Samuel Dash, the former senior Watergate counsel and one-time adviser on ethics to Whitewater Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr, published an article in Newsday in late October arguing that the Patriot Act should be invoked:If, as now seems likely, top White House aides leaked the identity of an American undercover agent, they may have committed an act of domestic terrorism as defined by the dragnet language of the Patriot Act their boss wanted so much to help him catch terrorists.
Section 802 of the act defines, in part, domestic terrorism as “acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any state” that “appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population.”
Clearly, disclosing the identity of a CIA undercover agent is an act dangerous to life—the lives of the agent and her contacts abroad whom terrorists [sic] groups can now trace—and a violation of the criminal laws of the United States.
And what about the intent of those White House officials in disclosing this classified information? Surely, this mean-spirited action on their part was for the purpose of intimidating the CIA agent’s husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, who had become a strong critic of the Bush administration’s Iraq policies. And not just Wilson. By showing their willingness to make such a dangerous disclosure, the White House officials involved were sending a message to all critics of the administration to beware that they too can be destroyed if they persist. That apparent intention “to intimidate or coerce a civilian population”—in this case American citizens—also meets the Patriot Act definition of domestic terrorism.
In fact, the exposure of a national security asset, regardless of who it might be, is fundamentally different from a mere leak of information. The president was flat wrong to equate the two. Dash concluded his article with an important recommendation: The history of White House scandals teaches a primary lesson. Delay, obfuscation and cover-up only make the scandal worse and create a quagmire that harms the presidency. President Bush has only one option. He should use his power as president and his control over his aides to demand that the leakers come forward and he should kick them out of the White House.
He should make it unambiguously clear that he does not and will not tolerate this kind of conduct by anyone who works for him. It is not enough for him to condemn generally such leaks and leave it up to only the Justice Department to find the leakers. He must act on his own if he wants to keep the confidence of the people and move ahead with his presidency.
Equating what the White House had done to putting a loaded gun against the temple of a CIA operative, New York Senator Charles Schumer took the lead in calling for a special counsel, and he was ably supported by Senators Kennedy, Leahy, Rockefeller, and others on the Justice and Intelligence Committees. My two senators, inasmuch as I still think of myself as a Californian, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, joined by Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow and Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu, pointed out the sexism demonstrable in the exposure of my wife’s career, which was quite separate from my own activities. Former White House Counsel John Dean likened it to the ordering of a Mafia hit.
But rather than adopting a forthcoming stance, the administration pushed it off on the Justice Department and then tried hiding behind the investigation to avoid answering questions. They preferred circling the wagons.
On October 15, I was honored to receive from the Fertel Foundation and The Nation Institute the first Ron Ridenhour Award as truth teller of the year. Ron Ridenhour was a Vietnam veteran who had sent letters to the Pentagon and to several members of Congress alerting them to the massacre at My Lai in 1968. His report eventually came to the attention of New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh, who then broke the story. Ridenhour, the soldier-turned-whistleblower, went on to become an investigative journalist and died most unexpectedly at fifty-two in 1998. I had not known his story before, but I have come to hold him in the utmost respect for his sturdy commitment to the truth-telling mission that defined his life.
I had been selected for the award several weeks before the criminal referral launched the most recent press orgy, and had been looking forward to receiving the award at a luncheon with Valerie at my side. Despite all the attention the story was receiving, we agreed she would still attend this function. We were determined to keep living a normal life, and not seclude ourselves. The Fertel and Nation staff were assiduous about keeping the photographers out of the luncheon, and escorted Valerie in through a side entrance at the National Press Club building so that she’d not encounter the reporters who had attended the press conference beforehand. At the luncheon we had a gratifying experience with an audience of patriotic Americans prepared to stand up and fight for our rights and freedoms. I was overwhelmed by the commitment of everybody there. At our table was the truth teller of the twentieth century, Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers in the Vietnam era, along with Deborah Scroggins, the author of Emma’s War, a revelatory book on the Sudan civil war. The two were honored for their remarkable accomplishments. Seymour Hersh was also in attendance.
After Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation magazine, afforded me a very kind and generous introduction, I stood before the audience and said that in the midst of people who had been activists all their lives, I felt like an unlikely recipient of such an award. I liked to play golf, not a pastime normally associated with earnest activists. I smoked big cigars, and I drove a Jaguar convertible instead of a hybrid. I liked my Hermes ties, and I had done nothing more than write a modest article titled, “What I Didn’t Find in Africa.” To be mentioned in the same breath as Dan Ellsberg, whose conscience had led him to make seven thousand pages of secret documents available to the public, was humbling. I would never have even considered doing what he had done.
