Hubris

by Michael Isikoff

  Levine disagreed. Allen was saying that a bunch of reporters had been called. How could McClellan, Rice, and he be certain that Tim Russert hadn’t been one of them? If Rice were to deny the story on Meet the Press and Russert were to say he had received such a call, it would be devastating. Levine suggested that Rice rely upon a traditional dodge, saying that she could not comment on a criminal investigation. Rice said she was inclined to take this advice, but McClellan favored going on the offensive. Later in the day, McClellan told Levine that he had spoken to Rove and Rove had assured him he had had nothing to do with the CIA leak. McClellan wanted to push back hard and say that the White House’s top aides had played no role in the disclosure.

  That assertion wasn’t true. Still, it would soon become the White House’s official line. For months, the administration had been contending with the charge that it had launched an increasingly unpopular war after misrepresenting the threat from Saddam Hussein. But the dispute over Iraq intelligence had so far been a policy and political debate. The leak matter was different; the White House would now have to deal with an FBI investigation, subpoenas, and grand jury appearances, all of which could lead to indictments. Faced with a criminal investigation, the White House was about to mount a public defense based on unequivocal denials. In classic Washington fashion, the cover-up would soon become the suspected crime.

  THE Sunday Post made the leak story even hotter. Mike Allen’s piece, with a double byline that included Dana Priest, repeated the news that the CIA had asked for a criminal investigation. But the article advanced the story, or seemed to:

  Yesterday, a senior administration official said that before Novak’s column ran, two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and disclosed the identity and occupation of Wilson’s wife…“Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge,” the senior official said of the alleged leak.

  This made it sound as though the CIA leak in Novak’s column had been the product of a vengeful and coordinated White House campaign to punish Joe Wilson for criticizing the White House. It now also looked as if Novak hadn’t been the only recipient of the leak and, perhaps most surprising, that a senior official in the tight-lipped Bush White House was ratting out two of his fellow aides. Immediately Washington had a new—and serious—guessing game: Who were the two top Bush aides? (Didn’t one of them have to be Rove?) Who were the six (or more) Washington reporters? Who was the Post’s Deep Throat–like source?

  When Levine read the story, it occurred to him that he had talked to Allen a number of times the previous day. Allen had mentioned that he knew about reporters getting phone calls. And Levine certainly knew that Rove and Libby had been targeting Joseph Wilson. He had confirmed some of the information Allen had told him. But he later said that he had never used the word “revenge.” Still, he wondered: Was he the unnamed senior administration official who was the Post’s secret source for this explosive allegation?

  Levine also wondered about something else. The same Post front page had a piece by Priest disclosing that the House intelligence committee had sent a blistering letter to Tenet regarding prewar intelligence. After staffers had combed through nineteen volumes of classified material, the committee’s Republican chairman, Representative Porter Goss, and its senior Democrat, Representative Jane Harman, were accusing the intelligence community of having relied on outdated, “circumstantial,” and “fragmentary information” containing “too many uncertainties” in concluding that Iraq had possessed WMDs. They also stated that the CIA had a “responsibility” to correct public officials if they “mischaracterized the available intelligence.” It was a clear warning: the House panel planned to hold Tenet and the CIA responsible for what was starting to look like a colossal intelligence failure—and for standing by while the White House had misrepresented the evidence.

  Could it be, Levine thought, that a stung CIA was looking to divert attention from the House intelligence committee’s letter by leaking the CIA referral and pointing the finger at the White House? It was only a theory. But in Washington these days—with the news out of Iraq relentlessly dismal—it didn’t seem far-fetched that the CIA’s press savvy spinners would do whatever they could to protect the agency and place the White House in the crosshairs.

  The Post story on the CIA leak was consequential. With its assertion that there had been an orchestrated White House plot, the article would give administration critics (and even neutral parties) cause to call for an independent counsel to handle the leak investigation. But this pivotal article (written mostly by Allen, not Priest) was partially off the mark—due to a slight wording change in a crucial sentence.

  In the paper’s early edition, the words “before Novak’s column ran” were not in the sentence noting that “two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists.” An editor on the Post national desk inserted that phrase to sharpen the copy and clarify what the editor took to be Allen’s understanding of events. But the addition of those four words—“before Novak’s column ran”—made a huge difference. If White House officials had called reporters about Valerie Wilson after the Novak column, they would have been playing a rather bruising (and arguably unethical) game of hardball: amplifying a leak of classified information and spreading information about the wife of a critic. Still, it would have been no crime to talk to a journalist about what had already been published in a newspaper column. But if Bush aides had placed the calls before the Novak column, they would have been divulging classified information—and perhaps violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.

