In My Time (65 page)

Rice realized sometime later that she had made a major mistake by issuing a public apology. She came into my office, sat down in the chair next to my desk, and tearfully admitted I had been right. Unfortunately, the damage was done. George Tenet was furious at having had to apologize. He would later write that after the sixteen words “my relationship with the administration was forever changed.” As Tenet would also recount in his book, while he was still smarting from making an apology, Colin Powell invited him over to his house in McLean and told him that although he, Tenet, still had support in the White House, he also had people trying to pull the rug out from under him and that I was
chief among them
.

This was not the case. I was a strong supporter inside the White House of what Tenet and the CIA were trying to do. When there were suggestions after 9/11 that we have a group similar to the Warren Commission investigate intelligence failures, I had argued against it, saying it would too easily turn into a witch hunt and that what we needed to do was focus on preventing the next attack. As for the sixteen words, I hadn’t thought George or anyone else should apologize, particularly after I learned what struck me as a pretty startling fact. Despite what Joe Wilson was saying in the press, he had brought back information from Africa that supported the sixteen words. He had told CIA debriefers about a conversation he’d had with a former prime minister of Niger, who said that in 1999 he had met with an Iraqi delegation to discuss “expanding commercial relations” between Iraq and Niger. Since Niger’s
chief export is uranium ore, the prime minister assumed the Iraqis
wanted to buy yellowcake
.

On July 14, 2003, Bob Novak wrote a column identifying Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, as an “operative” at the CIA and suggesting she may have recommended him for the trip to Niger. Soon thereafter, as I later learned, the CIA notified the Justice Department that the leak to Novak of where Wilson’s wife worked was a possible violation of criminal law, and the agency subsequently made a formal request for a criminal investigation. George Tenet later told me that there were close to four hundred reports of possible criminal violations involving classified information pending at the Justice Department and that they were seldom pursued. There were just too many of them, and they often involved the press, which the Justice Department was not eager to take on. But this referral involved the White House, and someone leaked news of it to Andrea Mitchell of NBC News, who on September 26, 2003, reported, “The CIA has asked the Justice Department to investigate allegations that the White House broke federal laws by revealing the identity of one of its undercover employees in retaliation against the woman’s husband, a former ambassador who publicly criticized President Bush’s since-discredited claim that Iraq had sought weapons-grade uranium from Africa.”

A criminal referral was a big story in any case, but I couldn’t help but note that we had made it bigger. By apologizing we had given reporters such as Mitchell grounds for saying that the president had been mistaken, although he had not been.
Mistaken
soon evolved into
lied
, and, of course, Joe Wilson was pushing the story line along. He “confirmed” for two reporters that the CIA had circulated his report to my office and told them that the administration “knew the Niger story was
a flat-out lie
.” He wrote a book, appeared in magazines, and continued to fabricate, claiming on behalf of Senator John Kerry’s presidential campaign, for example, that his “report” had exposed the “lie” in President Bush’s
State of the Union speech
. Senator Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, noted in the committee’s 2004 report that Wilson admitted at least twice to committee staff that
he drew “on either unrelated past experiences or no information at all” for some of his claims. Wrote Roberts, “The former ambassador, either by design or through ignorance, gave the American people and, for that matter, the world a version of events that was inaccurate,
unsubstantiated, and misleading
.”

ON SEPTEMBER 30, 2003, the Justice Department announced it had launched an investigation. Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself from the case, and Deputy Attorney General James Comey took over the matter. He decided to appoint a special counsel and chose Patrick Fitzgerald, an old friend of his, who was U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, to investigate and possibly prosecute the case. Fitzgerald was appointed on December 30, 2003.

Among the many things that should give a thinking person pause about this whole sad story is that Patrick Fitzgerald knew from the outset who had leaked the information about Wilson’s wife to Bob Novak. It had been Deputy Secretary of State Rich Armitage, who told the Justice Department that he had leaked the information to Novak, but kept what he had done from the White House. Armitage would later admit that he had even earlier told journalist Bob Woodward about Wilson’s wife’s employment. Indeed, on Bob Woodward’s tape of the June 13, 2003, conversation, Armitage can be heard leaking the fact that Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA
four separate times
.

Despite knowing Armitage’s role, Fitzgerald spent more than two years conducting what the
Washington Post
called “a lengthy and wasteful investigation.” For the latter part of 2003, all of 2004, and a good part of 2005, members of the White House staff produced box after box of documents, were interviewed by the FBI, hauled before a grand jury, and repeatedly questioned about these events.

Meanwhile, over at the State Department, Armitage sat silent. And, it pains me to note, so did his boss, Colin Powell, whom Armitage told he was Novak’s source
on October 1, 2003
. Less than a week later, on October 7, 2003, there was a cabinet meeting. At the end of it, the press came in for a photo opportunity, and there were questions about who
had leaked the information that Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA. The president said he didn’t know, but wanted the truth. Thinking back, I realize that one of the few people in the world who could have told him the truth, Colin Powell, was sitting right next to him.

I participated in two lengthy sessions with the special counsel. The first was in my West Wing office in May 2004. The second was in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in August 2004. The second session was conducted under oath so that my testimony could be submitted to the grand jury. The president himself was questioned by Fitzgerald in a session in the Oval Office.

At the end of it all, the special counsel did not charge anyone with leaking information about Wilson’s wife. The only charges brought were against my chief of staff, Scooter Libby, one of the most competent, intelligent, and honorable people I have ever met. Libby had worked for me at the Defense Department, where I had been very impressed by his performance. I had been delighted when he agreed to leave his successful law practice and come into the White House as vice presidential chief of staff and national security advisor. He did important work for me and for the nation.

