Tangled Webs (24 page)

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Authors: James B. Stewart

Tags: #History, #United States, #General, #Law, #Ethics & Professional Responsibility

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Libby’s position was too lofty for routine media operations, but Cheney relied on him for high-level media contacts on subjects of national importance, such as security and antiterrorism. At age fifty-four, Libby was graying but still trim and athletic. He was born in Connecticut but grew up in Florida before being sent to the elite New England boarding schools Eaglebrook and Andover at an early age. He was named after his self-made father, who didn’t graduate from college, although he never used his given name, which was Irve, preferring Scooter, his childhood nickname, which followed him to boarding school.
Although active in public life since serving in the State Department in the Reagan administration, he had successfully cultivated a low profile. He had three titles in the Bush White House: assistant to the president, chief of staff to the vice president, and national security adviser to the vice president, with a top-secret security clearance. Occasionally, he said, part of his job was to convey the vice president’s or White House’s views to the press. He spent much of his day dealing with intelligence and national security issues, and each day received a briefing from the CIA.
Libby was one of the Vulcans, a small but influential group of neoconservative intellectual policy makers that included Paul Wolfowitz, Condoleezza Rice, and Donald Rumsfeld, all of whom landed prominent roles in the Bush administration. Libby took a class taught by Wolfowitz as an undergraduate at Yale, where he graduated in 1972. Wolfowitz remained a mentor, and after Libby graduated from Columbia Law School, repeatedly lured him from private law practice to work with him in government: at the State Department from 1982 to 1984, and at the Defense Department in 1989. Libby worked closely with both Wolfowitz and Cheney while Cheney was secretary of defense.
Wolfowitz also influenced Libby’s intellectual transformation from a typically liberal Vietnam-era college student (at Yale he belonged to the student Democrats) to a hawkish neoconservative preoccupied by national security issues. Still, no one thought of Libby as all that ideological or partisan. He married Harriet Grant, a lawyer who worked as the Democratic staff member for the House Judiciary Committee, and helped air Anita Hill’s challenge to Clarence Thomas’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Libby also had a literary bent. While a Yale undergraduate he’d began work on a historical novel about a group of travelers stranded by a snowstorm at an inn in Japan in 1903, just before the Russo- Japanese War. It took twenty years of intermittent effort, but he finally published
The Apprentice
in 1996. Vice President Cheney and his wife, Lynne, threw Libby a book party for the 2002 paperback publication, and the guests included the Washington media elite such as the
Washington Post
’s Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn as well as columnist Robert Novak.
For many it was hard to reconcile the romantic novelist with the sober, cerebral architect of the war with Iraq. Though he was a lawyer by training (he once represented pardoned fugitive Marc Rich), Libby’s passion was foreign affairs, and he was a key advocate of the sweeping, ambitious, and muscular U.S. foreign policy doctrine that held sway in the Bush administration, especially after September 11, 2001. But he was also a consummate bureaucrat: thorough, methodical, careful, with a lawyer’s tendency toward verbal precision. Although part of his job was to cultivate and brief reporters, almost always on an unidentified, background basis, he showed little natural aptitude or enthusiasm for this; he was not a natural gossip or raconteur, except on the relatively rare occasions–like a White House Correspondents’ Association dinner–when he would toss back several shots, usually of tequila.
Kristof’s claim that the vice president’s office had asked for an investigation of the purported uranium deal caught Libby’s attention “because that basically had to do with us.” Libby didn’t think that the vice president or anyone in the office had asked about a uranium deal.
Cathie Martin, the assistant to the vice president for public affairs, was still relatively new in her job, which included handling press inquiries. Kristof hadn’t called their office for comment, and she didn’t pay the column much attention.
Martin had worked as Mary Matalin’s deputy, and ascended to Matalin’s position when she left at the beginning of the year. Trained as a lawyer, Martin was relatively new to the media. She was a Texas native, a graduate of the University of Texas and Harvard Law School, someone friendly with many in the Bush inner circle. Her husband, Kevin Martin, was chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, a connection that gave her some added clout within the White House. She was thoughtful, thorough, and level-headed.
