Informed Speculation

John Dickerson, who considers the work of our good friend the MinuteMan ‘overheated’, but praises the good work of the folks at firedoglake (though I’m sure political orientation doesn’t figure into the mix at all – oh, no, not a bit!), wonders why he doesn’t rate a visit from the feds, and explains his role in the increasingly ‘that’s so last year’ PlameGate.

First, though, Dickerson wastes a lot of time speculating that perhaps Libby may suggest Plame’s name was well known in Washington…yes, that’s right, that’s why Dickerson earns the big bucks, apparently, for making observations that most of the sentient organisms on this planet have long since noticed. Maybe if Dickerson were a little more concerned about the work being done by ‘overheated’ bloggers, he could have reached this conclusion months ago…

In any event, Dickerson puts the contoversy into the context of the long-running CIA/Bush Administration tug-of-war:

In July 2003, I was a White House correspondent for Time magazine, traveling with the president in Africa. Bush was trying to promote his $15 billion AIDS assistance package but he kept getting interrupted. He would visit a clinic and give a speech, but all reporters wanted to ask about was faulty prewar intelligence. Joe Wilson had published his infamous op-ed in the New York Times just before the trip. That, along with other disclosures, led White House spokesman Ari Fleischer to make a rare public admission: The 16 words mentioning Saddam’s efforts to buy uranium from Africa were “incorrect” and should not have been in the 2003 State of the Union address.

That didn’t stop the questions. It multiplied them. At every stop, we reporters clamored for an explanation of how that bad information about “yellowcake” had gotten into the speech. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell, who were traveling with Bush, held press conferences, but they raised more questions than they answered. The papers seemed to have a damaging new disclosure about weak prewar intelligence every day. Administration officials assumed the leaks were coming from the CIA, where analysts didn’t want to be blamed for the failure to uncover weapons stockpiles in Iraq.

The White House-CIA spat had been growing over the previous months. It was the second billing on the fight card below the Powell-Cheney cage match. When an administration official would say something that hinted the intelligence services might have made mistakes about Saddam’s weapons, leaks would soon follow suggesting that White House officials had spun carefully nuanced information from the CIA into a case for war. “Remind me to take something more than a knife to a gun fight,” one senior administration official on the trip said to me, referring to the spat.

Four days into the trip, on an early morning flight to Uganda, Condi Rice visited the small press cabin in the back of Air Force One, where I was in the pool of reporters that flies on the president’s plane. We expected more of the same fancy footwork from earlier in the week about who was to blame for the 16 words. We didn’t get it. Condi blamed the CIA. This was new. The Bush administration didn’t usually point fingers that openly. (We later learned that Dr. Rice had called Tenet that morning to let him know she was going to ruin his day.)

Moments later, we landed in Entebbe, Uganda. We drove past the abandoned Air France jet still marooned at the airport more than 30 years after the famous 1976 Israeli raid. We thought that would be the biggest drama of our short four-hour visit. Though the travel pool was going to be allowed in to see the start of President Bush’s meeting with Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, we were told Bush wouldn’t take a question, as he sometimes does in such situations. But moments before the meeting, we were told that Bush had changed his mind and would take a question. He knew that he would be asked about the faulty info and had a line prepared. “I gave a speech to the nation that was cleared by the intelligence services,” Bush said.

This was news. The president was known for his loyalty to subordinates, but here he was throwing his CIA director, George Tenet, under a bus. This wasn’t just a personal departure by the president. It was the ultimate blow in the bureaucratic battle between the CIA and his White House.

Then Dickerson gets coy:

While the president finished his meeting with Museveni, I hung out with a “senior administration official” by an old yellow school bus. This was the first of my two conversations about Wilson. In his letter to Libby, Fitzgerald has the chronology mixed up. When I had these conversations, I hadn’t yet talked to my colleague Matt Cooper about Wilson, and Cooper hadn’t yet talked to Rove.

