed to provoke a reaction by the United States in order to capitalize on widespread Arab resentment over Washington’s double standard of objecting to an Arab country procuring weapons of mass destruction while tolerating Israel’s nuclear arsenal. . .U.S. officials have admitted that there is no evidence that Iraq has resumed its nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons programs. Scott Ritter, a former U.S. Marine officer who served as chief weapons inspector for UNSCOM, responded to a query on a television talk show in 2001 about Iraq’s potential threat to the U.S. by saying: “In terms of military threat, absolutely nothing. His military was devastated in 1991 in Operation Desert Storm and hasn’t had the ability to reconstitute itself. . .In terms of weapons of mass destruction, we just don’t know. . .We should be trying to get weapons inspectors back into Iraq, so that we can ascertain exactly what’s transpiring in Iraq today instead of guessing about it.¹³⁷

One may well wonder how Ritter was able to confidently declare Iraq a military non-threat while simultaneously confessing ignorance of the state of Iraq’s WMD arsenal. Perhaps enough money from Saddam Hussein can make UN weapons inspectors turn a blind eye to self-contradiction as well as WMD. In any case, in addition to disputing allegations of Iraq’s possession of nuclear and biochemical Weapons of Mass Destruction, Zunes’ point on WMD also warned that forcibly disarming Saddam Hussein “would dramatically increase the likelihood of his ordering the use of any weapons of mass destruction he may have retained”--a point logically in tension with the point that our lack of knowledge of Iraq’s WMD program constituted a lack of a threat, illustrating how these points were essentially pretexts for countering any possible case for war rather than genuine arguments addressing factual situations and realistic risks. Zunes’ other talking points included among other items a critique of arguments alleging Iraq’s sponsorship of terrorism.

Bennis’ and Zunes’ talking points received wide distribution from antiwar media in late 2002 and early 2003. A modified version of Zunes’ August 2002 Foreign Policy in Focus report was published in the September 30, 2002 issue of The Nation,¹³⁸ which had previously published Bennis’ views on Iraq sanctions.¹³⁹ The November 11 and December 2, 2002 issues of The Nation included articles by Bennis.¹⁴⁰

The December 2, 2002 issue also featured an article by regular Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn that was posted on November 14 to that magazine’s website and was simultaneously published on Cockburn’s own website Counterpunch.com,¹⁴¹ soon to become the host of VIPS in February 2003.¹⁴² On December 4, 2002 the website of The Nation posted a debate between Cockburn and David Corn, whom Cockburn had attacked for mentioning the role of the World Workers Party in the antiwar movement.¹⁴³ Despite such Stalinist-Trotskyite family feuding, in the March 3, 2003 issue of The Nation Cockburn’s regular column--again crossposted to Counterpunch.org, now hosting VIPS--shared space with a new writer Corn had invited to contribute, Joseph Wilson.¹⁴⁴

By this time, Wilson says, he had known Corn through their mutual appearances on FOX News for some time and had “by and large. . .come to share” the editorial perspective of The Nation.¹⁴⁵ Reflecting this, Wilson’s antiwar speeches had come to echo the talking points of Bennis and Zunes and their comrades, with modifications specifically arguing with Bush’s pro-war speeches and eventually incorporating Wilson’s own unique talking points about his Niger trip For instance, Wilson’s article “How Saddam Thinks”, published in the San Jose Mercury News October 13, 2002 and reprinted by CommonDreams.org a day after that website had featured an article by Zunes,¹⁴⁶ regurgitated Zunes’ paradoxical WMD logic by arguing that “One of the strongest arguments for a militarily supported inspection plan is that it doesn’t threaten Saddam with extinction, a threat that could push him to fight back with the very weapons we’re seeking to destroy.”¹⁴⁷ Wilson’s article “Republic or Empire?”, posted online on the website of the The Nation on February 13, 2003 in anticipation of that magazine’s March 3 printed edition, echoed Zunes’ points on WMD and terrorism and added a third point to counter Bush’s more recent talking point emphasizing how the war would liberate the Iraqi people from tyranny.¹⁴⁸ Wilson’s June 14 lecture to the 2003 EPIC Iraq Forum, in which Zunes participated, developed the same three points and added a fourth based on combining the WMD and terrorism points into an additional point dismissing concerns posed by the threat of Iraq exporting WMD to terrorists. In the process of making these points Wilson elaborated an anti-neoconservative/anti-Zionist conspiracy theory sprinkled through the subtext of Bennis and Zunes’ talking points, as previously quoted.¹⁴⁹

