Leaking With A Vengeance

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So when Plame's husband tried to step in front of the shoot-first, verify-later car that Bush had been steering, it was only a matter of time before the hard-liners tried to flatten Wilson. A year before the war began, he had been sent by the CIA to investigate British intelligence claims that Saddam was trying to buy yellowcake uranium in Niger. Wilson seemed like an understandable choice for the secret CIA mission: he had been a diplomat in Niger in the '70s and had been the last U.S. envoy to meet Saddam before George H.W. Bush began the liberation of Kuwait in 1991. The yellowcake story was tantalizing to hard-liners because it backed their hunch that Saddam had been trying to acquire the makings of a nuclear weapon. But after an eight-day trip, Wilson concluded that the yellowcake claims were bogus. Throughout the summer of 2002, hard-liners ignored his findings and touted the tale anyway. Tenet and the CIA tried to shoot down the story again last fall as Bush was mobilizing for war. But the President made the charge in his State of the Union speech in January. The commotion had for the most part died down when Wilson broke a year's silence in July and wrote a New York Times op-ed piece criticizing the Administration for having "twisted" the intel in order to "exaggerate" the Iraqi threat. Wilson had a revelation of his own: it was Cheney who had approached the CIA, asking questions about the implication of an intelligence report on Iraq's seeking uranium in Africa. The CIA in turn responded by asking Wilson to embark on his trip. Cheney's staff has adamantly denied initiating the Wilson assignment, saying that midlevel CIA officials chose to dispatch Wilson on their own. Indeed, not even CIA chief Tenet knew of the trip.

That was news enough, but Wilson went a crucial step further. He implied that Bush either was wrong about the yellowcake or ignored information that "did not fit certain preconceptions about Iraq." In the view of the hard-liners, the gravity of the charge demanded a response in kind. In the days after Wilson's essay appeared, government officials began to steer reporters away from Wilson's conclusions, raising questions about his veracity and the agency's reasons for sending him in the first place. They told reporters that Wilson's evidence was thin, said his homework was shoddy and suggested that he had been sent to Niger by the CIA only because his wife had nominated him for the job.

The double-barreled leak had two targets. One was to tag Wilson as a tired, second-rate diplomat who couldn't get a job without his wife's help. The leakers also wanted to drop the hint that the CIA had purposefully chosen someone it believed would come back with a skeptical finding.

To the hard-liners, Wilson was exactly the wrong guy to send on a WMD hunt, particularly when it concerned Iraq. He had worked on President Clinton's national-security staff, contributed $2,000 to John Kerry's presidential campaign and made a donation to Al Gore's presidential bid in 2000 (as did his wife). And even though Wilson had given money to Bush that year as well, the hard-liners believed his instincts matched those of most people at the CIA--moderate, internationalist and, above all, too slow to see the enemy forming over the horizon.