CIA
Leak Path: Cheney, Libby, Woodward
By Jason Leopold
09 March, 2006
Countercurrents.org
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.
This report first appeared
on TruthOut
Jason Leopold is the author
of the forthcoming memoir, NEWS JUNKIE, to be published in April on
Process/Feral House Books. Visit www.newsjunkiebook.com for a preview
and to read an excerpt
© 2006 Jason Leopold