The empirically-demonstrable convergence between IPS’ talking points and Wilson’s potentially throws some light on an intriguing albeit unsubstantiated allegation Senator Trent Lott made to Sean Hannity on March 20, 2003. Lott stated he had received some information that the Democrats had tested various antiwar talking points on focus groups:

They'd been doing some focus groups or they'd been doing some polling that indicated maybe, don't attack the men and women (in uniform) but you can attack the diplomatic effort by Bush.¹⁵⁰

Although Lott’s allegation is again unsubstantiated, it fits the pattern of data detailed above indicating a continuity between the talking points of IPS and those of Democratic foreign policy consultants like Joseph Wilson.

Against the Phase 1 background of the antiwar movement’s talking points, it is possible to place the Phase 2 planting of the Niger forgeries in a broader context. The antiwar movement’s talking points were broader in scope than just WMD or the Niger forgeries. For instance, on a non-WMD-related talking point, in late 2002 Vince Cannistraro was quoted disputing the link between Iraq and Al Qaeda.¹⁵¹ With respect to WMD-related talking points, Glen Rangwala--a UK scientist associated with the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq (CASI), which worked with Voices in the Wilderness and George Galloway’s Emergency Committee on Iraq (ECI)--accused a new Iraq dossier Britain released on February 3, 2003 (the so-called “Dodgy Dossier”) of plagiarizing a graduate student’s thesis.¹⁵² Meanwhile in the process of publicizing the forgeries IAEA chief ElBaradei disputed US allegations about Iraq intending aluminum tubes for nuclear purposes.¹⁵³ It appears possible that there were several simultaneous propaganda operations of which Operation Nigergate was only one, and indeed, there was some contact between figures active in several different controversies. For example, Rangwala since November 2002 had been listed as an IPA spokesman in IPA press releases, alongside IPS’ Phyllis Bennis and VIPS’ David MacMichael; he was quoted in a VIPS memo published on May 1, 2003; he was quoted by Nicholas Kristof in the May 6, 2003 New York Times article which featured the first anonymous leaks from Wilson; he, Wilson, and Zunes all spoke at the June 14, 2003 EPIC Iraq Forum; and he and Dan Plesch of the Guardian coauthored a book accusing the British government of manufacturing WMD evidence.¹⁵⁴ Against this background, the planting of the Niger forgeries may be viewed as one prong of a multi-pronged progpanda operation to discredit the various arguments underpinning the case for war. Operation Nigergate aimed specifically to discredit one argument underpinning the case for Iraq’s nuclear threat: namely, to discredit the allegation made by Britain’s September 24, 2002 dossier that “there is intelligence that Iraq has sought the supply of significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”¹⁵⁵

Phase 2: Planting the forgery.

Within two weeks of the release of the September Dossier, attempts to plant the Niger forgeries in British and US intelligence files began. Around October 8, 2002, Rocco Martino began peddling his forgeries, first to the French DGSE he says (confirming information from other sources), and then to Italian Panorama journalist Elisabetta Burba.¹⁵⁶

According to Burba she was skeptical of the documents’ authenticity. Her editor-in-chief Carlo Rossella requested verification of the documents from the US embassy in Italy, headed by Melvin Sembler. Thus the forgeries entered US State Department files.¹⁵⁷

