In the early 1990s, Plame became a NOC, that most covert of covert officers. She was looking to work more on her own and to avoid what she could of the usual bureaucratic nonsense that afflicted even the government’s spy services. It was uncommon for a case officer who had official cover to turn into a NOC. Plame had already established a trail as a U.S. government officer. (This meant she would not be the purest of NOCs.) She “resigned” from her cover job at the State Department and began working out of Belgium, telling those who asked that she was in the energy field. People usually didn’t inquire much beyond that. Her main mission, though, remained the same as before: to gather agents for the CIA. In 1997, Plame returned to CIA headquarters.*59
Back at Langley, Plame had to choose a new career path within the agency. She figured that with the end of the Cold War, the two growth industries in the intelligence field were counterterrorism and counterproliferation. She picked weapons and requested an assignment in the DO’s new Counterproliferation Division, a unit Congress had pushed the CIA to create to address concerns about the spread of weapons of mass destruction.
About that time, she also moved into a Watergate apartment with Joe Wilson, who had recently served in Stuttgart, Germany, as the political adviser to the commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces in Europe. Wilson had come back to the capital to become senior director for African affairs at the National Security Council in the Clinton White House. The two had met a few months earlier at a reception at the Washington residence of the Turkish ambassador. At that party, Plame had told Wilson she was an energy executive living in Brussels. But shortly into their subsequent courtship, she disclosed her secret to him: she worked undercover for the CIA. (Later, Wilson would say that his only question at the time was, “Is your real name Valerie?”) They married in April 1998, and she took his last name. Less than two years later, Valerie Wilson gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl. (Wilson had been married twice before, and his first marriage had also produced a set of boy-girl twins.) After the twins were born, Valerie Wilson was struck by postpartum depression. It lasted for months. But with the help of medication, she recovered and later became executive director of a local postpartum support group.
After a maternity leave, Valerie Wilson returned to the CIA’s Counterproliferation Division in the spring of 2001. She was given a choice: she could work on North Korea or Iraq. She selected Iraq and became one of the two operations officers working for the CPD’s rather modest Iraq branch. But within months, it would expand into the Joint Task Force on Iraq and assume one of the agency’s most important missions: the search for intelligence on Iraq’s WMDs. (She also assisted on operations related to Iran.)
Two years later, Valerie Wilson was sitting at home, staring at the newspaper and wondering whether her CIA career was over. Prior to the leak, she had started to change her status from nonofficial cover to official cover. She was in the process of leaving the JTFI to assume a personnel management position within the CIA. After sixteen years in operations, she wasn’t relishing the new job. But others at the agency had advised her to put in some time as an administrator to rise through the ranks. She wanted to maintain official cover so she could return to operations. But her need for deep-cover NOC status had passed. The paperwork for this transition was in motion when Novak’s column hit. Now, for the first time since she had entered the CIA, she was without any cover at all.
LATER on the morning of July 14, 2003, Joe Wilson received a call from David Corn, Washington editor of The Nation. In the months before the war, the two had gotten to know each other during encounters in the greenroom at the Fox News Washington bureau. Corn was a Fox News contributor. And Wilson, at Corn’s invitation, had written a prewar piece for The Nation that had assailed the “imperial ambitions” of the administration’s neoconservatives. Corn had telephoned after reading the Novak column.
“You never told me your wife worked at the CIA,” he said to Wilson, half jokingly.
“And I can’t now,” Wilson said. The tone of his voice was drop-dead serious.
Well, what can you say? Corn asked.
“I will not answer questions about my wife,” Wilson replied. “This is not about me and less so about my wife. It has always been about the facts underpinning the president’s statement in the State of the Union speech.”
