WASHINGTON, 3 July 2004 — I. Lewis Libby, who seems to have lived every minute of his 54 years, is hard to categorize. At the moment he is a red hot suspect as the man who leaked the name of a CIA undercover agent, Valerie Plame, which is a federal offense, not just in Washington but in real life. At present he is Vice President Richard Cheney’s chief of staff and thus one of the most powerful people in Washington.
To have the law circling around him is like being hauled up for a traffic ticket but it could bring Libby’s career to a halt, at least briefly. It’s a lot like the case of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Sherman Adams, who finally had to leave the government because he accepted a gift of a valuable vicuna fur coat but neglected to subject it to government approval. The story, in brief, is that agent Plame got her husband a brief assignment to check out a story that “yellow cake” nuclear ore was sent to Iraq from Niger. In Bush’s State of the Union address in 2002 he mentioned the bogus uranium plot. The story did not go away although it seemed to be an out and out forgery.
It appeared in the US press and was knocked down. It appeared in Britain and then was used to bring up the subject again. And it almost found itself in a bill of particulars assembled by Secretary of State Colin Powell, although he threw it out before appearing in front of the United Nations prior to the Iraq war. Then it appeared elsewhere and was picked up by Cheney who for some time had manufactured his own “evidence” for going to war against Iraq. For reasons that seemed almost too ridiculous to mention, “someone” decided to expose Plame and thus lose her ability to continue in her undercover position at the CIA.
Supposedly a number of journalists were offered the name of Plame but being aware that there is a statuary law against revealing a CIA agent’s name, they declined to run the story. Eventually journalist Robert Novak printed it. Novak is a very conservative columnist who frequently discusses the fact that Israel is the biggest violator of laws in the Middle East. It is still a mystery as to why he wrote the column about Plame and her husband’s trip to Niger.
Meanwhile Ms. Plame’s husband, Joseph Wilson, who was the charge d’affaires in Baghdad when Saddam Hussain attacked Kuwait in 1991 and later US ambassador to Gabon, Sao Tome and Principe, has published a book of his own, The Politics of Truth. As the notoriety of Plame continues, Libby is said to have referred in anger to Wilson as “that expletive deleted playboy,” who has now been referred to as a member of John Kerry’s campaign
The White House has said publicly that several senior administration officials, including Karl Rove, Bush’s senior adviser; Libby; and Elliott Abrams, the director of Middle East affairs at the National Security Council, that they did not leak Ms. Plame’s name.
President George W. Bush was questioned, but not under oath, on June 24 by US prosecutors who were led by Patrick J. Fitzgerald, a US attorney who is in charge of the investigation, accompanied by his personal lawyer, James E. Sharp.
Earlier Bush had said that his campaign strategist Karl Rove is not involved in the Wilson-Plame affair. When someone then brought up Libby’s name, however, a White House spokesman dodged the question and repeatedly avoided it. There are other possible suspects but Libby and Abrams always come up whenever the subject arises.
Libby had another identity that was equally famous or infamous only a few years ago. He had an 18-year collaboration with Marc Rich. In 1985 Libby became his personal attorney shortly after Rich fled the United States to avoid tax evasion prosecution.
He jumped bail and went to Switzerland 17 years ago to avoid prosecution on racketeering, wire fraud, income tax evasion and illegal oil trading charges.
Rich’s ex-wife, Denise Rich, has been a major contributor to Democratic campaigns and the Clinton presidential library. Her close friend, Mary Beth Dozoretz, pledged to raise $1 million for the Clinton library. Upon the advice of her attorney, she declined to testify, using the Fifth Amendment in all questions in front of the House during an investigation of the Rich case. Clinton pardoned a large number of people in the last-minute rush pardoned Rich’s sentence, along with 139 other pardons. Among those who spoke up for Rich was Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. This was the most controversial Clinton pardon as he left office.
Let’s move on to the biography of I. Lewis Libby. He was born in Connecticut in 1950 and raised in Florida. He attended Andover and earned his BA from Yale University and his JD from Columbia University. After law school Libby went to work as a lawyer in Philadelphia, then got a job offer from his old Yale political science professor, Paul Wolfowitz. Libby went to work for Wolfowitz at the State Department from 1981-85. He then left to go into private practice. By 1989 he was working again for Paul Wolfowitz, this time at the Pentagon. He was principal deputy under-secretary of defense for strategy and resources (1990-’92). When the Democrats took over, Libby served as legal adviser for the House Select Committee on US National Security and Military/Commercial concerns with the People’s Republic of China, and followed that post by becoming managing partner at the Washington office of Dechert, Price and Rhoads law firm in 1995. He worked for the firm until 2001 when he became chief of staff and national security adviser for Vice President Cheney.
Libby was a founding member of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), along with Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and others. He has been on the board of the Rand Corporation and has owned shares in armaments companies and has oil interests. He has also been a consultant to Northrop Grumman, the defense contractor, and has been active in the Defense Policy Board of the Pentagon.
In 1992 while working with Defense Secretary Richard Cheney Libby co-wrote with Wolfowitz a policy guidance memorandum aimed at formulating a post Cold War defense posture. Upset by President George Bush’s decision to leave Saddam Hussain’s regime in place after the 1991 Gulf War, Libby and Wolfowitz argued in their memorandum that the US should actively deter nations from “aspiring to a larger regional or global role.” They suggested the use of preemptive force to prevent countries from developing weapons of mass destruction, and act alone if necessary. Although the draft guidance was soon quashed soon after it was leaked to The New York Times, many of its ideas-in particular, the doctrine of preemption-later found their way into President George W. Bush’s national security strategy. The document also seems to have served as a template for the founding statement of principles of the Project for a New American Century, which was signed by a who’s who list of hawks and neocons who now serve in the current administration, including Cheney, Libby, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Elliott Abrams, Peter Rodman and Zalmay Khalilzad. One can only say that Libby is truly an enigma.
(Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs Magazine.)
