Rove/Plame just a big lie by Joe Wilson, says WaPo

[fossten]

End of an Affair

It turns out that the person who exposed CIA agent Valerie Plame was not out to punish her husband.

Friday, September 1, 2006; A20

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/31/AR2006083101460_pf.html

WE'RE RELUCTANT to return to the subject of former CIA employee Valerie Plame because of our oft-stated belief that far too much attention and debate in Washington has been devoted to her story and that of her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, over the past three years. But all those who have opined on this affair ought to take note of the not-so-surprising disclosure that the primary source of the newspaper column in which Ms. Plame's cover as an agent was purportedly blown in 2003 was former deputy secretary of state Richard L. Armitage.

Mr. Armitage was one of the Bush administration officials who supported the invasion of Iraq only reluctantly. He was a political rival of the White House and Pentagon officials who championed the war and whom Mr. Wilson accused of twisting intelligence about Iraq and then plotting to destroy him. [GEE, I WONDER WHY HE NEVER CAME FORWARD? WHY DID HE LET THEM GO AFTER LIBBY?] Unaware that Ms. Plame's identity was classified information, Mr. Armitage reportedly passed it along to columnist Robert D. Novak "in an offhand manner, virtually as gossip," according to a story this week by the Post's R. Jeffrey Smith, who quoted a former colleague of Mr. Armitage.

It follows that one of the most sensational charges leveled against the Bush White House -- that it orchestrated the leak of Ms. Plame's identity to ruin her career and thus punish Mr. Wilson -- is untrue. The partisan clamor that followed the raising of that allegation by Mr. Wilson in the summer of 2003 led to the appointment of a special prosecutor, a costly and prolonged investigation, and the indictment of Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on charges of perjury. All of that might have been avoided had Mr. Armitage's identity been known three years ago.

That's not to say that Mr. Libby and other White House officials are blameless. As prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has reported, when Mr. Wilson charged that intelligence about Iraq had been twisted to make a case for war, Mr. Libby and Mr. Cheney reacted by inquiring about Ms. Plame's role in recommending Mr. Wilson for a CIA-sponsored trip to Niger, where he investigated reports that Iraq had sought to purchase uranium. Mr. Libby then allegedly disclosed Ms. Plame's identity to journalists and lied to a grand jury when he said he had learned of her identity from one of those reporters. Mr. Libby and his boss, Mr. Cheney, were trying to discredit Mr. Wilson; if Mr. Fitzgerald's account is correct, they were careless about handling information that was classified.

Nevertheless, it now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame's CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming -- falsely, as it turned out -- that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush's closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It's unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.

And yet so many writers took that story and ran with it. Where are their apologies? Where is their outrage against Armitage? Where are their campsites outside of Armitage's home, like there were outside of Rove's?

Columnist Paul Krugman, July 7, 2006: "And President Bush is especially unworthy of our trust, because on every front -- from his refusal to protect chemical plants to his officials' exposure of Valerie Plame, from his toleration of war profiteering to his decision to place the C.I.A. in the hands of an incompetent crony -- he has consistently played politics with national security."

Krugman, October 31, 2005: "The fact remains that officials close to both Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush leaked the identity of an undercover operative for political reasons. Whether or not that act was illegal, it was clearly unpatriotic."

Krugman, Jan. 16, 2004: "…the Bush people really are Nixonian. The bogus security investigation over Ron Suskind's 'The Price of Loyalty,' like the outing of Valerie Plame, shows the lengths they're willing to go to in intimidating their critics."

A Dec. 31, 2003 editorial: "Mr. Fitzgerald is charged with finding out who violated federal law by giving the name of the undercover intelligence operative to Mr. Novak for publication in his column...."

What a lowlife.

*owned*

 

[MonsterMark]

Anybody got Krugman's email address. I refuse to sign up at the NYT just to tell Kruggy boy what an a-hole he is.

But I would be glad to with a working email addy.

 

[Calabrio]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/02/w...&ex=1157774400&partner=MYWAY&pagewanted=print

September 2, 2006
New Questions About Inquiry in C.I.A. Leak
By DAVID JOHNSTON

WASHINGTON, Sept. 1 — An enduring mystery of the C.I.A. leak case has been solved in recent days, but with a new twist: Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the prosecutor, knew the identity of the leaker from his very first day in the special counsel’s chair, but kept the inquiry open for nearly two more years before indicting I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, on obstruction charges.

