Sorry, Chrisie but the Waxman report says "the C.I.A. and F.B.I. had concluded the meeting probably didn’t occur". That is true. However it remains true (as I posted) that Czech intelligence still believes otherwise.
10. Czech intelligence responds. In, fact there never was a retraction, or even modification, from the relevant officials in and supervising the Czech intelligence service. On December 17th, 2001 Gabriela Bartikova, the spokeswomen for the Minister of the Interior, had said "Minister Gross had the information from BIS, and BIS guarantees the information, So we stick by that information." On May 3rd, 2002 referring to the Washington Post-Newsweek allegation, Interior Minister Stanislav Gross stated "I believe the counterintelligence services more than journalists. I draw on the Security Information Service [BIS] information and I see no reason why I should not believe it." He further explained that he had consulted with BIS chief Jiri Ruzek on May 2nd in order to find out whether the Czech intelligence service had any new information that would cast doubt on the meeting. "The answer was that they did not. Therefore, I consider the matter closed,” Gross concluded.
In other words, to date, Czech intelligence, the only agency anywhere that claimed to monitor the meeting, stood by its guarantee that the atta-al-Ani had taken place.
What changed in this ping-pong journalism therefore was not any new revelations— or retractions— but the introduction of an anonymous “senior administration source” with an unknown agenda, whose claim that “the Czechs” doubted the meeting took place, has now been directly denied by the relevant officials.
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