Tenet’s statement did say that the inclusion of the Africa charge in the State of the Union speech had been a “mistake.” But whose mistake? Many of the details also implicated the White House in this mess. Tenet’s statement, which the CIA released that day, was as much a defense as a surrender.
THE next morning, July 12, Fleischer spoke to reporters at the National Hospital in Abuja, Nigeria, and pronounced the Niger matter closed. “The president has moved on,” he said.
Scooter Libby hadn’t.
That same morning, Libby flew on Air Force Two with the vice president to Norfolk, Virginia, to celebrate the latest addition to America’s military arsenal: the USS Ronald Reagan, a $4.5 billion aircraft carrier. More than 20,000 sailors and their family members cheered wildly as Nancy Reagan broke a bottle of sparkling wine to christen the ship. “Today we send forth a great American ship bearing a great American name,” Cheney said. “Something tells me that any potential adversary of the United States will take note when word arrives that the USS Ronald Reagan has been sighted offshore.”
On the plane ride back, Libby was still focused on Joe Wilson. With Cheney and Cathy Martin, the vice president’s spokesperson, he discussed how to handle the media requests still coming in on Niger and Joe Wilson, including one from Time’s Matt Cooper. Cheney, according to Libby’s later testimony to a grand jury, specifically selected him, instead of Martin, to talk to the press about Wilson—and to provide “on-the-record,” “background,” and “deep background” statements to reporters covering the story. Cheney and Libby remained committed to a counterattack against Wilson.
Cooper, meanwhile, was urging his editor to include in the magazine’s cover story the White House’s assault on Wilson. When Cooper read a draft of the cover story, written by bureau chief Michael Duffy, he was disappointed there was nothing on this angle. In an e-mail to Duffy, Cooper wrote, “The piece doesn’t really get at the level of infighting this week. For instance, there’s nothing about the dis of Wilson which I first unearthed.”
Libby and Cooper didn’t talk until three that afternoon. Cooper had gone swimming at a local country club, and when Libby called, Cooper was, as he later wrote, “wet, smelling of chlorine,” and sprawled on his bed. Libby initially spoke on the record and for the first time confirmed that it had indeed been Cheney who asked his CIA briefer for more information on the uranium-from-Niger issue. But Libby added that Cheney had had nothing to do with Wilson’s trip and had been “unaware” of it until it became public.
Libby also spoke off the record. Cooper asked Libby if he had heard anything about Wilson’s wife having been involved in sending her husband on the mission. “Yeah, I’ve heard that, too,” Libby said, according to Cooper’s account. (Libby would later give a quite different account.)
Cooper now had two sources, Rove and Libby, and he fired off another e-mail to Duffy. “Still think you oughta stick in WH v. Wilson fight,” he wrote.
Later that afternoon, Libby had a more extensive phone conversation with another reporter, Judy Miller. She called him from the home she shared in Sag Harbor with her husband, Jason Epstein, a legendary publisher and the founder of the liberal New York Review of Books. Miller later testified that she had probably been calling others about Joe Wilson’s wife by this point. And in this conversation, Libby again quickly turned to bad-mouthing Wilson. He said it was unclear whether Wilson had even spoken with the right people in Niger. In her notebook, Miller jotted, “Victoria Wilson”—once again a near-miss reference to Wilson’s wife. Although Miller’s memory would later be foggy on precisely who had mentioned the name, the conversation appeared to have been the third time Libby had discussed Wilson’s wife with her.
That same day, Walter Pincus was working on his latest story on the Niger controversy, and he had a scoop the White House wouldn’t like: that Tenet had personally intervened with the White House to keep the Niger claim out of the Cincinnati speech. (The CIA had left that incident out of Tenet’s quasi–mea culpa.) Pincus was talking to a confidential source when this administration official “veered off the precise matter we were discussing,” Pincus subsequently wrote. The official told him that the White House hadn’t paid attention to Wilson’s Niger mission because his wife, a WMD analyst at the CIA, had sent Wilson there on a “boondoggle.” Pincus didn’t really believe the claim and dismissed it. He made no reference to it in his story.
By the end of the week, Rove had discussed Wilson’s wife with two reporters (Novak and Cooper). Libby had also done so with two reporters (Cooper and Miller). And Armitage had revealed Valerie Wilson’s CIA connection to two reporters (Woodward and Novak). Including Pincus, five reporters had been told something by Bush administration officials about Valerie Wilson’s employment at the CIA in relation to Wilson’s mission to Niger.
ON SATURDAY, July 12, six days after Wilson’s op-ed appeared, The Washington Post and other newspapers received the latest column from Robert Novak. It was slated to run in many newspapers on Monday. The subject was “the political firestorm” over the Wilson trip. Most of the article was a routine rendition of the Wilson mission. Novak’s point was that the trip had not been all that significant because Wilson’s report “was regarded by the CIA as less than definitive” and it was “doubtful Tenet ever saw it.” But the sixth paragraph contained a small nugget not yet publicly known:
Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me that Wilson’s wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report.
Novak’s column made nothing more of Valerie Wilson’s role.
