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Have been re-reading articles on the rather sudden coming apart of the administration's Iraq-Niger uranium claims in March 2003 literally as the US invaded Iraq, and on the evolution of the investigation of the outting of Valerie Plame, from when the Justice Department investigation of the leak was announced in late September 2003. The timelines in these two articles from back in the fall of 2003 are helpful for going back and tracing what caught the White House's attention about the Niger yellowcake claims unravelling. What's striking is it wasn't the facts of the case coming apart that seemed to get the administration most exercised, but what they perceived and responded to as not just a partisan attack, but a partisan attack on those claims coming from both Wilson and the CIA.
This WaPo article by Dana Priest and Karen DeYoung from March 22, 2003 is one of the first press deconstructions of the Niger uranium fiasco. A wave of stories in the US and Europe which followed added to the story of the crude forgeries. But it seemed to be not those reports on the facts of the case that most raised the administration's ire, but this oped by the NYT's Nick Kristof from May 6, 2003, anonymously sourced by Wilson, that led to the chain of events in which several Bush administration officials coordinated an effort to try to get the press to stop reporting on Wilson's claims, by telling reporters that Wilson was a partisan who only got the job as a boondoggle from his wife, a CIA operative on WMD issues. What's also remarkable is how much the administration seemed to perceive Wilson's comments to Kristof and Pincus and other journalists as a parallel effort to or a cipher for the CIA's perceived leaking to the press that it long ago expressed doubts about the Niger yellowcake claims. The administration wanted to target Wilson, but was his wife targeted only because she was Wilson's wife, or also because she worked for the CIA? Two birds with one stone?
The evidence that it was Kristof's May 6, 2003 oped on Wilson's trip that got things rolling in terms of an apparently coordinated effort from some people in the administration to target Wilson/Plame is coming to light in this past week's reports on the timing of the State Department INR memo on how Wilson got sent to Niger in the first place. In that May 6, 2003 oped, Kristof wrote:
Kristof's column provoked this administration reaction on behalf of Cheney's office, as reported by Walter Pincus in the Washington Post June 12, 2003:I'm told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the vice president's office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger. In February 2002, according to someone present at the meetings, that envoy reported to the C.I.A. and State Department that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged.
The envoy reported, for example, that a Niger minister whose signature was on one of the documents had in fact been out of office for more than a decade. In addition, the Niger mining program was structured so that the uranium diversion had been impossible. The envoy's debunking of the forgery was passed around the administration and seemed to be accepted — except that President Bush and the State Department kept citing it anyway.
"It's disingenuous for the State Department people to say they were bamboozled because they knew about this for a year," one insider said.
In a follow up column June 13, 2003, Kristof reports on administration reaction to his May oped on Wilson/Niger:...The CIA's decision to send an emissary to Niger was triggered by questions raised by an aide to Vice President Cheney during an agency briefing on intelligence circulating about the purported Iraqi efforts to acquire the uranium, according to the senior officials. Cheney's staff was not told at the time that its concerns had been the impetus for a CIA mission and did not learn it occurred or its specific results.
Cheney and his staff continued to get intelligence on the matter, but the vice president, unlike other senior administration officials, never mentioned it in a public speech. He and his staff did not learn of its role in spurring the mission until it was disclosed by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof on May 6, according to an administration official...
Kristof's June 13 column appeared on a Friday, which would have put Rice's Meet the Press appearance that he referenced on Sunday June 8, 2003. And we now know from Saturday's NYT report that a State Department INR memo on Wilson supposedly getting sent to Niger because his CIA wife suggested him that is "of intense interest" to Plame-leak special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is dated on June 10, 2003. Writes the NYT:Condoleezza Rice was asked on "Meet the Press" on Sunday about a column of mine from May 6 regarding President Bush's reliance on forged documents to claim that Iraq had sought uranium in Africa. That was not just a case of hyping intelligence, but of asserting something that had already been flatly discredited by an envoy investigating at the behest of the office of Vice President Dick Cheney.
Ms. Rice acknowledged that the president's information turned out to be "not credible," but insisted that the White House hadn't realized this until after Mr. Bush had cited it in his State of the Union address.
