[Mb-civic] CIA Leak Path: Cheney, Libby, Woodward By Jason Leopold

[Michael Butler]

    CIA Leak Path: Cheney, Libby, Woodward
    By Jason Leopold
    t r u t h o u t | Report

    Monday 06 March 2006

    In mid-June 2003, when former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's criticism
against the White House's use of pre-war Iraq intelligence started to make
national headlines, Vice President Dick Cheney told his former chief of
staff and close confidant I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby to leak classified
intelligence data on Iraq's nuclear ambitions to a legendary Washington
journalist in order to undercut the charges made against the Bush
administration by the former ambassador.

    On June 27, 2003, Bob Woodward, the Pulitzer Prize winning reporter,
became the first journalist to whom Libby leaked a portion of the classified
National Intelligence Estimate that purportedly showed how Iraq tried to
acquire yellowcake uranium from Niger.

    This story is based on interviews with current and former administration
officials who work or worked at the CIA, the State Department and the
National Security Council. All of the individuals are familiar with the
events that took place in the days that led up to Libby's meeting with
Woodward and other journalists in which the NIE was discussed.

    Woodward, currently an assistant managing editor of the Washington Post,
did not return calls for comment. Leonard Downie, the executive editor of
the Post, would not comment for this story. A spokeswoman for Cheney said
she could not comment for this story, and attorneys for Libby did not return
calls for comment.

    Libby was indicted in October on five-counts of perjury, obstruction of
justice, and lying to investigators related to his role in the leak of
covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, Ambassador Wilson's wife.

    The leak of the NIE to Woodward was orchestrated by Cheney and Libby in
mid-June 2003 in hopes that Woodward would write a story for the Washington
Post that would contradict the assertions made by Wilson - that there was no
truth to intelligence cited by the Bush administration on numerous occasions
that Iraq tried to purchase 500 tons of uranium from Niger.

    Just two weeks earlier, Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus wrote an
article attacking the administration's use of the Niger uranium allegations
in President Bush's January 28, 2003 State of the Union address. Pincus's
article was based on an unnamed source - later learned to be Joseph Wilson -
who called into question the veracity of the White House's use of the
documents that supposedly proved Iraq sought uranium from Niger.

    Cheney and then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley led a
campaign beginning in March 2003 to discredit Wilson, according to current
and former State Department and CIA officials. Although the officials said
they helped prepare negative information on Wilson about his personal and
professional life and had given it to Libby and Cheney, Wilson seemed to
drop off the radar once the Iraq war started on March 19, 2003.

    With no sign of weapons of mass destruction to be found in Iraq, news
accounts started to call into question the credibility of the
administration's pre-war intelligence. In May 2003, Wilson re-emerged at a
political conference in Washington sponsored by the Senate Democratic Policy
Committee. There he told the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff that
he had been the special envoy who traveled to Niger in February 2002 to
check out allegations that Iraq tried to purchase uranium from the country.
He told Kristoff that he briefed a CIA analyst that the claims were untrue.
Wilson said he believed the administration had ignored his report and had
been dishonest with Congress and the American people.

    Then rumors started to swirl inside the Beltway in mid-June 2003 that
Wilson would soon go public and reveal that he was tapped by the CIA to
travel to Niger a year earlier to check out whether there was any truth to
the intelligence that claimed Iraq tried to acquire uranium from the African
country. He reported back to the CIA in March 2002 that the intelligence was
bogus.

    A day or two after Pincus's article was published in the Post, a meeting
took place in Cheney's office to coordinate a response to the charges. In
attendance were Libby, Cheney, and several other senior aides to the vice
president as well as officials from the State Department, and the National
Security Council.

    It was then that Cheney decided the only way to counter Wilson's
criticism was by having Libby leak portions of the NIE to a select group of
reporters whose previous work in their respective publications had advanced
the White House's political agenda.

    For an administration that despises leaks, the decision by Cheney to
declassify highly sensitive portions of the NIE and have his most trusted
aide leak it to reporters in order to attack the former ambassador's
credibility shows how personal the Wilson issue had become for the vice
president.

    Perhaps it's just a coincidence, but the timing of an executive order
signed by President Bush supposedly granting Cheney the authority to
declassify such national security intelligence fits nicely into the time
frame when he and his senior aides spearheaded a campaign to discredit
Wilson.

    The executive order was signed on March 23, 2003, four days after the
start of the Iraq war, and two weeks after Wilson first appeared on the
administration's radar.

    In an interview with Fox News last month, Cheney said he had the legal
authority to declassify intelligence as he saw fit. There is still strong
debate about the interpretation of the executive order Cheney referred to
that provided him with such power. Cheney's comments came on the heels of a
disclosure Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald made in a letter to defense
attorneys representing Libby in the leak case.

    In the letter, Fitzgerald said Libby testified before a grand jury that
he was authorized by his "superiors" to leak portions of the NIE to
journalists.

    Woodward was first on deck. He met with Libby on June 27, 2003, in
Libby's office next to the White House. A week or so earlier, Woodward met
with two other government officials, one of whom told him in a "casual" and
off-handed manner that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA.

    Woodward said the meeting with Libby and the other government officials
had been set up simply as "confidential background interviews for my 2004
book "Plan of Attack" about the lead-up to the Iraq war, ongoing reporting
for the Washington Post and research for a book on Bush's second term to be
published in 2006."

    Woodward wrote a first-person account for the Washington Post after he
gave sworn deposition to Fitzgerald about information he had learned about
Valerie Plame Wilson. It was a shocking revelation at the time. Woodward had
publicly discounted the importance of the Plame Wilson leak and had referred
to Fitzgerald as a "junkyard dog" prosecutor. He then revealed in November
that he had been told about Plame Wilson's CIA employment in June 2003 -
before any other journalist.

    In that first person account published in the Post, the Watergate-era
journalist wrote that when he met with Libby on June 27, 2003, "Libby
discussed the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's alleged
weapons of mass destruction, mentioned "yellowcake" and said there was an
effort by the Iraqis to get it from Africa. It goes back to February '02.
This was the time of Wilson's trip to Niger."

    The information in the NIE about Niger was still considered highly
classified and extremely sensitive, and although Woodward had been the
recipient of classified information on other occasions during the course of
gathering material for his books, the data he was provided with concerning
the NIE had been authorized by Cheney in order to rebut Wilson. Woodward
never wrote a story for the Post about the intelligence information he was
given.

    Libby also met with former New York Times reporter Judith Miller,
another Pulitzer Prize winner, and leaked the same portions of the NIE when
questions were raised by Miller about Wilson's claims about the
administration's use of pre-war Iraq intelligence.

    Miller and Woodward had been handpicked by Libby to receive the
information contained in the NIE, sources familiar with the events that led
up to the meetings said, and were urged by Libby to write stories to
undercut Wilson's credibility by showing that the NIE disagreed with
Wilson's claims.

    Miller never wrote a story for the Time, either. She testified before a
grand jury that Libby gave her information in the NIE concerning Iraq's
attempt to acquire yellowcake uranium from Niger.

    In the meantime, while Libby had been leaking portions of the NIE in
late June to back up the administration's use of the Niger claims, other
officials from Cheney's office and the National Security Council had been
speaking with a select group of journalists and had revealed Plame Wilson's
identity.

    On July 6, 2003, Wilson went public. A week later, his wife's name and
covert status were published in newspaper reports.

    In the interest of fairness, any individual named in this story who
believes he has been portrayed unfairly will have the opportunity to use
this space to respond.