Front-Paged at
Booman Tribune
Yesterday longtime UPI intelligence reporter Richard Sale, posting via
Patrick Lang's account, took
issue with an October 25th New York Times article
identifying Vice President Dick Cheney as I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's
original source for the identity of Valerie Plame Wilson. The Times
indicated that Libby's notes suggested that Cheney had learned about Plame
from former CIA Chief George Tenet and had passed the information on to
Libby on June 12, 2003, nearly a month before Joseph Wilson went public
about his March 2002 mission to Niger for the CIA (during which he had
concluded that reports of efforts by Iraq to buy yellowcake from Niger were
false).
According to Sale's
sources, "former senior and serving current intelligence officials,"
"Libby's notes on this are misleading and inaccurate or both." Sale insists
that he has four sources who allege that "it was a telephone call from the
Department of State that first gave Libby the name of Plame," and that while
no one is certain who placed the call, it "definitely came from the State
Department office of John Bolton, then the arms control chief of the
department." Sale implicates two Bolton employees in the leak, David
Wurmser, "a virulent pro-war hawk," and Frederick Fleitz, "a CIA officer
detailed to Bolton's office from the agency." Sale reports that Wurmser
learned about Valerie Plame from Fleitz.
Back on September 20, 2005
Arianna Huffington also implicated Bolton and Fleitz in the outing of Valerie
Wilson.
Time will tell if Sale's sources are correct, but there is a wealth of
circumstantial evidence to suggest that, at the very least, John Bolton was
intimately involved in the Bush administration's efforts to disseminate the
Niger Yellowcake rumors, and that he might well have been in a position to
learn of Valerie Plame's identity long before Robert Novak leaked it on July
14, 2003.
P>Fred Fleitz apparently had worked with John Bolton in the past, and when
Bolton went to work at the State Department he requested of the CIA that
Fleitz be assigned to him there. The person at CIA who "facilitated" that request was Alan Foley, then director of the
CIA office of Weapons, Intelligence, Nonproliferation and Arms Control
(Winpac). Foley was Bolton's main contact at CIA in the area of WMD, and he
spoke regularly with both Fleitz and Bolton "at least once a week or three
times a month," according to his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff
during Bolton's confirmation hearings for his United Nations appointment.
What is so interesting about this is that Alan Foley, as the head of Winpac,
would have almost certainly known and worked closely with one Valerie
Plame Wilson who worked in Non-Proliferation Division of the CIA, the
operational side that worked hand-in-hand with Alan Foley's Winpac in
the area of WMD.
Foley's testimony before the Foreign Relations Committee does not go into
great detail about his discussions of the Niger reports with Fleitz and/or
Bolton (at one point his testimony went "off the record" while this was
being discussed), but clearly he discussed this matter extensively with
either Fleitz or Bolton or both.
Apparently one of the things to incite the ire of Bolton and Fleitz in
which Foley was involved, he thought "early in '03," was an October 2002 CIA
National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) which,
among other things, characterized "claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural
uranium in Africa" as "highly dubious." Bolton was not pleased, and he let
Foley, through Fleitz, know it. (Fleitz also testified before the Foreign Relations Committee staff, but it
was a contentious session in which Fleitz either pleaded poor recall or
refused outright to answer many questions). George Bush had originally
intended to include reference to the Niger Yellowcake reports in an October
7, 2002 speech in Cincinnati, but that reference was removed from the speech
after George Tenet personally persuaded then-Deputy National Security
Adviser Stephen Hadley to omit it according to the Washington Post.
In spite of that, Bolton himself ignored the October NIE (which was
partially declassified in July 2003) in a December 19, 2002 fact sheet
issued by the State Department taking issue with Iraq's December 7, 2002
Weapons Declaration. The State fact sheet was request
ed and overseen by John Bolton, and it included the claim that the
report omitted that Iraq had recently sought to obtain uranium from
Niger as if that was an established fact.
Not long afterward Alan Foley, again according to the July 18, 2003 Washington Post,
was pressured to allow the now-famous "sixteen words" into the State of the
Union address:
...on the eve of Bush's Jan. 28 State of the
Union address, Robert Joseph, an assistant to the president in charge of
nonproliferation at the National Security Council (NSC), initially asked the
CIA if the allegation that Iraq sought to purchase 500 pounds of uranium
from Niger could be included in the presidential speech.
Alan Foley, a senior CIA official, disclosed this detail when he
accompanied Tenet in a closed-door hearing before the Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence on Wednesday.
Foley, director of the CIA's intelligence, nonproliferation and arms
control center, told committee members that the controversial 16-word
sentence was eventually suggested by Joseph in a telephone conversation just
a day or two before the speech, according to congressional and
administration sources who were present at the five-hour session.
At the hearing, Foley said he called Joseph to object to mentioning
Niger and that a specific amount of uranium was being sought. Joseph agreed
to eliminate those two elements but then proposed that the speech use more
general language, citing British intelligence that said Iraq had recently
been seeking uranium in Africa.
