by Roger Morris

The evidence of Rice’s complicity is increasingly damning as it gathers over a
six-year twisting chronology of the Nigerien uranium-Wilson-Plame affair,
particularly when set beside what we also know very well about the inside
operations of the NSC and Rice’s unique closeness to Bush, her tight grip on
her staff, and the power and reach that went with it all.

“We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." It was September
2002, and then-National Security Advisor, no-Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice was fastening on CNN perhaps the most memorable and frightening single
link in the Bush regime’s chain of lies propagandizing the war on Iraq. Behind
her carefully planted one-liner with its grim imagery was the whole larger hoax
about Saddam Hussein possessing or about to acquire weapons of mass
destruction, a deception as blatant and inflammatory as claims of the Iraqi
dictator’s ties to Al Qaeda.

Rice’s demagogic scare tactic was also very much part of the tangled history of
alleged Iraqi purchases of uranium from Niger, the fabrication leading to
ex-Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s now famous exposé of the fraud, the
administration’s immediate retaliatory “outing” of Wilson’s wife Valerie Plame
as a CIA operative, and now the revelation that the President’s supreme
political strategist Karl Rove and Vice President Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff
Lewis Libby were involved in that potentially criminal leak, ­altogether the most
serious political crisis Bush has faced. In fact, though her pivotal role has
been missed entirely ­or deliberately ignored­ in both the media feeding frenzy
and the rising political clamor, now-Secretary of State Rice was also deeply
embroiled in the Niger uranium-Plame scandal, arguably as much as or more so
than either Rove or Libby.

For those who know the invariably central role of the NSC Advisor in sensitive
political subjects in foreign policy and in White House leaks to the media as
well as tending of policy, especially in George W. Bush’s rigidly disciplined,
relentlessly political regime, Rice by both commission and omission was
integral in perpetrating the original fraud of Niger, and then inevitably in
the vengeful betrayal of Plame’s identity. None of that spilling of secrets for
crass political retribution could have gone on without her knowledge and
approval, and thus complicity. Little of it could have happened without her
participation, if not as a leaker herself, at least with her direction and with
her scripting.

*

The evidence of Rice’s complicity is increasingly damning as it gathers over a
six-year twisting chronology of the Nigerien uranium-Wilson-Plame affair,
particularly when set beside what we also know very well about the inside
operations of the NSC and Rice’s unique closeness to Bush, her tight grip on
her staff, and the power and reach that went with it all. What follows isn’t
simple. These machinations in government never are, especially in foreign
policy. But follow the bouncing ball of Rice’s deceptions, folly, fraud and
culpability. Slowly, relentlessly, despite the evidence, the hoax of the
Iraq-Niger uranium emerges as a central thread in the fabricated justification
for war, and thus in the President’s, Rice’s, and the regime’s inseparable
credibility. The discrediting of Wilson,
in which the outing his CIA wife is irresistible, becomes as imperative for
Rice as for Rove and Libby, Bush and Cheney. And when that moment comes, she
has the unique authority, and is in a position, to do the deed. Motive, means,
opportunity ­in the classic terms of prosecution, Rice had them all.

*

1995: Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law Hussein Kamel, in charge of Iraq’s
strategic weaponry, defects to the West. He tells CIA debriefers that at his
command after the Gulf War, “All weapons, biological, chemical, missile,
nuclear, were destroyed.” His claim is supported by continuing reports of UN
inspectors and US
intelligence, including sophisticated imagery analysis by both the CIA and
Pentagon.

