Libby: Fall of a Vulcan

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For anyone who has been trying to follow the bewildering saga of Scooter Libby, Karl Rove, Joseph Wilson and his wife CIA officer Valerie Plame, Fitzgerald's indictment is a helpful road map. After months of confusion, the indictment provides the most concrete evidence yet of a war between the Veep's office and the CIA--a war about a war--and the lengths Libby and his colleagues were willing to go to squelch any criticism of the Administration's prewar behavior. Libby was a Vulcan,* one of the Bush team hard-liners, along with former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who helped the President cram for foreign policy debates during the 2000 campaign and who had argued for years that the U.S. should depose Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and bring democracy and stability to the Middle East.

What's more, the Vulcans played for keeps. The indictment alleges that Libby sought to find out all he could about an Administration critic named Joe Wilson, then leaked the identity of Wilson's wife to several reporters to undercut the validity of Wilson's criticism, and then lied about his actions in his grand jury testimony. If convicted, lawyers say, Libby could face up to five years in prison. Fitzgerald's theory of the case can be broken into three parts:

THE HUNT FOR THE WHISTLE-BLOWER

The story begins with a mystery man who was dissing the Bush team from somewhere within the government. In May 2003, shortly after New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof first wrote about a secret CIA mission to Africa by an unnamed U.S. ambassador to assess suggestions by Cheney's office that Iraq had tried to buy uranium yellowcake from Niger, Libby asked Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman to go digging for more information on the mission. It was not an idle inquiry: the 2002 trip, taken by a former U.S. ambassador to Gabon, Joseph Wilson, had turned up no evidence that Iraq sought the uranium ore for its nuclear weapons program, as Cheney's office had suggested. And although Wilson reported his findings to the CIA, the claim about the African yellowcake kept popping up in Administration speeches in the weeks leading up to the war in Iraq. At Libby's behest, Grossman ordered the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) to look into the CIA mission to Africa.

Over the next few weeks, Libby got progress reports from the INR, and Grossman eventually informed Libby that it was Wilson who took the trip, that his wife worked at the CIA and that she may have played a role in sending Wilson on the trip. Fitzgerald's indictment alleges that Libby heard similar reports about Wilson and his wife from a senior CIA official and, on June 12, from Cheney, who by then knew that Wilson's wife worked in the CIA's Counterproliferation Division. To hard-liners like Libby, who believed that the CIA opposed the war in Iraq and had been quietly undercutting the President for months, it appeared that the CIA was turning on Cheney too. "Scooter thought the CIA was trying to screw us," says a former colleague of Libby's.