- WASHINGTON -- Vice-President
Dick Cheney was under mounting pressure last night after he and his senior
officials were accused of smearing a former ambassador and outing his wife
as an undercover CIA officer in a deliberate act of revenge hatched inside
the White House.
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- In a row which began with off-the-record comments he
made to The Independent on Sunday last year, a former diplomat, Joe Wilson,
said Mr Cheney oversaw a group of neo-conservatives who decided to try
to damage his reputation. Because of Mr Wilson, the White House was forced
to admit that a key claim in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address
- that Iraq was seeking uranium for nuclear weapons - should not have been
made.
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- The controversy over what happened next could prove to
be the most damaging yet to engulf the Bush administration. A criminal
inquiry is investigating the unveiling in the press of Mr Wilson's wife,
Valerie Plame, as a CIA agent - a serious felony under US law. If one of
Mr Cheney's senior officials were charged, the damage would be huge.
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- Should the Vice-President be personally implicated -
which Mr Wilson believes he is - the outcome would be devastating for both
Mr Cheney and Mr Bush as they campaign for re-election.
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- Mr Wilson has made his allegations in a newly published
book, The Politics of Truth, subtitled "Inside the lies that led to
war and betrayed my wife's CIA identity". In it he writes: "I
am told ... that the Office of the Vice-President - either the Vice-President
himself or more likely his chief of staff, Lewis 'Scooter' Libby - chaired
a meeting at which a decision was made to do a work-up on me. As I understand
it, this meant they were going to take a close look at who I was and what
my agenda might be."
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- The former diplomat has claimed elsewhere that it was
also at this meeting that the issue of his wife's identity and her role
as a covert CIA operative was discussed. Mr Wilson said he believed it
was very unlikely that Mr Cheney was not aware of this.
-
- In an exclusive interview in his office in Washington,
just a quarter of a mile from Mr Cheney's, he said: "I find it difficult
to believe that a chief of staff would be undertaking something like this
without - at a minimum - the Vice-President's knowledge." Mr Wilson
stopped short of asking for Mr Cheney's resignation, but said: "If
he [did not know] about it, he should be saying so. The leak took place
at the nexus of national security, policy and politics."
-
- His struggle with the White House dates to a mission
in early 2002, at the request of Mr Cheney's office. He was sent to the
west African state of Niger, where he was once ambassador, to investigate
claims that Iraq was seeking to purchase uranium to develop nuclear weapons.
The claims were based on a document obtained by Italian intelligence services,
which had passed the information to Washington.
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- In less than a week Mr Wilson proved that the claim was
false and that the document must be a fake. Returning to Washington, he
reported this to a debriefer from the CIA. Later, experts from the UN nuclear
watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, confirmed the document
was a crude forgery. But when Mr Bush and his senior officials continued
to make the claim - first publicised in the British Government's September
2002 dossier on Iraq - he felt it was his duty to speak out. In an interview
with The Independent on Sunday, in which he asked that he not be identified,
and subsequently in a signed piece in The New York Times, Mr Wilson pointed
out that it was inconceivable that senior US and British officials were
not aware of his findings.
-
- After he went public, his wife was identified as a CIA
operative by the syndicated right-wing columnist Bob Novak, a veteran Washington
journalist with close links to the Republicans. It was her suggestion to
send Mr Wilson to Africa, claimed Mr Novak, who said in his column he had
been provided with the information by "two senior administration officials".
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- The leaking of an intelligence officer's identity is
a criminal offence. An FBI team is investigating the leak and has called
a grand jury to hear evidence and question potential witnesses. Earlier
this year it was reported that Mr Libby and numerous other officials from
Mr Cheney's office had been questioned by the FBI. Mr Wilson alleges that
it was Mr Bush's senior political adviser, Karl Rove, who was responsible
for "pushing" the story of Ms Plame's CIA position, and that
a senior national security council official, Elliott Abrams, may also have
been involved.
-
- The White House has been very careful in its remarks
on the affair, insisting that Mr Rove, Mr Elliott and Mr Libby were "not
involved in leaking classified information". It has stopped short
of an outright denial. One reason the White House may have been keen to
smear Mr Wilson is because it knew his allegations would be taken seriously.
In the run-up to the first Gulf War he helped to secure the release of
US citizens taken hostage by Saddam Hussein. He was the last US official
to meet Saddam while he was in power.
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- Mr Wilson told the IoS that his wife still worked for
the CIA, but that her work had been severely disrupted. He said that she
might also be at risk from anyone who wished to harm her because of her
previous undercover work.
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- "It has been irredeemably changed," he said,
adding that his wife felt she had been a victim of the political ambitions
of senior officials within the administration.
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- © 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=517287
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