Now, the question of whether Mr. Fitzgerald properly exercised his prosecutorial discretion in continuing to pursue possible wrongdoing in the case has become the subject of rich debate on editorial pages and in legal and political circles.

Richard L. Armitage, the former deputy secretary of state, first told the authorities in October 2003 that he had been the primary source for the July 14, 2003, column by Robert D. Novak that identified Valerie Wilson as a C.I.A. operative and set off the leak investigation.

Mr. Fitzgerald’s decision to prolong the inquiry once he took over as special prosecutor in December 2003 had significant political and legal consequences. The inquiry seriously embarrassed and distracted the Bush White House for nearly two years and resulted in five felony charges against Mr. Libby, even as Mr. Fitzgerald decided not to charge Mr. Armitage or anyone else with crimes related to the leak itself.

Moreover, Mr. Fitzgerald’s effort to find out who besides Mr. Armitage had spoken to reporters provoked a fierce battle over whether reporters could withhold the identities of their sources from prosecutors and resulted in one reporter, Judith Miller, then of The New York Times, spending 85 days in jail before agreeing to testify to a grand jury.

Since this week’s disclosures about Mr. Armitage’s role, Bush administration officials have argued that because the original leak came from a State Department official, it was clear there had been no concerted White House effort to disclose Ms. Wilson’s identity.

But Mr. Fitzgerald’s defenders point out that the revelation about Mr. Armitage did not rule out a White House effort because officials like Mr. Libby and Karl Rove, the senior white House adviser, had spoken about Ms. Wilson with other journalists. Even so, the Fitzgerald critics say, the prosecutor behaved much as did the independent counsels of the 1980’s and 1990’s who often failed to bring down their quarry on official misconduct charges but pursued highly nuanced accusations of a cover-up.

Mr. Armitage cooperated voluntarily in the case, never hired a lawyer and testified several times to the grand jury, according to people who are familiar with his role and actions in the case. He turned over his calendars, datebooks and even his wife’s computer in the course of the inquiry, those associates said. But Mr. Armitage kept his actions secret, not even telling President Bush because the prosecutor asked him not to divulge it, the people said.

Mr. Armitage has not publicly commented on the matter. The people who spoke about Mr. Armitage’s thoughts and action did so seeking anonymity on the grounds that the criminal case was still open and that their remarks were not authorized by the prosecutor. A spokesman for Mr. Fitzgerald declined to comment.

Mr. Fitzgerald, who has spoken infrequently in public, came close to providing a defense for his actions at a news conference in October 2005, when Mr. Libby was indicted. Mr. Fitzgerald said that apart from the issue of whether any crime had been committed, the justice system depended on the ability of prosecutors to obtain truthful information from witnesses during any investigation.

The information about Mr. Armitage’s role may help Mr. Libby convince a jury that his actions were relatively inconsequential, because even Mr. Armitage, not regarded as an ally of Mr. Cheney, was talking to journalists about Ms. Wilson’s role.

But the trial, scheduled for early next year, may be focused on the narrow questions of whether Mr. Libby’s accounts to the grand jury and the F.B.I. were true. Judge Reggie M. Walton of Federal District Court, who is presiding, has resisted efforts by Mr. Libby’s lawyers to give the case a wider political scope.

Mr. Fitzgerald may also point out that Mr. Armitage knew about Ms. Wilson’s C.I.A. role only because of a memorandum that Mr. Libby had commissioned as part of an effort to rebut criticism of the White House by her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV.

Mr. Fitzgerald was named as a special counsel to investigate whether the leaking of Ms. Wilson’s identity as a C.I.A. officer was part of an administration effort to violate the law prohibiting the willful disclosure of undercover employees.

Some administration critics asserted that her identity had been disclosed in the Novak column as part of a campaign to undermine her husband. Mr. Wilson was sent by the C.I.A. in 2002 to Africa to investigate whether the Iraqi government had obtained uranium ore for its nuclear weapons program.

On July 6, 2003, a week before the Novak column, Mr. Wilson wrote a commentary in The New York Times saying his investigation in Africa had led him to believe that it was highly doubtful that any uranium deal had ever taken place and that the Bush administration had twisted intelligence to justify the Iraq war.

