The cult that's running the country

The neoconservatives who have taken us down this path are actually very few in number. It is a small pack of zealots whose dedication has spanned decades, and that through years of selective recruitment has become a government cult with cells in most of the national security system. Among those cells are the secretive Office of Special Plans in the Department of Defense (reportedly now disbanded) and a similar operation in the State Department that is managed in the office of Under Secretary for Disarmament John Bolton.

Pat Lang -- with whom I had frequently exchanged views on Iraq policy -- served his country first as an army officer, rising to the rank of colonel, then as an intelligence officer in the Defense Intelligence Agency in charge of the Middle East before retiring. He once told me about when he was recruited for possible membership in the group.

He described to me a visit, during the administration of the first George Bush, from an elderly couple who dropped in on him unannounced one afternoon at his Pentagon office. They had come, they said, at the suggestion of Paul Wolfowitz, then the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, who had told them that Colonel Lang was a bright fellow. They introduced themselves as Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter, professors from the University of Chicago, and they made themselves at home for a brief chat.

Albert Wohlstetter, one of the most influential strategists of nuclear weapons policy in the second half of the twentieth century until his death in 1997, was a mentor to Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. In the 1970s he had been an architect of the first effort to bring outside analysts into traditional institutions like the CIA to "reassess" the Soviet threat. This "Team B" effort resulted in the Reagan administration's use of wildly exaggerated claims about Soviet rearmament to justify huge American defense spending increases. By the end of the decade, Wohlstetter had expanded his definition of America's strategic role to include the Middle East. He advocated that the U.S. extend its security umbrella to the Persian Gulf on the grounds that even if no Soviet hand could be seen behind the Islamic revolution in Iran of 1979, the situation there still represented a threat to American interests in the Middle East and Pakistan.

During the Wohlstetters' conversation with Lang, they began to probe the colonel for his views and beliefs. Mrs. Wohlstetter, partner to her husband in academia and in political philosophy as well as in life, pointed out sections in books they had written and asked Lang for his views on the theories espoused in them.

It became apparent to Lang that he was being auditioned -- though, as it happened, not to the satisfaction of the Wohlstetters. They soon packed up their books and left.

Lang said that in later conversations with a number of uniformed officers, he learned that many of them had been auditioned as well and, like him, had been found wanting. However, one who did pass the test was former Navy Captain William J. Luti. In the Bush administration he holds the post of Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs. Luti also supervised the Office of Special Plans, described in a seminal 2003 New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh as "a separate intelligence unit ... in the Pentagon's policy office."

It was through these special offices that so many of the rumors, gossip, and unsubstantiated intelligence about Iraq were passed directly to senior White House officials, notably Vice President Cheney, and were accepted without first being subjected to the rigorous analysis of the $30-billion-a-year intelligence community. American intelligence, which routinely sees and sifts thousands of bits of information daily, has had years of experience developing an analytical capability that can assess precisely whether the information we are receiving is fact or fiction. Short-circuiting this process -- or, in the vivid term Hersh adopted for the title of his disturbing article, "stovepiping" information directly into policy-makers' hands -- is dangerous. Addressing his investigation directly to Luti's enterprise, Hersh added: "This office, which circumvented the usual procedures of vetting and transparency, stovepiped many of its findings to the highest-ranking officials" in the administration.

President Bush could fundamentally change the direction of his administration by firing fewer than fifteen senior officials, beginning with those signatories of the Project for the New American Century and those currently holding government posts who signed a 1998 letter that urged President Clinton to wage war on Iraq. They are clustered at the National Security Council (NSC), in the Defense and State Departments, and within Vice President Cheney's own parallel national security office. That particular little-known organization -- not accountable to Congress and virtually unknown to the American people -- should be completely dismantled. Never in the history of our democracy has there been established such an influential and pervasive center of power with the ability to circumvent longstanding and accepted reporting structures and to skew decisionmaking practices. It has been described to me chillingly by a former senior government official as a coup d'etat within the State. That's all it would take -- firing fewer than fifteen officials, and the scuttling of Cheney's questionable office -- to alter this administration's radical course.

But President Bush would have to want to make these changes. The fact that he has utterly failed to do so suggests that one popular notion about this president -- that he has delegated foreign policy to his "prime minister," Dick Cheney, and that the president is somehow manipulated by him -- is doubtful. Even as the criticism mounts and the failure of the war policy becomes ever more evident with every attack on American interests in Iraq, the president refuses to make changes in his lineup. In fact, as one former intelligence officer suggested to me, President Bush may himself be a neoconservative "recruit," and now an active leader of the radical movement rather than a passive follower unable to block it.

