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How did the Italians do that? It’s not entirely clear. To see a chilling description of the history of the Italian intelligence services, read Soj’s latest diary.
What is clear is that phony documents were circulated in 2001 and 2002 that purported to show that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Niger in 1999. Many people looked at them. French intelligence decided they were fake. The CIA decided they were fake. The state department decided they were fake. Dick Cheney thought otherwise.
This was not the only area where Cheney clashed with the CIA. He also believed that Mohammed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague. Or, at least, he pretended to believe it. The CIA insisted that it never happened. This obviously enraged Cheney, who then unleashed the dogs of hell on Langley. Witness hatchet man, Bill Safire, as he heaps withering abuse on the CIA.
“Mr. Atta Goes to Prague”, by William Safire
[snip]
A misdirection play is under way in the C.I.A.’s all-out attempt to discredit an account of a suspicious meeting in Prague a year ago. Mohamed Atta, destined to be the leading Sept. 11 suicide hijacker, was reported last fall by Czech intelligence to have met at least once with Saddam Hussein’s espionage chief in the Iraqi Embassy — Ahmed al-Ani, a spymaster whom the Czechs were keeping under tight surveillance.
If the report proves accurate, a connection would exist between Al Qaeda’s murder of 3,000 Americans and Iraq’s Saddam. That would clearly be a casus belli, calling for our immediate military response, separate from the need to stop a demonstrated mass killer from acquiring nuclear and germ weapons. Accordingly, high C.I.A. and Justice officials — worried about exposure of the agency’s inability to conduct covert operations — desperately want Atta’s Saddam connection to be disbelieved.
They are telling favored journalists: Shoot this troublesome story down. In March, a Washington Post columnist obliged with: “hard intelligence to support the Baghdad-bin Laden connection is somewhere between ‘slim’ and ‘none.’ ” In April, Newsweek headlined: “A spy story tying Saddam to 9-11 is looking very flimsy,” and its Michael Isikoff wrote: “the much touted ‘Prague connection’ appears to be an intriguing, but embarrassing, mistake.”
[snip]
Whom do you believe — a responsible official on the scene speaking on the record, with no ax to grind, or U.S. spooks who may be covering up a missed signal from Prague about Sept. 11 and are also fearful of revealing their weakness in Iraq?
Hard-liners can play this background game, too. A “senior Bush administration official” not in the protect-Saddam cabal tells me: “You cannot say the Czech report about a meeting in 2001 between Atta and the Iraqi is discredited or disproven in any way. The Czechs stand by it and we’re still in the process of pursuing it and sorting out the timing and venue. There’s no doubt Atta was in Prague in 2000, and a subsequent meeting is at least plausible.”
I have to assume that this is not the kind of column George Tenet enjoyed reading with his morning coffee. And this could not have been received much better:
In May and June of 2002, State Department officials were arguing strenuously for no military action to achieve “regime change” until Turkey was fully a part of a broad anti-Saddam coalition. Mid-level generals, fearful of comparisons with our cakewalk victory of a decade ago, were infuriating their Pentagon superiors with leaks downmouthing the whole operation.
The C.I.A., having failed previously in a Baghdad coup attempt, could not decide on which indigenous Iraqi dissidents to equip and train for an uprising to support our invasion. To restrain Bush’s hawks, C.I.A. doves denied any connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda, despite hard intelligence linking Mohamed Atta, the leading suicide hijacker, with the Iraqi spymaster in Prague — a fact reaffirmed in June to The Prague Post by Hynek Kmonicek, the Czech ambassador to the U.N.
Or this:
“The Way We Live Now”, by William Safire
[NOTE: This if from Safire’s “On Language” column and NOT an Op-Ed piece.]
[snip]
In my Op-Ed incarnation, I’ve been in a running battle with our intelligence agencies about their all-out campaign to discredit evidence of a visit to Saddam Hussein’s spymaster in Prague by the suicide hijacker Mohamed Atta. I called the torrent of self-protective leaks by C.I.A. and F.B.I. sotto voce spokesmen “a misdirection play,” and defined this as a move by an adept offensive lineman: “He blocks his man toward the center; as the defender pushes back hard, the misdirecting lineman gives way, seemingly overcome by the countercharge — as his running back scoots through the hole near the center left by the defender.”
Watch out for those sports metaphors. “What you described as a misdirection play,” e-mails an anonymous Sunday couch potato, “is really an influence block. A misdirection play is when running backs and sometimes linemen flow in one direction and the ball carrier, usually after a delay, runs in the opposite direction.”
Or this:
…Another example of risk-taking columny: Czech intelligence agents reported that Mohamed Atta, the lead suicide hijacker, met only months before Sept. 11 with a Saddam Hussein spymaster in Prague. C.I.A. analysts covering their posteriors rejected any data establishing connections between Saddam and Al Qaeda, and went to great lengths to discredit the report in the U.S. press.
Because the C.I.A. had refused to interrogate Al Qaeda assassins captured by Kurdish forces in northern Iraq, I had a hunch that our spooks’ overly eager “discreditation” of the Czech report was misleading. After checking with sources in the Bush administration and overseas, I stuck with the original story made known by the Czech prime minister and his cabinet colleagues.
Safire really did a nice job for Cheney, and for the reputation of his employer, and for the American public. But this endless spew of totally fabricated evidence and these groundless attacks on the competency and courage of the CIA, could not have gone unnoticed.
It’s very clear that the CIA felt its reputation was under attack from the hawks that were beating the war drums. So, it must have come as quite a body-blow when the administration insisted, after Joe Wilson disclosed that the claims about Niger uranium were bunk, that Tenet take the blame for allowing bad intelligence into the State of the Union speech.
But, on July 11th, 2003 Tenet loyally issued a statement saying “These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the president.” He then assigned the blame to his agency alone.
But somewhere across town, Karl Rove was placing a phone call to Time reporter, Matt Cooper and exposing the identity of one of Tenet’s agents. In another part of town, Robert Novak was writing and then posting his infamous article on the AP wire.
I can only imagine the outrage that Tenet felt when he learned what had been done. On the surface he did his duty, even going so far as to allow himself to be quoted as having said the case for WMD was a `slam-dunk’. But behind the scenes he demanded an investigation, and he made damn sure that someone would eventually pay for their thuggery and deceit. We will soon find out just how much damage Tenet has been able to do, and how sweet will be his revenge.