By this point members of the intelligence community were complaining behind the scenes about pressure from the administration to find evidence of links between Saddam and international terrorism, and also between Saddam and weapons of mass destruction. According to an October 27, 2003, story by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker, there seemed to be a tendency by Cheney's office, among others, to bypass the analysts and use raw intelligence given directly to the administration. There was also increased reliance on intelligence provided by Ahmad Chalabi, the charismatic head of the opposition Iraqi National Congress, from Iraqi defectors. .... The C.I.A. did not trust Chalabi or his men. Cheney and the Pentagon, on the other hand, stood firmly behind him.
Cheney and his chief of staff, Lewis Libby, visited the C.I.A. several times at Langley and told the staff to make more of an effort to find evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and to uncover Iraqi attempts to acquire nuclear capabilities. One of the people who objected most fervently to what he saw as "intimidation," according to one former C.I.A. case officer, was Alan Foley, then the head of the Weapons Intelligence, Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center. He was Valerie Plame's boss. (Foley could not be reached for comment.)
[Note that the line at the beginning about Cheney's office making the request, refers not to Cheney requesting that Wilson per se make the trip, but that Cheney's office requested the CIA to send someone. We now know it was Valerie Plame's boss who asked Wilson to go. That sentence could have been more clearly stated.]
Anyway, the Vanity Fair article seems to jive in large part with what Larry Johnson, Vince Cannistraro and others have said.
One other part of interest concerns Novak. Did he lie to Wilson?
Wilson was caught off guard when around July 9 he received a phone call from Robert Novak, who, according to Wilson, said he'd been told by a C.I.A. source that Wilson's wife worked for the agency. "Can you confirm or deny?" Wilson recalls Novak as saying. "I need another source."
Wilson says he replied, "I'm not going to answer any questions about my wife." At this point, Wilson says, he and his wife thought the leak could be contained if no one picked it up.
When the Novak story ran, identifying not the C.I.A. as the source of the leak but "two senior administration officials," Wilson says, he called Novak and said, "When you asked for the confirmation you said a 'C.I.A. source.'" "I misspoke," Wilson says Novak replied. (Novak declined to comment.)
....In the last week of September, Novak modified his story. In an appearance on CNN's Crossfire, he said, "Nobody in the Bush administration called me to leak this," and also that, "according to a confidential source at the C.I.A., Mrs. Wilson was an analyst, not a spy, not a covert operative, and not in charge of undercover operatives."
Then there's this:
NBC's Andrea Mitchell called him that weekend, he says, and told him that sources at the White House were telling her, "The real story here is not the 16 words-the real story is Wilson and his wife." Next, Wilson got a call from a journalist whom he won't name-but who is widely thought to be Chris Matthews-who, according to Wilson, gushed, "I just got off the phone with Karl Rove. He says your wife is fair game. I gotta go." Click.
