In Washington, legal controversies are like whitecaps on a stormy sea: surface manifestations of stronger, deeper forces. Watergate wasn’t really about a third-rate burglary, or even obstruction of justice, but about the political establishment, and, eventually, the country, rising against Richard Nixon’s megalomaniacal presidency. The impeachment of Bill Clinton wasn’t really about perjury, per se, it was about the culture wars of the ’90s: his laissez faire mores vs. the GOP’s (often hypocritical) Bible Belt propriety.
Now a new legal firestorm is consuming the Beltway world. The plotline: unnamed White House insiders are being investigated by the Department of Justice for having leaked the name of a CIA operative, Valerie Plame, supposedly with the aim of discrediting or intimidating her husband, Joe Wilson. He’s the former American diplomat, who had the temerity to attack President Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq. There are the inevitable calls for a “special prosecutor” and lots of heavy breathing by the usual legal pundits who emerge from their law school carrels at such times. But what’s this new furor–the Plame Game–really about? Here is my sense:
THE WAR IN IRAQ
Behind the scenes or openly, at war or at peace, the United States has been debating what to do in, with and about Iraq for more than 20 years. We always have been of two minds. One faction, led by the CIA and State Department, favored using secular forces in Iraq–Saddam Hussein and his Baathists–as a counterweight to even more radical elements, from the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to the Shiite ayatollahs in Iran to the Palestinian terrorists in the Levant. The other faction, including Dick Cheney and the “neo-cons,” has long held a different view: that, with their huge oil reserves and lust for power (and dreams of recreating Baghdad’s ancient role in the Arab world), the Baathists had to be permanently weakened and isolated, if not destroyed. This group cheered when, more than 20 years ago in a secret airstrike, the Israelis destroyed a nuclear reactor Saddam had been trying to build, a reactor that could have given him the ultimate WMD.
The “we-can-use Saddam” faction held the upper hand right up to the moment he invaded Kuwait a decade ago. Until then, the administration of Bush One (with its close CIA ties) had been hoping to talk sense with Saddam. Indeed, the last American to speak to Saddam before the war was none other than Joe Wilson, who was the State Department charge’ d’affaires in Baghdad. Fluent in French, with years of experience in Africa, he remained behind in Iraq after the United States withdrew its ambassador, and won high marks for bravery and steadfastness, supervising the protection of Americans there at the start of the first Gulf War. But, as a diplomat, he didn’t want the Americans to “march all the way to Baghdad.” Cheney, always a careful bureaucrat, publicly supported the decision. Wilson was for repelling a tyrant who grabbed land, but not for regime change by force.
CIA VS. VEEP’S OFFICE
That history is one reason why, in the eyes of the anti-Saddam crowd, Wilson was a bad choice to investigate the question of whether Iraq had been trying to buy uranium in Africa.
Here’s how that came about. We’re in the winter of ‘01-‘02. Attacked on Sept. 11, the administration of Bush Two has responded by destroying the Taliban in Afghanistan. Now it’s looking for its next target. Cheney and his allies in Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon know what Bush should do next: take out Saddam. Rumors are in the air (apparently from British intelligence) that he has been trying to acquire uranium “yellowcake”–raw fissile material suitable for bomb-making–from Niger. If this is true, it adds urgency to the argument that the United States needs to invade Iraq, because the United Nations is either too slow-moving or antagonistic to the idea altogether. Cheney, at a regular briefing from the CIA, is told of rumors about the uranium. He expresses interest in the topic. According to a Cheney aide, the CIA reports back to him a few days later with what seems like further, credible information. Cheney’s office says he did not specifically ask the CIA to send someone to investigate the matter further.
The CIA sends Wilson to check it out. On the surface, he would seem to be a logical choice: he’d spent years in Africa, knew French, knew the Saddam regime. But there were other things about him that Cheney’s office might not have liked. Wilson had close ties to the Democrats, having worked for them on the Hill and on Clinton’s national security staff; he was close to Democratic Sen. John Kerry and some other former NSC people who are now allies of the senator. Plus, he contributed to Al Gore’s campaign in 2000. Just as important, his wife was a CIA analyst who specialized in assessing WMD risks–and the CIA was not leading the charge to attack Iraq. In fact, the agency was doing just the opposite: In a report and testimony, CIA Director George Tenet argued that attacking Iraq would do more to create a generation of terrorists than eliminate one. What did Valerie Plame think of the seriousness of Saddam’s WMD capability? Sooner or later, we’ll find out–because it bears on what Wilson probably thought before he ever got to Niger to ask questions.
