How the Plame Affair Started

I’ve just re-read Joe Wilson’s July 2003 Times Op-Ed piece, the column that set off the Plame affair. It’s striking to read again, as it reminds me that the entire trip was set off in response to Vice President Cheney’s attempt to change a CIA assessment.

Think for a moment about the scene: the CIA has developed a scenario about Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs, one which doesn’t sound threatening enough to the Vice President. So Cheney (and his assistant, Libby) shows up at the CIA offices in Langley to challenge them. It was only in response to this Vice-Presidential challenge that Wilson was asked to go to Niger. “Joe please see if we missed something about a deal to sell uranium to the Iraqis,” the CIA asks the former Ambassador.

What Wilson found is well known. He checked Niger’s small uranium industry, run by a consortium of European interests, well inspected by the IAEA, which would apparently have been unable to squirrel away a substantial sale to the government (and then to Iraq). Wilson interviewed dozens of officials and former officials and came to the same conclusion arrived at by the then US Ambassador to Niger, Ms. Owens-Kirpatrick, that there had been no deal with Iraq. Wilson reported this back to the CIA and went home.

Despite his findings, the Niger ‘deal’ reamined crucial in the explanations by the Administration of why we had to go to war in Iraq. President Bush used the Niger deal as proof of Hussein’s capabilities. Rice described a mushroom cloud that we would not want to see as the ‘smoking-gun’ proof of Hussein’s nuclear program. The war was sold as protection against the nightmare vision of a nuclear device, set off by Iraqi agents in New York or Washington. Hussein was described as an imminent threat to the US.

Let’s go back for a moment to the origins of the CIA request for a second opinion. This occurred after the Vice President himself attempted to bully a CIA analyst into changing an assessment. This was the Vice President, going to a junior analyst and telling him he’s wrong, that Hussein has these capabilities, so he’d better get on board and find them. Find them. How often does a Vice President show up to tell a junior analyst to change his assessment of events having occurred or not? Without new evidence. “Find the evidence,” he says.

One CIA official described this as something he’d never seen, in 28 years of experience in intelligence. Coupled with the willingness to then personally attack anyone who dares to speak about the truth afterwards, it makes you wonder how high up responsibility for the Plame outing goes.

EDITOR’S NOTE: According to the new Michael Isikoff story breaking today in Newsweek, Karl Rove attempted to discredit Joe Wilson shortly after his Op-Ed’s publication.In a conversation with Matt Cooper on July 11,2003, Rove claimed that Wilson was sent to Niger by his wife, Valerie Plame, saying she “apparently works at the agency on wmd [weapons of mass destruction] issues.’

Rove’s deep background comments, which preceded the Novak article outing Plame, were intended to establish that Wilson’s findings were tainted. Cooper’s e-mail stated that Rove said, "not only the genesis of the trip is flawed an[d] suspect but so is the report. he [Rove] implied strongly there's still plenty to implicate iraqi interest in acquiring uranium fro[m] Niger ... "

We’ll see how close Rove has come to the legal definition of compromising an undercover agent as the case unfolds (his language was careful, note the use of word “apparently”), but the extent of this Administration’s willingness to engage in personal attacks at the most vicious level is becoming clearer and clearer. National Security seems not to have been an issue for Rove, when a political bloodbath was the object. How far up this will go is still an open question.