Mr. Armitage spoke with Mr. Novak on July 8, 2003, those familiar with Mr. Armitage’s actions said. Mr. Armitage did not know Mr. Novak, but agreed to meet with the columnist as a favor for a mutual friend, Kenneth M. Duberstein, a White House chief of staff during Ronald Reagan’s administration. At the conclusion of a general foreign policy discussion, Mr. Armitage said in reply to a question that Ms. Wilson might have had a role in arranging her husband’s trip to Niger.

At the time of the offhand conversation about the Niger trip, Mr. Armitage was not aware of Ms. Wilson’s undercover status, those familiar with his actions said. The mention of Ms. Wilson was brief. Mr. Armitage did not believe he used her name, those aware of his actions said.

On Oct. 1, 2003, Mr. Armitage was up at 4 a.m. for a predawn workout when he read a second article by Mr. Novak in which he described his primary source for his earlier column about Ms. Wilson as “no partisan gunslinger.” Mr. Armitage realized with alarm that that could only be a reference to him, according to people familiar with his role. He waited until Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, an old friend, was awake, then telephoned him. They discussed the matter with the top State Department lawyer, William H. Taft IV.

Mr. Armitage had prepared a resignation letter, his associates said. But he stayed on the job because State Department officials advised that his sudden departure could lead to the disclosure of his role in the leak, the people aware of his actions said.

Later, Mr. Taft spoke with the White House counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales, now the attorney general, and advised him that Mr. Armitage was going to speak with lawyers at the Justice Department about the matter, the people familiar with Mr. Armitage’s actions said. Mr. Taft asked Mr. Gonzales whether he wanted to be told the details and was told that he did not want to know.

One day later, Justice Department investigators interviewed Mr. Armitage at his office. He resigned in November 2004, but remained a subject of the inquiry until this February when the prosecutor advised him in a letter that he would not be charged.

But Mr. Fitzgerald did obtain the indictment of Mr. Libby on charges that he had untruthfully testified to a grand jury and federal agents when he said he learned about Ms. Wilson’s role at the C.I.A. from reporters rather than from several officials, including Mr. Cheney.

Mr. Libby has pleaded not guilty to all the charges, and his lawyers have signaled that he will mount a defense based on the notion that he did not willfully lie.

Neil A. Lewis contributed reporting from Washington for this article.

 

[97silverlsc]

It ain't over till the fat lady sings. I think this is nothing more than smoke screen being thrown by the white house in anticipation of a bombshell. Time will tell.

 

[Calabrio]

It ain't over till the fat lady sings. I think this is nothing more than smoke screen being thrown by the white house in anticipation of a bombshell. Time will tell.

Maybe it's time to move on.
The writing has been on the wall for a real long time. Even the New York Times has to recognize it now....

The fat lady hasn't just sung, she passed out from exhaustion

 

[97silverlsc]

Why Did the Washington Post Ignore Its Own Reporting on PlameGate?
http://libbydefensefund.com/news/06/0904.htm
September 4, 2006


In response to a recent highly flawed, factually incorrect (as in disproven by the Washington Post's own reporting), and blisteringly dishonest editorial by the Washington Post, LibbyDefenseFund.com and BuzzFlash.com received the following bullet point refutations of the egregiously misleading WP editorial. (The editorial ran in the September 1 edition of the Post, and could have been dictated by Cheney or Rove.)

WP Allegation: It is untrue that the White House orchestrated leak of Plame’s identity to ruin her career and punish Joe Wilson

• According to Washington Post article of 10/12/03: “two top White House officials disclosed Plame’s identity to at least six Washington journalists.” An administration source told the Post: “officials brought up Plame as part of their broader case against Wilson . . . It was unsolicited . . . They were pushing back. They used everything they had.”

• After Novak’s column appeared Rove called Chris Matthews and told him Mr. Wilson’s wife was “fair game” (Newsweek 7/11/05)

• Mr. Fitzgerald, who has long been aware of Mr. Armitage’s role, stated in court filing: “there is ample evidence that multiple officials in the White House discussed [Valerie Wilson’s] employment with reporters prior to (and after) July 14, “ and further that “it is hard to conceive of what evidence there could be that would disprove the existence of White House efforts to ‘punish’ [Mr.] Wilson.” (Washington Post 4/7/06)

WP Allegation: Mr. Wilson’s charge that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger is false

• The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Assessment of Iraq describes Mr. Wilson’s role:

