Filing: Iraq's nuclear plans were disproved before leak

WASHINGTON — As he drew back the curtain last week on the evidence against Vice President Dick Cheney's former top aide, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald for the first time described a "concerted action" by "multiple people in the White House" to "discredit, punish or seek revenge against" a critic of President Bush's war in Iraq.

Fitzgerald placed Cheney at the center of that campaign. Citing grand-jury testimony from the vice president's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Fitzgerald said Cheney was the first to voice a line of attack that at least three White House officials would soon deploy against former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

Cheney, in a conversation with Libby in early July 2003, was said to describe Wilson's CIA-sponsored trip to Niger the previous year — in which the envoy found no support for charges that Iraq tried to buy uranium there — as "a junket set up by Mr. Wilson's wife," CIA case officer Valerie Plame.

Libby is charged with perjury and obstruction of justice for denying under oath that he disclosed Plame's CIA employment to journalists.

There is no public evidence to suggest Libby made the Plame disclosure with Cheney's knowledge.

But according to Libby's grand-jury testimony, described for the first time in legal papers filed last week, Cheney "specifically directed" Libby in late June or early July 2003 to pass information to reporters from two previously classified CIA documents: an October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate and a March 2002 summary of Wilson's visit to Niger.

One striking feature of that decision — unremarked until now, in part because Fitzgerald did not mention it — is that the evidence Cheney and Libby selected to share with reporters had been disproved months before.

United Nations inspectors had exposed the main evidence for the uranium charge as crude forgeries in March 2003, but the Bush administration and British Prime Minister Tony Blair maintained they had additional, secret evidence they could not disclose.

In June 2003, a British parliamentary inquiry concluded otherwise, delivering a scathing critique of Blair's role in promoting the story.

With no ally left, the White House debated whether to abandon the uranium claim.

It was at that moment that Libby, allegedly at Cheney's direction, sought out at least three reporters to bolster the discredited uranium allegation. Libby made careful selections of language from the 2002 estimate, quoting a passage that said Iraq was "vigorously trying to procure uranium" in Africa.

The first conversation, according to the evidence made known thus far, came when Libby met with Bob Woodward of The Washington Post on June 27, 2003. In sworn testimony for Fitzgerald, according to a statement Woodward released on Nov. 14, 2005, Woodward said Libby told him of the intelligence estimate's description of Iraqi efforts to obtain "yellowcake," a processed form of natural uranium ore, in Africa.

On Friday, Woodward said his notes showed Libby described those efforts as "vigorous."

Libby's next meeting with a reporter, according to Fitzgerald's legal filing, was with Judith Miller, then of the New York Times, on July 8, 2003. He spoke again to Miller, and to Time magazine's Matt Cooper, on July 12.

At Cheney's instruction, Libby testified, he told Miller the uranium story was a "key judgment" of the intelligence estimate, a term indicating there was consensus on a question of central importance.

In fact, the alleged effort to buy uranium was not among the 96-page estimate's key judgments.

The uranium claim lay deeper inside the estimate, where it said a fresh supply of uranium ore would "shorten the time Baghdad needs to produce nuclear weapons."

But it also said U.S. intelligence did not know the status of Iraq's procurement efforts, "cannot confirm" any success and had "inconclusive" evidence about Iraq's domestic uranium operations.

The alleged procurement was a minor issue for most U.S. analysts — the hard part would be enriching uranium, not obtaining the ore, and Niger's controlled market made it an unlikely seller — but the Niger story proved irresistible to speechwriters.

Eventually, the Pentagon asked for an authoritative judgment from the National Intelligence Council, the senior coordinating body for the 15 agencies that then constituted the U.S. intelligence community. Did Iraq and Niger discuss a uranium sale, or not?

The council's reply, drafted in a January 2003 memo by the national intelligence officer for Africa, was unequivocal: The Niger story was baseless and should be laid to rest.

Four U.S. officials with firsthand knowledge said in interviews that the memo, which has not been reported before, arrived at the White House as Bush and his highest-ranking advisers made the uranium story a centerpiece of their case for the rapidly approaching war against Iraq.

Bush put his prestige behind the uranium story in his Jan. 28, 2003, State of the Union address. Less than two months later, the International Atomic Energy Agency exposed the principal U.S. evidence as bogus.

A Bush-appointed commission later concluded the evidence, a set of contracts and correspondence sold by an Italian informant, was "transparently forged."