The president is not powerless and does not need to demonstrate, as Senator Richard Lugar pleaded on Meet the Press in October 2003: "The president has to be president. That means the president over the vice president and over these secretaries [of State and Defense]." On the contrary, he is the president and he is directing his vice president and his cabinet secretaries to do his bidding. He is responsible for what has been wrought in his name.

In recent months I have tried to piece together the truth about the attacks on myself and the disclosure of Valerie's employment by carefully studying all the coverage and by speaking confidentially with members of the press who have been following the story. A number of them have been candid with me in our private conversations but unwilling to speak publicly with the same candor. When I have asked why the reporting on the story has not been more aggressive, I have received responses that are very disturbing. A reporter told me that one of the six newspeople who had received the leak stated flatly that the pressure he had come under from the administration in the past several months to remain silent made him fear that if he did his job and reported on the leak story, he would "end up in Guantanamo" -- a dark metaphor for the career isolation he would suffer at the hands of the administration. Another confided that she had heard from reporters that "with kids in private school and a mortgage on the house," they were unwilling to cross the administration.

In the halcyon days of an aggressive investigative press corps, journalists saw it as their job "to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted," as the great Chicago journalist Finley Peter Dunne put it early in the twentieth century. What does it say for the health of our democracy -- or our media -- when fear of the administration's reaction preempts the search for truth? Mark Fineman, the late Los Angeles Times foreign correspondent who did a profile on me in Baghdad in 1990, used to call his passion for the truth the search for the "dirtball" stories -- the stories that lay in the soft underbelly of the public pronouncements, the stories behind the story. Clearly, many stories lie behind the story of the attacks on my family, but they have prompted very little "dirtball" reporting. I am disappointed by the reluctance of the press to make waves and get to the very bottom of the real story.

From everything I have heard, the truth may be found at the nexus between policy and politics in the White House. Whoever made the decision to disclose Valerie's undercover status occupies a position where he -- and I believe it is a "he" because Robert Novak's own statements employ the male pronoun exclusively -- has access to the most sensitive secrets in our government, and a political agenda to advance or defend. In gumshoe parlance, he's got the means and he's got the motive. Only a few administration officials meet both of these criteria, and they are clustered in the upper reaches of the National Security Council, the Office of the Vice President, and the Office of the President.

After my appearance on CNN in early March 2003, when I first asserted that the U.S. government knew more about the Niger uranium matter than it was letting on, I am told by a source close to the House Judiciary Committee 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 "workup" 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.

The meeting did not include discussion of how the president or his senior staff might address the indisputable, if inconvenient, fact that the allegation I had made was true. In other words, from the very beginning, the strategy of the White House was to confront the issue as a "Wilson" problem rather than as an issue of the lie that was in the State of the Union address. That time frame, from my CNN appearance in early March, after the administration claimed they "fell for" the forged documents, to the first week in July, makes sense, as it allows time for all the necessary sleuthing to have been done on us, including the discovery of Valerie's name and employment.

The immediate effect of the workup, I am told by a member of the press, citing White House sources, was a long harangue against the two of us within the White House walls. Over a period of several months, Libby evidently seized opportunities to rail openly against me as an "asshole playboy" who went on a boondoggle "arranged by his CIA wife" -- and was a Democratic Gore supporter to boot.

So what if I'd contributed to the Gore campaign? I had also contributed to the Bush campaign. So what if I'd sat on a Gore foreign policy committee? I had had no political role whatsoever in the campaign. Moreover, my trip to Niger was taken more than two years after the GoreBush election, and I had not even been involved in any partisan activities during the campaign. And it was not until the spring of 2003, several months after the president's State of the Union address, that I contributed to the Kerry campaign and began to work with his foreign policy committee.

Would a staunch Republican have disregarded the facts and offered findings from Niger that were different than mine? Intelligence collection is not party-specific. Perhaps a Republican would have allowed the lie to pass without comment, but if so, that is a Republican problem. The national security question is always the same: Did we go to war under false pretenses? I am not prepared to argue that Republicans per se endorse the practice of government officials lying and distorting the facts, but it may be that Vice President Cheney and his chief of staff do.

Next Page: The man who may have exposed my wife's identity is an ardent neoconservative

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