That morning, I had written myself a reminder of the points I wanted to make. One was to acknowledge the terrible offense done to Valerie by her own government. I started to say: “To my wife Valerie, I cannot begin to tell you how sorry I am for what your government has done to you. If I could give you your anonymity back, I would do it in an instant.” But I had to stop midway. For the first time since the beginning of this ordeal, I was overcome with emotion, not because of the often inane and frequently childish attacks on me but because of what my own government, for which I had worked most of my adult life, had done to my wife. I looked at Valerie as she wiped a couple of tears from her eyes, and I wondered whether I was going to be able to continue. Fortunately, the moment passed. I regained my composure. It seemed to me like an eternity had ticked by while I’d stifled my unexpected surge of sentiment. From the sympathetic response of the audience as they waited for me to continue, I judged the silence was neither too awkward nor as long as it had seemed to me.
Once I had composed myself, I concluded my remarks with a personal and heartfelt attack on the president himself. Noting that while I had tried to be scrupulous in attacking the policies and not the person in this matter, I said I was “frankly appalled at the apparent nonchalance shown by the president of the United States.” Bush knows how he felt about Saddam’s attempt to assassinate his dad, I said; he cited it at campaign rallies before the 2002 midterm elections as yet another reason to attack Iraq. And I felt the same way about attacks on my wife. I found the idea that I had to defend her against her own political leadership to be repugnant.
In the two weeks following the criminal referral to Justice, a number of profiles had been published about both Valerie and me by responsible reporters. I was grateful, because I thought it important to have some unbiased profiles published to counter the fantasies being concocted by people who knew nothing about either of us. The New York Times published what I considered the most accurate profile of me. Coverage in the Washington Post and Time magazine guaranteed that Valerie would forever be known for what she is: an adoring mother of twins and an active volunteer in a family health foundation dedicated to helping mothers suffering from postpartum depression, while worki
ng full time to make her country safer.
The sympathetic portrayals helped to silence those who would question her qualifications and dedication. Gone were the asinine “analyst or glorified secretary” comments. Regrettably, there still seemed to be far too much partisanship in the discussion. While Republicans who phoned me were, if anything, more outraged than Democrats, that fact did not surface in the public debate.
Valerie had been a pillar of strength and serenity throughout this huge upheaval in her life. She had not tried to influence my actions in any way, except when she urged me to tone down my frog-march comments—and even then, she suggested only that I temper my remarks as I saw fit, say by dropping the “handcuffs” from the charge. Yet her life had irrevocably changed. All of her friends and most of her family looked at her differently now. Some, including mere acquaintances, expressed surprise that they had not known her true occupation, to which she would invariably reply: “That’s the point of cover, isn’t it? That you not know.”
She fended off questions related to her work with the simple comment: “These are not things I would talk about before you heard what I did for a living; I am certainly not going to discuss them now.” I noticed that she now took particular care with her grooming before we went out. She had always looked gorgeous, but now she would run the comb through her hair just once more or give a last-minute touch-up to the gloss on her lip—little details here and there. I teased her about it one day on our way to a wedding. “Of course,” she said. “Everybody is going to be looking at me, voyeuristically curious, and you can be damn sure I am going to look my best!” Ever pragmatic, she was not going to let the new situation faze her, even as she remained adamant about not being quoted or photographed in a way that could identify her.
After the Ridenhour award ceremony, it struck Valerie and me that we had been in the pressure cooker for quite a while without a break. We thought it might be a good idea to get away for a while. Norman and Lyn Lear had invited us to spend a weekend with them in Los Angeles, and we gratefully took them up on their kind offer, leaving our twins with their adoring grandparents. I arranged to deliver a couple of speeches out there, and Valerie could meanwhile relax with our new friends, who did everything possible on our arrival to make her feel welcome and comfortable. Valerie had joked that “things had to be tough if we were going to L.A. to relax,” but it proved to be just the tonic we needed.
The Lear guesthouse, set on a hillside, looked down a canyon to the Pacific Ocean. We arrived late in the afternoon on a Thursday and watched the sun set from our balcony, the California blue sky surrendering to a starry night while the lights of the city twinkled below. The silence in the hills was a welcome change from the roar of airplanes flying low over our Washington home. I could see the stress melt from Valerie’s face and the tension ebb from her shoulders; she was finally able to let go.
On Friday, I gave a speech at UCLA, did a number of interviews, and met with students to talk about the war and to urge them to become politically active. That evening, Valerie and I attended a small dinner in our honor at the Lears’. Guests included Warren Beatty and Annette Bening. During the cocktail hour, Valerie and Annette, the mother of four, struck up an easy conversation, comparing the joys and trials of bringing up children. All the guests were politically savvy, with much to offer to the national dialogue, and consummate professionals. In many ways, they had been interpreters of American society for well over a generation, and their considerable success in the entertainment industry had sprung from a keen sensitivity to the pulse of American life, which their work reflected and recreated as it became part of the popular culture. The great irony was that these talented and involved people are routinely lambasted by the Right for daring to utter their political opinions, while a serial groper like Arnold Schwarzenegger, a caricature of a comic-book figure, had just received the benediction of none other than that self-promoting paragon of morality—and admitted gambling addict—William Bennett, in his run for governor of my home state. The hypocrisy was breathtaking.