1999: The first rumors begin to circulate in Europe that the Iraqis may be
trying to buy “yellow cake” weapons grade uranium from Niger, a poor
West African country that earns more than half its export income from the
strategic ore. Since Iraq is known to have used only amply available Iraqi
uranium in nuclear research until its disbanding in 1991, and because Niger’s
yellow cake is produced solely at two mines owned by a French consortium and the entire output strictly
controlled and committed to sale to France, European intelligence agencies and
UN officials soon discount the story ­though the rumors persist along with
other alarming allegations by Iraqi exile groups long working to incite the US
Government to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Meanwhile, American embassies and CIA
stations in Europe routinely report the rumors in repeated, widely circulated
cable traffic to Washington
over the summer and fall of 1999. Among the recipients is the nuclear
non-proliferation section of the Clinton Presidency’s NSC staff, whose files on
Iraq, a “red flag” country,
are turned over to Rice and her staff when she assumes office eighteen months
later

January 2001: Parties unknown burgle the Nigerien embassy in Rome. Stolen from the torn-up offices are
various valuables along with stationery and official seals, which the Italian
police warn might be used to forge documents.

February 24, 2001: “Saddam Hussein has not developed any significant capacity
with respect to weapons of mass destruction,” says Secretary of State Colin
Powell. “He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors.”

July 29, 2001: “We are able to keep his [Saddam’s] arms from him,” NSC advisor
Rice tells the media. “His military forces have not been rebuilt.”
August 2001: An African informant reportedly hands Italian intelligence what
are purported to be official Nigerien documents of “great importance.” Among
them are letters apparently dealing with Niger’s
sale of uranium to Iraq,
including an alleged transaction in 2000 for some 500 tons of uranium oxide,
telltale in a weapons program. The Italians routinely pass the letters on
through NATO channels to the US, where by the fall of 2001 both State
Department and Department of Energy nuclear intelligence analysts doubt the
genuineness of the documents, and duly report their findings to Rice’s NSC
staff.

January 2002: In cables cleared by both Secretary of State Colin Powell and
Rice, the first high-level reference to the subject after 9/11, Washington asks the US
ambassador to Niger
to uncover any possible Iraqi purchases of uranium. After talks with senior
Nigerien officials and French executives in the uranium mining operations,
along with a still wider investigation by the embassy, including the CIA, the
ambassador reports back that there is no evidence of such dealings, and no
reason to suspect them.

February 2002: Vice President Cheney hears “about the possibility of Iraq trying to acquire uranium from Niger,”
according to what his chief of staff Libby later tells Time. In his daily
intelligence briefing by the CIA, as Libby relates, Cheney asks about “the
implication of the [Niger]
report.” CIA briefing officers tell Cheney and Libby of the documents passed on
months before by the Italians, including the State and Energy Department
judgment that the papers are probable forgeries.

A few days later, with the routine concurrence of Rice and her staff, Cheney
through Libby asks the CIA to look into the matter further. The Agency has no
ready experts in Niger
suitable to assign the Vice President’s requested inquiry. After routinely
canvassing the relevant offices and relatively brief discussion, they seize on
the suggestion of one of their operatives working on nuclear proliferation
issues, a mid-level CIA veteran named Valerie Plame who has worked abroad and
in Washington under ”NOC” –non-official cover in private business in contact
with several foreign sources. Her pertinent if personal recommendation for the
assignment is her husband, then-fifty-three year-old Joseph Wilson IV, a retired
Foreign Service Officer who has served briefly as Charge d’Affairs in Baghdad
in 1990 and then from 1992-1993 as US Ambassador to Gabon, a seasoned diplomat
with experience in both Iraq and West Africa, and even some specialization in
African strategic minerals.

February 19, 2002: A meeting at the CIA discusses sending Wilson
to Niger.
Attending is an analyst from the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and
Research who says the trip is unnecessary, since the US embassy in Niger and
European intelligence agencies have already disproved the story of an Iraqi
purchase ­and whose notes of the meeting, including the facts of Valerie
Plame’s CIA identity as an NOC operative on WMD and her role in recommending
her husband, will be the basis for later crucial memos in the scandal.

Despite State Department objection, the CIA decides to go ahead with the Wilson mission to satisfy the Vice President’s request,
and the former ambassador is “invited out [to CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia]
to meet with a group of people at the CIA who were interested in this subject,”
as he will remember it. Wilson
is introduced to the gathering by his wife, who then leaves the room.

