Libby Trial Offered Glimpses of Way White House Worked

In 2002, the CIA dispatched Wilson to Niger to assess reports that Iraq had recently sought to buy weapons-grade uranium from the African nation. He concluded that the reports were false, and later published a stinging rebuke of the administration, accusing Bush of distorting his findings to justify the invasion of Iraq, and contending that he had been sent to Niger in response to an inquiry from Cheney.

Prosecutors argued at the trial that Libby had told Fleischer and reporters about Plame and her CIA job as part of a White House strategy to discredit Wilson's assertions by suggesting that the agency had chosen him for the Niger mission because of nepotism.

As the multi-pronged campaign to tarnish Wilson's credibility unfolded, the trial demonstrated, participants held information so closely that often one aide did not know what another had done.

Cathie Martin, the vice president's former public affairs director and still a White House employee, testified that on July 10, 2003 -- four days after the publication of Wilson's stinging op-ed piece -- she sat in a hall outside Libby's office while she worked with him on a statement that then-CIA Director George J. Tenet was to give to try to diffuse the controversy over war intelligence.

In a handwritten note, she jotted the initials for a secret National Intelligence Estimate, a pivotal October 2002 document on what the government knew about any danger posed by Iraq's weapons programs.

Martin testified she was advocating on that day that parts of the document be declassified to help fight Wilson's assertions. She did not know, the trial demonstrated, that Bush had already declassified parts of it -- and that Libby had shared them with Judith Miller, then a New York Times reporter. Other evidence showed that then-White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. had also not known about the declassification.

In a similar vein, Martin testified, she attended a meeting convened by Stephen J. Hadley, who succeeded Rice as national security adviser, in which Hadley brought up a report by NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell. In it, she suggested that the White House was shifting the blame to the CIA for a statement about Iraqi weapons in Bush's State of the Union address, for which the White House later apologized. Irked, Hadley looked around the room, wondering whether anyone at the meeting had been a source for Mitchell's story.

Libby had. But instead of telling Hadley, Martin testified, Libby simply "looked down."

Staff writer Carol D. Leonnig contributed to this report.