In any event, Wilson went, found nothing, and reported back to the CIA, which then reported as much to the administration–though who said what to whom is murky. Still, the yellowcake allegation got into the president’s now infamous State of the Union address, attributed only to the Brits. When the speech came under fire for accuracy (or lack thereof), the CIA at first ducked. Then White House aides let it be known that the agency had “signed off” on the entire contents of the speech, after which the CIA came forward to say yes, after much discussion and emendation, that they’d approved it. Tenet took the heat. But it was clear that he had been forced to do so.
TENET AND BUSHES
It was a fascinating moment if you know the history. The way I hear the story, Bush Two, when he was elected, had his doubts about Tenet, but was told he was a “good guy” by the ultimate arbiter of “good guys” in the Bush Family, Bush One. Tenet had curried favor with the family years earlier when he was still an intelligence bureaucrat on the Hill, serving as chief of staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Though he was working in a Democrat-controlled environment, Tenet helped out–or at least did not stand in the way–when Bush One wanted to appoint his friend, Robert Gates, to head the CIA. Word was that Tenet was a “team player”–a standup guy, not a relentless Democratic partisan by any means. An expert at the inside game from his years as a staffer on the Hill, Tenet knew how to fit into Bush Two’s world. He did so with ease from the start.
Bush presumably trusted Tenet and the CIA to get the goods on Saddam and his WMD. Cheney’s staff evidently did too. But why did Tenet send Wilson to Africa? Maybe he just thought he was sending the most qualified guy. But the neo-cons and their allies came to see it as a conspiracy to ignore the truth–especially after Wilson, last July, went public with the essence of his findings, which was that the yellowcake rumors were false.
The moment that piece hit the op-ed page of the New York Times, it was all-out war between the pro- and anti-war factions, and between the CIA and its critics. I am told by what I regard as a very reliable source inside the White House that aides there did, in fact, try to peddle the identity of Joe Wilson’s wife to several reporters. But the motive wasn’t revenge or intimidation so much as a desire to explain why, in their view, Wilson wasn’t a neutral investigator, but, a member of the CIA’s leave-Saddam-in-place team.
And on Tenet’s part, it was time for payback–whatever his past relationship with the Bush’s had been. First, he and his agency had been humiliated, caught by the White House trying to distance themselves from the president’s speech. Then the CIA was forced to admit that it had signed off on the speech. Now one of its own investigations was coming under attack, as was one of its own undercover staffers.
Are we to believe that it was a routine matter for the CIA to forward to the Department of Justice a complaint about the leak of Valerie Plame’s name and job? Are we to think that Tenet didn’t know that the complaint was being forwarded? Or that Tenet couldn’t have shortstopped it if he wanted to?
WHITE HOUSE ARROGANCE
Bush preaches humility, and believes it is a cardinal virtue. But some of the people around him honor it in the breach. If it can be proved that they did, in fact, leak Mrs. Wilson’s name and job, they committed an act of arrogance–and political stupidity. You’d think that the Bush White House would know an essential lesson of presidential survival in Washington: You don’t pick a fight with the CIA. Nixon learned the consequences of doing so; Bush One, a former director of the CIA, could have explained it to his son.
ROVE AND ANTI-ROVE
From the time I first started covering Bush, in 1993, I was struck by the fact that his inner circle of advisers and friends was the most tight-knit and disciplined I had seen in politics. To be sure, there were tensions at times between, say Karl Rove and Karen Hughes, but everyone was always on the same page. No one trashed the boss, and no one trashed other staffers.
The Bush administration, of course, has been riven by arguments over how to proceed in the war on terror, especially with regard to Iraq. But the president not only tolerated the rift, I think in many ways he used it for his own purposes. This is something different: For the first time, I see the signs of internal dissension inside the White House staff. There are those who clearly want to finger Rove as the mastermind of the leaks, even though, through spokesmen, he flatly denies that he was involved. But while he is universally admired for his brilliance, he has generated much jealously by essentially gathering all the reins of political power in his own hands. Democrats loathe him, which is to be expected. But many Republicans, especially on the Hill, don’t like him much, either. He’s just too powerful. If they can rat him out, they will–never mind that Bush would be lost without him.
DEMS VS. REPUBS
The Democrats who are latching onto this aren’t doing so, for the most part, out of somber regard for the law. They are in near hysteria because they finally see a way to make stick a line of attack they have been using for months: that Bush, far from being a decent Texas straight-shooter, is really a genially deceitful liar–a man who cannot be trusted. Indeed, as Bush’s poll numbers have fallen for handling the economy and the war on terrorism, his re-election plan calls for selling him as a man of faith, virtue and solid leadership.
But you don’t always get to choose your own test of leadership. The Plame Game has turned into one. Bush didn’t expect it and now he has to survive it.