In late February, with the concurrence of CIA Director George Tenet as well as
Rice and Powell, Wilson flies to Niger.

February 24, 2002: Meanwhile, to further emphasize the importance of the issue
and with Washington’s concurrence, the US Ambassador in Niger
has invited to the capital of Niamey Marine four-star General Carlton Fulford,
Jr., deputy commander of the US-European Command, which is responsible for
military relations with sub-Saharan West Africa.
Fulford meets with Niger’s
president and other senior officials on the 24th, and afterward confirms the
Ambassador’s earlier findings, as he later tells the Washington Post, that there
is no evidence of the sale of yellow cake to Iraq,
and that Niger’s
uranium supply is “secure.” The General’s report duly goes up through the chain
of his command to the Joint Chiefs in the Pentagon and on to Rice at the NSC,
Powell at State, the CIA, the Energy Department and other interested agencies.

March 5, 2002: Having met with several Nigerien officials and sources over a ten-day
visit and debriefed at length the US Embassy staff and Ambassador (who promptly
cables a report on to Powell and Rice), Wilson returns from Niger and gives CIA
officers, as they request, an oral report which is the basis for a CIA-written
memo on his trip then forwarded to Rice and Powell, and for a further CIA
debriefing for Cheney in response to his original request. Republicans will
later dispute about how categorical or emphatic Wilson’s report and its derivatives actually
are at this point. He refers to "an Algerian-Nigerien intermediary"
for Iraq who had approached Niger about sales of ore, though adds that Niger “ignored
the request.” But the essence of his conclusion is, once again, that there is
no evidence of Iraq procuring
uranium from Niger.
In de facto acceptance of this finding, the several Washington
agencies involved in the issue, including Rice and her NSC staff, make no other
effort ­beyond the US
embassy investigation, General Fulford’s trip, and the Wilson
mission­ to investigate the matter further in Niger or anywhere else.

May-June 2002: With the Iraq-Niger uranium issue apparently laid to rest, Defense
Secretary Don Rumsfeld establishes in the Pentagon, with the full knowledge of
Rice, a new Office of Special Plans, under the direction of Deputy Secretary
Paul Wolfowitz and cabal of neo-conservatives the Bush regime has assembled at
the upper civilian reaches of the Defense Department. Believing the CIA, FBI
and other agencies in myriad negative reports, including the Wilson
mission, have simply “failed” to find existing evidence of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and Saddam’s
ties to al-Qaeda, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz direct “Special Plans” to gather and interpret
its own “intelligence” on Iraq.
Meanwhile Rice takes over coordination of efforts to stymie ongoing arms
inspections of Iraq
by the United Nations.

June 26, 2002: In a meeting with Prime Minister Tony Blair and other senior British
officials at Ten Downing Street, Sir Richard Dearlove, “C,” head of MI6 British
intelligence, reports on what he found during recent Washington
conversations at the highest levels of the CIA, White House and other US official
quarters. “Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove
Saddam through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and
WMD,” as a summary records his words. “But intelligence and facts were being
fixed around the policy.”

July 2002: Concerned at the potential opposition to the war, and to coordinate
policy and media relations for the coming attack on Iraq, a special White House
Iraq Group (WHIG) is set up, chaired by White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card,
and composed of Rice, Rove, Libby, Rice’s deputy Stephen Hadley, and media
strategists Karen Hughes, a longtime Bush aide, Mary Matalin and others. The
WHIG is to plan and control carefully all high-level leaks and public
statements on Iraq
and related issues. “Everything, I mean everything, was run through them and
came out of them,” a ranking official will say of the group. “It was
understood, of course, that Condi or Hadley would clear everything from a policy
point of view, Rove and Libby would do the politics, and the rest would handle
the spin.”

August 26, 2002: “Now we know,” Vice President Cheney tells the VFW convention,
“Saddam Hussein has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.” Rice
routinely clears this speech.

