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Does Fitzgerald Have A 'Mr. X' Witness?
Soon after 9/11, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, began routinely calling intelligence officials, high and low, to pump them for any scraps of information on Iraq. He would read obscure, unvetted intelligence reports and grill their authors, but always in a courtly manner, report Newsweek's National Security Correspondent John Barry and Investigative Correspondents Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball in the October 31 issue. The intel officials were often more than a little surprised. It was extraordinarily unusual for the vice president's office to step so far outside of channels and make personal appeals to mere analysts. "He was deep into the raw intel," one government official tells Newsweek. Libby was the most relentless digger in Cheney's close-knit group of advisers, which also included Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, Rumsfeld's under secretary for policy. Together, the group largely despised the on-the-one-hand/on-the-other analyses handed up by the intelligence bureaucracy.
Story Continues Below Instead, they went in search of intel that helped advance their case for war, Newsweek reports. Central to that case was the belief that Saddam was determined to get nukes - a claim helped by a report that Saddam had attempted to buy uranium from Niger, which the White House doggedly pushed. Ambassador Joseph Wilson damaged that claim with his landmark New York Times op-ed piece, printed on July 6, 2003, about his trip to Niger to investigate the story, during which he concluded it was not credible. Within the White House inner circle, Wilson's op-ed was seen as an act of aggression against President Bush and Cheney. Someone, perhaps to punish the loose-lipped diplomat, let it be known to columnist Robert Novak and other reporters that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was an undercover CIA operative, a revelation that is a possible violation of laws protecting classified information. This week the two-year-long investigation of that leak could finally end. It is widely expected that Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor appointed in the case, may issue indictments for one or more top administration officials, possibly including Karl Rove and Scooter Libby. Some lawyers close to the case are convinced Fitzgerald has a mysterious "Mr. X" - a yet unknown principal target or cooperating witness. Some press reports identified John Hannah, Cheney's deputy national-security adviser, as a potentially key figure in the investigation. Hannah played a central policymaking role on Iraq and was known to be particularly close to Ahmad Chalabi, whose Iraqi National Congress supplied some of the faulty intelligence about WMD embraced by the vice president in the run-up to the invasion. Last week Hannah's lawyer Thomas Green told Newsweek his client "knew nothing" about the leak and is not a target of Fitzgerald's probe. "This is craziness," he said. Whatever news Fitzgerald makes this week, however, the case has shed light on how Cheney and his clique of advisers cleared the way to war, and how they obsessed over critics who got in the way. "The notion that they've become a gang has some merit," says a longtime colleague of Libby's. "A small group who only talk to each other...You pay a price for that."
Editor's note:
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