The senior administration official spoke to me on background about Wilson and the president’s amazing decision to blame the CIA. Other reporters wandered in and out of the conversation, but there were stretches where it was just the two of us (my tedious newsmagazine questions always had a tendency to drive other deadline-oriented reporters away). The official walked me through all the many problems with Wilson’s report: His work was sloppy, contradictory, and hadn’t been sanctioned by Tenet or any senior person. Some low-level person at the CIA was responsible for the mission. I was told I should go ask the CIA who sent Wilson.

An hour later, as Bush spoke at an AIDS treatment center, I chatted with a different senior administration official, also on background. We talked about many different aspects of the story—the fight with the CIA, the political implications for the president, and the administration’s shoddy damage control. This official also pointed out a few times that Wilson had been sent by a low-level CIA employee and encouraged me to follow that angle. I thought I got the point: He’d been sent by someone around the rank of deputy assistant undersecretary or janitor.

Was one of these ‘senior administration officials Hadley? Was the other Ari Fleischer? (I’m sure Tom will enlighten us later with the appropriate parsing.) It wasn’t Rove, that’s for sure:

My inbox was a mess. In the middle of it was an e-mail from Matt Cooper telling me to call him from a land line when I had some privacy. At some time after 1 p.m. his time, I called him. He told me that he had talked to Karl Rove that morning and that Rove had given him the same Wilson takedown I’d been getting in Uganda. But Matt had the one key fact I didn’t: Rove had said that Wilson’s wife sent him.

One more extended excerpt, plus the return of Hadley at the end:

I missed the final sausage-making process of putting together the weekly magazine. As Time’s cover story was being written in Washington, I was flying back from Africa. I saw the final piece only moments before it was closed. By then, Matt had talked to Scooter Libby, who confirmed Rove’s tip. The attack on Wilson had not been included. The writers focused on his original trip and the damage his op-ed had done to administration credibility. Time’s cover showed the president giving the State of the Union address under the headline “Untruth and Consequences.”

Since the attack on Wilson was not included in the printed magazine that came out Monday, Cooper thought we should put it online. All administrations discredit their critics through whispers to reporters, but we hadn’t seen high-level Bush people do anything like this in the past. It suggested desperation and unsteadiness in a national security team that had often been heralded for its smooth competency.

At this point the information about Valerie Plame was not the radioactive material it is today. No one knew she might have been a protected agent—and for whatever reason, the possibility didn’t occur to us or anyone else at the time. But it was still newsworthy that the White House was using her to make its case. That Scooter Libby and Karl Rove mentioned Plame to Matt was an example of how they were attempting to undermine Wilson. They were trying to make his trip look like a special family side deal not officially sanctioned by the agency. No one at a high level in the government was worried enough about the veracity of the uranium claim to send a “real” special envoy. And no one at a high level ever saw Wilson’s report when he returned. Later we would learn that Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley had been warned by the CIA that the uranium claims were shaky and that Wilson’s wife was one of many people involved in the decision to send her husband.

If Dickerson’s account is true, then, we know definitively that Rove was the first source for Matt Cooper, and Libby the confirming second one – but really, we already knew that, didn’t we?

Note to those looking for a smoking gun here: nothing in the above suggests that Rove knew of the ‘covert status’ of Plame, nor that he lied to investigators or a grand jury…

UPDATE 1:14 p.m.: I knew Tom wouldn’t let us down! From the MinuteMan:

Mr. Dickerson does provide an interesting hint about sources – Mr. Dickerson was on the President’s trip to Africa, and Condi Rice, Colin Powell, and Ari Fleischer are the only three senior Administration official named in the article as accompanying them on the trip. Two different senior Admin officials exhorted Mr. Dickerson to look into who it was that sent Wilson on his trip to Niger, but neither mentioned Valerie Plame.

From that short list, it has to be Condi Rice and Ari Fleischer…