The CIA leak (Latest From Novak)

townhall.com ^ | 10/01/03 | Robert Novak

[kattracks]

WASHINGTON -- I had thought I never again would write about retired diplomat Joseph Wilson's CIA-employee wife, but feel constrained to do so now that repercussions of my July 14 column have reached the front pages of major newspapers and led off network news broadcasts. My role and the role of the Bush White House have been distorted and need explanation.

The leak now under Justice Department investigation is described by former Ambassador Wilson and critics of President Bush's Iraq policy as a reprehensible effort to silence them. To protect my own integrity and credibility, I would like to stress three points. First, I did not receive a planned leak. Second, the CIA never warned me that the disclosure of Wilson's wife working at the agency would endanger her or anybody else. Third, it was not much of a secret.

The current Justice investigation stems from a routine, mandated probe of all CIA leaks, but follows weeks of agitation. Wilson, after telling me in July that he would say nothing about his wife, has made investigation of the leak his life's work -- aided by the relentless Sen. Charles Schumer of New York. These efforts cannot be separated from the massive political assault on President Bush.

This story began July 6 when Wilson went public and identified himself as the retired diplomat who had reported negatively to the CIA in 2002 on alleged Iraq efforts to buy uranium yellowcake from Niger. 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. It was an offhand revelation from this official, who is no partisan gunslinger. When I called another official for confirmation, he said: "Oh, you know about it." The published report that somebody in the White House failed to plant this story with six reporters and finally found me as a willing pawn is simply untrue.

At the CIA, the official designated to talk to me denied that Wilson's wife had inspired his selection but said she was delegated to request his help. He asked me not to use her name, saying she probably never again will be given a foreign assignment but that exposure of her name might cause "difficulties" if she travels abroad. He never suggested to me that Wilson's wife or anybody else would be endangered. If he had, I would not have used her name. I used it in the sixth paragraph of my column because it looked like the missing explanation of an otherwise incredible choice by the CIA for its mission.

How big a secret was it? It was well known around Washington that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA. Republican activist Clifford May wrote Monday, in National Review Online, that he had been told of her identity by a non-government source before my column appeared and that it was common knowledge. Her name, Valerie Plame, was no secret either, appearing in Wilson's "Who's Who in America" entry.

A big question is her duties at Langley. I regret that I referred to her in my column as an "operative," a word I have lavished on hack politicians for more than 40 years. While the CIA refuses to publicly define her status, the official contact says she is "covered" -- working under the guise of another agency. However, an unofficial source at the Agency says she has been an analyst, not in covert operations.

The Justice Department investigation was not requested by CIA Director George Tenet. Any leak of classified information is routinely passed by the Agency to Justice, averaging one a week. This investigative request was made in July shortly after the column was published. Reported only last weekend, the request ignited anti-Bush furor.

©2003 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Contact Robert Novak | Read Novak's biography

[Lib-Lickers 2]

Nope,, the demoncraps don't always clean house,, remember one Linda Tripp?,,, boo haa haaaaa haa!!

[Bonaparte]

"Out of his element, eh?"

Truly a babe in the woods.

[Timesink]

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[Recovering_Democrat]

America's response to this tempest in a teapot:

[Travis McGee]

The next question should be: how and when and why did the wifey of the well-connected partisan hack "diplomat" get her cushy little CIA "weapons analyst" job?

What has been her unique career path? What are her creds as a "weapons analyst?" Was her "job" payola?

[AmericanVictory]

You forget that Mrs. Wilson routinely sneaks into Cuba from the sea in a wet suit with a SEAL team to report on Castro's inner secrets, which she penetrates, after burying her wet suit, as his favorite tortilla cook. This is, of course, only when she is not dawdling in the bazaars of Damascus disguised as a camel driver.

Operative indeed!

[cartoonistx]

[Fledermaus]

This non-issue shows that the Dems are desparate to get any kind of silly coverage.

No one is paying attention to the 9 dwarfs plus 1 (plus three actually, no one bothers to talk about the candidacy of Lyndon LaRouche and Fern Penna also seeking the DNC nomination).

How Al Sharpton is considered a viable candidate over Lyndon LaRouche is beyond me.

[JustPiper]

I read this on WND. Novak is the only good conservative we have at the Times! It's hard enough living here ;(

[JustPiper]

I heard early yesterday from her husband's own nasty mouth he has donated $2000 to Kerry when he called him on it! It's obvious this dim is another Clinton attack dog!

[JustPiper]

I know another Clitonite lost her security clearance today under Tenet!

[veronica]

As Joe Wilson and his wife muse about "who will play her in the movie."

