Indictment Gives Glimpse Into a Secretive Operation
By DOUGLAS JEHL
10/29/05 " New York Times " -- -- WASHINGTON - Over a seven-week period in the spring of 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney's suite in the Old Executive Office Building appears to have served as the nerve center of an effort to gather and spread word about Joseph C. Wilson IV and his wife, a C.I.A. operative.
I. Lewis Libby Jr., the vice president's chief of staff, is the only aide to Mr. Cheney who has been charged with a crime. But the indictment alleges that Mr. Cheney himself and others in the office took part in discussions about the origins of a trip by Mr. Wilson to Niger in 2002; about the identity of his wife, Valerie Wilson; and whether the information could be shared with reporters, in the period before it was made public in a July 14, 2003, column by Robert D. Novak.
The indictment identifies the other officials only by their titles, but it clearly asserts that others involved in the discussion involved David Addington, Mr. Cheney's counsel; John Hannah, deputy national security adviser; and Catherine Martin, then Mr. Cheney's press secretary.
Mr. Grossman, Mr. Hannah, Mr. Addington and Ms. Martin have all declined to comment, citing legal advice. The fact that they were not named in the indictment suggests that they will not be charged, but all can expect to be called as witnesses in any trial of Mr. Libby, setting up a spectacle that could be unpleasant for the administration.
That Mr. Cheney and his office sparred with the C.I.A. before the invasion of Iraq has never been a secret. Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby made repeated trips to C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va., in the months before the American invasion in March 2003, and Mr. Libby was often on the phone with senior C.I.A. officials to challenge the agency's intelligence reports on Iraq. A principal focus, former intelligence officials say, was the question of whether Al Qaeda had had a close, collaborative relationship with Saddam Hussein's Iraqi government, an argument advanced publicly by Mr. Cheney but rejected by the C.I.A. intelligence analysts.
The antipathy felt by Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby toward Mr. Wilson, in the aftermath of the invasion, has also long been known. But the events spelled out in the 22-page indictment suggest a far more active, earlier effort by the vice president's office to gather information about him and his wife.
The indictment provides a rare glimpse inside a vice presidential operation that, under Mr. Cheney, has been extraordinary both for its power and its secrecy. It tracks a period in the spring of 2003, at a time when the American failure to find illicit weapons in Iraq meant that the administration's rationale for war was beginning to unravel, and when early reports about Mr. Wilson's 2002 trip, which had not yet identified him by name, raised questions about whether the White House should have known just how weak its case been, particularly involving Iraq and nuclear weapons.
By any measure, the indictment suggests that Mr. Libby and others went to unusual lengths to gather information about Mr. Wilson and his trip. An initial request on May 29, 2003, from Mr. Libby to Marc Grossman, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, led Mr. Grossman to request a classified memo from Carl Ford, the director of the State Department's intelligence bureau, and later for Mr. Grossman to orally brief Mr. Libby on its contents.
Later requests appear to have prompted C.I.A. officials to fax classified information to Mr. Cheney's office about Mr. Wilson's trip, on June 9. Mr. Cheney himself is alleged to have shared details about the nature of Ms. Wilson's job with Mr. Libby, on June 12. The indictment says that Mr. Libby first shared information about Mr. Wilson's trip with a reporter, Judith Miller of The New York Times, on June 23; but it also describes discussions involving Mr. Libby, Mr. Addington, Mr. Hannah, Ms. Martin and White House officials, about whether the information could be shared with reporters.
Among the discussions, the indictment says, were one on June 23, 2005, in which Mr. Libby is said to have told Mr. Hannah that there could be complications at the C.I.A. if information about Mr. Wilson's trip was shared publicly. It is also not clear how Mr. Cheney may have learned "from the C.I.A." that Ms. Wilson worked in the agency's counterproliferation division, a fact that meant she was part of the C.I.A.'s clandestine service, and that she might well be working undercover.
