Pieces of the Puzzle

Special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald is investigating how the occupation of CIA operative Valerie Plame was made public in 2003 and whether Bush administration officials broke a federal law that protects the identities of covert personnel. The probe centers on disclosures and articles in 2003, touched off by an opinion article by Plame’s husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, that was critical of the Bush administration’s use of intelligence.

Here are excerpts of related writings and reporting from that time, some public and some not officially disclosed:

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July 6, 2003

An opinion article by Wilson, titled “What I Didn’t Find in Africa,” is published in the New York Times.

Did the Bush administration manipulate intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs to justify an invasion of Iraq?

Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.

For 23 years, from 1976 to 1998, I was a career foreign service officer and ambassador. In 1990, as charge d’affaires in Baghdad, I was the last American diplomat to meet with Saddam. (I was also a forceful advocate for his removal from Kuwait.) After Iraq, I was President George H.W. Bush’s ambassador to Gabon and Sao Tome and Principe; under President Bill Clinton, I helped direct Africa policy for the National Security Council.

It was my experience in Africa that led me to play a small role in the effort to verify information about Africa’s suspected link to Iraq’s nonconventional weapons programs. Those news stories about that unnamed former envoy who went to Niger? That’s me.

In February 2002, I was informed by officials at the CIA that Vice President Dick Cheney’s office had questions about a particular intelligence report. While I never saw the report, I was told that it referred to a memorandum that documented the sale of uranium yellowcake -- a form of lightly processed ore -- by Niger to Iraq in the late 1990s. The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story.

After consulting with the State Department (and through it with Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick, the U.S. ambassador to Niger), I agreed to make the trip. The mission I undertook was discreet but by no means secret. While the CIA paid my expenses (my time was offered pro bono), I made it abundantly clear to everyone I met that I was acting on behalf of the U.S. government.

In late February 2002, I arrived in Niger’s capital, Niamey, where I had been a diplomat in the mid-1970’s and visited as a National Security Council official in the late-90’s....

The next morning, I met with Ambassador Owens-Kirkpatrick at the embassy. For reasons that are understandable, the embassy staff has always kept a close eye on Niger’s uranium business. I was not surprised, then, when the ambassador told me that she knew about the allegations of uranium sales to Iraq -- and that she felt she had already debunked them in her reports to Washington. Nevertheless, she and I agreed that my time would be best spent interviewing people who had been in government when the deal supposedly took place, which was before her arrival.

I spent the next eight days ... meeting with dozens of people: current government officials, former government officials, people associated with the country’s uranium business. It did not take long to conclude that it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place....

Those are the facts surrounding my efforts. The vice president’s office asked a serious question. I was asked to help formulate the answer. I did so, and I have every confidence that the answer I provided was circulated to the appropriate officials within our government....

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July 7, 2003

In a White House briefing, reporters ask Press Secretary Ari Fleischer about Wilson’s article.

Reporter: Can you give us the White House account of Ambassador Wilson’s account of what happened when he went to Niger and investigated the suggestions that Niger was passing yellowcake to Iraq?...

Mr. Fleischer: Well, there is zero, nada, nothing new here. Ambassador Wilson, other than the fact that now people know his name, has said all this before. But the fact of the matter is in his statements about the Vice President -- the Vice President’s office did not request the mission to Niger. The Vice President’s office was not informed of his mission and he was not aware of Mr. Wilson’s mission until recent press accounts -- press reports accounted for it.

So this was something that the CIA undertook as part of their regular review of events, where they sent him. But they sent him on their own volition, and the Vice President’s office did not request it. Now, we’ve long acknowledged -- and this is old news, we’ve said this repeatedly -- that the information on yellowcake did, indeed, turn out to be incorrect.

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July 7-9, 2003

State Department memo

As the administration deals with fallout from Wilson’s article, a memo from the State Department -- on how Wilson came to be sent to Niger and the role his wife may have played in that decision -- is reportedly circulated.

The memo was seen aboard Air Force One in the hands of then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, sources close to the investigation have told the New York Times, according to an article published Saturday, and the Los Angeles Times, in an article published today.

Powell, along with other White House officials and members of the media, was accompanying President Bush on a tour of African nations.

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July 9, 2003

Syndicated columnist Robert Novak calls White House senior advisor Karl Rove.

Rove told federal investigators that in his conversation with Novak, it was the columnist who used the name of Valerie Plame, a person familiar with his testimony told the Los Angeles Times on Friday.

After Novak laid out his plans to write about Wilson’s 2002 trip to Niger, the source said, Rove indicated that he, too, had heard about the involvement of Wilson’s wife. Rove’s comments to Novak appeared to give the columnist at least indirect confirmation of Plame’s CIA role.

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July 11, 2003

Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper and Rove have a telephone conversation.

E-mail from Cooper to his bureau chief, as reported by Newsweek:

“Subject: Rove/P&C;” (for personal and confidential), Cooper began. “Spoke to Rove on double super secret background for about two mins before he went on vacation.... “

Cooper writes that Rove told him Wilson’s trip had not been authorized by “DCIA”--CIA Director George Tenet--or Vice President Dick Cheney. Rather, “it was, KR said, wilson’s wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd [weapons of mass destruction] issues who authorized the trip.”

Cooper finished, “please don’t source this to rove or even WH [White House],” and suggested another reporter check with the CIA.

