Probe Focuses on Month Before Leak to Reporters
FBI Agents Tracing Linkage of Envoy to CIA Operative
By Walter Pincus and Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, October 12, 2003; Page A01
FBI agents investigating the disclosure of a CIA
officer’s identity have begun by examining events in the month before
the leak, when the CIA, the White House and Vice President Cheney’s
office first were asked about former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV’s
CIA-sponsored trip to Niger,
according to sources familiar with the
probe….. (irony alert)
The name of Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, a clandestine case
officer, was revealed in a July 14 column by Robert D. Novak that
quoted two unidentified senior administration officials.
In their interviews, FBI agents are asking questions about events
going back to at least early June, the sources said. That indicates
investigators are examining not just who passed the information to
Novak and other reporters but also how Plame’s name may have first
become linked with Wilson and his mission, who did it and how the
information made its way around the government.
Administration sources said they believe that the officials who
discussed Plame were not trying to expose her, but were using the
information as a tool to try to persuade reporters to ignore Wilson.
The officials wanted to convince the reporters that he had benefited
from nepotism in being chosen for the mission.
What started as political gossip and damage control has become a
major criminal investigation that has already harmed the administration
and could be a problem for President Bush for months to come.
One reason investigators are looking back is that even before
Novak’s column appeared, government officials had been trying for more
than a month to convince journalists that Wilson’s mission was not as
important as it was being portrayed. Wilson concluded during the 2002
mission that there was no solid evidence for the administration’s
assertion that Iraq was trying to acquire uranium in Niger to develop
nuclear weapons, and he angered the White House when he became an
outspoken critic of the war.
The FBI is trying to determine when White House officials and
members of the vice president’s staff first focused on Wilson and
learned about his wife’s employment at the agency. One group that may
have known of the connection before that time is the handful of CIA
officers detailed to the White House, where they work primarily on the
National Security Council staff. A former NSC staff member said one or
more of those officers may have been aware of the Plame-Wilson
relationship.
White House press secretary Scott McClellan said in response to a
query for this article: “I think it would be counterproductive during
an ongoing investigation for me to chase rumors and speculation. The
president has directed the White House to cooperate fully, and that is
exactly what we are doing.”
Investigators are trying to establish the chain of events leading to
the leak because, for a successful prosecution under the law
prohibiting unauthorized disclosure of a covert U.S. officer’s name,
the disclosure must have been intentional, the accused must have known
the person was a covert officer and the identity must not have been
disclosed earlier.
The first public mention of Wilson’s mission to Niger, albeit
without identifying him by name, was in the New York Times on May 6, in
a column by Nicholas D. Kristof. Kristof had been on a panel with
Wilson four days earlier, when the former ambassador said State
Department officials should know better than to say the United States
had been duped by forged documents that allegedly had proved a deal for
the uranium had been in the works between Iraq and Niger.
Wilson said he told Kristof about his trip to Niger on the condition
that Kristof must keep his name out of the column. When the column
appeared, it created little public stir, though it set a number of
reporters on the trail of the anonymous former ambassador. Kristof
confirmed that account.
The column mentioned the alleged role of the vice president’s office
for the first time. That was when Cheney aides became aware of Wilson’s
mission and they began asking questions about him within the
government, according to an administration official.
In the meantime, Wilson was pressing his case. He briefed two
congressional committees conducting inquiries into why the president
had mentioned the uranium allegation in his Jan. 28 State of the Union
address. He also began making frequent television appearances.
In early June, Wilson told his story to The Washington Post on the
condition that his name be withheld. On June 12, The Post published a
more complete account than Kristof’s of Wilson’s trip. Wilson has now
given permission to The Post to identify him as one source for that
article.
By that time, officials in the White House, Cheney’s office, the CIA
and the State Department were familiar with Wilson and his mission to
Niger.
Starting that week, the officials repeatedly played down the
importance of Wilson’s trip and its findings, saying it had been
authorized within the CIA’s nonproliferation section at a low level
without requiring the approval of senior agency officials. No one
brought up Wilson’s wife, and her employment at the agency was not
known at the time the article was published.
