White House Striking Back?
Former Ambassador Charges Mudslinging Over Statements
By Andrea Mitchell
NBC NEWS
Monday 21 July 2003
WASHINGTON - They were just 16 words in the State of the Union address - words that we now know were misleading. And this man, retired career diplomat Joe Wilson tried to warn the administration of just that nearly a year before the speech.
Now in an NBC News exclusive, Wilson says his family is the subject of a smear campaign. Wilson tells NBC News the White House deliberately leaked his wife's identity as a covert CIA operative, damaging her future career and compromising past missions after he criticized the administration on "Meet the Press" and in the New York Times.
He told me, "It's a shot across the bow to those who might step forward, those unnamed analysts who said they were pressured by the White House for example would think twice about having their own families names being dragged through this particular mud."
The White House strongly denies the charge. In fact, Wilson was only one of three experts who warned the administration a year before the State of the Union that the Niger information didn't check out.
As previously reported on NBC News, then-Ambassador to Niger Barbro Owens-Fitzpatrick reported it was false in February 2002. So did four-star Marine Gen. Carlton Fulford two months later. So the warnings came to the White House more than a year before the State of the Union.
Wilson reached his judgment without ever seeing the forged documents that led to the charge. We showed him the documents for the first time Monday: I asked, "This is the first you are seeing the documents?" Wilson answered, "Yes. This was never a legitimate piece of information."
ITALIAN CONNECTION
And in their first TV interview Monday, the Italian journalists who first gave the documents to the U.S. Embassy in Rome tell NBC News the documents didn't even pass an amateur's test. "The smell of these documents, since the beginning, I was not convinced," says Carlo Rosell. So, the Italian magazine never printed the Niger story.
But the CIA wasn't as careful. NBC News has learned that it sent at least two secret memos to the White House only days before the State of the Union recycling the Niger charge - even though the agency knew it was false.
NBC News has learned one memo said "fragmentary reporting" on the Iraqi attempts to procure uranium from Africa is "another sign of reconstitution of a nuclear program."
POLITICAL FALLOUT
The Senate Intelligence Committee is investigating. But the committee itself is at war: Republicans blame the CIA. Democrats say the White House is ultimately responsible.
Monday night the White House tells NBC News these memos show that the CIA did not do enough to protect the president - more ammunition in what is becoming a war between the White House National Security Council and the CIA.
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Columnist Blows CIA Agent's Cover
By Timothy M. Phelps and Knut Royce
Newsday
Tuesday 22 July 2003
Washington - The identity of an undercover CIA officer whose husband started the Iraq uranium intelligence controversy has been publicly revealed by a conservative Washington columnist citing "two senior administration officials."
Intelligence officials confirmed to Newsday yesterday that Valerie Plame, wife of retired Ambassador Joseph Wilson, works at the agency on weapons of mass destruction issues in an undercover capacity - at least she was undercover until last week when she was named by columnist Robert Novak.
Wilson, while refusing to confirm his wife's employment, said the release to the press of her relationship to him and even her maiden name was an attempt to intimidate others like him from talking about Bush administration intelligence failures.
"It's a shot across the bow to these people, that if you talk we'll take your family and drag them through the mud as well," he said in an interview.
It was Wilson who started the controversy that has engulfed the Bush administration by writing in the New York Times two weeks ago that he had traveled to Niger last year at the request of the CIA to investigate reports that Iraq was trying to buy uranium there. Though he told the CIA and the State Department there was no basis to the report, the allegation was used anyway by President George W. Bush in his State of the Union speech in January.
Wilson and a retired CIA official said yesterday that the "senior administration officials" who named Plame had, if their description of her employment was accurate, violated the law and may have endangered her career and possibly the lives of her contacts in foreign countries. Plame could not be reached for comment.
"When it gets to the point of an administration official acting to do career damage, and possibly actually endanger someone, that's mean, that's petty, it's irresponsible, and it ought to be sanctioned," said Frank Anderson, former CIA Near East Division chief.
A current intelligence official said that blowing the cover of an undercover officer could affect the officer's future assignments and put them and everyone they dealt with overseas in the past at risk.
"If what the two senior administration officials said is true," Wilson said, "they will have compromised an entire career of networks, relationships and operations." What's more, it would mean that "this White House has taken an asset out of the" weapons of mass destruction fight, "not to mention putting at risk any contacts she might have had where the services are hostile."
Deputy White House Press Secretary Claire Buchan referred questions to a National Security Council spokesman who did not return phone calls last night.
"This might be seen as a smear on me and my reputation," Wilson said, "but what it really is is an attempt to keep anybody else from coming forward" to reveal similar intelligence lapses.
Novak, in an interview, said his sources had come to him with the information. "I didn't dig it out, it was given to me," he said. "They thought it was significant, they gave me the name and I used it."
Wilson and others said such a disclosure would be a violation of the law by the officials, not the columnist.
Novak reported that his "two senior administration officials" told him that it was Plame who suggested sending her husband, Wilson, to Niger.
A senior intelligence official confirmed that Plame was a Directorate of Operations undercover officer who worked "alongside" the operations officers who asked her husband to travel to Niger.
But he said she did not recommend her husband to undertake the Niger assignment. "They [the officers who did ask Wilson to check the uranium story] were aware of who she was married to, which is not surprising," he said. "There are people elsewhere in government who are trying to make her look like she was the one who was cooking this up, for some reason," he said. "I can't figure out what it could be."
"We paid his [Wilson's] air fare. But to go to Niger is not exactly a benefit. Most people you'd have to pay big bucks to go there," the senior intelligence official said. Wilson said he was reimbursed only for expenses.
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