Stephen Hadley, Condoleezza Rice?s right-hand man in the Bush administration?s National Security Council, served as the fall guy when allegations arose regarding the national security adviser?s mishandling of information about Iraq?s purported effort to buy uranium from Niger. According to the Washington Post, Hadley was told by CIA Director George Tenet that the Niger allegations, which were used by Bush in various speeches (including the January 2003 State of the Union Address) and served as a key justification for invading Iraq, were probably bogus and should not be used by the president. Hadley, who claimed that Rice had been unaware of the controversy, told the newspaper, ?I should have recalled ... that there was controversy associated with the uranium issue.? (4)
Hadley also took a hit for his role in pushing the idea that Mohamed Atta, the lead hijacker in Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, met with Iraqi intelligence agent Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani in the Czech Republic several months before the attack. In an effort to establish a connection between former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the hijackers, Hadley -- in tandem with Vice President Dick Cheney and top aide I. Lewis Libby -- worked to have the allegation mentioned in speeches during the lead up to the war, despite the Czech Republic?s admission that it could not verify the meeting took place and U.S. intelligence agencies? inability to prove that Atta was out of the United States at the time of the alleged meeting. This effort apparently alienated several officials in the Bush administration.
According to a Sept. 29, 2003, Washington Post article: ?Behind the scenes, the Atta meeting remained tantalizing to Cheney and his staff. Libby -- along with Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley, a longtime Cheney associate -- began pushing to include the Atta claim in Powell's appearance before the U.N. Security Council a week after the State of the Union speech. Powell's presentation was aimed at convincing the world of Iraq's ties to terrorists and its pursuit of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. On Jan. 25, with a stack of notebooks at his side, color-coded with the sources for the information, Libby laid out the potential case against Iraq to a packed White House situation room. ?We read [their proposal to include Atta] and some of us said, ?Wow! Here we go again,? ? said one official who helped draft the speech. ?You write it. You take it out, and then it comes back again.? ... [Some] officials present said they felt that Libby's presentation was over the top, that the wording was too aggressive and most of the material could not be used in a public forum. Much of it, in fact, unraveled when closely examined by intelligence analysts from other agencies and, in the end, was largely discarded.? (14)
A former member of the Nixon and Bush Sr. administrations, Hadley served on then-candidate George W. Bush?s ?Vulcan? team of foreign policy advisers, along with Condoleezza Rice and Richard Perle. (11) He also participated in the National Institute for Public Policy?s study team that produced Rationale and Requirements for U.S. Nuclear Forces and Arms Control, a study that called for the development of ?mini?-nuclear weapons and served as a road map for George W. Bush?s Nuclear Posture Review. (10)
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