• The CIA’s decision to send Mr. Wilson to Niger was part of an effort to obtain responses to questions from the Vice President’s Office and State and Defense on “the alleged Iraq-Niger uranium deal” (p. 39)

• Two CIA staffers debriefed Mr. Wilson upon his return from Niger and wrote a draft intelligence report that was sent to the CIA Director of Operations (“DO”) reports officer. (p. 43)

• The intelligence report based on Mr. Wilson’s trip was disseminated on March 8, 2002, and was “widely distributed.” It did not identify Mr. Wilson by name to protect him as a source, which the CIA had promised Mr. Wilson. (p. 43)

• According to the report, the CIA’s DO gave Mr. Wilson’s information a grade of “good” “which means it added to the IC’s body of understanding on the issue.” (p. 46)

• After Mr. Wilson’s July 6, 2003 New York Times op-ed, the Administration acted as if he had made a major revelation:

• The day after a spokesman for the President told The Washington Post: “the sixteen words [“The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa”] did not rise to the level of inclusion in the State of the Union.” (NY Times 7/8/03)

• On July 11, 2003, CIA Director George Tenet said “These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the president.” (LA Times 7/12/03).

• According to a Washington Post article, the National Intelligence Council stated in a January 2003 memo that “the Niger story [that Iraq had been caught trying to buy uranium from Niger] was baseless and should be laid to rest.” (Washington Post 4/9/06)

• According to a Vanity Fair article of July 2006, there was a last-minute decision before the President’s State of the Union Address to attribute the Niger uranium deal to British intelligence even though “the CIA had told the White House again and again that it didn’t trust the British reports.”

• On March 7, 2003, Mohamed ElBaradei, the Director General of the IAEA, publicly disclosed that the Niger documents which formed the basis for reports of a Iraq-Niger uranium transaction were false. He stated that “the IAEA has concluded, with the concurrence of outside experts, that these documents . . . are in fact not authentic. We have therefore concluded that these specific allegations are unfounded.”WP Allegation: Mr. Wilson “ought to have expected . . . that the answer [to why he was sent to Niger] would point to his wife.”

• A July 22, 2003 Newsday article cites a senior intelligence officer who confirmed that “she [Valerie Plame] did not recommend her husband to undertake the Niger assignment.”

• Joe Wilson’s July 15, 2005 letter to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence explains that Valerie Wilson was not at the meeting at which the subject of him traveling to Niger was raised for the first time and then only after a discussion of what the participants at the meeting did not did not know about Niger. This is confirmed by SSCI report at p. 40.

 

[fossten]

When even the New York Times admits the screwup, you have to hear the fat lady's dulcet tones more loudly.

It's OVER, Phil. You were wrong, every lousy lib on this board was wrong, the Democrats were wrong, the entire MSM was wrong. Get over it. Oh, I forgot, you still haven't gotten over the '00 election, have you? Oh, well, stew in your own juices then for all I care.


NY Times Finally Puts Valerie Plame Fizzle-out on Front Page

Posted by Clay Waters on September 5, 2006 - 12:40.

Ever since the "controversy" was ignited by Bush enemies like Joseph Wilson three years ago, The New York Times has run almost 40 front-page stories on the leak of the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame (Wilson's wife) to Robert Novak. But now that the prime anti-Bush angle has fizzled out, the Times has been notably reluctant to return to the scene of the non-crime.

This Saturday, the Times finally put the Plame-gate aftermath on the front page, in an interesting piece by David Johnston, "Leak Revelation Leaves Questions -- Prosecutor Knew Identity but Still Pushed Inquiry."

"An enduring mystery of the C.I.A. leak case has been solved in recent days, but with a new twist: Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the prosecutor, knew the identity of the leaker from his very first day in the special counsel’s chair, but kept the inquiry open for nearly two more years before indicting I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, on obstruction charges.

"Now, the question of whether Mr. Fitzgerald properly exercised his prosecutorial discretion in continuing to pursue possible wrongdoing in the case has become the subject of rich debate on editorial pages and in legal and political circles."

Too bad such accusations of prosecutorial overreach, so popular in the media during the Ken Starr-Whitewater-Paula Jones era, went rarely mentioned during the two years of Fitzgerald's service. Instead the Times, as documented here previously, routinely assumed as fact that Valerie Plame was "outed" as a CIA agent by the White House.

