What Happened

In late May 2003, when the president asked me to begin serving as his chief spokesman in July, I did not fully appreciate just how contentious and venomous the atmosphere in Washington was—and how controversial and polarizing the presidency of George W. Bush was about to become.

By October, less than three months after starting the new job, I was on the front lines defending a White House that was becoming engulfed in a growing scandal on the eve of a reelection campaign that had an increasingly hostile media clamoring and our partisan critics pouncing. For the American public, which had grown weary of the endless investigations and scandals connected with the Clinton presidency, the situation typified the worst of what they saw in Washington.

The emerging narrative in the Washington press was that the White House had deliberately blown the cover of Valerie Plame, a covert CIA official. Administration officials had anonymously leaked her identity to reporters in order to punish (at worst) or discredit (at best) her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who was publicly alleging that the administration had misled the country into war in Iraq. News stories suggested that White House aides had disclosed Plame's identity to at least five reporters. A concerted White House effort to disclose her identity would have meant that the officials involved, knowingly or not, had leaked classified national security information.

For nearly two weeks, following the September 29 disclosure of a criminal investigation by the Department of Justice, I vigorously pushed back at the notion that the White House was behind the leak. Even before then, I had bat-ted down any suggestion that my colleague and fellow Texan Karl Rove, a frequent target of our critics as the president's closest adviser, was involved in the leak. Later I added the vice president's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, to the list of those I defended.

By the daily White House briefing on October 10, I was looking for a way to extricate myself from commenting any further about specifics of the Plame case, which were now part of the recently announced investigation.

The opening I sought came near the end of that Friday's briefing in the form of a question from Victoria Jones, a cordial yet skeptical liberal talk radio journalist and Bush administration critic.

"Scott," Jones said, "earlier this week you told us that neither Karl Rove, Elliott Abrams, nor Lewis Libby disclosed any classified information with regard to the leak. I wondered if you could tell us more specifically whether any of them told any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA?"

I was ready with a reply. "I spoke with those individuals, as I pointed out, and those individuals assured me they were not involved in this," I said. "And that's where it stands."

Another reporter, seeking clarification, jumped in: "They were not involved in what?"

"The leaking of classified information," I said.

It sounded final and definitive—just as I intended.

I'd chosen my words carefully. While I believed what I'd been told by Rove and Libby, I could never know with 100 percent certainty that it was true. So I purposely put the onus on them, noting that they had "assured me" about their lack of involvement. It was a firewall of sorts, designed to protect my own credibility if the truth turned out to be more complicated—or wholly different—from what I'd been told. Not that I expected it to be. After all, I was confident, at the time, that neither the president nor the vice president would knowingly send me out to mislead the public.

The public assurances I provided that October 10 would be my final comments from the podium denying that Rove and Libby had been involved in the outing of a covert CIA official, and my final comments on any other matters which might be part of the criminal investigation that the leaking of Plame's name had already spawned.

There was only one problem. What I'd said was not true.

I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest-ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, Vice President Cheney, the president's chief of staff Andrew Card, and the president himself.

For my next two years as press secretary, the false words I uttered at that Friday's briefing would stand as the official White House position on the Plame case. Little did I know at the time that what I said, and the pervasive deception underlying it, would be my undoing as the president's chief spokesman.

I had allowed myself to be deceived into unknowingly passing along a falsehood. It would ultimately prove fatal to my ability to serve the president effectively.

I didn't learn that what I'd said was untrue until the media began to figure it out almost two years later. Neither, I believe, did President Bush. He too had been deceived, and therefore became unwittingly involved in deceiving me. But the top White House officials who knew the truth—including Rove, Libby, and possibly Vice President Cheney—allowed me, even encouraged me, to repeat a lie.

When the truth finally began to emerge, my credibility as White House spokesman was badly tarnished—a terribly painful experience for me.

I blame myself. I allowed myself to be deceived. But the behavior of the president and his key advisers was even more disappointing.

During 2003 and 2004, the White House chose not to be open and forthright on the Plame scandal but rather to buy time and sometimes even stonewall, using the ongoing investigation as an excuse for silence. The goal was to prevent political embarrassment that might hurt the president and weaken his bid for reelection in November 2004. The motive was understandable, but the behavior was wrong—and ultimately self-defeating. And, in retrospect, it was all too characteristic of an administration that, too often, chose in defining moments to employ obfuscation and secrecy rather than honesty and candor.