From here the forgeries spread through the US intelligence community via several routes. According to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s review, within the State Department, the documents passed from the Italian embassy via the Bureau of Nonproliferation (NP) to the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), headed by Carl Ford (who has also worked for Cassidy & Associates, a firm that lobbies for Gabon and was purchased by Shandwick Public Affairs in 2000), who was assisted on WMD-related issues until September 2002 by Greg Thielmann (later to join VIPS¹⁵⁸). The INR was immediately suspicious, with one analyst commenting in an email to other intelligence community colleagues, “you’ll note that it bears a funky Emb. of Niger stamp (to make it look official, I guess).” On October 16, 2002 INR made copies of the documents available at meeting of the Nuclear Interdiction Action Group (NIAG) attended by representatives of a number of agencies including CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the Department of Energy (DOE). Analysts from the DIA, NSA, and DOE picked up copies at the meeting. None of the four CIA representatives who attended the meeting recall picking up copies, but a later internal inspection found copies in the vault of the CIA’s Counterproliferation Division (CPD),¹⁵⁹ where Valerie Plame worked under Alan Foley of the CIA’s Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control Center (WINPAC).¹⁶⁰ CIA spokesman Bill Harlow told Seymour Hersh in March 2003 that the CIA did not obtain an actual copy of the forgeries until after the President’s January 2003 State of the Union address.¹⁶¹ Contradicting this, Vince Cannistraro later told Hersh that the State Department’s Italian embassy had passed the forgeries to the CIA’s Italian station, headed by Jeffrey Castelli, and that the CIA’s Italian station had passed them on to CIA headquarters.¹⁶² Whether the CPD got the documents through this alleged route, from the meeting where the INR made copies available, or through another channel is unclear.

On November 22, 2002 (a date that in retrospect takes on symbolic significance), the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs Director for Nonproliferation told State Department officials that France had information on an Iraqi attempt to buy uranium from Niger. France then waited until March 4, 2003 to inform the US that this information was based on Martino’s forgeries.¹⁶³

Meanwhile on December 17, 2002, analysts from the CIA’s WINPAC produced a paper, U.S. Analysis of Niger’s Declaration, 7 December 2002, which critically reviewed a disclosure Iraq had just made to the UN. The paper included statements that Iraq’s declaration failed to explain its procurement of aluminum tubes and “does not acknowledge efforts to procure uranium from Niger, one of the points addressed in the U.K. dossier.” The day after this paper was produced WINPAC, the State Department’s NP, and the NSC began helping prepare a fact sheet to be released following a speech by UN ambassador John Negroponte and a press conference by Secretary of State Colin Powell. Despite a suggestion by the WINPAC Director to change the “Niger” reference to “Africa”, despite a suggestion by an INR analyst to change the phrase “efforts” to “reported efforts”, and despite a check by the State Department’s Office of United Nations Political Affairs with NP to make sure WINPAC had reviewed some last-minute changes to the final draft of the fact sheet, the fact sheet was posted to the State Department’s website with the same language used in WINPAC’s December 17 paper: “efforts to procure uranium from Niger.”

After seeing the WINPAC paper, an INR analyst sent an email to a DOE analyst on December 23, 2002 expressing surprise that WINPAC’s paper had not mentioned that the INR took a skeptical view on the aluminum tube and Niger uranium issues. The DOE analyst mentioned in reply, “it is most disturbing that WINPAC is essentially directing foreign policy in this matter. There are some very strong points to be made in respect to Iraq’s arrogant non-compliance with UN sanctions. However, when individuals attempt to convert those ‘strong statements’ into the ‘knock out’ punch, the Administration will ultimately look foolish--i.e. the tubes and Niger!”¹⁶⁴

Along similar lines, Seymour Hersh reported in March 2003, after ElBaradei had publicized the forgeries:

The chance for American intelligence to challenge the documents came as the Administration debated whether to pass them on to ElBaradei. The former high-level intelligence official told me that some senior C.I.A. officials were aware that the documents weren’t trustworthy. “It’s not a question as to whether they were marginal. They can’t be ‘sort of’ bad, or ‘sort of’ ambiguous. They knew it was a fraud--it was useless. Everybody bit their tongue and said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if the Secretary of State said this?’ The Secretary of State never saw the documents.”. . .A former intelligence officer told me that some questions about the authenticity of the Niger documents were raised inside the government by analysts at the Department of Energy and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. However, these warnings were not heeded.
“Somebody deliberately let something false get in there,” the former high-level intelligence official added. “It could not have gotten into the system without the agency being involved. Therefore it was an internal intention. Someone set someone up.”¹⁶⁵

Hersh later added,

a former senior C.I.A. officer. . .had begun talking to me about the Niger papers in March, when I first wrote about the forgery, and said, "Somebody deliberately let something false get in there." He became more forthcoming in subsequent months, eventually saying that a small group of disgruntled retired C.I.A. clandestine operators had banded together in the late summer of last year and drafted the fraudulent documents themselves.
"The agency guys were so pissed at Cheney," the former officer said. "They said, 'O.K, we're going to put the bite on these guys.'" My source said that he was first told of the fabrication late last year, at one of the many holiday gatherings in the Washington area of past and present C.I.A. officials. "Everyone was bragging about it-'Here's what we did. It was cool, cool, cool.'" These retirees, he said, had superb contacts among current officers in the agency and were informed in detail of the sismi intelligence.
"They thought that, with this crowd, it was the only way to go-to nail these guys who were not practicing good tradecraft and vetting intelligence," my source said. "They thought it'd be bought at lower levels-a big bluff." The thinking, he said, was that the documents would be endorsed by Iraq hawks at the top of the Bush Administration, who would be unable to resist flaunting them at a press conference or an interagency government meeting. They would then look foolish when intelligence officials pointed out that they were obvious fakes. But the tactic backfired, he said, when the papers won widespread acceptance within the Administration. "It got out of control."¹⁶⁶

Whether or not the allegation of Hersh’s source is accurate, what may be stated as established fact is that between October and December 2002, copies of the Niger forgeries and references to the forgeries had been widely distributed through the US intelligence community, and a specific reference to Niger had been posted to the US State Department website. From here information would begin to leak outside the US intelligence community, initiating Phase 3 of Operation Nigergate.

Phase 3: Publicizing the forgery.

Neither the September Dossier nor Bush’s State of the Union address actually referred to Niger, and both British and US intelligence would later insist they had evidence of Iraq’s attempts to acquire uranium from Africa independent of the Niger forgeries.¹⁶⁷ But for Operation Nigergate’s propaganda purposes, the mere presence of the forgeries in British and US files was sufficient to cast doubt on the case for war. The next step was to publicize that doubt by leaking it to sympathetic politicians and reporters.

The posting of the Niger reference to the State Department’s website got the ball rolling. This prompted a public denial from Niger on December 24, 2002 and a request for substantiating informtation from the director of the IAEA’s Iraq Nuclear Verification Offfice, Jacques Baute, on January 6, 2003.¹⁶⁸ Iraqi scientist Jafar Dhia Jafar would later publish a book which mentioned that on January 20, 2003 while being questioned by Baute, he was informed that Baute was in possession of information about Iraqi attempts to acquire uranium from Niger which had been“recieved from a certain country on the condition that it wasn’t shown to Iraq”.¹⁶⁹

Baute’s request for more information was echoed throughout January by Senator Carl Levin, who had been pushing for the US to share more information with the UN since December 2002.¹⁷⁰ Levin also sent a request the day after President Bush’s January 28, 2003 State of the Union address asking the CIA to provide him with details on what the US intelligence community knew about Iraqi attempts to acquire uranium from Africa.¹⁷¹ Then on January 31 in anticipation of Powell’s speech to the UN, Levin, along with Senators Jay Rockefeller and Joseph Biden, signed a letter from Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle asking President Bush to have Powell brief Congress on newly-acquired intelligence before going to the UN with that information.¹⁷² The next day Levin travelled to New York to meet with UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix.¹⁷³

