In My Time - Dick Cheney [214]
This was not the case. I was a strong supporter inside the White House of what Tenet and the CIA were trying to do. When there were suggestions after 9/11 that we have a group similar to the Warren Commission investigate intelligence failures, I had argued against it, saying it would too easily turn into a witch hunt and that what we needed to do was focus on preventing the next attack. As for the sixteen words, I hadn’t thought George or anyone else should apologize, particularly after I learned what struck me as a pretty startling fact. Despite what Joe Wilson was saying in the press, he had brought back information from Africa that supported the sixteen words. He had told CIA debriefers about a conversation he’d had with a former prime minister of Niger, who said that in 1999 he had met with an Iraqi delegation to discuss “expanding commercial relations” between Iraq and Niger. Since Niger’s chief export is uranium ore, the prime minister assumed the Iraqis wanted to buy yellowcake.
On July 14, 2003, Bob Novak wrote a column identifying Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, as an “operative” at the CIA and suggesting she may have recommended him for the trip to Niger. Soon thereafter, as I later learned, the CIA notified the Justice Department that the leak to Novak of where Wilson’s wife worked was a possible violation of criminal law, and the agency subsequently made a formal request for a criminal investigation. George Tenet later told me that there were close to four hundred reports of possible criminal violations involving classified information pending at the Justice Department and that they were seldom pursued. There were just too many of them, and they often involved the press, which the Justice Department was not eager to take on. But this referral involved the White House, and someone leaked news of it to Andrea Mitchell of NBC News, who on September 26, 2003, reported, “The CIA has asked the Justice Department to investigate allegations that the White House broke federal laws by revealing the identity of one of its undercover employees in retaliation against the woman’s husband, a former ambassador who publicly criticized President Bush’s since-discredited claim that Iraq had sought weapons-grade uranium from Africa.”
A criminal referral was a big story in any case, but I couldn’t help but note that we had made it bigger. By apologizing we had given reporters such as Mitchell grounds for saying that the president had been mistaken, although he had not been. Mistaken soon evolved into lied, and, of course, Joe Wilson was pushing the story line along. He “confirmed” for two reporters that the CIA had circulated his report to my office and told them that the administration “knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie.” He wrote a book, appeared in magazines, and continued to fabricate, claiming on behalf of Senator John Kerry’s presidential campaign, for example, that his “report” had exposed the “lie” in President Bush’s State of the Union speech. Senator Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, noted in the committee’s 2004 report that Wilson admitted at least twice to committee staff that he drew “on either unrelated past experiences or no information at all” for some of his claims. Wrote Roberts, “The former ambassador, either by design or through ignorance, gave the American people and, for that matter, the world a version of events that was inaccurate, unsubstantiated, and misleading.”
ON SEPTEMBER 30, 2003, the Justice Department announced it had launched an investigation. Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself from the case, and Deputy Attorney General James Comey took over the matter. He decided to appoint a special counsel and chose Patrick Fitzgerald, an old friend of his, who was U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, to investigate and possibly prosecute the case. Fitzgerald was appointed on December 30, 2003.
Among the many things that should give a thinking person pause about this whole sad story is that Patrick Fitzgerald knew from the outset