September 2002: Several months earlier, the US and UN embargo of Iraq has seized
a shipment of high strength aluminum tubes, which the International Atomic
Energy Agency (IAEA) and the US State and Energy Departments duly identify as
designed solely for launch tubes for conventional artillery rockets. Despite
those expert findings, Rice now claims publicly that the tubes are “only really
suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs.”

Apparently reflecting the original rumors of the Iraq-Niger deal and the subsequent
dubious documents handed the Italians thirteen months before (copies of which
have reportedly been given to MI6 British intelligence by an Italian
journalist), a British Government White Paper on Iraq released in September
mentions that Baghdad “had recently sought significant quantities of uranium
from Africa.” Pressed on the issue by the CIA (on the basis of its now-several
reports debunking the story) to drop that statement as inaccurate, the British
claim they have sources for the assertion “aside from the discredited
[Nigerien] letters,” but never identify them. Rice is fully briefed on all
these exchanges.

(Eventually, British intelligence officials will admit the 2002 White Paper statement
on uranium from Africa was “unfounded.”
Meanwhile, however, much of official Washington
is aware of the CIA-MI6 squabble over the Niger uranium and questionable
letters. “The Brits,” a Congressional intelligence committee staffer will later
tell the New Yorker’s Sy Hersh in discussing the issue, “…placed more stock in
them than we did.”)

It’s also that September, in answer to a question in a CNN interview about what
evidence the White House has of Iraqi nuclear weapons, that Rice makes her
infamous quip, a line first authored by Mary Matalin­ “We don’t want the smoking
gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

September 26, 2002: In closed-hearing testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee (with a transcript closely reviewed by Rice), Powell refers to
“reports” of an Iraqi purchase of Nigerien uranium as “further proof” of Saddam
Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.

October 2002: Seizing on the British White Paper, despite the documented disagreement
of the CIA as well as the State and Energy Departments, the Office of Special
Plans inserts in a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq, apparently one of the few
documents Bush reads in this sequence, a reference to the British report of an
Iraq-Niger uranium transaction. Though the NIE at CIA insistence notes “different
interpretations of the significance of the Niger
documents,” and that the State Department judges them “highly dubious,” the
reference to Nigerien uranium is listed among other reasons to conclude that Iraq poses a
danger to American national security.

“Facing clear evidence of peril,” Bush says in a speech in Cincinnati that October, “we cannot wait for
the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom
cloud.” Behind the scenes, an earlier draft of the October speech has also
contained a reference to an Iraqi purchase of 500 tons of uranium from Niger, the
now-revived claim from the discredited documents of fifteen months before. CIA
Director Tenet urges that the White House take out that reference, and though
the Pentagon’s Special Plans office is pushing for inclusion of the reference,
Rice’s deputy (and eventual successor) Stephen Hadley, after two memoranda and
a phone call from Tenet, finally agrees to drop the passage. Rice is fully
briefed on all this.

December 19, 2002: As preparations are hurried for the attack on Iraq, a State
Department “Fact Sheet,” cleared by Rice, asks ominously, “Why is the Iraqi
regime hiding their uranium procurement?”

The assumption of the Niger-Iraq uranium connection now begins to appear regularly
in the President’s Daily Brief, the CIA intelligence briefing which is now also
drafted under the influence of the Office of Special Plans.

January 23, 2003: In a New York Times op-ed entitled “Why We Know Iraq is Lying,” Rice refers prominently to “Iraq’s
efforts to get uranium from abroad.”

January 28, 2003: "The British government,” Bush says in his State of the Union
litany on the dangers of Iraq,
“has [sic] learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities
of uranium from Africa.”

Rice and her staff, of course, have as always laboriously worked and reworked
the national security passages of the speech. In readying the address, Rice’s
NSC Staff assistant for nonproliferation, Robert Joseph, asks Alan Foley, a
ranking CIA expert on the subject, about the “uranium from Africa” passage,
which obviously refers to the old Niger issue. Foley says the CIA
doubts the Niger
letters and connection, has disputed the British White Paper (as Rice and
Joseph well know), and recommends that the NSC strike the reference. In typical
bureaucratic fashion, however, Foley also says it would be “technically
accurate” to say that the British had in
fact issued such a report on Iraq,
however mistaken. With the approval of Rice and her deputy Hadley, the passage
stays, becoming a major piece of “evidence” in the case for war.