  The truth was somewhere in the middle. Armitage had been Novak’s original source. But two White House officials, Rove and Libby, had spoken to at least three reporters—Novak, Judy Miller, and Matt Cooper—about Valerie Wilson before the Novak column came out. The reporters, though, had contacted them, not the other way around. After the Novak column appeared, Rove had called Matthews and angrily told the talk-show host that Valerie Wilson was “fair game.” NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell had reported that she had heard talk of Wilson’s wife from “White House sources”—after the Novak column. The White House’s anti-Wilson campaign had been less organized than depicted by the explosive Post story, and much (but not all) of it had occurred after the Novak column was published. Mike Allen’s source had supplied him a slice of the story—with some significant details wrong.*65

  ON THE Sunday morning that the Post story appeared, the accuracy of Allen’s disclosure wasn’t the issue. On Fox News Sunday, the first questions Condoleezza Rice faced concerned Goss and Harman’s tough letter to Tenet. “Did you have fresh intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before the war began?” host Tony Snow asked. Rice replied, “Well, the president believes that he had very good intelligence going into the war and stands behind what the director of central intelligence told him going into the war.” She added, “Every day David Kay says he’s getting better information.” Rice also noted that there was “progress being made every day” in Iraq and that life was “getting back to normal.”

  Then came questions about the leak investigation and White House involvement. “I’m not going to go into this,” she said. On Meet the Press, she did the same, telling Russert, “The Justice Department will now take appropriate action, whatever that is.”

  ON MONDAY, the Plame leak was the news consuming Washington. Democrats were demanding a special counsel. How could John Ashcroft’s Justice Department, they argued, be trusted to investigate the Bush White House, which, according to the Post, had mounted a covert and extensive campaign to punish an enemy? Democratic Party researchers dug up a 1999 quote from the first President Bush, a former CIA director, and e-mailed it to reporters: “I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the name of our [intelligence] sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious of traitors.”

  In the White House pressroom, reporters anxiously waited for McClellan to conduct the d
aily briefing. Let’s hear him spin his way out of this, some were saying. McClellan appeared shortly after noon. An amiable Texan who had been with Bush for years, McClellan was relatively new on the job. At the podium, he tended to look stiff, robotically repeating his prescripted talking points. This briefing would be his biggest challenge.

  “Has the president tried to find out who outed the CIA agent?” asked Helen Thomas. “And has he fired anyone in the White House yet?”

  “First of all, that is not the way this White House operates,” McClellan replied. “The president expects everyone in his administration to adhere to the highest standards of conduct. No one would be authorized to do such a thing.”

  CBS News’ Bill Plante asked if Bush and the White House were going to take a “proactive role” to determine if a White House official had leaked information regarding Valerie Wilson. McClellan answered, “Do you have any specific information to bring to my attention suggesting White House involvement?” McClellan was saying that the White House had no information of its own and no intention of gathering any. But if reporters wanted to tell the White House who their sources were, the White House would look into the matter. This was a none-too-subtle hint to the press corps: Do you really want to go down this road?

  And the questions started coming about Rove. Was he in any way involved in the leak to Novak?

  “I’ve made it very clear, from the beginning, that it is totally ridiculous,” McClellan said. “I’ve known Karl for a long time, and I didn’t even need to go ask Karl, because I know the kind of person that he is, and he is someone that is committed to the highest standards of conduct.” But McClellan added, “I have spoken with Karl about this matter…. I’ve made it very clear that he was not involved, that there’s no truth to the suggestion that he was.”

  What about the vice president? Could McClellan say categorically that Cheney hadn’t been involved?

  “I’ve made it clear that there’s been nothing, absolutely nothing brought to our attention to suggest any White House involvement, and that includes the vice president’s office,” he remarked.

  McClellan also issued a rather definitive statement. Bush, he said, had “made it very clear to people in his administration that he expects them to adhere to the highest standards of conduct. If anyone in this administration was involved in it, they would no longer be in this administration.”

  THAT evening, the Justice Department informed Alberto Gonzales, the White House counsel, that a criminal investigation was under way, and it asked the White House to instruct its staff to preserve any records related to the case, including records of contacts with Novak.

  When the White House senior staff assembled in the Roosevelt Room for a meeting the next morning, a somber Gonzales relayed the news. All members of the staff were instructed to go review all their files and turn over to the counsel’s office any material relevant to the investigation.*66 All members of the staff were to cooperate fully with the inquiry. “It was a very dramatic moment,” a senior staff member said. Gonzales looked gravely serious. Members of the Bush White House tended to pride themselves on their probity, believing they were quite different from the occupants of the ethically challenged Clinton White House. A criminal investigation—that was what happened to them, not us, the staffer thought. Judging from Gonzales’s tone, this staffer believed that anyone who didn’t cooperate would be fired.

  Rove was at the meeting, seated as usual across from Card and Gonzales at the grand conference table, and Libby, as always, was in a chair slightly behind. Neither said a word. The senior staffer had heard the gossip that the two of them might somehow have participated in the CIA leak. No way those rumors could be true, the staffer thought.

  That day, Bush reinforced the point that McClellan had made. Talking briefly to reporters after meeting with business executives in Chicago, Bush said, “If there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if the person has violated law, the person will be taken care of.”

  When a reporter said, “Yesterday, we were told that Karl Rove had no role in it,” Bush interrupted and said, “Yes.”