As I reflected on this leak episode—one of the defining episodes of my tenure as press secretary—my view of Washington began to crystallize as never before. What I witnessed and have come to realize about my time in the spotlight—beyond just this episode—is a larger, very unpleasant truth. The deception was not isolated to one event or even to the Bush White House. It permeates our national political discourse. And while much of the deceit has been incidental and has not been embraced consciously by our elected leaders, it has become an accepted way of winning the partisan wars for public opinion and an increasingly destructive part of Washington's culture. Coming to Washington as a member of a Republican administration, I thought the mentality of political manipulation had been largely the creation of our predecessors in the Clinton White House and that the leader I placed great hope in, George W. Bush, was dead set on changing it. He chose not to do so. Instead, his own White House became embroiled in political maneuvering that was equally unsavory, if not worse, much of it related directly to his most consequential decision as president—the decision to invade Iraq.

The explosive controversy that eventually led to the leak scandal began with an assertion about Iraqi efforts to obtain fissile uranium concentrates—so-called yellowcake—from the west African country of Niger. Based on documents that the CIA later acknowledged to be forgeries, this claim was one element of administration efforts in 2002 to demonstrate that the regime of Saddam Hussein was actively seeking to reconstitute its once-abandoned nuclear weapons program and was maintaining a stockpile of biological and chemical weapons. Largely for these reasons, along with the regime's support for terrorism, the president said that Iraq posed "a grave and gathering danger" to peace in the Middle East and even to the security of the United States. This argument about WMD was, in turn, the centerpiece of his position that the United States was justified in leading its allies, as well as the United Nations, toward preemptive war against Iraq.

In the fall of 2002, as debate was swirling around Washington and the world over whether or not a war with Iraq was necessary, Congress requested a national intelligence estimate (NIE) about the status of Iraq's WMD program. An NIE represents the collective judgment of all the agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community. And the NIE of October 2002, entitled "Iraq's Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction," stated that Iraq had been "vigorously trying to procure uranium ore and yellowcake" (the "yellowcake" a reference to the Niger claim). Based partly on this NIE, Congress voted overwhelmingly and across party lines on October 11, 2002, to authorize military action against Iraq by the commander in chief.

The next step in the development of the Niger controversy was the president's 2003 State of the Union address, which largely focused on the threat posed by Iraq. He delivered the speech as rhetorical and military preparations for an invasion were intensifying and Saddam continued to defy demands from the United Nations Security Council.

After talking at some length about the Iraqi regime's continued pursuit of chemical and biological weapons as well as its ties to terrorism, the president briefly and ominously alluded to the greatest fear-provoking claim—that the regime was moving forward on an advanced nuclear weapons program. The president had already stated that Iraq could build a nuclear bomb "within a year" if it acquired necessary fissile material, such as uranium. Now he uttered what would become known as "the sixteen words"—his first personal reference to the Niger uranium claim: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Those sixteen words would become the nexus of the controversy that delivered a near-fatal blow to the credibility of the president and his administration.

As the push toward war continued, President Bush and others in his administration continued to make the case for action against Iraq. Because of Secretary of State Colin Powell's enormous bipartisan popularity, as well as his unquestioned honor and integrity, the White House recognized that he would be the most logical and persuasive person to help seal the case at home and abroad. So, on February 5, Powell made a special presentation before the UN Security Council concerning the Iraqi effort to develop and stockpile weapons of mass destruction. This presentation did not include the Africa claim. After carefully scrutinizing the intelligence, Powell had chosen not to use it—a decision that, in retrospect, was both wise and highly revealing.

Still, that claim remained in the public mind one of the most potent bits of evidence in the administration's case for war. After all, the threat of nuclear attack by Iraq seemed far more frightening to most Americans than the more remote danger of a chemical or biological attack on U.S. soil. That is why the words of national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on September 8 had made headlines: "The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly [Saddam] can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

Then, just as America was on the verge of war, the Niger claim was seriously undermined.