This whole "scandal" is pure Bush-bashing. Election year politics as usual.

[dennisw]

Time Magazine

Thursday, Jul. 17, 2003

A War on Wilson?

Inside the Bush Administration's feud with the diplomat who poured cold water on the Iraq-uranium connection
By MATTHEW COOPER, MASSIMO CALABRESI AND JOHN F. DICKERSON
Has the Bush Administration declared war on a former ambassador who conducted a fact-finding mission to probe possible Iraqi interest in African uranium? Perhaps.

Former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson raised the Administration's ire with an op-ed piece in The New York Times on July 6 saying that the Administration had "twisted" intelligence to "exaggerate" the Iraqi threat. Since then Administration officials have taken public and private whacks at Wilson, charging that his 2002 report, made at the behest of U.S. intelligence, was faulty and that his mission was a scheme cooked up by mid-level operatives. George Tenet, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, took a shot at Wilson last week as did ex-White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer. Both contended that Wilson's report on an alleged Iraqi effort to purchase uranium from Niger, far from undermining the president's claim in his State of the Union address that Iraq sought uranium in Africa, as Wilson had said, actually strengthened it. And some government officials have noted to TIME in interviews, (as well as to syndicated columnist Robert Novak) that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, is a CIA official who monitors the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. These officials have suggested that she was involved in her husband's being dispatched Niger to investigate reports that Saddam Hussein's government had sought to purchase large quantities of uranium ore, sometimes referred to as yellow cake, which is used to build nuclear devices.

In an interview with TIME, Wilson, who served as an ambassador to Gabon and as a senior American diplomat in Baghdad under the current president's father, angrily said that his wife had nothing to do with his trip to Africa. "That is bulls__t. That is absolutely not the case," Wilson told TIME. "I met with between six and eight analysts and operators from CIA and elsewhere [before the Feb 2002 trip]. None of the people in that meeting did I know, and they took the decision to send me. This is a smear job."

Government officials are not only privately disputing the genesis of Wilson's trip, but publicly contesting what he found. Last week Bush Administration officials said that Wilson's report reinforced the president's claim that Iraq had sought uranium from Africa. They say that when Wilson returned from Africa in Feb. 2002, he included in his report to the CIA an encounter with a former Nigerien government official who told him that Iraq had approached him in June 1999, expressing interest in expanding commercial relations between Iraq and Niger. The Administration claims Wilson reported that the former Nigerien official interpreted the overture as an attempt to discuss uranium sales.

"This is in Wilson's report back to the CIA," White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer told reporters last week, a few days before he left his post to join the private sector. "Wilson's own report, the very man who was on television saying Niger denies it...reports himself that officials in Niger said that Iraq was seeking to contact officials in Niger about sales."

Wilson tells the story differently and in a crucial respect. He says the official in question was contacted by an Algerian-Nigerien intermediary who inquired if the official would meet with an Iraqi about "commercial" sales — an offer he declined. Wilson dismisses CIA Director George Tenet's suggestion in his own mea culpa last week that the meeting validates the President's State of the Union claim: "That then translates into an Iraqi effort to import a significant quantity of uranium as the president alleged? These guys really need to get serious."

Government officials also chide Wilson for not delving into the details of the now infamous forged papers that pointed to a sale of uranium to Iraq. When Tenet issued his I-take-the-blame statement on the alleged Iraq-Niger uranium connection last week, he took a none-too-subtle jab at Wilson's report. "There was no mention in the report of forged documents — or any suggestion of the existence of documents at all," Tenet wrote. For his part Wilson says he did not deal with the forgeries explicitly in his report because he never saw them. However, Wilson says he refuted the forgeries' central allegation that Niger had been negotiating a sale of uranium to Iraq. Wilson says he explained in the report that several Nigerien government signatures would be required to permit such a sale — signatures that were either absent or clearly botched in the forged documents.

Administration officials also claim that Wilson took at face value the claims of Nigerien officials that they had not sold uranium ore to Saddam Hussein. (Such sales would have been forbidden under then-existing United Nations sanctions on Iraq.) "He spent eight days in Niger and he concluded that Niger denied the allegation." Fleischer told reporters last week. "Well, typically nations don't admit to going around nuclear nonproliferation,"

For his part, Wilson says that the Administration conflated the prior report of the American ambassador to Niger with his own. Wilson says a report by Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick, the American ambassador to Niger, addresses the issue of Nigerien government officials disputing the allegation. Wilson says that he never made the naïve argument that if Nigerien officials denied the sales, then their claims must be believed.

