Backstory: How the CIA leak case began

Cheney ordered NIE to be released
Later in June 2003, Cheney instructs Libby to disclose a portion of a secret National Intelligence Estimate, which the vice president tells Libby was just declassified, to several reporters to refute the claims made by Wilson in his report to the CIA

The National Intelligence Estimate, which was done in October 2002, said that Iraq ''will probably have a nuclear weapon during this decade,'' but it included some dissenting views.

Libby testified in the grand jury that he had contact with reporters in which he disclosed the content of the "NIE" in June and July 2003.

According to prosecutors, on June 23, Libby crossed his first big line. At a meeting in his office with New York Times reporter Judith Miller, he said Wilson's wife might be a CIA employee.  Libby will met again with Miller on July 8 and July 12, 2003.

The first leaker
A week earlier, on June 13, Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward first learns of Plame in a meeting with deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage in his State Department office. During the course of that meeting, Armitage tells Woodward that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA as an analyst on weapons of mass destruction.

Woodward never wrote about the case, even after it became the most prominent story in Washington, although he made public statements dismissing its importance.

Armitage publicly revealed only in 2006 that he was the first to leak Plame's identity to Woodward and syndicated columnist Bob Novak. But Armitage was not charged with any crime, saying it was an inadvertent slip.

Armitage said, he made a terrible mistake in revealing Plame's employer at the time. Armitage added, "Oh I feel terrible. Every day, I think I let down the president. I let down the Secretary of State. I let down my department, my family and I also let down Mr. and Mrs. Wilson."  But he said he didn't even know Plame's name. "I didn't know the woman's name was Plame. I didn't know she was an operative," he said.

On June 27 2003, according to prosecutors, Woodward has conversations with Libby about Wilson's wife.

The Wilson bombshell
But it was Wilson himself who so exorcized the office of the vice president in the summer of 2003, when he wrote a highly charged column in the New York Times dismissing what the Bush administration had portrayed as Iraq's reach in West Africa for yellowcake uranium, fuel for a weapons program.

On July 6, 2003, Wilson's article titled, "What I Didn't Find in Africa," said the Bush administration "twisted" some intelligence about Iraq's nuclear weapons program.

Embarrassment from the statement that slipping into the President's speech months before no doubt hit a raw nerves in the White House when Wilson's column hit the news stands.

Cheney's handwritten notes
Prosecutors say Libby's memory defense, misremembering White House conversations about Wilson and Plame is hard to imagine, being that Wilson's column was such an irritant to the Vice President at the time, and whose handwritten notes on a clipping of the article make clear Cheney was personally concerned, and suspected, that Wilson's wife orchestrated the Niger trip for her husband.

The notes written by Cheney on the margins of the newspaper clipping seemingly question the CIA's motivation for sending Wilson on the fact-finding trip.  Cheney writes, "Have they done this sort of thing before?  Send an Ambr (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?"

Fleischer's ‘weird’ lunch
A day later, on July 7 then White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer recalls that over lunch at the White House, Libby told him the Vice President did not send Ambassador Wilson to Niger and it was the CIA who sent Wilson on the trip.  According to Fleischer's grand jury testimony, Libby tells him Wilson's wife, who works in the counter proliferation area of the CIA, sent Wilson.

Fleischer described the lunch as "kind of weird" noting that Libby typically "operated in a very closed-lip fashion." Fleischer recalled that Libby "added something along the lines of, you know, this is hush-hush, nobody knows about this. This is on the q.t."

Though Libby remembers the lunch meeting, and even said he thanked Fleischer for making a statement to the press about the Niger issue, he denied discussing Wilson's wife with him.

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