Foley said he told Joseph that the CIA had objected months earlier to
the British including that in their published September dossier because of
the weakness of the U.S. information. But Foley said the British had gone
ahead based on their own information.
If Robert
Joseph pressured Foley to sign-off on the "sixteen words," it is a
virtual certainty that John Bolton was in the loop. Joseph is a long-time
associate of Bolton's with a very similar Neocon-rooted philosophy. When
Bolton moved on the United Nations it was Robert Joseph who stepped into
Bolton's former job at the State Department.
If Joseph Wilson's sources are correct it was not long after this that
the White House turned its attention toward Wilson. Wilson claims he was told that in
March of 2003 it was decided at a White House meeting in which Scooter Libby
was present to do a "work up" on Wilson, explaining that "a work up means to
run an intel op to glean all the information you can." Wilson later
concluded that the group was the White House Iraq
Group. WHIG was basically a marketing operation set up to sell the
invasion of Iraq to the public and the media, and its members included Karl
Rove, Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin, Andrew Card, James R. Wilkinson, Nicholas
E. Calio, Condoleeza Rice, Stephen Hadley, and Scooter Libby. Perhaps
significantly, it was also about this time, March 7, 2003, that IAEA
Director General Mohamed ElBaradei announced that the documents purporting
to prove that Iraq had sought to purchase Yellowcake from Niger were crude
forgeries.
As far as we know, the first time Valerie Wilson's name ever appeared in
a memo was a June
10, 2003 document which has been widely reported on, but which is still
classified. It was written by Carl W. Ford, then Assistant Secretary of
State for Intelligence and Research for then Undersecretary of State for
Political Affairs Marc Grossman, and it recalled the February 19, 2002 CIA
meeting at which it was discussed whether to send Joseph Wilson to Niger to
investigate the reports of attempts by Iraq to purchase yellowcake.
Reportedly the memo said that Valerie Wilson had played a major role in the
discussions, but CIA sources have maintained to the media that she merely
introduced her husband and then left the meeting. In any event, the fact
that the memo was not written until some fifteen months after the meeting
had occurred suggests a political motive behind its creation. Months later
on December 26, 2003, The Washington Post would report that the "CIA is angry about the circulation of a
still-classified document to conservative news outlets suggesting Plame had
a role in arranging her husband's trip to Africa for the CIA. The document,
written by a State Department official who works for its Bureau of
Intelligence and Research (INR), describes a meeting at the CIA where the
Niger trip by Wilson was discussed." "On Oct. 28, Talon News, a news
company tied to a group called GOP USA, posted on the Internet an interview
with Wilson in which the Talon News questioner asks: `An internal government
memo prepared by U.S. intelligence personnel details a meeting in early 2002
where your wife, a member of the agency for clandestine service working on
Iraqi weapons issues, suggested that you could be sent to investigate the
reports. Do you dispute that?' " [the author of that article was none other
than Jeff Gannon, who was later outed as a non-accredited "journalist" (and
former male escort) whose reports were closely tied to the Republican
agenda]. If The New York Times is correct, it was only two days after the
drafting of the June 10, 2003 memo that Scooter Libby first learned of the
identity of Valerie Plame Wilson.
We do not know who directed Marc Grossman to request the June 10th memo,
but it seems a good guess that it was John Bolton. At the time he was Under
Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs, and
WMD came under his area of jurisdiction. After Wilson went public in the
New York Times on July 6, 2003 Colin Powell's deputy, Richard L. Armitage requested the CIA to prepare an
account of the Wilson trip. Rather than forwarding the June 10th memo, a new
memo was prepared readdressed to Powell, but based primarily on the
original. Clearly the original memo was withheld from Powell, and the new
one was prepared rather than supply him with the one prepared a month
earlier. Had Powell been belatedly provided with the June memo it is likely
he would have wanted to know why he was only then seeing it. But was Bolton
in a position to block important State Department memos from getting to
Powell? Apparently he was, and often did. The Washington Post r
eported on April 18, 2005 that "John R. Bolton... often blocked
then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and, on one occasion, his successor,
Condoleezza Rice,... from receiving information vital to U.S. strategies...
according to current and former officials who have worked with Bolton."
Ironically, the author of the June 10th memo would later come back to
haunt John Bolton when he t
estified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Bolton was
a "bully" who abused his authority and power.
There is no proof, so far as we know, that John Bolton or Fred Fleitz
ever discussed the subject of Valerie Plame or Valerie Wilson with Alan
Foley, but one cannot help but wonder if it is likely that the matter never
came up. That Fleitz and Bolton were both intimately involved in pushing
the Niger Yellowcake rumors is undeniable. It is also established that both
had very frequent contact with Alan Foley, who certainly knew about Joseph
Wilson's trip to Niger and his relationship to his colleague Valerie Plame.
One can't help but suspect that Patrick Fitzgerald has also connected
these dots, and is asking similar questions.