Within the vice president’s office, Eric Edelman, a career foreign service officer who was the deputy national security adviser to the vice president, seemed most upset about the column and said he’d look into it. Edelman told vice presidential press secretary Jennifer Millerwise that the column “isn’t right,” “didn’t make sense,” and he “wasn’t aware” of sending anyone on a factfinding mission. Ordinarily, someone would have contacted Kristof to point out these issues, but no one had a relationship with Kristof, and since they considered him openly hostile to the administration, they didn’t give it a high priority. Edelman said he’d deal with the matter, but left the office soon after to become ambassador to Turkey.
But the questions raised by the column lingered. Several weeks later, on May 29, Libby attended a regular weekly meeting of the Deputies Committee, consisting of the chief deputies to the nation’s top officials. Marc Grossman, the under secretary of state for political affairs, was representing the State Department, and Libby asked him if he knew anything about a retired ambassador who’d been sent by the CIA to Africa. Grossman told him he didn’t, and later recalled that he was a little “embarrassed” because he couldn’t answer Libby’s questions and didn’t know anything about it. He told Libby he’d find out and get back to him. A couple of days later Grossman called Libby to report that he had “some” of the answers, and that it was true that a former ambassador–Joe Wilson–had been sent by the CIA to Niger. Grossman said he knew Wilson, and thought it “best to go directly to the source.” He had spoken to Wilson, who described the trip and said he thought it had been requested by the vice president. Grossman apologized for not knowing more, and said he’d report again when he had a fuller explanation. In the meantime, he asked the State Department’s bureau of intelligence and research for a written report summarizing everything the department knew about Wilson’s trip and its origins.
The Kristof article was still stirring controversy. Kristof’s assertions had developed into a steady drumbeat of articles questioning the accuracy of the State of the Union address, and specifically the sixteen words about uranium in Africa: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” It was as if all doubts about the candor of the Bush administration, which by now were legion, were focused on that one sentence. Libby’s notes from June 9 indicate that President Bush himself was now asking about it. Apparently in response to a request from Libby, the CIA faxed him a classified report discussing Wilson’s mission. It referred to Wilson only as a former ambassador, but Wilson’s name was written in the margins, in what appears to be Cheney’s handwriting. That Sunday on
Meet the Press
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice had been questioned about the uranium claim, and had come across as uncertain and badly prepared. The Kristof column had touched a raw nerve of suspicion among the White House, the State Department, the CIA, and the Defense Department, each fearful that another arm of the administration would try to blame it for the intelligence failure and resulting war.
As one White House official recalled at the time, the issue had rapidly become “an obsession” in the White House. “Condi [Rice] was calling me at home every night from all over: what was the press, what were they saying? She was worried. She knew that once it was obvious there were no WMD, someone was going to be blamed. Bush didn’t care that much about the sixteen words, but Cheney was obsessed. So were Libby and Rove.”
That same week, Cathie Martin told Libby that the
Washington Post’
s senior national security reporter, Walter Pincus, was calling, and was “sniffing around” about the trip to Niger and the sixteen-words controversy. Maybe this might prove an opportunity to correct the record. Libby discussed this in a phone call with Vice President Cheney, and during the conversation they talked about the Kristof article and what they considered its inaccuracies. Cheney had apparently spoken to someone at the CIA–presumably Director George Tenet–and told Libby there had been “strong interest” at both the State and Defense departments in the uranium issue, suggesting that they–not the vice president’s office–might well have been behind the mission. Wilson had been debriefed by the CIA “here,” meaning in Washington. Then, Cheney said–in an “offhand, sort of curious, curiosity-type manner,” according to Libby–that Wilson’s wife worked at “the agency” in counterproliferation, all of which Libby wrote in his notes of the conversation. Libby interpreted this to mean that Cheney found this interesting but wasn’t sure how significant it might be. The conversation turned to the “talking points” Libby should use with Pincus: that the vice president didn’t know about Wilson’s mission, that he didn’t get a report on it, and that he didn’t know any documents were forged. A possible fourth point was that State or Defense had asked for the mission, but Cheney had cautioned Libby that such an assertion should come from them, not his office.