At dinner Valerie found herself seated between Norman Lear and Warren Beatty. She turned to Warren and, looking around the room, remarked, “My life is becoming more surreal every day.” And indeed it was. Here we were in the midst of some of our best-known performing artists, and the person they wanted to see was Valerie, the stories they wanted to hear were ours. They wanted to support us as we traversed the white-hot glare of the media circus. Their outrage at what the Bush administration had done was as strong as ours.
The following day, while Valerie continued to take full advantage of the brief respite from her strange new life, relaxing and reading on the terrace, I participated in the first screening of Robert Greenwald’s documentary Uncovered. The completed film was a devastating deconstruction of the Bush administration’s case for war. It intercut the statements of senior administration officials with interviews featuring many experts on weapons of mass destruction, the war, and Iraq, myself included. The effect created was a stark juxtaposition of the administration’s self-justifying rhetoric and the insistence by its critics that the case for war was based on selectively cited and manipulated intelligence.
The film’s critique of Colin Powell’s theatrics at the United Nations was particularly devastating. One came away from that segment feeling sorry for—and angry with—the general, who, after such a distinguished career in the service of his country, had been reduced to being the front man for a war promoted under false pretenses. In his February 5, 2003 presentation at the U.N., Powell began by flatly stating that disarmament was the purpose of U.N. Resolution 1441. Not the prevention of terrorism, not the boon of Iraqi liberation, but the achievement of disarmament—that was the goal to which the international community had unanimously agreed. How to achieve that goal was what stood at issue. Was 1441 working or not, and if not, how should the international community proceed to achieve the disarmament goal? These were the questions that should have been before the world body.
To those who work on disarmament issues, the answer would have been “yes,” 1441 was working. The Iraqi bureaucracy was spending so much time and energy on U.N. inspection-related tasks that it could not have made any progress toward a WMD program, whether it wanted to or not. Resolution 1441 was proving effective, and Powell’s U.N. speech had said as much. But he spun the facts to conclude the opposite.
Uncovered went unflinchingly further. It pointed out every instance in which the secretary’s conclusions were simply not supported by the analysis, including one example that showed a plane spraying “simulated” anthrax—only, the plane had been destroyed in 1991. And yet, in the hysteria of the moment, the supposed evidence presented in Powell’s speech was widely interpreted as “the smoking gun.” Powell had turned his back on his eponymous doctrine, on the U.S. armed forces, and on the American people who had put their trust in him.
Valerie and I returned from Los Angeles refreshed and profoundly grateful for the friendship of thoughtful and tolerant Americans and fellow Californians. I had given speeches and interviews before hundreds of people, and it was clear that no one had been fooled by the attack campaign being waged against Valerie and me. Everyone understood that this was serious business, not just the petty politics of revenge driven by partisan sympathies.
Valerie went back to work, and I tried to focus on the most important of the debates raging on Iraq.
In September, I had written a third article for the San Jose Mercury News, this one calling on the administration to internationalize the reconstruction of Iraq, and to stop misleading the American people about the serious problems we faced created by our occupation of the country. I feared that our poor management of the reconstruction would ultimately, after a bitter civil war, result in the Balkanization of Iraq unless we managed to curb the insurgency, restore public safety, and give Iraqis hope that their future would be better than what they had known: thirty years of Baathist tyranny, destruction caused by three wars, including the
shock and awe of the recent American campaign.
But all anybody wanted to hear from me was a status report on the investigation. In my notoriety as Mr. Valerie Plame, I had been effectively sidelined in the important discussion about how to proceed and succeed in Iraq.
Vanity Fair writer Vicky Ward had been calling me for some time about doing an interview. I was not initially enthusiastic, but she was persistent; the more I thought about it, though, the more I concluded it would be a good idea. Right-wing hacks were still trying to define me with their lies, though there were some exceptions.Tony Blankley, the editor of the right-wing Washington Times, owned by the Korean cult leader Sun Myung Moon, was among those on his side of the political spectrum to write that the attack on my wife was wrong.
Blankley had once been Newt Gingrich’s press secretary and later became a pundit and conservative columnist. I had little in common with him and his politics, but I called to thank him for his article. I told him the accusation that I was some left-wing crank was simplistic and inaccurate, to which he responded frankly that the right wing was intent on turning me into a caricature of liberal partisanship. I thought that an article in Vanity Fair would be a good way for me to take a stab at defining myself, rather than letting the opposition try to have their way. Moreover, Vanity Fair had been the preferred vehicle for the entire national security team, from the president on down, to pose for a victory photo shoot in the Oval Office. Surely, if they could find a forum in the magazine, then so could I.
The Politics of Truth_Inside the Lies That Put the White House on Trial and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity Page 41