The "culprit," of course, turned out to be Richard Armitage, former deputy to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, neither of whom are considered to be particularly partisan or hawkish.

Below are just a few examples of how the Times assumed White House duplicity.

From a Jan. 4, 2006 editorial in the Times: "The longest-running of the leak cases involves Valerie Wilson, a covert C.I.A. operative whose identity was leaked to the columnist Robert Novak. The question there was whether the White House was using this information in an attempt to silence Mrs. Wilson's husband, a critic of the Iraq invasion, and in doing so violated a federal law against unmasking a covert operative."

Columnist Nicholas Kristof, July 4, 2006: "The Times would never have been as cavalier about Valerie Plame Wilson's identity as the White House was."

Television critic Alessandra Stanley, Oct. 25, 2005: "On Tuesday night, [Mock host Stephen Colbert] asked '60 Minutes' correspondent Lesley Stahl about the Valerie Plame scandal and listened blankly as she likened the White House leak of a C.I.A. agent's identity to Watergate."

And here's Johnston himself from February 10, 2004: "At first, the investigation seemed narrowly focused on trying to identify who at the White House provided the information about Ms. Plame to Mr. Novak."

No one, as it turned out.

 

[97silverlsc]

When even the New York Times admits the screwup, you have to hear the fat lady's dulcet tones more loudly.

It's OVER, Phil. You were wrong, every lousy lib on this board was wrong, the Democrats were wrong, the entire MSM was wrong. Get over it. Oh, I forgot, you still haven't gotten over the '00 election, have you? Oh, well, stew in your own juices then for all I care.

No Fossie, it's not over. I'm sure the White House and press involved in publishing the info about Plame would like to think it's over, but it's not!!

Special Counsel Under Attack
By Marc Ash
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Tuesday 05 September 2006

Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald and his investigation of the outing of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame are under attack by multiple mainstream media organizations acting simultaneously. The reports are - at best - shoddy journalism and at worst a deliberate attempt to bury one of the most powerful political news stories in US history.

Friday, September 1st, began with perhaps one of most curious stories I have ever seen published. "End of an Affair," the unsigned editorial published by the Washington Post, was a bizarre fusillade against not only Valerie Plame and Joseph Wilson, but Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald as well. The story begged a motive. The day ended with the New York Times blatantly trying to ignite a media stampede through Fitzgerald's office with their "news" piece authored by David Johnston titled "New Questions About Inquiry in CIA Leak." Again, motive conspicuously absent.

All of this followed closely on the heels of what was heralded as a revelation by Newsweek's Michael Isikoff and The Nation's David Corn. Isikoff and Corn - who will shortly release a book on the subject - purportedly led American journalism out of the darkness by reporting that former State Department official Richard Armitage was columnist Robert Novak's primary source for the information on Valerie Plame's CIA status. This apparently provided enough ammunition for both the Times and the Post to declare Fitzgerald's investigation dead on arrival, and ill-conceived to boot.

A startling decision on its face. The information on Armitage was hardly new: it had been reported months ago by several news agencies, including Truthout and the New York Daily News. Further, Fitzgerald's investigation/prosecution is hardly dead, as both the Times and Post are well aware. So why the deliberate attempt to kill the story?

The threat to the White House posed by Fitzgerald's investigation is abundantly clear, but Fitzgerald threatens another powerful institution in his pursuit of the Plame truth, America's multibillion-dollar commercial news industry. The threat is not abstract or academic, it's quite real. For undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame to have been "outed," someone had to reveal her identity, but someone else had to publish the information. Enter the US Fourth Estate - all rights intact.

Fitzgerald viewed the reporters and publications who published classified details of Plame's role with the CIA as little better than those who supplied the information to them. That became abundantly clear on July 6th, 2005, when Fitzgerald persuaded federal Judge Thomas Hogan to jail New York Times reporter Judith Miller on contempt of court charges for refusing to testify as to the identity of her source for the Plame information. TIME Magazine's Matt Cooper might well have ended up as Miller's cell-mate had he not, reluctantly and with great fanfare, decided to cooperate with the Special Counsel.

In all, Miller spent 85 days in jail before deciding she really wasn't cut out for martyrdom and rolling over on her source, with his permission of course - not Richard Armitage, but Scooter Libby. Cooper likewise got the green light from his source and reveled an even bigger fish - again not Armitage, but White House power broker Karl Rove.