Bush’s sixteen words in the State of the Union address had sparked a Washington furor. Novak’s two sentences—thirty-nine words in all—were about to cause a bigger explosion.
The president of the United States is not a fact checker.
—DAN BARTLETT, WHITE HOUSE COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR
15
A Cover Blown
VALERIE WILSON, a suburban-style mother of three-year-old twins, was at home with her husband in the couple’s well-decorated brick town house in the tony Palisades section of Washington, when she read The Washington Post on the morning of July 14. She stared at Robert Novak’s column and could scarcely believe it. There was her name—her maiden name—and the description of her as a CIA “operative.” She knew that Washington was a town fueled by leaks. But why, she wondered, would anyone have done this?
She had known Novak was sniffing around on the story; the columnist had called her husband for comment a few days earlier. (Wilson had said to Novak that he didn’t talk about his wife.) Valerie Wilson had told her supervisors about Novak’s inquiry. She had figured someone at the CIA would take care of it—talk to Novak and keep things quiet. This wasn’t the first time a journalist had stumbled across the identity of an undercover CIA officer. She assumed the agency would somehow protect her.
But it hadn’t. And now her cover, both professional and personal, was blown. For nearly two decades, she had maintained a secret identity. Neighbors, friends, relatives—they had no idea that Valerie Wilson, this poised and confident woman who had told everybody she was an energy analyst—was a spy.
After reading the article, Valerie Wilson zeroed in on close-to-home worries. Her career, she feared, was in jeopardy. Her previous operations—the assets and sources she had worked with—might be threatened. Brewster-Jennings & Associates, the paper-only front group that had provided cover for her and other CIA officers, could be revealed as a fake company; anyone connected to it would be compromised. Intelligence services around the globe, she assumed, were probably already running her name through their records, looking to see if she had had contact with anyone of importance to them.
Valerie Wilson started a list of what would have to be done to minimize the fallout to her operations. She would have to reconcile her deception with family, friends, and neighbors. She also wo
rried about her safety. Who knew what some kook might do now that it had been reported she was a CIA spy? Through her anxiety, she recognized the irony at hand. The Bush administration had taken the country to war by charging Iraq was a threat based on its weapons of mass destruction. As a member of the CIA’s Joint Task Force on Iraq, Valerie Wilson had tried to find the evidence that would support the president’s claims. But because her husband had challenged Bush’s case for war, somebody in the administration was retaliating against her by outing her secret CIA identity.
At the time she had no idea that the leak had been caused by both Armitage’s indiscretion and Rove’s desire to discredit a critic. The disclosure would effectively end Valerie Wilson’s CIA career—but it also would kick off another wild week for the White House and transform the WMD controversy from a bitter political debate into a criminal inquiry that would imperil both White House aides and journalists.
VALERIE PLAME entered the CIA in 1985, recruited straight out of Pennsylvania State University and placed in the program that trained the agency’s best prospects. She was twenty-two years old.
It was a go-go moment for the CIA. With Reagan in the White House and William Casey in charge, the agency, as its champions liked to say, had been unleashed. The spy service had stepped up its covert and paramilitary activities around the globe, especially in Central America, Africa, and Afghanistan. The agency’s secret war against the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua was generating controversy and would soon turn into a scandal.
Plame, whose father was an Air Force lieutenant colonel who served in the National Security Agency for three years and whose mother taught elementary school, grew up in Huntington Valley, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, in a household with country-club Republican politics (strong on defense, conservative on fiscal policy, liberal on social matters). But she was no ideological or political partisan. She had joined the CIA not to be a covert Cold War crusader but for the simplest of reasons: she wanted to serve her country, and the work seemed interesting.
She had married her college boyfriend, Todd Sesler, and the plan was for him to sign up with the CIA, too. But after they received their security clearances, Sesler soured on becoming a spy. The marriage ended. And in September 1985, Plame found herself in a conference room in the CIA with about forty-five other new trainees. The class included trainees who would be heading toward various careers in the agency: analysts, logistics managers, technicians, operatives. Plame was in a case officer slot; she had been hired to be an undercover CIA employee who would run agents and operations overseas. She was one of the youngest in the class.
During a ten-week course, Plame and her classmates were taught the basics of the CIA: how the agency was structured, how the classification system functioned, how to create and maintain cover, how to write an intelligence report. There were classes on how the federal government functioned—on international trade, budgets, the diplomatic corps. Much of it was mundane. But present and retired case officers came in to share stories of their glory days and best operations.
During one class, a CIA official who had been stationed overseas talked about life as a case officer working under nonofficial cover (or NOC), the most perilous of agency positions. Most case officers dispatched abroad operate under what’s called “official cover.” They pretend to be, say, a foreign service officer and have an office in the U.S. Embassy while holding a diplomatic passport. If anything goes wrong with an operation, such an officer has the protection of diplomatic immunity. Being a NOC is different. A CIA spy with nonofficial cover will pose as, perhaps, a businessperson and have no official connection to the local U.S. Embassy. If such an officer’s cover is blown, he or she is out in the cold. The embassy offers no lifeline. The officer can be arrested and imprisoned (or worse) by any government for espionage.