But the two discussed—in theoretical terms—the implications of the Novak column. Without acknowledging that his wife was a CIA employee of any kind, Wilson said that naming her this way could compromise all the operations she had worked on and all the networks with which she had been associated, were she a spy. “This is the stuff of Kim Philby and Aldrich Ames,” Wilson said. And, he noted, if she weren’t actually a CIA officer, Novak and his administration sources were inaccurately branding a woman known to friends as an energy analyst for a private firm as a CIA spy—and that wouldn’t do her much good. Not giving anything away about his wife, Wilson was making a good case that this leak (true or otherwise) was bad news for Valerie Wilson—and possibly damaging to national security.
Wilson wouldn’t discuss with Corn whether his wife had been involved in his trip to Niger: “I was invited out to meet with a group of people at the CIA who were interested in this subject. None I knew more than casually. They asked me about my understanding of the uranium business and my familiarity with the people in the Niger government at the time. And they asked, ‘What would you do?’ We gamed it out—what I would be looking for. Nothing was concluded at that time. I told them if they wanted me to go to Niger, I would clear my schedule. Then they got back to me and said, ‘Yes, we want you to go.’ ” Wilson did note with a laugh that at the time of his Niger mission their twins were two years old and that it wouldn’t have been in his wife’s interest to encourage him to head off to Africa for two weeks on an unpaid gig.
But Wilson was upset and said that he regarded the leak as a warning to others: “Stories like this are not intended to intimidate me, since I’ve already told my story. But it’s pretty clear it is intended to intimidate others who might come forward. You need only look at the stories of intelligence analysts who say they have been pressured. They may have kids in college, they may be vulnerable to these types of smears.”
Corn asked if Wilson had ever heard of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. No, Wilson said. This leak might be more serious than you think, Corn remarked. It might be a criminal offense.
NEARLY a decade earlier, Corn had published an unauthorized biography of a controversial CIA officer, Theodore Shackley, and he was familiar with this esoteric and rarely cited law, which had been passed in 1982. The act made it a crime for a government official with access to classified information to “intentionally” disclose any information that identified a “covert agent” of the U.S. government. Under this law, a government leaker could be prosecuted only if he or she had known that the outed officer was working undercover and had realized that the government was taking affirmative measures to conceal that officer’s clandestine status. And the law covered only covert officers working abroad or those who had “within the last five years served outside the United States.” The punishment was steep: a fine of up to $50,000 and/or up to ten years in prison. Journalists couldn’t be prosecuted, unless they engaged in a “pattern” of naming intelligence officers with the intent of impairing U.S. intelligence activities.
The law had been partly a response to the December 1975 assassination of Greece station chief Dick Welch, who had been serving under State Department cover as the embassy’s first secretary at the time of his murder. In the mid-1970s, Philip Agee, a CIA case officer turned vehement CIA critic, and several colleagues—often drawing on public information, such as State Department directories—published books and magazine articles listing the names of CIA officers around the world. Their stated goal was to ruin as many CIA operations as they could—and to force agency officers to return home. Welch had been on one of these lists, published in CounterSpy magazine in early 1975. Bu
t years before that, his name had appeared in a book called Who’s Who in the CIA, which was written by someone named Julius Mader. The book was published in East Germany and was probably a KGB publication. Also, Welch’s name and address had been published in the English-language Athens News the month before he was killed. In a security lapse, Welch had been living in a house known locally as the residence of the CIA station chief.
Even if Agee’s actions hadn’t led to Welch’s murder, he and his colleagues had unquestionably exposed hundreds of CIA officers—and they kept doing so. By 1979, they had, by their own estimate, outed more than a thousand CIA employees.*60 Louis Wolf, a collaborator of Agee, was an editor of a publication called Covert Action Information Bulletin, which contained a section titled “Naming Names” dedicated to blowing the cover of CIA officers. In the summer of 1980, Wolf and his associates held a press conference in Jamaica and revealed the names of fifteen purported CIA officers working at the U.S. Embassy there, including Station Chief Richard Kinsman. Their intent was to disrupt what they claimed was CIA intervention in that nation’s upcoming election. Within forty-eight hours, unknown gunmen fired shots at Kinsman’s home.