E-mail from Rove to Stephen Hadley, then deputy national security advisor, as reported by the Associated Press.

“Matt Cooper called to give me a heads-up that he’s got a welfare reform story coming....

“When he finished his brief heads-up, he immediately launched into Niger. Isn’t this damaging? Hasn’t the president been hurt? I didn’t take the bait, but I said if I were him, I wouldn’t get Time far out in front on this.”

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July 14, 2003

Novak first uses Valerie Plame’s name in a syndicated column titled “Mission to Niger.”

WASHINGTON -- The CIA’s decision to send retired diplomat Joseph C. Wilson to Africa in February 2002 to investigate possible Iraqi purchases of uranium was made routinely at a low level without Director George Tenet’s knowledge. Remarkably, this produced a political firestorm that has not yet subsided.

Wilson’s report that an Iraqi purchase of uranium yellowcake from Niger was highly unlikely was regarded by the CIA as less than definitive, and it is doubtful Tenet ever saw it. Certainly, President Bush did not, prior to his 2003 State of the Union address, when he attributed reports of attempted uranium purchases to the British government....

This misinformation, peddled by Italian journalists, spread through the U.S. government. The White House, State Department and Pentagon, and not just Vice President Dick Cheney, asked the CIA to look into it.

That’s where Joe Wilson came in. His first public notice had come in 1991 after 15 years as a Foreign Service officer when, as U.S. charge [d’affaires] in Baghdad, he risked his life to shelter in the embassy some 800 Americans from Saddam Hussein’s wrath ....

Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson’s wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him....

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July 17, 2003

An online article, titled “A War on Wilson?” by reporter Matt Cooper and two others, is posted on Time.com.

Has the Bush Administration declared war on a former ambassador who conducted a fact-finding mission to probe possible Iraqi interest in African uranium? Perhaps.

Former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson raised the Administration’s ire with an op-ed piece in The New York Times on July 6 saying that the Administration had “twisted” intelligence to “exaggerate” the Iraqi threat. Since then Administration officials have taken public and private whacks at Wilson, charging that his 2002 report, made at the behest of U.S. intelligence, was faulty and that his mission was a scheme cooked up by mid-level operatives. George Tenet, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, took a shot at Wilson last week as did ex-White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer. Both contended that Wilson’s report on an alleged Iraqi effort to purchase uranium from Niger, far from undermining the president’s claim in his State of the Union address that Iraq sought uranium in Africa, as Wilson had said, actually strengthened it. And some government officials have noted to TIME in interviews (as well as to syndicated columnist Robert Novak) that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, is a CIA official who monitors the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. These officials have suggested that she was involved in her husband’s being dispatched [to] Niger to investigate reports that Saddam Hussein’s government had sought to purchase large quantities of uranium ore ... which is used to build nuclear devices.

In an interview with TIME, Wilson ... angrily said that his wife had nothing to do with his trip to Africa....

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Oct. 1, 2003

In another syndicated column, “The CIA Leak,” Novak revisits the story.

WASHINGTON -- I had thought I never again would write about retired diplomat Joseph Wilson’s CIA-employee wife, but feel constrained to do so now that repercussions of my July 14 column have reached the front pages of major newspapers and led off network news broadcasts. My role and the role of the Bush White House have been distorted and need explanation....

To protect my own integrity and credibility, I would like to stress three points. First, I did not receive a planned leak. Second, the CIA never warned me that the disclosure of Wilson’s wife working at the agency would endanger her or anybody else. Third, it was not much of a secret....

This story began July 6 when Wilson went public and identified himself as the retired diplomat who had reported negatively to the CIA in 2002 on alleged Iraq efforts to buy uranium yellowcake from Niger. I was curious why a high-ranking official in President Bill Clinton’s National Security Council (NSC) was given this assignment. Wilson had become a vocal opponent of President Bush’s policies in Iraq after contributing to Al Gore in the last election cycle and John Kerry in this one.

During a long conversation with a senior administration official, I asked why Wilson was assigned the mission to Niger. He said Wilson had been sent by the CIA’s counter-proliferation section at the suggestion of one of its employees, his wife. It was an offhand revelation from this official, who is no partisan gunslinger. When I called another official for confirmation, he said: “Oh, you know about it” ....

At the CIA, the official designated to talk to me denied that Wilson’s wife had inspired his selection but said she was delegated to request his help. He asked me not to use her name, saying she probably never again will be given a foreign assignment but that exposure of her name might cause “difficulties” if she travels abroad. He never suggested to me that Wilson’s wife or anybody else would be endangered. If he had, I would not have used her name. I used it in the sixth paragraph of my column because it looked like the missing explanation of an otherwise incredible choice by the CIA for its mission.

How big a secret was it? It was well known around Washington that Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA. Republican activist Clifford May wrote Monday, in National Review Online, that he had been told of her identity by a non-government source before my column appeared and that it was common knowledge. Her name, Valerie Plame, was no secret either, appearing in Wilson’s “Who’s Who in America” entry.

A big question is her duties at Langley. I regret that I referred to her in my column as an “operative,” a word I have lavished on hack politicians for more than 40 years. While the CIA refuses to publicly define her status, the official contact says she is “covered” -- working under the guise of another agency. However, an unofficial source at the Agency says she has been an analyst, not in covert operations....