February 5, 2003: In his now infamous presentation to the United Nations, a factor
in silencing many potential dissenters in Congress, Powell pointedly omits any
reference to the Nigerien uranium. The story “had not stood the test of time,”
he says later.

That February, too, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, as part of his own propaganda
for war, issues a Ten Downing Street paper called “Iraq: Its Infrastructure of
Concealment, Deception, and Intimidation,” which includes a reference to the
Nigerien uranium. Thought to be drawn from authoritative MI6 intelligence, the
paper is soon widely ridiculed, eleven of its sixteen
pages found to be copied verbatim from an old Israeli magazine.

March 7, 2003: In response to a request four months before, the State Department
finally hands over to the IAEA copies of the Niger letters, which UN experts
promptly dismiss as “not authentic” and “blatant forgeries.” "These
documents are so bad," a senior IAEA official tells the press, "that I
cannot imagine that they came from a serious intelligence agency. It depresses
me, given the low quality of the documents, that it was not stopped. At the
level it reached, I would have expected more checking.” A former high-level
intelligence official tells The New Yorker, “Somebody deliberately let
something false get in there. It could not have gotten into the system without
the agency being involved. Therefore it was an internal intention. Someone set
someone up.”

March 8, 2003: In reply to questions about the forgery, a State Department spokesman
says the US Government “fell for it.” "It was the information that we had.
We provided it,” Powell will say lamely on “Meet the Press.” “If that
information is inaccurate, fine."

March 17, 2003: Bush, in a statement cleared by Rice, repeats that ”Iraq continues
to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.”

March 19, 2003: Bush orders the invasion of Iraq.

March 21, 2003: Senator John D. Rockefeller IV (D. WVa) writes FBI Director Robert
Mueller asking for an investigation of the Niger letters. "There is a possibility,”
Rockefeller says, “that the fabrication of these [Niger] documents may be part
of a larger deception campaign aimed at manipulating public opinion and foreign
policy regarding Iraq,"

May 6, 2003: In an anonymous interview with New York Times columnist Nicholas
Kristof, Ambassador Wilson ­identified none too subtly as “a former US
Ambassador to [sic] Africa,” says about the failure to find WMDs in Iraq: “It’s
disingenuous for the State Department people to say they were bamboozled
because they knew about this [that Saddam had no nuclear program
or weapons] for a year.”

June 10, 2003: Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman asks the Bureau of Intelligence
and Research (INR) for a briefing on the Niger
uranium issue, and specifically the State Department’s opposition to the
continuing White House view that Iraq had tried to buy yellow cake.
The resulting memo is dated the same day, and drawn from notes on the February
19 meeting at the CIA on the Wilson
mission and other sources. Befitting the sensitivity of the information, the
memo is classified “Top Secret,” and contains in one paragraph, separately
marked ‘(S/NF)” for “Secret/No dissemination to foreign governments or
intelligence agencies, ” two sentences describing in passing Valerie “Wilson’s”
identity as a CIA operative and her role in the inception of the Wilson trip to
Niger. This June 10 memo reportedly does not use her maiden name Plame.

June 12, 2003: The Washington Post reports that an unnamed “former US ambassador” was sent to Niger to look
into the uranium issue and found no evidence of any Iraqi purchase.

At the State Department, Deputy Secretary Richard Armitage asks INR to prepare
a memorandum on the background of what the Post is reporting, and INR sends to
Armitage that same day a copy of the June 10 memo to Grossman. The memo is also
sent to Undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security (and future
UN Ambassador-designate) John Bolton.