On October 28, 2005, Scooter was indicted on one count of obstructing justice, two counts of perjury, and two of making false statements. In 2007, during a time of intense public debate and anger about the war in Iraq, Libby’s trial took place at the federal courthouse in Washington, D.C. He was convicted on four counts, none of which were based on leaking Valerie Plame’s name or CIA employment to the press. Instead the counts turned essentially on what Scooter recalled about a telephone conversation he’d had with Tim Russert of NBC News in 2003. The issue wasn’t whether a public official had leaked Plame’s CIA employment to a reporter. The special counsel had left that subject far behind and was now focused on whether a reporter, Russert, had mentioned Wilson’s wife to a public official, Libby. Russert said he had not brought her up. Scooter said Russert had.

I believed that Scooter was innocent and should never have been indicted, much less convicted. It was hardly surprising that two busy men
would disagree about what happened in a telephone conversation that occurred months before. Even if you decided that one version was more accurate than the other, it wasn’t right to insist that the second version was a lie rather than the result of a faulty memory. During the trial there were many examples of witnesses forgetting important events, but their fates didn’t hang on the
accuracy of their recall
.

I’d watched before as independent or special counsels assigned to investigate public figures went on and on, and even when they failed to find an underlying crime, they caused plenty of human wreckage. Once an independent or special counsel has been appointed, there is pressure to indict someone for something. Without a trial and conviction, it is very difficult to justify the amounts of time and taxpayer dollars expended—and they are enormous. Under the old Independent Counsel Act or in the case of a special counsel given the full power of the Attorney General of the United States, as Patrick Fitzgerald was, there are no time constraints, no budgetary limits, and no oversight. You very quickly end up with an unaccountable organization armed with the full power of the state to go after public officials.

In 1992, after investigating for six years and spending more than $40 million, Lawrence Walsh, the independent counsel for Iran-Contra, indicted former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger for not mentioning notes he had on file in the Library of Congress. Walsh brought the indictment on the eve of the hotly contested 1992 presidential election. The following month I observed on
Meet the Press
that the Weinberger indictment was a “travesty.” Noting that I had been the senior House Republican on the Iran-Contra committee, I pointed out that Weinberger had been
opposed
to the Iran-Contra operation. “Now, six years after the fact...,” I said, “on a fairly slim reed, the special prosecutor who has yet really to nail anybody, and who’s spent millions of dollars, is out trying to prosecute Cap Weinberger.” I concluded by calling the indictment an “outrage.”

After the 1992 election I was among those whom President George H. W. Bush consulted about issuing pardons for individuals involved in Iran-Contra. He summoned James Baker and me into the private
study next to the Oval Office in the closing days of 1992 and asked our opinion. Jim and I both supported the idea of pardons. I believed that the individuals in question were good men who hadn’t thought they were doing anything wrong. They were CIA and administration officials who’d gotten in the way of the independent counsel juggernaut, and in the case of Weinberger, politics was clearly at work. Pardons were the right thing, and the president issued them on Christmas Eve 1992, putting the matter to rest.

President George W. Bush commuted Scooter’s sentence so he would not have to go to prison. While that was appreciated, I felt strongly that Scooter deserved a pardon, and I broached the subject on numerous occasions with the president. We talked about what the president’s father had done before he left office, and I was of the impression that the president agreed with me that Libby should be pardoned, although he made no commitments. We had small meetings with a group of senior staff members in the Oval Office near Thanksgiving and Christmas 2008 to discuss cases that were pending and pardons that would be issued then. The president said he planned to do some of the more controversial pardons nearer to the end of his term.

Just before George W. Bush and I left office, we had the last of our private lunches, and he told me he had changed his mind about an additional round of pardons. There were not going to be any more, which meant there would be none for Libby. I was deeply disappointed. I understood that a pardon for Libby was unlikely to be well received in the mainstream media and that it wouldn’t be of short-term help to those around the president who were focused on generating positive press about his last days in office. But in the long term, where doing the right thing counts, George W. Bush was, in my view, making a grave error. “Mr. President,” I said, “you are leaving a good man wounded on the field of battle.”

George Bush made courageous decisions as president, and to this day I wish that pardoning Scooter Libby had been one of them.

ON SATURDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2003, I flew to New York for a political fund-raiser. As Air Force Two landed at Stewart International
Airport in Newburgh around 3:30 in the afternoon, I got word that I should call President Bush. We connected at 3:43 p.m. and he said, “Dick, it looks like we’ve captured Saddam Hussein.” He explained that elements of the 4th Infantry Division operating near Tikrit, working with a special operations unit specializing in hunting high-value targets, had pulled a man who appeared to be Saddam out of a small spiderhole. We knew Saddam had body doubles, so although this man had tattoos and scars that appeared to match those we knew Saddam had, we were proceeding cautiously. The president told me the prisoner was being escorted to Baghdad under heavy guard.

Almost as soon as I hung up, Don Rumsfeld called. He said the man in custody had been identified by a witness as Saddam, and there were plans to do a comparison of the prisoner’s DNA with DNA from one of Saddam’s late sons. If news of Saddam’s capture didn’t leak, he told me, an announcement would be made the next morning at 7:00 a.m. D.C. time.

Capturing Saddam was a major accomplishment.