With Pincus’s deadline approaching, Libby called Robert Grenier at the CIA at 1:15 p.m. on June 11. Grenier worked in clandestine operations, and was the Iraq mission director. He knew Libby from Deputies Committee meetings, but Libby had never called him before. Libby said “Joe Wilson” was “going around town” telling his Niger uranium story, and Libby wanted to know if he had in fact been sent by the CIA and if the CIA had indicated this was because of interest on the part of the vice president’s office. Grenier thought Libby sounded “aggrieved” and “slightly accusatory” that anyone at the CIA might have told Wilson such a thing.
This was all new to Grenier, but after speaking to an agent in counterproliferation, he thought he had the answers to most of Libby’s questions. He told Libby, “Yes, in fact, it was true that the CIA had sent Ambassador Wilson to Niger” and “It wasn’t only the office of the vice president that was driving all this. There had been inquiries as well from State and Defense.”
Would the CIA state this publicly? Libby asked.
Grenier said he thought so, although he’d have to check.
Then, in passing, Grenier added that “Wilson’s wife works there [in counterproliferation] and that’s why–that’s where the idea came from.” Almost as soon as he said this, Grenier felt guilty, he recalled. Even though he hadn’t used her name, he worried that “by saying Joe Wilson’s wife was working in the CIA, in effect, I was revealing the identity of a CIA officer. That is information that we normally guard pretty closely.”
Libby returned Pincus’s call late that afternoon, apparently just after speaking to Grenier. He conveyed the points he’d discussed with the vice president, but didn’t say anything about Wilson’s wife. Pincus’s article ran the next day: “CIA Did Not Share Doubt on Iraq Data.” From the vice president’s narrow perspective, the article was a success. A “senior administration official” made clear the CIA never informed the White House about Wilson’s trip or any doubts about the uranium story, and the article quoted a “senior intelligence official” saying the CIA’s failure to do so was “extremely sloppy.” In this sense it largely corrected the impression from the Kristof article that the vice president had deliberately suppressed intelligence. But while critical of the CIA, the article was hardly flattering to the Bush administration, with a quote from a “senior CIA analyst” that “information not consistent with the administration agenda was discarded and information that was [consistent] was not seriously scrutinized.”
That same day, Grossman and Libby were attending back-to-back Deputies Committee meetings, one at noon, on Indonesia, and another at 12:45, on Iraq. They’d also met the day before for a meeting on Afghanistan. Grossman had received and read the report he’d commissioned on the Wilson mission, which revealed that Wilson’s wife, Valerie, worked at the CIA and had chaired a meeting to organize Wilson’s trip. Grossman found it “odd” and “remarkable” that his wife worked at the CIA and was involved in organizing his trip. He thought it “didn’t seem right somehow, that the spouse of someone would be organizing their spouse’s trip.” Grossman felt it was his responsibility to Libby to give him the full context, so at one of those meetings (he couldn’t remember exactly which), Grossman reminded Libby about the Wilson mission, and said, “There’s one other thing you’ve got to know,” which was that “his wife works at the agency.”
Libby thanked him for the information and said there was also something he wanted Grossman to know, which was that the office of the vice president had “nothing” to do with organizing Wilson’s trip. That was the end of their relatively brief exchange.
Libby also took up the issue with Craig Schmall, the CIA official responsible for briefing Libby and the vice president, mentioning Wilson and his wife, and asking for an explanation of why Wilson had been told the vice president’s office had asked for the mission. Schmall made notes of the conversation.
The day after the Pincus article implicitly criticizing Kristof’s assertions about the vice president’s involvement in Wilson’s mission, Kristof weighed in with another column, “White House in Denial,” which the vice president’s staff found even more vexing and hostile. It flatly repeated that the vice president had sent Wilson to Niger and disputed the notion that the White House had never been briefed on his findings, essentially undoing everything Libby had accomplished in the
Post
. Kristof concluded, “I don’t believe that the president deliberately lied to the public in an attempt to scare Americans into supporting his war. But it does look as if ideologues in the administration deceived themselves about Iraq’s nuclear programs–and then deceived the American public as well.” It was clear who those “ideologues” were–Cheney and his staff.

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