On February 4, the day before Powell’s UN speech, someone briefed Baute on the Niger forgeries and provided him with copies. Who provided the briefing and forgeries to him and where they did so have been reportedly differently by different sources. According to Baute’s account as reported by Seymour Hersh, he was briefed by the US mission in Austria while aboard a plane en route from IAEA headquarters in Vienna to UN headquarters in New York, and upon reaching New York he was provided with copies of the documents by the US.¹⁷⁴ What the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s report says regarding this is censored at a key point, reading, “On February 4, 2003, the U.S. Government passed electronic copies of the Iraq-Niger documents to [3/4 line deleted] the IAEA. Because the Director of the IAEA’s INVO [Iraq Nuclear Verification Office] was in New York at the time, the U.S. Government also provided the documents to him in New York.”¹⁷⁵ So far this seems consistent enough. But slightly at variance with these accounts is a July 18, 2003 article by Walter Pincus and Dana Priest which depicts the briefing occurring in Vienna rather than on the plane from Vienna: “On Feb. 4, the U.N. inspectors' Iraq team was called to the U.S. mission in Vienna and verbally briefed on the contents of the documents. A day later, they received copies, according to officials familiar with the inspectors' work.” A couple weeks earlier, Pincus and Richard Leiby had reported that the copies of the forgeries the inspectors received came from the CIA: “In early February, the CIA received a translation of the Niger documents and in early March, copies of the documents, which it turned over to the International Atomic Energy Agency.”¹⁷⁶ A seemingly different account is found in a March 8, 2003 article by Ian Traynor, stating that Britain provided the documents to the IAEA in Vienna: “British officials named the state of Niger as the source of the uranium and passed their evidence to the UN nuclear watchdog, the international atomic energy agency, in Vienna.” Hans Blix curiously stated as reported in an April 22, 2003 article by Sally Bolton, “The CIA say they got a copy of the document from the UK.”¹⁷⁷ This is contradicted by a September 2003 British Parliamentary investigation which states, “In February 2003 the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) received from a third party (not the UK) documents that the party had acquired in the autumn of 2002 and which purported to be evidence of Iraq’s attempts to obtain uranium from Niger. In March 2003 the IAEA identified some of the documents it had received as forgeries and called into question the authenticity of the others.” Britain’s July 2004 Butler Report similarly though somewhat more vaguely states: “it was not until early 2003 that the British Government became aware that the US (and other states) had received from a journalistic source a number of documents alleged to cover the Iraqi procurement of uranium from Niger. Those documents were passed to the IAEA. . .”¹⁷⁸

On February 15, 2003, Levin, Rockefeller, and their Intelligence Committee colleagues left for their secret fact-finding mission abroad, returning February 27.¹⁷⁹ Less than a week later, Levin and Joseph Wilson appeared together with the French ambassador Jean-David Levitte present on ABC’s Nightline on March 4, 2003¹⁸⁰--the same day the US was first informed that the information French intelligence had provided on November 22 had been based on the Niger forgeries. Four days after his Nightline appearance with Levin, Wilson made his first public statement on the Niger forgeries, prompted by CNN’s David Ensor, who was investigating the origin of the forgeries.¹⁸¹

Ensor’s prompting was intended to get Wilson to comment on a quote the March 8 The Washington Post writer Joby Warrick attributed to 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.¹⁸²

Several things are striking about Warrick’s quote. For one thing, six weeks earlier on January 26, 2003, another Post writer, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, had quoted someone else saying something remarkably similar to the March 8 statement of the anonymous “U.S. official”:

The Iraqi government believes it has done enough to cooperate with U.N. weapons inspectors and now regards a war with the United States as almost inevitable, a top adviser to President Saddam Hussein said today. Providing a rare glimpse into the strategic thinking of Hussein's secretive, authoritarian government, his chief adviser on weapons issues, Gen. Amir Saadi, suggested Iraq would not alter its policy toward the inspections and overall disarmament. Although U.N. and U.S. officials demand that the government work actively to resolve conflicts over the private questioning of scientists, the handover of documents and a host of other issues, Iraq believes that it is already "doing all the things we think can prevent war," he said. . .
Administration officials also contend they have strong evidence that Iraq has active programs to manufacture chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. But Saadi dismissed those claims, noting that allegations advanced by the administration last year that Iraq was using imported aluminum tubes to enrich uranium have largely been dismissed by inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
"It was a lie and they fell for it," he said.¹⁸³

It is also interesting that although Warrick’s Post article does not name the anonymous official, Joseph Wilson is more specific. In his book he says it is a “State Department spokesman”:

. . .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. . .
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. . .¹⁸⁴

Elsewhere Wilson names the State Department spokesman he has in mind:

Wilson says he let the matter drop until he saw State Department spokesman Richard Boucher say a few months later that the U.S. had been fooled by bad intelligence. It was then that Wilson says he realized that his report had been overlooked, ignored, or buried.¹⁸⁵

Thus, Wilson’s first comments on the Niger forgeries represent a convergence of several curious items rolled into one:

1) Wilson’s fingering of Richard Boucher as the anonymous source for Warrick’s Washington Post quote;

2) Wilson’s prompting by CNN, a network which seems to have inherited its founder Ted Turner’s antiwar spin and anti-Israeli bias;¹⁸⁶ and

3) Warrick’s attribution to an anonymous source of a phrase strikingly similar to that of an Iraqi spokesman quoted six weeks earlier by Chandrasekaran in the Post, a prime mover in the Watergate coup against Richard Nixon.¹⁸⁷

If the public were not regularly assured that the Post and CNN like Joseph Wilson are non-partisan victims of a right-wing smear campaign, someone might begin to suspect the trio were up to something here--particularly in light of Walter Pincus’ revelation of the behind-the-scenes role of Bob Woodward, who coincidentally has recently released an insider account of the Bush administration along with his latest work of fiction about Deep Throat,¹⁸⁸ in the wake of John Dean coming forward to declare that Plamegate is worse than Watergate.¹⁸⁹

Was Wilson already playing “Deep Throat II” by the time of his March 8, 2003 CNN interview? If so, for information he purported to have about the Niger forgeries beyond his own personal knowledge of his February 2002 trip--made over half a year before Martino’s documents entered US intelligence files in October--he would have had to have had access to other sources of information about the Niger forgeries. By what means could Wilson have obtained such information?

The most direct potential channel would have been his wife, CIA CPD agent Valerie Plame. Questions about CPD’s role in the Niger forgery saga are raised by several unresolved issues, such as the enigma of how and when CPD first obtained the copies of the forgeries found in its vault. Another issue is the discrepancy between the the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence testimony of Plame’s supervisor Alan Foley and that of his NSC counterpart Robert Joseph. Foley initially testified to the Senate that he told Joseph not to include the African uranium reference in Bush’s State of the Union speech on Iraq. After this and other elements of Foley’s testimony were disputed by Joseph, Foley located a draft of Bush’s speech, which proved to be more consistent with Joseph’s testimony, and Foley conceded that he may have mixed up his recollection of two different speeches he and Joseph had worked on together.¹⁹⁰

Plame’s intelligence community colleagues may also have been a potential source of information for Wilson on the Niger forgeries. Seymour Hersh reported that Vince Cannistraro had learned about the forgeries a few months after October 2002 through an inside source at CIA: “Vincent Cannistraro. . .told me that copies of the Burba documents were given to the American Embassy, which passed them on to the C.I.A.'s chief of station in Rome, who forwarded them to Washington. Months later, he said, he telephoned a contact at C.I.A. headquarters and was told that ‘the jury was still out on this’--that is, on the authenticity of the documents.”¹⁹¹ VIPS founder Ray McGovern claimed he knew Foley from working with him.¹⁹² Wilson’s “longtime colleague” Pat Lang professed inside knowledge of conflicts between DIA Middle East officer Bruce Hardcastle and the Bush administration over Iraq-related intelligence.¹⁹³ One email Lang circulated online in September 2003 was sent to a distribution list which included both McGovern and Cannistraro as well as associates of Lyndon LaRouche’s Executive Intelligence Review.¹⁹⁴

