In My Time

by Dick Cheney

  In 1991 Saddam had time to set Kuwait’s oil fields ablaze. In 2003 our special operations forces were sent in early to protect the six hundred oil wells in southern Iraq. During Desert Storm Saddam had fired Scud missiles at Israel and Saudi Arabia. In Iraqi Freedom our special operations forces seized control of the missile launch baskets in western Iraq and prevented their use.

  The plan put together by General Franks and Secretary Rumsfeld for the liberation of Iraq was bold, impressive, and effective. By moving with astonishing speed, going with a small force, and without preceding air bombardment, they achieved tactical surprise. With less than half of the ground forces and two-thirds of the air assets used in Desert Storm, they achieved a far more difficult objective in less time and with fewer casualties.

  On April 9 Lynne and I were visiting the D-Day Museum in New Orleans. Watching television in our hotel before I went onstage to speak, we saw the statue of Saddam in central Baghdad pulled down by Iraqis and American marines. We knew we were watching the end of Saddam’s regime.

  Just before the statue came down, a young marine draped an American flag over Saddam’s face. Watching the scene on television, I completely understood. We all wanted to see an Iraqi flag up there soon, but our troops had just accomplished a stunning military victory. They had earned the right to plant the stars and stripes anyplace they wanted.

  At the end of the day, back in the White House, my guest was Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi dissident who had stood against Saddam for decades. A gentle, soft-spoken man, he had documented the atrocities of Saddam’s regime. It was an emotional meeting, and I’ll never forget Kanan’s words that evening: “Thank you,” he said, “for our liberation.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Intelligence and Politics

  During the spring of 2003, stories began to appear in the press that a former U.S. ambassador had been sent to Africa in 2002 after I had asked questions about a report that Iraq had tried to acquire uranium from Niger. According to the articles the unnamed ambassador told the CIA upon his return that the report was wrong. His assessment was of interest to the media because it seemed to contradict a sixteen-word statement that President Bush had made in his 2003 State of the Union speech. “The British government,” he had said, “has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

  I was surprised by the stories about the ambassador. Well over a year before, when I had read a Defense Intelligence Agency report about Iraq possibly trying to acquire uranium from Niger, I had done what I often did and asked for further information. What was the CIA’s opinion of the report? What did the CIA think were the implications for Iraq’s nuclear program? A few days later, around Valentine’s Day 2002, I received a CIA memo saying that Iraq had existing stockpiles of yellowcake, or unenriched uranium ore, two hundred tons of which had previously been acquired from Niger, but that these stockpiles were in sealed containers that the International Atomic Energy Agency inspected annually. This was interesting information, since it indicated that if Saddam intended to restart his nuclear program, he was going to have to acquire uranium clandestinely—and he had a history with Niger. The mid-February memo said the agency was seeking to clarify and confirm the reporting on recent efforts by Iraq to acquire Niger uranium.

  Fifteen months had passed and I hadn’t gotten an answer from the CIA, yet now I was reading in the newspapers that the agency had sent someone on a mission to Niger, an unnamed ambassador, who was intent on providing the results of his trip, which had never been provided to me, to members of the press, and he was doing so in order to call our truthfulness into question. In all my years working with the intelligence community—as White House chief of staff, as a member of the House Intelligence Committee, as secretary of defense supervising such intelligence organizations as the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the National Security Agency—I had never seen anything like this, and after I had read a couple of the stories, I picked up the secure phone on my desk and punched the button that gave me a direct line to CIA Director George Tenet out at CIA headquarters in Langley. “What the hell is going on, George?” I asked when he picked up the phone.

  Tenet sounded embarrassed and seemed not to know much more than I did. He said neither he nor his deputy, John McLaughlin, had been aware of an envoy being sent to Niger. He did add one fact, though. He said they had learned that the wife of the fellow who went to Niger “worked in the unit that sent him.” George said he’d get to the bottom of it and get back to me. I shook my head as I hung up. It sounded like amateur hour out at the CIA.

  On July 6, 2003, the retired ambassador, Joe Wilson, apparently tired of anonymity, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times titled “What I Didn’t Find in Africa.” Wilson said that in response to my request for more information, the CIA had sent him to Niger, paying his expenses, but not for his time, which he donated “pro bono.” As a result of his trip, he said, he concluded that the story about Iraq trying to acquire uranium in Niger was false, and he asserted that I surely must have been told that by the CIA. To round things out, Wilson brought up the president’s statement in the State of the Union address and accused the administration of twisting intelligence in order to justify the war.

  I often clipped pieces out of newspapers, and that’s what I did with Wilson’s op-ed. I wrote a few comments in the margin that expressed my consternation: “Have they done this sort of thing before? Send an ambassador to answer a question? Do we ordinarily send people out pro bono to work for us? Or did his wife send him on a junket?”

  After the op-ed appeared, there was a debate inside the White House, and at least one discussion in the Oval Office, about whether we should apologize for the inclusion of “the sixteen words” in the president’s State of the Union speech. The CIA had cleared the president’s address; but now with a spotlight on the words, Director Tenet was saying that they didn’t rise to an appropriate level of certainty. Some on the president’s senior staff believed that if we issued an apology, the story would go away. I strongly opposed the idea. An apology would only fan the flames, and why apologize when the British had, in fact, reported that Iraq had sought a significant amount of uranium in Africa? The sixteen words were true.

  It is worth noting at this point in a complicated story that when the British government later investigated prewar intelligence on Iraq, they confirmed their reporting. “Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999,” the Butler Review noted, and “the British Government had intelligence from several different sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium.” The British not only stood by their intelligence, they concluded that the statement in President Bush’s State of the Union speech was “well-founded.”

  I was under the impression that the president had decided against a public apology, and was therefore surprised a few days later when National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice told the White House press pool, “We wouldn’t have put it in the speech if we had known what we know now.” The result was the conflagration I had predicted. The media immediately wanted to know who was responsible. Suddenly the White House staff was consumed with reviewing drafts of the President’s State of the Union speech, going over communications with the CIA about the speech, and poring through previous speeches to determine how the sixteen words got into the speech. First George Tenet and later Steve Hadley, the deputy national security advisor, issued statements accepting the blame. It was a ridiculous situation—particularly in light of the fact that the sixteen words were, as the British put it, “well-founded.”

  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 taxpay
er 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.