July 6, 2003: Outraged by continuing references to the Nigerien uranium, Wilson breaks his anonymity with a sensational New York
Times op-ed disclosing his mission to Niger sixteen months before, and
the fact that he found no evidence of an Iraqi purchase of ore. "Based on
my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the
war," Wilson writes, "I have little choice but to conclude that some
of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to
exaggerate the Iraqi threat." He tells "Meet the Press,"
"Either the administration has information that it has not shared with the
public or ... they were using the selective use of facts and intelligence to
bolster a decision that had already been made to go to war."

Later in the day, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage calls INR Assistant
Secretary Carl W. Ford at home, and asks him to send a briefing memo to Powell
about the Niger
uranium issue. Ford simply pulls out the previous June 10 memo with its
reference to Wilson’s wife (her name now corrected from Wilson to Plame),
addresses it to Powell, and forwards the memo to Rice to be passed on to
Powell, who is due to leave the next day with the Presidential party on a trip
to Africa.

Meanwhile, the WHIG is also moving that Sunday to deal aggressively with the Wilson op-ed. They will
no longer focus on the too obviously fraudulent claim of an Iraqi purchase of
yellow cake ­White House orthodoxy before the invasion ­but will instead
discount the issue, discredit Wilson,
and shift blame for the now-embarrassing State of the Union reference. White
House
press secretary Ari Fleischer is to try to downplay and dismiss Wilson’s article
on-the-record at the next day’s press briefing, while Rice and others begin to
make off-the-record calls to the media to do the same. While pursuing their own
contacts among right-wing reporters and columnists, Rove and Libby are also to
work with CIA Director George Tenet in a statement by Tenet taking
responsibility for any inaccuracy in the State of the Union passage.

July 7, 2003: Under a barrage of questions at a 9:30 am press briefing, White
House spokesman Ari Fleischer says of the Wilson claims, “There is zero, nada,
nothing new here,’ adding that "Wilson's own report [shows] that officials
in Niger said that Iraq was seeking to contact officials in Niger about
sales." (A reference to the “Algerian-Nigerien intermediary” in Wilson’s debriefings…
"That then translates into an Iraqi effort to import a significant
quantity of uranium as the President alleged?" Wilson later that day replies to Fleischer.
"These guys really need to get serious.") But as the briefing wears
on, Fleischer’s defense grows “murkier,” as the New York Times reports, and he
seems to “concede” that the State of the Union reference to Niger uranium
“might have been flawed.”

That evening, with the White House scrambling to defend itself against Wilson’s resonating charges, Bush leaves for a trip to Africa, accompanied by Rice and Powell. Before the party
flies out of Andrews, Rice is in several meetings with Rove, Libby and other
senior aides of the WHIG.

The scene now shifts to the plush but still relatively close quarters of Air Force
One, the specially configured 747 where the accompanying media are boarded
through a rear door and funneled directly to their mid-level section closed off
from the forward official compartment, and where Administration VIPs like Rice
and Powell are in conference rooms and adjoining lounge
chairs in closer and easier proximity and informality than in any other official
venue. It is in this setting, soon after takeoff, as the New York Times will
report two years later, that Powell is seen walking around carrying the INR
June 12/July6 memo detailing Wilson’s
mission and Plame’s
identity and role in the “(S/NF)” paragraph. Powell discusses the memo with Rice
and other presidential aides on board, including press secretary Ari Fleischer.
Witnesses later see Fleischer “perusing” the memo. There are reports, too, of
several calls between the plane and the White House discussing the Wilson affair. En route
over the Atlantic, Rice and Fleischer both
call contacts at the Washington Post and New York Times “to make it clear,” the
Times will report, “that they no longer stood behind Mr. Bush’s statement about
the uranium ­the first such official concession on the sensitive issue of the
intelligence that led to the war.”