Wilson also had inside contacts in the State Department. He mentions that after Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address he discussed the Africa uranium reference privately with State Department personnel, including Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Walter Kansteiner.¹⁹⁵ Kansteiner had been involved in the organization of Wilson’s Niger trip¹⁹⁶ and like Wilson was also associated with the Corporate Council on Africa and Brent Scowcroft.¹⁹⁷

Finally, Wilson had contacts in Congress who could have been potential sources of information. As mentioned previously, Wilson says he “also shared what I knew with . . .several Democratic Senators and. . .met with the staffs of the House and Senate Intelligence committees”,¹⁹⁸ and among the Democratic Senators and Senate Intelligence Committee members he is known to have been in contact with from at least March 4, 2003 was Carl Levin, whose colleague Jay Rockefeller requested an FBI investigtion of the Niger forgeries on March 14. Congressman Henry Waxman was also active in the Niger forgery investigation by March 17, 2003.¹⁹⁹

Finally, between ElBaradei’s March 7,2003 announcement on the forgeries and Kristof’s May 6, 2003 article quoting Wilson anonymously some information about the forgeries was publicized in newspapers, so by the time Wilson talked to Kristof he could have obtained some information from articles on the forgeries or from contact with reporters known to be working on the story, who included David Ensor, Walter Pincus’ Washington Post colleagues Dana Priest and Susan Schmidt, Seymour Hersh, and Kristof himself.²⁰⁰

Through Wilson, a mixture of information and disinformation about the Niger forgeries leaked to various media outlets from March 8 through July 6, 2003, beginning with his comment for CNN’s David Ensor on the “We fell for it” quote reported by Washington Post writer Joby Warrick. In this Wilson was wittingly or unwittingly assisted by various media contacts, including CNN’s Ensor; New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof; Washington Post reporters Walter Pincus, Richard Leiby, and Dana Priest; The New Republic writers John Judis and Spencer Ackerman; British Independent journalists Andrew Buncombe and Raymond Whitaker; and NBC Meet the Press guest host Andrea Mitchell.

Wilson’s leaks did not occur in a vacuum. They were concurrent with the leaks to Britain’s BBC and Guardian that prompted Blair supporter John Reid to complain on June 3, 2003 that “rogue elements” in the intelligence community were out to smear Blair.²⁰¹ Meanwhile on the other side of the Atlantic, Ensor followed up his March 8, 2003 interview with Wilson with a March 14 interview of VIPS’ Ray Close, who had been writing on the Niger forgeries since March 10.²⁰² In the following months VIPS and similar sources continued to feed stories to both fringe and mainstream media, using channels such as Cockburn’s CounterPunch, LaRouche’s Executive Intelligence Review, Seymour Hersh, Nicholas Kristof, the June 14, 2003 EPIC Iraq Forum where McGovern spoke with Wilson, and McGovern’s July 15, 2003 press conference with Dennis Kucinich. By July 11 Senator Pat Roberts was voicing sentiments similar to that John Reid had expressed on the other side of the Atlantic:

What now concerns me most, however, is what appears to be a campaign of press leaks by the CIA in an effort to discredit the President. Unnamed ‘intelligence officials’ are now claiming that they told the White House that attempts by Iraq to acquire uranium from countries in Africa were unfounded. I understand, however, that as late as mid-January, 2003, approximately ten days before the State of the Union speech, the CIA was still asserting that Iraq was seeking to acquire uranium from Africa and that those attempts were further evidence of Saddam’s efforts to reconstitute his nuclear program. I have seen no documentation that indicates that the CIA had reversed itself after January 17th and prior to the State of the Union.²⁰³

]

Phase 4: Mop-up: Publicizing the alibi.