Lawyers in the case say that notes taken by Mr. Libby indicate that detail was provided to Mr. Cheney by George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, but several former intelligence officials say they do not believe that Mr. Tenet was the source of the information.
Many questions remain unanswered in the indictment. The special counsel, Mr. Fitzgerald, said that Ms. Wilson's affiliation with the C.I.A. had been classified, but he did not assert that Mr. Libby knew that she had covert status, something the prosecutor would have had to prove to support a charge under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.
It is not clear, for example, what guidance, if any, Mr. Cheney gave to Mr. Libby about whether or how to share information about Mr. Wilson's trip with reporters. Among their discussions, lawyers in the case have said, was one on July 11, 2003, on a trip to Norfolk, Va., that preceded by a day what two reporters, Ms. Miller and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, have said were conversations in which Mr. Libby mentioned Mr. Wilson's wife.
Beyond Mr. Cheney's office, some of the government officials involved in the discussions have yet to be identified. It is not clear from the indictment, for example, who faxed the "classified information from the C.I.A." about Mr. Wilson's trip to the vice president's office on June 9, or which "senior C.I.A. officer" provided further information to Mr. Libby on June 11.
Another question is whether Mr. Libby made appropriate use of the briefings provided to him by the C.I.A., a privilege afforded to only eight or nine other members of the Bush administration. The indictment says that Mr. Libby complained to a C.I.A. briefer on June 14 that C.I.A. officials were making comments critical of the Bush administration, and that he mentioned, among other things, "Joe Wilson" and "Valerie Wilson" in the context of Mr. Wilson's trip to Niger. Also still unclear is how Ms. Martin, the press secretary, may have learned in June or early July that Mr. Wilson's wife worked at the C.I.A. The indictment says that Ms. Martin learned the information from "another government official" and shared that information with Mr. Libby.
Mr. Grossman, who served under Colin L. Powell, left the government in January and is now a private consultant. Mr. Addington, still Mr. Cheney's counsel, has been a major participant in debates within the administration about the treatment of suspected terrorists, including questions surrounding interrogation rules, and whether those held at the American facility in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, should face military tribunals. Mr. Hannah, a Middle East specialist, was a main liaison between the vice president's office and Ahmad Chalabi, who as an Iraqi exile was a major force in urging the administration toward war.
Mr. Hannah and Mr. Libby were also the main authors of a 48-page draft speech prepared in January 2003 that was intended to make the administration's case for war in Iraq before the United Nations. The draft was provided to Mr. Powell, in advance of his speech to the Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003, but most of its contents were cast aside by Mr. Powell and Mr. Tenet, who during several days of review at C.I.A. headquarters rejected many claims related to Iraq, its weapons program and terrorism as exaggerated and unwarranted.
It has long been understood that Mr. Libby, Mr. Cheney and others felt hostility toward Mr. Wilson by July 6, 2003, the day the former ambassador emerged publicly, in an Op-Ed article in The New York Times and an appearance on "Meet the Press," to describe his trip to Niger and to criticize the administration.
Mr. Wilson suggested that he had taken the trip at the behest of Mr. Cheney's office, and that the office had been briefed on his findings. Neither assertion was strictly accurate (the C.I.A. had dispatched Mr. Wilson on its own, after questions from Mr. Cheney about a possible uranium deal between Iraq and Niger; and his findings, briefed orally to the agency, were never shared with Mr. Cheney's office). After Mr. Wilson's public appearance, the White House worked aggressively to challenge his statements.
But the indictment shows that, within Mr. Cheney's office, the pushback against Mr. Wilson began far earlier, at a time when the only news accounts about his trip had referred to him only as a "former ambassador." Nicholas D. Kristof of The New York Times wrote about Mr. Wilson on May 6, 2003, without naming him. But the timeline spelled out in the indictment suggests that it was a second round of news media inquiries, this time from Walter Pincus of The Washington Post, whose article appeared on June 12, that set Mr. Libby and the vice president's office on the path toward digging out the information that is now at the heart of the case against Mr. Libby.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