Fitzgerald sent shock waves through the highest levels of the most powerful news organizations in the country with his hardball pursuit of the truth in the Plame case. From his perspective, the outing of Valerie Plame was not only an attack on the career of Plame - and her work group - but a deliberate compromising of their mission and personal safety as well. One justice department official I spoke to called it "treason." Valerie Plame's assignment and that of her group was WMDs. It was the very thing the Bush administration professed to be their highest priority. While Valerie Plame risked her life to combat WMD threats, Bush administration officials made speeches and in the end, many federal law enforcement personnel believe, betrayed her and her group.

Fitzgerald showed no patience with members of the press he viewed as instruments in an attack on the federal law-enforcement family as a whole. He wanted to leave an indelible impression that they too would be held accountable. This does not sit well with the overlords of American journalism. They view this as an attack on the freedom of the press, and the jailing of Judith Miller as an act of intimidation against the entire journalism fraternity.

Whether righteous or misguided in their ire toward Fitzgerald's perceived attacks on them, the US commercial press has abandoned objectivity in their reporting of the Plame investigation. Fitzgerald's investigation is ongoing, there are multiple individuals under examination, and right now US commercial press can't bring themselves to say it.

 

[97silverlsc]

What Valerie Plame Really Did at the CIA
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060918/corn
David Corn

In the spring of 2002 Dick Cheney made one of his periodic trips to CIA headquarters. Officers and analysts were summoned to brief him on Iraq. Paramilitary specialists updated the Vice President on an extensive covert action program in motion that was designed to pave the way to a US invasion. Cheney questioned analysts about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. How could they be used against US troops? Which Iraqi units had chemical and biological weapons? He was not seeking information on whether Saddam posed a threat because he possessed such weapons. His queries, according to a CIA officer at the briefing, were pegged to the assumptions that Iraq had these weapons and would be invaded--as if a decision had been made.

Though Cheney was already looking toward war, the officers of the agency's Joint Task Force on Iraq--part of the Counterproliferation Division of the agency's clandestine Directorate of Operations--were frantically toiling away in the basement, mounting espionage operations to gather information on the WMD programs Iraq might have. The JTFI was trying to find evidence that would back up the White House's assertion that Iraq was a WMD danger. Its chief of operations was a career undercover officer named Valerie Wilson.

Her specific position at the CIA is revealed for the first time in a new book, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, by the author of this article and Newsweek's Michael Isikoff. The book chronicles the inside battles within the CIA, the White House, the State Department and Congress during the run-up to the war. Its account of Wilson's CIA career is mainly based on interviews with confidential CIA sources.

CONTINUED BELOW
In July 2003--four months after the invasion of Iraq--Wilson would be outed as a CIA "operative on weapons of mass destruction" in a column by conservative journalist Robert Novak, who would cite two "senior administration officials" as his sources. (As Hubris discloses, one was Richard Armitage, the number-two at the State Department; Karl Rove, Bush's chief strategist, was the other. I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, also talked to two reporters about her.) Novak revealed her CIA identity--using her maiden name, Valerie Plame--in the midst of the controversy ignited by former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, her husband, who had written a New York Times op-ed accusing the Bush Administration of having "twisted" intelligence "to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."

The Novak column triggered a scandal and a criminal investigation. At issue was whether Novak's sources had violated a little-known law that makes it a federal crime for a government official to disclose identifying information about a covert US officer (if that official knew the officer was undercover). A key question was, what did Valerie Wilson do at the CIA? Was she truly undercover? In a subsequent column, Novak reported that she was "an analyst, not in covert operations." White House press secretary Scott McClellan suggested that her employment at the CIA was no secret. Jonah Goldberg of National Review claimed, "Wilson's wife is a desk jockey and much of the Washington cocktail circuit knew that already."


Valerie Wilson was no analyst or paper-pusher. She was an operations officer working on a top priority of the Bush Administration. Armitage, Rove and Libby had revealed information about a CIA officer who had searched for proof of the President's case. In doing so, they harmed her career and put at risk operations she had worked on and foreign agents and sources she had handled.

Another issue was whether Valerie Wilson had sent her husband to Niger to check out an intelligence report that Iraq had sought uranium there. Hubris contains new information undermining the charge that she arranged this trip. In an interview with the authors, Douglas Rohn, a State Department officer who wrote a crucial memo related to the trip, acknowledges he may have inadvertently created a misimpression that her involvement was more significant than it had been.

