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.
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 requested 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 reported 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 testified 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.
