A May 6, 2003, column by Nicholas Kristoff in the New York Times was the first public mention of Wilson's trip to Niger but Kristoff's column did not identify Wilson by name. Kristoff had been on a panel with Wilson four days earlier and said that Wilson told him that intelligence documents that proved Iraq attempted to buy uranium from Niger were forged and the White House should have known that before allowing Bush to include it in his State of the Union speech.
Wilson told Kristoff he could write about his trip and the forged documents but asked the columnist not to print Wilson's name as the source behind those statements. The column also mentioned for the first time the alleged role Cheney's office played in sending Wilson to Niger.
"That was when Cheney aides became aware of Wilson's mission and they began asking questions about him within the government," the Post reported, citing an unnamed administration official.
At this time Wilson spoke to two congressional committees that were investigating why Bush had mentioned the uranium allegation in his State of the Union address. Also in early June, Wilson told his story to The Washington Post on the condition that he not be named. On June 12, 2003, the Post published a detailed account of Wilson's trip and the fact that there was no truth to the claims that Iraq had tried to purchase yellow-cake uranium from Niger.
Beginning that week, officials in the White House, Cheney's office, the CIA and the State Department repeatedly played down the importance of Wilson's trip in interviews with several reporters, and his oral report to the CIA, which was turned into a 1 ½ page CIA intelligence memo for the White House and the National Security Council. By tradition, Wilson's identity as the source, even though he traveled to Niger on behalf of the CIA, was not disclosed.
As soon as the Post's story was published a number of officials in the Bush administration became concerned and started questioning who Wilson was and why he was criticizing the president, a senior administration official told the Post.
By Wilson's own account, he said he ratcheted up the pressure on the White House to come clean about its error in giving credence to the Niger uranium claims by calling some present and former senior administration officials who knew then National Security adviser Condoleezza Rice, asking his colleagues to tell Rice she was flat wrong in saying on NBC's "Meet the Press" on June 8 that there may be some intelligence "in the bowels of the agency" but that there was no doubt the uranium story was true.
Wilson said Rice told him through intermediaries that she was uninterested in what he had to say and urged Wilson to tell his story publicly if he wanted to state his case. So he did.
On July 6, 2003 Wilson was interviewed for a story that appeared in the Washington Post and accused the White House of "misrepresenting the facts on an issue that was a fundamental justification for going to war." That same day he wrote an op-ed in the New York Times which said that "some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."
The very next day, July 7, 2003, the White House admitted it had erred in including the references about uranium in Bush's State of the Union speech. Two days later, two top White House officials disclosed Plame's identity to at least six Washington journalists, an administration official told The Post in an article published Sept. 28, 2003.
Those two officials were Karl Rove and Lewis Libby.
"The source elaborated on the conversations last week, saying that officials brought up Plame as part of their broader case against Wilson," the Post reported in the Sept. 28, 2003 story.
On July 12, 2003, two days before Novak wrote his column, a Washington Post reporter was told by an administration official that the White House had not paid attention to the former ambassador's CIA-sponsored trip to Niger because it was set up as a boondoggle by his wife, an analyst with the agency working on weapons of mass destruction. Plame's name was never mentioned and the purpose of the disclosure did not appear to be to generate an article, but rather to undermine Wilson's report.
That source was Karl Rove and the unidentified reporter was Walter Pincus who covers the White House.
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