The attack in Kingston further inflamed members of Congress who had been outraged for years by the CIA-outing efforts of Agee, Wolf, and others. The incident increased support for pending legislation to criminalize the exposure of undercover intelligence officers. The Reagan administration strongly supported the bill. But media advocates, including The New York Times, raised First Amendment concerns. Would the measure, for example, criminalize the publication of information about illegal or rogue CIA activities? (“All should hope the courts will wipe the law from the books,” the Times editorialized as the bill moved through Congress in early 1982.) Due partly to such complaints, Congress defined the scope of the prohibited conduct narrowly. And in June 1982, the House and Senate passed the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, and Reagan signed it into law at a ceremony outside CIA headquarters.
AS HE was talking to Wilson, Corn found a copy of the law online and remarked that it could apply to the two administration sources who had leaked the information on Valerie Wilson to Novak. (The law didn’t cover Novak; by publishing just that one leak, he hadn’t engaged in an Agee-like “pattern” of actions.) Has no one mentioned this to you? Corn asked. No, Wilson replied.
This might be worth an article, Corn noted. Wilson remarked that he wasn’t looking to draw any additional attention to the Novak column. He seemed to be hoping that the incident might blow over.
Well, Corn said, he would mull this over. He had another piece due the next day. He would get back to Wilson.
THAT Monday morning, Time magazine hit newsstands with a cover story on the Niger controversy headlined, “Untruth and Consequences: How Flawed Was the Case for Going to War Against Saddam?” Citing the White House’s retreat on the Niger charge, the magazine asked, “Where else did the U.S. stretch evidence to generate public support for the war?” And it noted, “the controversy over those 16 words would not have erupted with such force were they not emblematic of larger concerns about Bush’s reasoning for going to war in the first place.”
When Scooter Libby read the story, he once again was angry. Wilson’s tale was repeated in a fashion sympathetic to the retired diplomat. The authors referred to Wilson as a “wise choice for the mission.” Even worse, Time hadn’t used all of a lengthy on-the-record quote Libby had given Cooper two days earlier, stating explicitly that the vice president had been unaware of the Wilson trip until it became public. And the Time story said nothing about Valerie Wilson, even though Libby had confirmed to Cooper that she had sent her husband to Niger.
After reading the Time article, Libby called Cooper and complained. But Cooper was not done with the Wilson story, particularly the angle he had not been able to get into the cover story: the White House campaign against Wilson. And he had another option: Time’s Web site. That afternoon, he sent an e-mail to Duffy and Dickerson: “Wonder if we shouldn’t try to whip something up for time.com tomorrow? i’ve got the white house dissing wilson (as does john) and we have wilson pushing back…it probably won’t hold the week so why not get a little juice out of it tomorrow?” Duffy replied, “Excellent idea…. I like it also because it shows how far these boys will go to get their way.” Oddly, neither Cooper nor Duffy had noticed Novak’s column.
ON TUESDAY, Corn checked in with Joe Wilson. Had anyone else, he asked the former diplomat, picked up on the leak as a possible violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act? Not yet, Wilson replied. In fact, Wilson said, the leak hadn’t generated any media attention. He was still seething but not eager to publicize the leak. Corn mentioned he intended to write about it. “I’m not going to tell you how to do your job,” Wilson said. “It’s up to you.”
After that, Corn called Novak and had a brief conversation with the columnist about the article. Novak said he had been tipped off by administration officials about Valerie Wilson and that he hadn’t been reluctant to name her. “I figured if they gave it to me,” he remarked, “they’d give it to others…. I’m a reporter. Somebody gives me information and it’s accurate, I generally use it.”
