Hubris by Michael Isikoff

Author:Michael Isikoff
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780307381934
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2006-09-07T16:00:00+00:00

PINCUS finally got Libby on the phone. Libby wouldn’t say anything on the record. He wouldn’t allow Pincus to refer to him as a vice presidential aide or even a White House official. He could be called only a “government official.” Once granted virtually complete anonymity, Libby answered a few questions—as he tried to spin the Post reporter with a small piece of disinformation so Cheney wouldn’t get prominent play in Pincus’s story.

Libby said nothing about Valerie Wilson. He insisted that Cheney hadn’t known about Wilson’s trip as the Kristof column had suggested. Libby did acknowledge that the trip might have originated with a question from an aide from Cheney—but not from Cheney himself.

This was a deflection. It had been Cheney who had first asked the questions that prompted the Wilson trip. There had been nothing improper about this. But now was not the time to say that Cheney’s personal interest in the purported uranim deal had spurred Joe Wilson’s mission to Niger. Pincus and Priest had, days earlier, disclosed Cheney’s prewar visits to the CIA. Other media reports were suggesting that intelligence analysts had been pressured by the White House before the war. Libby didn’t want to see a new story revealing that a request from Cheney had led to a trip that had produced information contradicting Bush’s now-controversial State of the Union claim—information that, according to the Kristof column, the White House had deliberately ignored.

Libby’s fibbing worked.

Pincus’s article appeared on the front page on June 12, 2003. It barely mentioned Cheney. The story reported that a “key component of President Bush’s claim in his State of the Union address last January that Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program…was disputed by a CIA-directed mission to the central African nation in early 2002” but that the CIA had not passed on the results of this mission to the White House. Pincus quoted the unnamed ambassador (Wilson) as relating the same story he had told Kristof—how he had gone to Niger to investigate the yellowcake claims, concluded the uranium-deal story was false, and told the CIA that the documents may have been forged because the “dates were wrong and the names were wrong.” Wilson later told the Senate intelligence committee that he may have “misspoken” to Pincus. He had not seen the documents and had not known what names were on them. (Wilson said to the committee that he might have become confused about his own recollections after the IAEA had reported that the names and dates on the documents were wrong and that he might have thought he had seen the names.)

Only toward the end of Pincus’s story did it mention the request from an “aide” to the vice president for more information about Niger. The story caused no public uproar. The White House didn’t feel compelled to respond. Reporters traveling with Bush on Air Force One didn’t ask press secretary Ari Fleischer about it during a press briefing. “Nobody picked up on it,” Pincus later said, not even The New York Times.

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