Valerie Plame was recruited into the CIA in 1985, straight out of Pennsylvania State University. After two years of training to be a covert case officer, she served a stint on the Greece desk, according to Fred Rustmann, a former CIA official who supervised her then. Next she was posted to Athens and posed as a State Department employee. Her job was to spot and recruit agents for the agency. In the early 1990s, she became what's known as a nonofficial cover officer. NOCs are the most clandestine of the CIA's frontline officers. They do not pretend to work for the US government; they do not have the protection of diplomatic immunity. They might claim to be a businessperson. She told people she was with an energy firm. Her main mission remained the same: to gather agents for the CIA.

In 1997 she returned to CIA headquarters and joined the Counterproliferation Division. (About this time, she moved in with Joseph Wilson; they later married.) She was eventually given a choice: North Korea or Iraq. She selected the latter. Come the spring of 2001, she was in the CPD's modest Iraq branch. But that summer--before 9/11--word came down from the brass: We're ramping up on Iraq. Her unit was expanded and renamed the Joint Task Force on Iraq. Within months of 9/11, the JTFI grew to fifty or so employees. Valerie Wilson was placed in charge of its operations group.

There was great pressure on the JTFI to deliver. Its primary target was Iraqi scientists. JTFI officers, under Wilson's supervision, tracked down relatives, students and associates of Iraqi scientists--in America and abroad--looking for potential sources. They encouraged Iraqi émigrés to visit Iraq and put questions to relatives of interest to the CIA. The JTFI was also handling walk-ins around the world. Increasingly, Iraqi defectors were showing up at Western embassies claiming they had information on Saddam's WMDs. JTFI officers traveled throughout the world to debrief them. Often it would take a JTFI officer only a few minutes to conclude someone was pulling a con. Yet every lead had to be checked.

"We knew nothing about what was going on in Iraq," a CIA official recalled. "We were way behind the eight ball. We had to look under every rock." Wilson, too, occasionally flew overseas to monitor operations. She also went to Jordan to work with Jordanian intelligence officials who had intercepted a shipment of aluminum tubes heading to Iraq that CIA analysts were claiming--wrongly--were for a nuclear weapons program. (The analysts rolled over the government's top nuclear experts, who had concluded the tubes were not destined for a nuclear program.)

The JTFI found nothing. The few scientists it managed to reach insisted Saddam had no WMD programs. Task force officers sent reports detailing the denials into the CIA bureaucracy. The defectors were duds--fabricators and embellishers. (JTFI officials came to suspect that some had been sent their way by Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, an exile group that desired a US invasion of Iraq.) The results were frustrating for the officers. Were they not doing their job well enough--or did Saddam not have an arsenal of unconventional weapons? Valerie Wilson and other JTFI officers were almost too overwhelmed to consider the possibility that their small number of operations was, in a way, coming up with the correct answer: There was no intelligence to find on Saddam's WMDs because the weapons did not exist. Still, she and her colleagues kept looking. (She also assisted operations involving Iran and WMDs.)

When the war started in March 2003, JTFI officers were disappointed. "I felt like we ran out of time," one CIA officer recalled. "The war came so suddenly. We didn't have enough information to challenge the assumption that there were WMDs.... How do you know it's a dry well? That Saddam was constrained. Given more time, we could have worked through the issue.... From 9/11 to the war--eighteen months--that was not enough time to get a good answer to this important question."

When the Novak column ran, Valerie Wilson was in the process of changing her clandestine status from NOC to official cover, as she prepared for a new job in personnel management. Her aim, she told colleagues, was to put in time as an administrator--to rise up a notch or two--and then return to secret operations. But with her cover blown, she could never be undercover again. Moreover, she would now be pulled into the partisan warfare of Washington. As a CIA employee still sworn to secrecy, she wasn't able to explain publicly that she had spent nearly two years searching for evidence to support the Administration's justification for war and had come up empty.

Valerie Wilson left the CIA at the end of 2005. In July she and her husband filed a civil lawsuit against Cheney, Rove and Libby, alleging they had conspired to "discredit, punish and seek revenge against" the Wilsons. She is also writing a memoir. Her next battle may be with the agency--over how much of her story the CIA will allow the outed spy to tell.