Wilson’s oral report to a CIA officer had been turned into a routine
one-and-a-half page CIA intelligence memo to the White House and other
agencies. By tradition, his identity as the source, even though he went
under the auspices of the CIA, was not disclosed.
“This gent made a visit to the region and chatted up his friends,”
a senior intelligence official said last June in describing the
agency’s view of the mission. Regarding the allegation about Iraq
seeking uranium, the official said: “He relayed back to us that they
said it was not true and that he believed them.”
The Post article generated little public response. But behind the
scenes, Bush officials were concerned. “After the June story, a lot of
people in government were scurrying around asking who is this envoy and
why is he saying these things,” a senior administration official said.
Wilson said he attempted to increase pressure on the White House
the day after the June 12 article was published by calling some present
and former senior administration officials who know national security
adviser Condoleezza Rice. He wanted them to tell Rice that she was
wrong in her comment on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on June 8 that there may
be some intelligence “in the bowels of the agency,” but that no one
around her had any doubts about the uranium story.
Wilson said those officials told him Rice was not interested and he
should publish his story in his own name if he wanted to attract
attention.
On July 6, Wilson went public. In an interview published in The
Post, Wilson accused the administration of “misrepresenting the facts
on an issue that was a fundamental justification for going to war.” In
an opinion article the same day in the New York Times, he wrote that
“some of the intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was
twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.”
On “Meet the Press” that day, Wilson said: “Either the
administration has some information that it has not shared with the
public or, yes, they were using the selective use of facts and
intelligence to bolster a decision in the case that had already been
made, a decision that had been made to go war.”
On July 7, the White House admitted it had been a mistake to include
the 16 words about uranium in Bush’s State of the Union speech. Four
days later, with the controversy dominating the airwaves and drowning
out the messages Bush intended to send during his trip in Africa, CIA
Director George J. Tenet took public blame for failing to have the
sentence removed.
That same week, two top White House officials disclosed Plame’s
identity to least six Washington journalists, an administration
official told The Post for an article published Sept. 28. The source
elaborated on the conversations last week, saying that officials
brought up Plame as part of their broader case against Wilson.
“It was unsolicited,” the source said. “They were pushing back. They used everything they had.”
Novak has said he began interviewing Bush officials about Wilson
shortly after July 6, asking why such an outspoken Bush policy critic
was picked for the Niger mission. Novak reported that Wilson’s wife
worked at the CIA on weapons of mass destruction and that she was the
person who suggested Wilson for the job.
Officials have said Wilson, a former ambassador to Gabon and
National Security Council senior director for African affairs, was not
chosen because of his wife.
On July 12, two days before Novak’s column, a Post reporter was told
by an administration official that the White House had not paid
attention to the former ambassador’s CIA-sponsored trip to Niger
because it was set up as a boondoggle by his wife, an analyst with the
agency working on weapons of mass destruction. Plame’s name was never
mentioned and the purpose of the disclosure did not appear to be to
generate an article, but rather to undermine Wilson’s report.
After Novak’s column appeared, several high-profile reporters told
Wilson that they had received calls from White House officials drawing
attention to his wife’s role. Andrea Mitchell of NBC News said she
received one of those calls.
Wilson said another reporter called him on July 21 and said he had
just hung up with Bush’s senior adviser, Karl Rove. The reporter quoted
Rove as describing Wilson’s wife as “fair game,” Wilson said. Newsweek
has identified that reporter as MSNBC television host Chris Matthews.
Spokespeople said Matthews was unavailable for comment.
McClellan, the White House spokesman, has denied that Rove was
involved in leaking classified material but has refused to discuss the
possibility of a campaign to call attention to the revelations in
Novak’s column.
On July 17, the Time magazine Web site reported that “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.” On July 22, Wilson appeared on NBC’s “Today” show and
said that disclosing the name of a U.S. intelligence officer would be
“a breach of national security,” could compromise that officer’s entire
network of contacts and could be a violation of federal law.
Wilson said that brought an immediate halt to the reports he had
been getting of anonymous attacks on him by White House officials.
An administration source said, “One of the greatest mysteries in all
this is what was really the rationale for doing it and doing it this
way.”
© 2003 washingtonpost.com
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