It is in these hours of late July 7 and early July 8 that Rove, Libby and other
officials get word of Plame’s identity from Air Force One. Rove and Libby will
hear of Plame in the drafting with Tenet of his mea culpa, but officials on the
plane reading the INR memo cannot know or be sure of this, and the memo’s
passages on Wilson, including his wife, are now relayed back to Washington.
Reporters later speculate that Powell might have called either Rove or Libby
with such information, but as one concludes aptly, “That was above his pay
grade.” The President himself might have read the memo and called the two
aides. But given Bush’s style and grasp, that, too, is implausible, though he
may well have been informed of the calls and given his approval. The only
official on board Air Force One with the knowledge and authority ­motive, means
and opportunity ­to instruct Rove and Libby in their leaks and so betray Plame
was Condoleezza Rice.

July 7-8, 2003: Right-wing Columnist Robert Novak is called by thus far unidentified
senior officials leaking to him that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame (they use her
maiden name), is a CIA operative who instigated her husband’s trip to Niger. “I
didn’t dig it out, it was given to me,” Novak tells Newsweek of the leak. “They
thought it was significant. They gave me the name and I used it.”

July 9, 2003: Rove discusses the Wilson
imbroglio, including the role of Wilson’s
CIA wife, with columnist Robert Novak, who identifies her by her maiden name,
Valerie Plame.

July 11, 2003: Peppered by questions about Wilson’s
charges, Bush in a press conference in Uganda says, “I gave a speech to
the nation that was cleared by the intelligence services.” That evening, aboard
Air Force One flying over East Africa, Rice
speaks at length with the media about the “clearances” of the President’s
speech. “Now I can tell you,” she says, “if the CIA, the director of central
intelligence, had said, ‘Take this out of the speech,’ it would have gone
without question.” She says nothing about the actual maneuvering behind the
now-troublesome passage, the Joseph-Foley exchange, the controversial British
memorandum US
intelligence has disputed, the shadowy history of the yellow cake fraud.

July 11, 2003: Back in Washington, working to
discredit Wilson, Rove leaks to Time’s Matthew
Cooper that “Wilson’s wife” is, in fact, in the
CIA “working on WMD” and has been behind his mission to Niger. Rove
“implied strongly,” Cooper later emails his editor, “there’s still plenty to implicate
Iraqi interest in acquiring uranium from Niger.”

After that conversation, in evidence of the central role of Rice and her staff
in the betrayal of Plame’s identity to discredit Wilson, Rove emails Rice’s NSC
deputy Hadley that he has “waved Cooper off” Wilson’s claim, and that he (Rove)
“didn’t take the bait” when Cooper offered that Wilson’s revelations had
damaged the Administration. Hadley immediately relays this message to Rice in Africa.

That same day, after extensive deliberations with Rove and Libby, CIA Director
Tenet makes a public statement that the Nigerien uranium allegation should
never have appeared in the Bush 2003 State of the Union.
"This did not rise to the level of certainty which should be required for
presidential speeches,” he confesses, “and CIA should have ensured that it was
removed,"

July 12, 2003: When asked by Cooper about Plame being CIA, Libby confirms the story to the Time reporter. That same
day, in a talk with the Washington Post’s Walt Pincus, an unidentified “senior
administration official” brings up Plame’s CIA identity, in what is now a
widely authorized leak approved by Rice as well as Rove.

July 14, 2003: Columnist Robert Novak, attributing the story to “two senior administration
officials” ­neither of which is Rove or Libby­ identifies Plame as a CIA
“operative on weapons of mass destruction” who was behind her husband’s mission
to Niger.

July 20, 2003: “Senior White House sources” call NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell
to say, “the real story here is not the 16 words [Bush’s reference to Niger uranium in the State of the Union]… but Wilson and his wife.”

July 21, 2003: On MSNBC, host Chris Mathews tells Wilson, “I just got off the phone with Karl
Rove. He says, and I quote, ‘Wilson’s
wife is fair game.’”

July 30, 2003: Alarmed about the impact of the betrayal of Plame’s identity on
current and future agents and sources abroad, the CIA asks the Justice Department
to investigate the leak, which leads to the naming of US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald as a Special Prosecutor.

