Ex-Aide Says Cheney Led Rebuttal Effort

Cheney told Martin to alert the news media that a highly classified and recent National Intelligence Estimate indicated no doubts about Iraq's efforts to buy uranium. Intelligence analysts have said that the uranium claim was never a key finding of the NIE and that there were doubts about it.

On college-rule paper, in blue ink, Martin scribbled what Cheney told her reporters needed to know about the Niger controversy as they conferred in his Capitol Hill office on July 7, 2003. "As late as last October, the considered judgment of the intel community was that SH [Saddam Hussein] had indeed undertaken a vigorous effort to acquire uranium from Africa, according to NIE [the National Intelligence Estimate]," she wrote.

Martin, who now works on communication issues for President Bush, said Libby also directed her to ask the CIA which journalists were calling with questions about Wilson's Africa trip, then personally telephoned at least one in an attempt to influence the broadcast.

Martin said that Cheney also determined the reply to questions she had received from Time reporter Matt Cooper about the role the vice president's office had played in the Niger trip. While flying back from Norfolk on the vice president's plane, she mentioned to Libby the e-mailed questions from Cooper.

Libby later came to her seat in the back of the plane, holding a handwritten card with notes he said were Cheney's instructions about what to say to Cooper. Libby told her, Martin testified, that Cheney, in a rare move, authorized him to provide a specific quote on the record, with Libby's name attached.

Martin portrayed both Libby and Cheney as concerned that reporters were not telephoning their office directly to get their side of the story about Wilson and his criticism of the administration. She said they directed her and her staff to begin monitoring television reports on the Niger trip and provide daily transcripts along with their usual canvas of printed stories about the vice president's office.

Attorneys for Libby repeatedly pressed Martin to acknowledge that, though she saw Cheney and Libby working overtime to rebut Wilson's criticisms, she had no evidence that either of them tried to leak Plame's name to reporters.

"At no time did Vice President Cheney indicate to you that he considered Valerie Wilson part of the story he wanted to get out," attorney Theodore V. Wells Jr. said to Martin.

"I did not have a conversation with the vice president about that," Martin responded.