Diplomatic Diary: Credibility Gap
Why The White House Can't Drive A Stake Through The Story Of Niger, Uranium And The Cia AgentWritten Sept. 30, 2003
It started out as just 16 words in the president's State of the Union address. But like all good examples of political chaos theory, it's the smallest details that can cause the biggest dislocations. If only the White House had dropped the brief line about Saddam's nuclear program and the link with Africa. That, at least, was the sentiment inside the Bush administration back in July, when it first got a taste of the kind of trial by fire that Tony Blair, the British prime minister, has been enduring for months.
Back then, at the start of summer, the White House halted the runaway train by tying two senior officials to the track: George Tenet, the director of the CIA, and Stephen Hadley, deputy national security advisor to the president. With not one but two officials sacrificing themselves (at least with public admissions of guilt), the seemingly technical story just evaporated into the summer heat. But the truth is that the story never went away. The White House tactics of dumping on Tenet and Hadley left many inside the administration--including at the White House itself--bitterly disappointed with their own leadership. That bitterness did not fade over the summer.
Yet there's another reason the White House can't drive a stake through the heart of this story. Over the coming days and weeks, there will be much talk of former ambassador Joe Wilson, his wife the CIA agent, political operatives close to the White House, and the all-too-cozy media. (For those not familiar with the details, the story resurfaced this week when the Justice Department, at the request of the CIA, opened an investigation into who illegally disclosed that Wilson's wife was a CIA officer. Some are accusing Bush senior advisor Karl Rove of leaking the information to retaliate against Wilson for his outspoken criticism of the case for going to war. While the White House denies the involvement of any senior officials, Democrats are calling for the appointment of an independent counsel.) In fact, the scandal lives on because it's about a fundamental question: Did the Bush administration mislead the world in going to war in Iraq?
Joe Wilson's investigations in Africa--which led him to dismiss the uranium story-- only scratched the surface. The really exhaustive study took place in the days after the January State of the Union speech, in Tenet's conference room at CIA headquarters. It was there that the agency's analysts sat down with senior aides to Secretary of State Colin Powell for 96 hours, preparing for Powell's landmark speech at the United Nations in February.
The team of CIA and State officials were examining something that Powell called "the script" that emerged from the president's national security council. Powell had little confidence that he could trust the script in full. "Had the script been accurate or even reasonably accurate, it would have been not nearly as tough to build the presentation," one senior State Department official told NEWSWEEK. "But the script was grossly inaccurate. Suffice it to say, the secretary of State would never have given that presentation."
How could such poor intelligence rise all the way to the top of the Bush administration? The original material came from the Iraqi National Congress, the umbrella group of exiles headed by Ahmed Chalabi, the former banker who now heads Iraq's governing council. Chalabi's material found its way up to the highest levels of U.S. policymaking--and the White House script--through three routes, according to officials present at the CIA review.
The most critical was Vice President Dick Cheney's office. But the veep's aides found vital allies inside the president's national security council, where Bob Joseph, the senior director dealing with weapons of mass destruction, guided the process of building the case against Iraq. Both offices worked hand-in-hand with intel analysts under Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary.
The hawks' script was full of holes. Powell was determined to test the story with a simple question: show me more than one source. "There were things that were unsubstantiated and uncorroborated," said one of Powell's staff. Still, the wrestling contest over the case against Iraq raged for several days and nights, as the hawks fought to reinstate their most aggressive accusations.
Top of the hawks' agenda: Saddam's links to terrorists and especially Al Qaeda. For months, Wolfowitz and his aides had argued forcefully that Saddam was working with Al Qaeda, raising that specter within days of the 9/11 attacks. But Powell's aides were deeply skeptical of the intel used to support that indictment. Drawing on foreign intelligence from the British, French and German governments, they threw most of the terrorist allegations out of the White House script. "In some cases we refuted and in other cases invalidated it with multiple sources to the contrary," said one senior State official.
The dispute over Saddam's links to Al Qaeda raged through to the end. Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, spent 10 hours over two nights overseeing the review, arguing forcefully for the terrorist allegations to be re-inserted in Powell's speech. Her message was echoed by Hadley, and by Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the vice-president's chief of staff.
Even Tenet, who had closely aligned himself with Powell's mission of weeding out the poor intel, was pushing for more terrorist accusations to survive. The pressure on Powell continued with phone calls through the night before he traveled to the U.N. Tenet's anguish was clear to those present at the intelligence review. "If you've briefed the president and the vice-president on some things and then suddenly you are backing off them, you have a lot of ground to cover," said one official in his conference room before Powell's speech. "You've got to make the pitch, even if your heart isn't in it."
As for the now-discredited claims that Saddam attempted to purchase uranium from Niger, the allegations were contained in the White House script, but were kicked out at the earliest review. Less than a week after the State of the Union address, Powell and Tenet's aides concluded that the Niger story was deeply flawed.
"No one could give us anything that was credible about that," said one senior State Department official. Another official said the story was rejected not because they realized they were based on forged documents, but because they proved nothing about the Iraqi nuclear program. All the documents showed was an intent to develop some kind of nuclear program: something the officials already knew. "It doesn't mean squat," said one Powell aide. "The Iraqis had access to uranium all over the place. It didn't mean anything."
So why did Powell join in and lend his credibility to such a flawed exercise? Powell's position, dating back to his experience during the first gulf war, was that Saddam would strike at the United States if he could. He also believed that Saddam had effectively hidden his weapons programs to avoid detection. But he was also deeply concerned that no evidence might be found on the ground--either by U.N. inspectors or U.S. forces. "The nuclear program was all piecemeal," said one State official, "so what were you going to find? We were worried about that. But we knew what the man's intent was. We knew he wanted to do it when he had an opportunity, and we felt the same way about terrorism, even though there might not be too many connections now."
Were such fears enough to convince the world to go to war? Probably not. That's why the battle over Powell's speech was so intense, and why some administration officials were so desperate to discredit Joe Wilson. The Niger story is about far more than 16 words, or a CIA agent's identity. It's about the credibility of the White House.
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