September 2003: An unidentified “White House official” tells the Washington Post
that “at least six reporters” had been told about Plame before Novak’s column
appeared. The disclosures, the source says, were “purely and simply out of
revenge.”

_____________________________________________________________________________

This chronology will no doubt continue to expand in the days and weeks ahead.
There may well be a ticking time-bomb in the Grand Jury investigation of the
Plame leak that goes beyond anything we now envision.

In earlier findings in cases of reporters refusing to testify, DC Circuit Judge,
David Tatel, a distinguished jurist known for his devotion to civil liberties
and especially press freedoms, had stoutly maintained a federal privilege for
the media, shielding it from being compelled to testify except under the most
exceptional conditions. But then later joining his colleagues in ordering
Cooper and the New York Times’ Judith Miller to testify, Tatel reviewed
extensive secret information from the prosecutor, devoted eight blacked-out
pages of his judgment to the material, and concluded that the privilege he had
upheld throughout his career as a lawyer and judge had to give way before
"the gravity of the suspected crime." No other element of the scandal
bodes so ill for the Bush regime.

There is also the intriguing relationship between John Bolton, the regime’s stymied
appointee to the UN, and Judith Miller, the New York Times correspondent sent
to jail for contempt in refusing to divulge her sources on Plame even for a
story she never wrote. Bolton’s close relationship to Miller, in which many
suspect the right-wing lobbyist handed the reporter much of the fraudulent
accounts of Iraqi weaponry that ended up on the front page of the Times, may
well have encompassed as well the passing of information from the INR memo on
Plame, which Bolton saw before Powell or even
Rice.

Then, too, as the Progressive Review’s Sam Smith and Counterpunch’s Alexander
Cockburn have pointed out from their lonely perch of substance and perspective
atop what’s left of American journalism, there is, in the end, much less to the
whole story than meets the eye. In their too obvious relish of celebrity,
Wilson and Plame as heroes are as dubious as the Niger
letters. The CIA, and the Presidents who used it as a private mafia, account for
a more than half-century history far more catastrophic than a legion of seedy
Roves and Libbys or even multiple Bush regimes. Relentlessly corrupt, inept,
anachronistic, if ever an institution deserved to be “outed” and prosecuted in
its numbers, it is our vastly bloodstained intelligence agency. But as it is so
often in politics, we are left with the lesser, still needed reckoning at hand.

And, of course, the larger issue beyond Plame is the Bush regime’s Big Lie behind
the invasion of Iraq,
in which the phantom Nigerien yellowcake was an important malignant element. No
government since World War II has more blatantly invented the pretext for
waging a war of aggression. The Rove and Libby collusion only begins to peel
away the layers of the crime. Rice is the next skein to be pulled.

Her manifest failures in the fateful months before 9/11 in meeting the principal
responsibilities of the National Security Advisor ­the sheer incompetence and
shallowness that left so much intelligence uncoordinated, so much neglected or
misunderstood ­should have been enough to have run her from public office long
ago, of course, were it not for her hold on this tragically flawed president,
and her deplorable immunity amid the chronic political cowardice of both the
Democrats and the media.

Now, however, her role in the Plame scandal cannot be ignored or excused. She
alone among senior officials was knowing and complicitous at every successive
stage of the great half-baked yellow cake fraud. She alone was the White House
peer ­and in national security matters the superior ­to Rove and Libby, who
never could have acted without her collusion in peddling
Plame’s identity. She as much as anyone had a stake in smearing Wilson by any and all
means at hand. If Rove and Libby are to be held criminally or at least
politically accountable for a breach of national security, our “mushroom cloud”
secretary of state should certainly be in the dock with them.

# # # #

(This article owes a primary debt to the ground-breaking research of Professor
Gary Leupp of Tufts
University in his “Faith-Based
Intelligence,” CounterPunch.org, July 26, 2003.)

*

Roger Morris was Senior Staff on the National Security Council under both Presidents
Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, until resigning over the invasion of Cambodia. An
award winning author, he has written extensively about the Presidency and
American foreign policy.