  “I don’t know of anybody in my administration who leaked classified information,” Bush continued. “If somebody did leak classified information, I’d like to know it, and we’ll take the appropriate action…. And if people have got solid information, please come forward with it…. And we can clarify this thing very quickly if people who have got solid evidence would come forward and speak out. And I would hope they would. And then we’ll get to the bottom of this and move on…. I want to know who the leakers are.”

  With Bush and McClellan saying they had no idea who the leakers were, Rove and Libby made no public statements about the case. Nor did Cheney.

  MEANWHILE, a full-force shoutfest was under way among pundits, politicos, and cable show talking heads. The leak case now had all the ingredients of a Washington scandal: an alleged crime, high-level suspects in the White House, and a Justice Department investigation. To White House allies, it was a phony controversy ginned up by Democrats trying to smear the president for a war they had never really supported in the first place. Ed Gillespie, the head of the Republican Party, dismissed Wilson as a “partisan.” Bill Kristol claimed that the leak case was really a tale of “the enemies of the hawks in the administration us[ing] this…unfortunate revealing of Mrs. Wilson’s name as a weapon—quite skillfully—against people in the White House.” The editorial page of The Wall Street Journal called Wilson “an open opponent of the U.S. war on terror” and argued that the public “had a right to know” about Valerie Wilson and her CIA job.

  The president’s critics were hailing Wilson as a heroic whistle-blower and decrying the CIA leak as a grievous blow to national security. “Someone high in the administration committed a felony,” thundered New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. “End of story.” Speaking on PBS’s NewsHour, Larry Johnson, a CIA classmate of Valerie Wilson and a Republican, proclaimed, “This is not about partisan politics. This is about a betrayal.”

  ROBERT NOVAK felt the need to defend himself. On October 1, he published a column to explain what had happened and to “protect my own integrity and credibility.” Novak wrote that he had not received a “planned leak.” His first source—a senior administration official—had told him about the CIA employment of Joe Wilson’s wife as an “offhand revelation,” he claimed. The CIA had not warned him that publishing her name—which, he noted, was listed in Who’s Who in America—would endanger her or anyone else. He did regret describing her as an “operative,” calling it a term he had “lavished on hack politicians.” But he then cited an “unofficial source” at the CIA who had assured him (wrongly) that Valerie Wilson “has been an analyst, not in covert operations.” Novak also wrote, “It was well known around Washington that Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA.” But he offered no real proof of this.

  After reading Novak’s column early that morning, Richard Armitage became alarmed. From home, he called his boss, Colin Powell. “I’m sure he’s talking about me,” Armitage said. The deputy secretary was in distress. “He was very unhappy and upset with himself,” said another State Department official who spoke to him that day. But Powell wondered if Armitage was overreacting. Perhaps, he thought, Novak might be referring to someone else. At Powell’s suggestion, Armitage tracked down Ken Duberstein, who was in New York on business, and asked him to call Novak and find out if he indeed was the columnist’s primary source. Powell also called Duberstein and made the same request. When Duberstein called Novak, the columnist brushed him off. “Why would he think that he’s the person?” Novak replied, declining to confirm his source to Duberstein.*67

  But neither Powell nor Armitage really needed Novak’s confirmation to realize what had happened. By mid-morning, Powell had called William Taft IV, the department’s top lawyer. Taft then phoned Armitage and debriefed him. Powell, Taft, and Armitage knew they had a tremendous problem.

  Taft, an o
ld Washington hand, had been deputy secretary of defense during the Reagan administration and had lived through the Iran-contra scandal with both Powell and Armitage. He later maintained that there had never been any question as to what action they should now take. There would be no cover-up. “We decided we were going to tell [the investigators] what we thought had happened because that’s what the president had directed,” said Taft. He notified the Justice Department’s criminal division that Armitage had information for them about the CIA leak case. An interview was scheduled for the next day.

  But there was another, more sensitive phone call to make—to the White House.

  Taft felt obligated to inform Alberto Gonzales, the White House counsel. But Taft, Powell, and Armitage feared that the White House would leak that Armitage had been Novak’s source to deflect attention from itself and to embarrass State Department leaders who had never been enthusiastic about the president’s Iraq policy. Public disclosure could be harmful not only for Armitage but for Powell (who had encouraged his deputy’s meeting with Novak).

  So when Taft called Gonzales, he was oblique. He told the White House counsel that the State Department possessed information relevant to the investigation—without mentioning Armitage—and that he had already contacted the Justice Department. Taft asked the White House lawyer if he wanted to know the details. Gonzales said no. It was exactly the answer Taft wanted; Armitage’s central role in the leak case would stay secret.

  ON OCTOBER 1, McClellan took another pounding in the briefing room: Why didn’t Bush do anything back in July, when the leak first occurred? Would he order his staffers to take polygraph examinations? Does the White House condone the Republican attacks on Wilson’s credibility? McClellan had no direct answers, but he added, “The president is focused on getting to the bottom of this.” Congressional Democrats—led by Senator Chuck Schumer—kept pushing for a special counsel. (News accounts noted how Rove, a possible target, had once done campaign work for Attorney General John Ashcroft.) Senator Arlen Specter, a Republican, said, “Recusal is something Ashcroft ought to consider.”