A source close to the matter says that Wilson was dispatched to Niger because Vice President Dick Cheney had questions about an intelligence report about Iraq seeking uranium and that he asked that the CIA get back to him with answers. Cheney's staff has adamantly denied and Tenet has reinforced the claim that the Vice President had anything to do with initiating the Wilson mission. They say the Vice President merely asked routine questions at an intelligence briefing and that mid-level CIA officials, on their own, chose to dispatch Wilson.

In an exclusive interview Lewis Libby, the Vice President's Chief of Staff, told TIME: "The Vice President heard about the possibility of Iraq trying to acquire uranium from Niger in February 2002. As part of his regular intelligence briefing, the Vice President asked a question about the implication of the report. During the course of a year, the Vice President asked many such questions and the agency responded within a day or two saying that they had reporting suggesting the possibility of such a transaction. But the agency noted that the reporting lacked detail. The agency pointed out that Iraq already had 500 tons of uranium, portions of which came from Niger, according to the International Atomic Energy Administration (IAEA). The Vice President was unaware of the trip by Ambassador Wilson and didn't know about it until this year when it became public in the last month or so. " Other senior Administration officials, including National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, have also claimed that they had not heard of Wilson's report until recently.

After he submitted his report in March 2002, Wilson says, his interest in the topic lay dormant until the State of the Union address in January 2003. In his speech, the President cited a British report claiming that Hussein's government had sought uranium in Africa. Afterward, Wilson says, he called a friend at the Africa bureau of the State Department and asked if the reference had been to Niger. The friend said that he didn't know but, says Wilson, allowed the possibility that Bush was referring to some other country on the continent. 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. Wilson told TIME that he considers the matter settled now that the White House has admitted the Bush reference to Iraq and African uranium should not have been in the State of the Union address.

[Stultis]

So...were did the WP get this info ["shopping" the story to "6 reporters"] from??? A n inside source name T. M. Cauliffe perhaps?

I would assume Wilson. The Compost has been smearing (and backpeddaling) in lockstep with him on other aspects of the story. Wilson makes it up, and the Compost prints it. Nice, neat, simple, sleazy.

[putupon]

They Hire Left RAT Wilson do CIA work?

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.

BUMP! Forget the so-called leak, it's all BS; BUT FIRE THE FOOL IN CHARGE OF HIRING AT THE WHITE HOUSE!

[Stultis]

Bush did a good job appointing competent top-level people he could trust. But he has done a LOUSY job of shoveling out clinton's political appointees in the middle ranks. ... The Democrats NEVER make this kind of mistake. They always clean house.

I believe there are laws prohibiting the firing of government service employees for political reasons. The Rapist just ignored 'em, apparently. (Wonder if there's an untold story there. Were there any lawsuits or adminstrative/union challenges over that?)

[Stultis]

At the same time, like Reagan before him, Bush seems to believe that fighting a drawn out partisan battle back home will jeopardize the war abroad.

The ironic thing, of course, is the only way we could realistically lose the war on terror is if the Democrats succeed in demonizing it and the president.

A well founded fear. South Vietnam, after all, was lost because of Watergate. To his credit Ford did try to enforce the accords Nixon had obtained but the emboldened 'Rats said, "fugetaboutit, Ho's our boy."

[mn-bush-man]

People need to understand why they should be outraged, and it's going to be hard to draw them a picture in this case. Back in impeachment people only needed to understand that Clinton lied under oath and obstructed an investigation. They didn't get it. It this case they need to understand why leeking this name is significant, they need to believe it's a retaliation for criticism of the Iraq war, they need to believe the leak comes from the top... etc. Too complex. People aren't going to follow a flowchart to understand the "gotcha"

At the same time, this is exactly why it is a perfect "scandal" for the demscums to try to promote. Because the average 'joe six pack' wont make the efforts to connect the dots, the general public is susceptible to buying into the spin (aka outright lies) that Schumer, Boxer, Pelosi, et al spew in their sound bites. Because it takes a little bit of effort to seek the truth, very few will bother to find it.

And that is exactly why it is so frustrating to me that we don't have the same willingness as our opponents to stand up and exhibit some fortitude when the knob on the political strategy stove gets cranked up. All too often it seems that our political "leadership" is willing to sacrifice widespread dissemination of the truth for the sake of complacency.

[kattracks]

I think all of the "news" we hear about Bush being vulnerable in 2004 is just so much garbage. So much so that the Dims have to keep coming up with stuff like this in the hopes something will stick. And naturally, the media will do their part to help.

[dokmad]

"This smear should drop Bush's credibility with the voters another 10-15 points. A little lower and hillary can jump in the race."

The problem is, (It's working!!) people believe this crap. Why do the republicans not fight back? I dont get it...