With the publication of Wilson’s New York Times editorial on July 6, 2003, Phase 3 of Operation Nigergate was complete and the main task of smearing Bush’s war effort was done. However after any crime there remains the problem of an alibi. What if the Republicans or investigative journalists discovered Wilson’s wife’s CIA connection and uncovered the propaganda campaign? Wilson naturally does not say this in so many words, but he does recall his awareness that his anonymity was bound to be short-lived:

In late June, the story began to spin out of control as journalists started to report speculation as fact. At this point I was warned by a reporter that I was about to be named in an article as the U.S. official in question. . .
. . . with my name now openly circulating among the press, it was clear that sooner or later my anonymity was going to be sacrificed on the altar of the story.
I learned that on June 22, the London newspaper The Independent blared a headline across the top of the front page. . .that read “Retired American diplomat accuses British Ministers of being liars.” I knew then that the story was spinning out of control and that I now had no choice but to write it myself.²⁰⁴

Once again Wilson’s story cannot be taken at face value, for the fact is that a week before June 22 he had already publicly revealed himself to his EPIC Iraq Forum audience: “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. . .I can assure you that that retired American ambassador to Africa, as Nick Kristof called him in his article. . .has every intention of ensuring that this story has legs.”²⁰⁵ But even if Wilson was not being as careful to protect his anonymity as he pretends, his comments do reflect his awareness of the obvious eventuality that sooner or later the targets of his attacks were going to fight back. One way to counter this eventuality would be that in the event anyone began to dig too deeply into his background, it could be attributed to White House “retaliation” against a “whistleblower”.

Based on what is currently known, it is possible that Wilson’s “whistleblower” defense was not originally part of Operation Nigergate and was only conceived after Novak’s article. But is also possible that it was designed ahead of time as a contingency plan, to be activated after word of Valerie Plame’s CIA association predictably passed through the Washington grapevine to the White House and media. Additional investigation would be required to settle this matter.

In either case, the chain of events that triggered Wilson’s whistleblower defense has been well-documented as a result of Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation of Plamegate.²⁰⁶ The paper trail that would eventually leave the White House open to charges of retaliation began to be laid in early June 2003 when Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus, who had a long history of association with both the CIA and IPS,²⁰⁷ asked the CIA about Wilson’s as background for an article he was then writing which quoted Wilson anonymously. Pincus’ Post colleague Bob Woodward claims he told Pincus about Plame’s CIA background in mid-June, which Pincus denies. Whatever the truth there, the process of responding to Pincus’ question predictably prompted an exchange of paperwork between the CIA and the State Department. The publication of Pincus’ article on June 12 naturally drew increased attention to his anonymous source and was, again predictably, followed up in the coming weeks by further inquiries from various reporters to both Vice President Cheney’s aide Lewis Libby and President Bush’s aide Karl Rove, as well as other administration sources and the CIA. Among the reporters who went to Rove for confirmation of information he had heard elsewhere was Robert Novak, on July 8, 2003. On the same day Novak talked to Rove--whether earlier in the day or later is unclear--he was approached on the street by an as-yet unidentified friend of Wilson, who according to Wilson did not mention that he knew him, struck up a conversation about Wilson, and then reported back to Wilson that Novak was saying, “Wilson’s an [expletive deleted]. The CIA sent him. His wife, Valerie, works for the CIA. She’s a weapons of mass destruction specialist. She sent him.” Three days after Novak’s encounter with Wilson’s anonymous friend, his July 14 article was pre-distributed by AP’s wire service on July 11, 2003. By July 16, David Corn, who had solicited Wilson to write his article “Republic or Empire?” for The Nation back in February, was accusing the White House of targeting Wilson through Plame. The day after that Matthew Cooper of TIME began echoing Corn’s accusations.

The rest is history.