On July 16, Corn posted a piece on The Nation’s Web site. Called “A White House Smear,” it began, “Did senior Bush officials blow the cover of a US intelligence officer working covertly in a field of vital importance to national security—and break the law—in order to strike at a Bush administration critic and intimidate others?” The article explained the possible relevance of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, and it noted that if the leak was accurate, Valerie Wilson was “apparently” a NOC. The logic behind that assumption was straightforward. Since Joe Wilson had mentioned that Valerie was known as a private energy consultant, she would not be an official-cover CIA employee. Such CIA officers told people they were government employees working for the State Department or the Pentagon. A CIA operative who claimed to have a job outside the U.S. government was, by process of elimination, a NOC. “Will there be any inquiry?” the article asked.
This was the first article to suggest that the Plame leak might have been a federal crime. It received no attention in the media—at first. But within two days it had been read by nearly 100,000 readers on The Nation’s Web site, a sizable number. Other Web sites and bloggers jumped on the story and angrily asked why other Washington reporters weren’t covering the leak.
AMONG the president’s communications advisers, there was talk that the attack-Wilson strategy might have gotten out of hand. In a White House meeting that week, communications director Dan Bartlett, just back from Africa, talked about redirecting coverage away from Wilson and his wife—and stopping the Wilson bashing. It was unproductive and demeaning, he suggested. Bartlett, according to Adam Levine, was “against the idea of the wife as a talking point.” But shifting the White House gears wouldn’t be easy. Before the meeting, Levine had received another call from a cable TV reporter asking him about the information in the Novak column. Rove and Libby “are flacking this,” the reporter had said to him—meaning they were encouraging reporters to write about Valerie Wilson. “Scooter and Karl are out of control,” Levine told Bartlett at the meeting. “You’ve got to rein these guys in.” Bartlett rolled his eyes and looked exasperated, but agreed. “I know, I know,” he said, according to Levine.
MATT COOPER finally got to make use of the information that Rove had leaked to him and Libby had confirmed—but only after he came close to chucking it. Cooper spent two days preparing the new Wilson story with Dickerson and another Time correspondent, Massimo Calabresi. Then, on Wednesday afternoon, as the story was done, one of Cooper’s colleagues noticed something: Novak’s column. Cooper still hadn’t seen it. A chagrined Cooper sent a copy of the Novak column to Duffy with a note: “I’d missed this earlier in the week. Does this obviate our doing a piece?” No, replied Duffy, because their new article had more “pushback” from Wilson.
On July 17, Time posted the article, which carried a triple byline—Cooper, Dickerson, and Calabresi—and a strong headline: “A War on Wilson?” The subtitle asked, “Has the Bush Administration declared war on a former ambassador who conducted a fact-finding mission to probe possible Iraqi interest in African uranium?” Its answer: “Perhaps.” The article noted that the White House had been taking “public and private whacks at Wilson.” It stated that “some government officials have noted to TIME in interviews (as well as to syndicated columnist Robert Novak) that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, is a CIA official who monitors the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.” The phrase “government officials” was a reference to Rove and Libby. The article said these officials had “suggested” that Valerie Wilson had been “involved” in her husband’s being dispatched to Niger. “That is bulls—t,” the newsmagazine quoted Wilson as saying in response.
The article also referred to top administration officials who had claimed that Wilson’s post-trip report had actually strengthened the case for the Niger deal because Wilson had said that in 1999 an Iraqi representative had approached Niger to revive commercial ties. Wilson, in the Time piece, returned the fire: “That then translates into an Iraqi effort to import a significant quantity of uranium as the president alleged? These guys really need to get serious.”
The Web story included Libby’s on-the-record quote about Cheney’s lack of knowledge of the Wilson trip. Still, it wasn’t the sort of piece Libby was looking for. It distanced Cheney from Wilson’s trip. But it didn’t undercut Wilson, and it didn’t dwell on the Valerie Wilson angle. It suggested administration officials (meaning Rove and Libby) had been disclosing information about Valerie Wilson as part of a “war” on her husband. And it gave Wilson the last word on each of the administration’s specific charges against him. “This is a smear job,” Wilson was quoted as saying about the attacks on him and the allegations about his wife.
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