Stop Me If You've Heard This One

Through his fine reporting at the New Yorker, Seymour Hersh has solved the yellowcake mystery.

It’s all just a joke.

A “former senior CIA official” who, for the record, is probably not Valerie Plame, told Hersh that “a small group of disgruntled retired CIA clandestine operators had banded together in the late summer of last year and drafted the fraudulent documents themselves.”

“The agency guys were so pissed at Cheney,” the former officer said. “They said, ‘O.K, we’re going to put the bite on these guys.’” My source said that he was first told of the fabrication late last year, at one of the many holiday gatherings in the Washington area of past and present CIA officials. “Everyone was bragging about it—‘Here’s what we did. It was cool, cool, cool….”

“They thought that, with this crowd, it was the only way to go—to nail these guys who were not practicing good tradecraft and vetting intelligence,” my source said. “They thought it’d be bought at lower levels—a big bluff.” The thinking, he said, was that the documents would be endorsed by Iraq hawks at the top of the Bush Administration, who would be unable to resist flaunting them at a press conference or an interagency government meeting. They would then look foolish when intelligence officials pointed out that they were obvious fakes.

Here is where the plan went astray. Instead of flaunting the forgeries at a press conference(when only some of the country would be watching), the administration kept them secret until unveiling them centerstage at the State of the Union address (when somewhat more of the country would be watching).

The CIA’s response?

“Holy shit.”

Direct quote.

So to summarize: the CIA leaked that the Niger documents were forgeries to the IAEA, and:

• Cheney asked the CIA to find out if Niger had sold yellowcake to Iraq,

• the CIA sent Ambassador Wilson and he said Niger hadn’t, >• Wilson writes a New York Times opinion piece accusing the White House recklessly making claims about yellowcake,

• the White House blows the cover of Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, to Robert Novak, to punish/discredit Wilson

• the CIA complains to the FBI that the White House is, you know, pissing on their employees,

• the White House claims it doesn’t know who blew Plame’s cover, and certainly doesn’t suspect Karl Rove, and

• the Department of Justice starts investigating the White House,

• where Karl Rove serves as the key political adviser to the President,

• who is titularly the head of the Department of Justice.

So far, the joke is playing out fairly well.