In My Time - Dick Cheney [213]
On July 6, 2003, the retired ambassador, Joe Wilson, apparently tired of anonymity, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times titled “What I Didn’t Find in Africa.” Wilson said that in response to my request for more information, the CIA had sent him to Niger, paying his expenses, but not for his time, which he donated “pro bono.” As a result of his trip, he said, he concluded that the story about Iraq trying to acquire uranium in Niger was false, and he asserted that I surely must have been told that by the CIA. To round things out, Wilson brought up the president’s statement in the State of the Union address and accused the administration of twisting intelligence in order to justify the war.
I often clipped pieces out of newspapers, and that’s what I did with Wilson’s op-ed. I wrote a few comments in the margin that expressed my consternation: “Have they done this sort of thing before? Send an ambassador to answer a question? Do we ordinarily send people out pro bono to work for us? Or did his wife send him on a junket?”
After the op-ed appeared, there was a debate inside the White House, and at least one discussion in the Oval Office, about whether we should apologize for the inclusion of “the sixteen words” in the president’s State of the Union speech. The CIA had cleared the president’s address; but now with a spotlight on the words, Director Tenet was saying that they didn’t rise to an appropriate level of certainty. Some on the president’s senior staff believed that if we issued an apology, the story would go away. I strongly opposed the idea. An apology would only fan the flames, and why apologize when the British had, in fact, reported that Iraq had sought a significant amount of uranium in Africa? The sixteen words were true.
It is worth noting at this point in a complicated story that when the British government later investigated prewar intelligence on Iraq, they confirmed their reporting. “Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999,” the Butler Review noted, and “the British Government had intelligence from several different sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium.” The British not only stood by their intelligence, they concluded that the statement in President Bush’s State of the Union speech was “well-founded.”
I was under the impression that the president had decided against a public apology, and was therefore surprised a few days later when National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice told the White House press pool, “We wouldn’t have put it in the speech if we had known what we know now.” The result was the conflagration I had predicted. The media immediately wanted to know who was responsible. Suddenly the White House staff was consumed with reviewing drafts of the President’s State of the Union speech, going over communications with the CIA about the speech, and poring through previous speeches to determine how the sixteen words got into the speech. First George Tenet and later Steve Hadley, the deputy national security advisor, issued statements accepting the blame. It was a ridiculous situation—particularly in light of the fact that the sixteen words were, as the British put it, “well-founded.”
Rice realized sometime later that she had made a major mistake by issuing a public apology. She came into my office, sat down in the chair next to my desk, and tearfully admitted I had been right. Unfortunately, the damage was done. George Tenet was furious at having had to apologize. He would later write that after the sixteen words “my relationship with the administration was forever changed.” As Tenet would also recount in his book, while he was still smarting from making an apology, Colin Powell invited him over to his house in McLean and told him that although he, Tenet, still had support in the White House, he also had people trying to pull the rug out from under him and that I was chief