Plamology

The second grand jury hearing evidence in the case convened for the first time earlier this month. Their term expires in 18 months.

The investigation is expected to shift back to top officials in the Office of the Vice President, the State Department and the National Security Council, and may even shed some light on the genesis of the Niger forgeries, lawyers close to the case say. The forged documents, cited in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address, claimed Iraq sought yellowcake uranium from the African country. It may also reveal how key players in the White House decided to expose Plame’s undercover status and top secret front company, Brewster Jennings.

Separately, these people said, the FBI’s renewed interest in probing the Niger forgeries grew out of Fitzgerald’s probe.

Another explanation was provided by a former senior C.I.A. officer. He had begun talking to me about the Niger papers in March, when I first wrote about the forgery, and said, “Somebody deliberately let something false get in there.” He became more forthcoming in subsequent months, eventually saying that a small group of disgruntled retired C.I.A. clandestine operators had banded together in the late summer of last year and drafted the fraudulent documents themselves.

“The agency guys were so pissed at Cheney,” the former officer said. “They said, ‘O.K, we’re going to put the bite on these guys.’ ” My source said that he was first told of the fabrication late last year, at one of the many holiday gatherings in the Washington area of past and present C.I.A. officials. “Everyone was bragging about it—‘Here’s what we did. It was cool, cool, cool.’ ” These retirees, he said, had superb contacts among current officers in the agency and were informed in detail of the sismi intelligence.

“They thought that, with this crowd, it was the only way to go—to nail these guys who were not practicing good tradecraft and vetting intelligence,” my source said. “They thought it’d be bought at lower levels—a big bluff.” The thinking, he said, was that the documents would be endorsed by Iraq hawks at the top of the Bush Administration, who would be unable to resist flaunting them at a press conference or an interagency government meeting. They would then look foolish when intelligence officials pointed out that they were obvious fakes. But the tactic backfired, he said, when the papers won widespread acceptance within the Administration. “It got out of control.”

Like all large institutions, C.I.A. headquarters, in Langley, Virginia, is full of water-cooler gossip, and a retired clandestine officer told me this summer that the story about a former operations officer faking the documents is making the rounds. “What’s telling,” he added, “is that the story, whether it’s true or not, is believed”—an extraordinary commentary on the level of mistrust, bitterness, and demoralization within the C.I.A. under the Bush Administration.

Horton: I am talking with Seymour Hersh from the New Yorker magazine. He’s the author of Chain of Command: The Road From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib. We’ll be right back to wrap up after this…

All right, my friends, welcome back to the Weekend Interview Show. I’m Scott Horton, and I am talking with Seymour Hersh from the New Yorker magazine. He’s the author of the book Chain of Command: The Road From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib. And I’ve got to tell you, Sy, I really wish we had another hour to finish this interview because I have a lot more questions here for you, but I guess I am going to have to settle for asking you about the Niger uranium forgeries. Speaking of Phil Giraldi, who we brought up a minute ago, I basically got it out of him on this show that Ledeen was involved and a couple of former CIA officers. Later, Justin Raimondo, my boss at Antiwar.com, named two former CIA operatives, Duane Clarridge and Alan Wolf, as the principle forgers of the documents, and I noticed the name Duane Clarridge in your book Chain of Command as being closely connected to the Iraqi National Congress. So I wonder if you know anything more about that that you could add to my jigsaw puzzle I am trying to put together here?

Hersh: No, I don’t. I know that story that’s circulating that it all happened, and there has been a number of stuff, a long series of articles published in La Repubblica in Italy, one of the national newspapers there, published, I think out of Rome. And I know the kid who did the writing, Carlo Bonini, who’s a very competent journalist, so I read all this stuff with great interest. I’m not persuaded that anybody really knows who did the paper yet. Alan Wolf was the former station chief. He passed away a few years ago. Very competent guy, you know, and anecdotally I have heard his name mentioned, but I haven’t published it because I just couldn’t confirm what happened. As you may know, I wrote about this for the New Yorker. I wrote a long piece very early about the Niger forgeries long… before Joe Wilson went public. They were obvious forgeries, very bad forgeries. The one thing that makes me a little skeptical is Michael Ledeen is certainly, really smart, I disagree with everything, you know, he and I are on the other ends of the world, but it is such a bad forgery, I mean, it is such a bad forgery. It is a forgery that was discovered initially by officials at the International Atomic Energy Agency, a guy named Jacques Baute, one of their investigators, when they first found the document. When they were first given to them, I think, by us. It took Jacques Baute about 20 minutes, 30 minutes on Google to prove that they were no good. You know at least it began to unravel them, you know, very early on.

Horton: So you think Ledeen would have made sure that whoever was working for him would have done a better job than that?

Hersh: Well, common sense says they would have done a better job than that. It was such a bad job. We just don’t know, but the one thing we should be interested in and remain interested in is the Patrick Fitzgerald investigation. I think he’s formidable.

Horton: You think it will expand to where the forgeries actually came from?

Hersh: Well, the FBI has been actually looking at it, and everyone poo-poos it. But I think the FBI, they may not have made it the most, you know, highest priority investigation, but they looked at it. As I wrote much later, I think I quote a senior CIA or official saying that they are pretty sure it was an inside job. In other words, that would buttress the notion that somebody connected with the intelligence community could have done it for a variety of reasons – one, really to be honest, to embarrass the administration. That’s always been a theory that I’ve had. We don’t know. It’s a lousy forgery. It was taken at face value by these wackos that run our government and it shouldn’t have been, but anyway and there we are, over and out. Thanks for having me.

Horton: All right. Thanks a lot.