Behind the CIA leak investigation

by Justin Raimondo

Has I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff, made a deal with CIA leak investigator Patrick J. Fitzgerald – and turned on his boss in return for leniency?

It sure looks like it. Or else how is it that Scooter suddenly discovered his notes of a “previously undisclosed” conversation held with Cheney on June 12, 2003, in which the vice president was the first to tell him that Joe Wilson’s wife, Valerie, worked for the CIA? Prior to Scooter’s eleventh-hour revelation, he had been telling the grand jury that he got the information from journalists.

That makes at least three neocons “turned” by the Bulldog. Libby follows John Hannah, the VP’s national security adviser, and David Wurmser, Cheney’s Middle East expert-in-residence, down the well-trodden path to collaboration with the special counsel.

All roads lead directly to Dick Cheney.

What crime, however, has been committed? New light has been shed on this mystery with the breaking news that Fitzgerald is homing in on the question at the heart of his investigation – who forged the Niger uranium documents, and how did they get passed off as reliable enough information to be referenced in the president 2003 State of the Union address? UPI’s Martin Walker confirms what I reported in this space last Wednesday:

“The CIA leak inquiry that threatens senior White House aides has now widened to include the forgery of documents on African uranium that started the investigation, according to NATO intelligence sources. … NATO sources have confirmed to United Press International that Fitzgerald’s team of investigators has sought and obtained documentation on the forgeries from the Italian government. Fitzgerald’s team has been given the full, and as yet unpublished, report of the Italian parliamentary inquiry into the affair.”

The key to finding out who outed deep cover CIA agent Valerie Plame has always been the motive. Why would anyone in the U.S. government deliberately expose the identity of an agent working in the vitally important realm of nuclear proliferation – identifying not only Ms. Plame, but also her co-workers at “Brewster Jennings and Associates,” the CIA front company whose real function was to scour the world for evidence of rogue nukes and other weapons of mass destruction? In busting up the Agency’s operations designed to prevent the spread of WMD, whoever outed Plame was taking a very big risk – but why?

In investigating what led to the outing of Valerie Plame, Fitzgerald discovered that a fraud had been perpetrated on the American people and the Congress of the United States. In detailing the case for war, the administration based much of its argument that Saddam was close to acquiring nuclear weapons on a cache of documents that purported to show an agreement between Iraq and the African nation of Niger to purchase “yellowcake” uranium. The president referred to this, albeit obliquely, in his 2003 State of the Union address. A few weeks after that speech was delivered, however, the White House was forced to retract its statement – because the documents turned out to be forgeries.

Now we discover – and Fitzgerald no doubt knows more about this than anyone – that it wasn’t an error, another dreaded “intelligence failure,” that had allowed the Niger uranium forgeries to be marshaled along with similarly bogus intelligence as “evidence” of Iraqi WMD; it was a deliberate act of deception, carried out at the highest levels of the U.S. government. A series of articles in La Repubblica exposes the provenance of the documents, shows how they were funneled to U.S. policymakers, and maps their course all the way up to the White House. Go here for an English translation of the first installment. Here is the Italian version of Part II, and here is the translated version.

Authors Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d’Avanzo describe how SISMI, the Italian intelligence agency, was a party to faking the documents. Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi was keen to put SISMI at America’s disposal in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and SISMI’s chief, Nicolo Pollari, was eager to make himself – and Italy – indispensable to the warlords of Washington. Pollari’s initial attempts to pass off the Niger uranium forgeries as authentic evidence of Iraq’s nuclear ambitions did not, however, meet with success. Whereupon Pollari took advantage of the developing split between the State Department-CIA professionals, who tended to be skeptical, and the Cheney-Pentagon-neocon ideologues, who were looking for any evidence – however dubious –of Iraq’s WMD, and the Italians developed a strategy to legitimize the forgeries in the eyes of the White House.

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