This former NOC told Plame’s class that his cover had been as an executive for an American heavy equipment company in one of the firm’s overseas offices. He had had to work during the day in his cover position; he tended to his spy tasks off the company clock. One night he came home to his apartment and noticed that things had been moved around. It looked to him as if someone had rifled through his possessions and then tried to place items back where they had been. He had a sports car registered in another name sitting in a garage a block or so away. He immediately backed out of his room, collecting only his briefcase, and went to that car. He drove four hours to the border at 180 miles per hour and then flew back to the United States. He never returned to that country.
“He told us,” Brent Cavan, a classmate of Plame, said, “that you have to think about this. This is not a life for someone with a family. He had a fantastic salary with this company, but he didn’t get to keep it—and he had to work two jobs. We heard lots of stuff like that. Valerie took it to heart.”
Plame, according to one member of her class, was “the kid sister in the group.” She came across, Cavan said, as young but “plucky,” determined, ambitious, and personable. “She was physically stunning, with platinum blond hair,” a fellow trainee later said. “During our first four to five minutes together, I could tell she was more of a listener than a talker. That’s why she was going into the DO.” The trainees didn’t know each other by their full names. To her fellow trainees, she was Val P.
After the initial orientation, members of the class were assigned internships with various parts of the CIA. Then they headed to the Farm, the CIA’s paramilitary training facility near Williamsburg, Virginia. Because of her young age, Plame did extra internships and headed to the Farm later.
At that facility, also known as Camp Peary, trainees were issued military-style green uniforms, boots, backpacks, and the like. They attended classes on how to do airdrops, how to navigate through tough terrain on foot at night with a compass, how to insert an operative into hostile territory from the water, how to use explosives, how to handle and fire weapons, including an AK-47.
The most intense moment at the Farm for CIA trainees came during the hostage exercise. At some point, mock terrorists would stage an ambush and take the trainees captive. The trainees would be bound, blindfolded, and thrown into a ditch. They would be taken—perhaps marched—to a makeshift prison, stripped, and forced to put on baggy clothes. They were placed in cells, some so small that the trainees could not lie down. They were forced to stand. They were not permitted to speak or sleep. Loud white noise, Arabic music, or the sound of a baby crying was played on speakers. Periodically, each trainee would be taken to an interrogation session. There would be no physical abuse, but trainees would be placed in stress positions.
The goal for each rookie was to not provide any information about him or herself or about a fellow trainee for as long as possible. “The aim is to survive,” noted Larry Johnson, another Plame classmate, “and to realize that all information is perishable and you should give it up only when you need to. You learn how to divulge it when doing so can save your life and hopefully not compromise anyone else’s life.”
Though all trainees knew that this was only an exercise, and that no harm could come of it, forty-eight hours of such treatment took its toll. “It still seemed real,” Johnson recalled. “One woman cracked and gave me up for a Grape Nehi and a ham sandwich.” Trainees came up with various ways of coping. Val P. devised her own: repeatedly dancing the hokey-pokey in her cell.
At the end of the exercise, the trainees were “rescued” by a special operations team, with guns drawn, and then the group together sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
PLAME graduated from the Farm in the fall of 1986. The following spring she took a course in operations for trainees destined to be case officers, the elite corps of the Directorate of Operations. This covered the essence of espionage: how to recruit an agent—a foreign national who would be willing to hand over valuable information about his government, his military, his company. (In CIA lingo, agency officers are not “agents”; that word applies to foreigners persuaded by case officers to become sp
ies.) Plame learned the basics: how to assess a potential agent, how to make contact, how to make a pitch. “Recruiting an agent is essentially selling a product,” one of Plame’s classmates later explained. “You’re not saying this vacuum cleaner will save you work. But you’re selling an idea: if you help us, you will be helping your country, your people. But every time you recruit somebody, you expose yourself. We had to be taught all this.”
After her CIA education was complete, Plame was assigned to the Cyprus/ Greece/Turkey desk in the European Division of the DO. She was a junior case officer, basically doing work that supported officers in the field. She studied Greek. The branch’s main focus at the time was counterterrorism. The CIA’s Cyprus station was a field headquarters for much of the agency’s counterterror operations related to the Middle East. The branch’s number one target was the 17 November leftist terrorism group working out of Greece. The agency had an intense interest in these terrorists for good reason: the 17 November group had claimed responsibility for the 1975 assassination of Richard Welch, the CIA station chief in Athens. (The group had targeted the CIA for working with the repressive military junta that ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974.) More than a decade later, the Cyprus/ Greece/Turkey desk was still looking to find Welch’s killers.
In 1989, Plame was posted to the CIA station in Athens as a case officer. She served under official cover as a State Department officer, working in the U.S. Embassy there. She carried a diplomatic passport. Her task was to spot and recruit agents for the CIA. After that first tour, she obtained a master’s degree at the London School of Economics and a master’s in European studies at the Collège d’Europe in Bruges, Belgium.
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