And now an administration official tells The Washington Post that Mr. Cheney's office first learned of its role in the episode by reading that column of mine. Hmm. I have an offer for Mr. Cheney: I'll tell you everything I know about your activities, if you'll tell me all you know...
Newsweek reports today that in fact this State INR memo on how Wilson was sent to Niger was actually prepared in May -- perhaps after Kristof's first column on the Niger issue sourced anonymously by Wilson. Reports Newsweek:The memorandum was dated June 10, 2003, nearly four weeks before Mr. Wilson wrote an Op-Ed article for The New York Times in which he recounted his mission and accused the administration of twisting intelligence to exaggerate the threat from Iraq. The memorandum was written for Marc Grossman, then the under secretary of state for political affairs, and it referred explicitly to Valerie Wilson as Mr. Wilson's wife, according to a government official who reread the document on Friday.
When Mr. Wilson's Op-Ed article appeared on July 6, 2003, a Sunday, Richard L. Armitage, then deputy secretary of state, called Carl W. Ford Jr., the assistant secretary for intelligence and research, at home, a former State Department official said. Mr. Armitage asked Mr. Ford to send a copy of the memorandum to Mr. Powell, who was preparing to leave for Africa with Mr. Bush, the former official said. Mr. Ford sent it to the White House for transmission to Mr. Powell.
It is not clear who asked for the memorandum, but in the weeks before it was written, there were several accounts in newspapers about an unnamed former diplomat's trip to Africa seeking intelligence about Iraq's nuclear program. On May 6, 2003, Nicholas D. Kristof, a columnist for The Times, wrote of a "former U.S. ambassador to Africa" who had reported to the C.I.A. and the State Department that reports of Iraq seeking to acquire uranium in Niger were "unequivocally wrong."
The memorandum was prepared at the State Department, relying on notes by an analyst who was involved in meetings in early 2002 to discuss whether to send someone to Africa to investigate allegations that Iraq was pursuing uranium purchases. The C.I.A. was asked by Mr. Cheney's office and the State and Defense Departments to look into the reports.
According to a July 9, 2004, Senate Intelligence Committee report, the notes described a Feb. 19, 2002, meeting at C.I.A. headquarters on whether Mr. Wilson should go to Niger.
The notes, which did not identify Ms. Wilson or her husband by name, said the meeting was "apparently convened by" the wife of a former ambassador "who had the idea to dispatch" him to Niger because of his contacts in the region. Mr. Wilson had been ambassador to Gabon..
About this classified State INR memo, we note not just its timing being written in the days after apparently Cheney's office became focused on Wilson's contention via Kristof's column that his office should have known about the findings of Wilson's Niger trip, and that its information about Wilson's wife's role in his trip is apparently fraudulent, but that it was apparently circulated or summarized to conservative news outlets, including the Wall Street Journal and Talon News' Jeff Gannon, in the days and weeks after the Justice Department announced its investigation into who leaked Plame's identity. Check out this WSJ article on the classified memo on how Wilson got the trip -- and how closely it seems to track with what Gannon was told too.In May, the State Department's intelligence unit had prepared a secret memorandum about the provenance of Wilson's journey and its classified results—including the curious fact that Wilson's wife, a CIA agent then working on weapons of mass destruction issues, had been involved in planning the mission, and had even suggested that her husband undertake it. Still, there had been no cause to criticize Wilson—let alone mention his wife.
But then Wilson went public...
On this last point, correspondent EW notes this morning "One more point. Novak and now Cooper (in his Time story today) say Rove talked about declassifying something that would discredit Wilson (Novak mentioned a memo, Cooper only 'something'). But they never did declassify it. I wonder why, if they were willing to leak what is presumably the same memo later in the year?"
(And indeed Matt Cooper reports today, "The notes, and my subsequent e-mails, go on to indicate that Rove told me material was going to be declassified in the coming days that would cast doubt on Wilson's mission and his findings.")
It seems that the conspiracy to keep attacking Wilson, Plame and the CIA via leaks of classified material including summaries of this State INR memo continued even as the investigation into who leaked Plame's name got underway.