Late
on Tuesday afternoon, July 8, six days before Robert Novak’s
article about Valerie and me, a friend showed up at my office with a
strange and disturbing tale. He had been walking down Pennsylvania
Avenue toward my office near the White House when he came upon Novak,
who, my friend assumed, was en route to the George Washington
University auditorium for the daily taping of CNN’s Crossfire. He
asked Novak if he could walk a block or two with him, as they were
headed in the same direction; Novak acquiesced. Striking up a
conversation, my friend, without revealing that he knew me, asked Novak
about the uranium controversy. It was a minor problem, Novak replied,
and opined that the administration should have dealt with it weeks
before. My friend then asked Novak what he thought about me, and Novak
answered: “Wilson’s an asshole. The CIA sent him. His wife,
Valerie, works for the CIA. She’s a weapons of mass destruction
specialist. She sent him.” At that point, my friend and Novak
went their separate ways. My friend headed straight for my office a
couple of blocks away.
Once
he related this unsettling story to me, I asked him to immediately
write down the details of the conversation and afterwards ushered him
out of my office. Next, I contacted the head of the news division at
CNN, Eason Jordan, Novak’s titular boss, whom I had known for a
number of years. It took several calls, but I finally tracked him down
on his cell phone. I related to him the details of my friend’s
encounter with Novak and pointed out that whatever my wife might or
might not be, it was the height of irresponsibility for Novak to share
such information with an absolute stranger on a Washington street. I
asked him to speak to Novak for me, but he demurred— he said he
did not know him very well—and suggested that I speak to Novak
myself. I arranged for him to have Novak call me and hung up.
Novak
called the next morning, but I was out, and then so was he. We did not
connect until the following day, July 10. He listened quietly as I
repeated to him my friend’s account of their conversation. I told
him I couldn’t imagine what had possessed him to blurt out to a
complete stranger what he had thought he knew about my wife. Novak
apologized, and then asked if I would confirm what he had heard from a
CIA source: that my wife worked at the Agency. I told him that I
didn’t answer questions about my wife. I told him that my story
was not about my wife or even about me; it was about sixteen words in
the State of the Union address.
I
then read to him three sentences from a 1990 news story about the
evacuation of Baghdad: “The chief American diplomat, Joe Wilson,
shepherds his flock of some 800 known Americans like a village priest.
At 4:30 Sunday morning, he was helping 55 wives and children of U.S.
diplomats from Kuwait load themselves and their few remaining
possessions on transport for the long haul on the desert to Jordan. He
shows the stuff of heroism.” The reporters who had written this,
I pointed out, were Robert Novak and Rowland Evans. I suggested to
Novak that he might want to check his files before writing about me. I
also offered to send him all the articles I had written in the past
year on policy toward Iraq so that he could educate himself on the
positions I had taken. He would learn, if he took the time, that I was
hardly antiwar, just anti–dumb war. Before I hung up, Novak
apologized again for having spoken about Valerie to a complete stranger.
The
following Monday, July 14, 2003, I read Novak’s syndicated column
in the Washington Post. The sixth paragraph of the ten-paragraph story
leapt out at me: “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 Wilson’s wife
suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report.”
When
I showed it to Valerie, she was stoic in her manner but I could see she
was crestfallen. Twenty years of loyal service down the drain, and for
what, she asked after she had read it. What was Novak trying to say?
What did blowing her cover have to do with the story? It was nothing
but a hatchet job. She immediately began to prepare a checklist of
things she needed to do to minimize the fallout to projects she was
working on. Ever efficient, she jotted down reminders to mask the
emotions swirling through her body. Finally, as the enormity of what
Novak had done now settled on her, she sat in the corner and wondered
aloud if she would still have any friends left after they found out
that the person they knew was not her at all but a lie that she lived
very convincingly. Amid the welter of emotions I felt that morning, I
tried to understand a particular element of Novak’s story.
He
cited not a CIA source, as he had indicated on the phone four days
earlier, but rather two senior administration sources; I called him for
a clarification. He asked if I was very displeased with the article,
and I replied that I did not see what the mention of my wife had added
to it but that the reason for my call was to question his sources. When
we first spoke, he had cited to me a CIA source, yet his published
story cited two senior administration sources. He replied: “I
misspoke the first time we talked.”
A
couple of days before Novak’s article was published, but after my
friend’s strange encounter with him, I had received a call from
Post reporter Walter Pincus, who alerted me that “they are coming
after you.” Since I already knew what Novak had learned about
Valerie, I was increasingly concerned over what else might be put out
about her. I assumed, though, that the CIA would itself quash any
article that made reference to Valerie. While not yet familiar with the
specifics of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, I knew that
protection of the identity of agents in our clandestine service was the
highest priority, and well understood by the experienced press corps in
Washington. Novak had still been trolling for sources when we spoke on
the telephone, so I assumed that he did not have the confirmations he
would need from the CIA to publish the story. I told Valerie, who
alerted the press liaison at the CIA, and we were left with the
reasonable expectation that any reference to her would be dropped,
since he would have no way of confirming the information—unless,
of course, he got confirmations from another part of the government,
such as the White House.
Quite
apart from the matter of her employment, the assertion that Valerie had
played any substantive role in the decision to ask me to go to Niger
was false on the face of it. Anyone who knows anything about the
government bureaucracy knows that public servants go to great lengths
to avoid nepotism or any appearance of it. Family members are expressly
forbidden from accepting employment that places them in any direct
professional relationship, even once or twice removed. Absurd as these
lengths may seem, a supervisor literally cannot even supervise the
supervisor of the supervisor of another family member without
high-level approval. Valerie could not have stood in the chain of
command had she tried to. Dick Cheney might be able to find a way to
appoint one of his daughters to a key decision-making position in the
State Department’s Middle East Bureau, as he did; but Valerie
could not—and would not if she could—have had anything to
do with the CIA decision to ask me to travel to Niamey.
The
publication of the article marked a turning point in our lives. There
was no possibility of Valerie recovering her former life. She would
never be able to regain the anonymity and secrecy that her professional
life had required; she would not be able to return to her discreet work
on some of the most sensitive threats to our society in the foreseeable
future, and perhaps ever.
I
had many questions for Novak: What did the inclusion of Valerie’s
name add to his article? So what if she worked on intelligence related
to weapons of mass destruction? There was nothing nefarious about that.
All this had happened because Novak chose not to heed the entreaties of
government officials to whom he spoke and who, by Novak’s own
admission, asked that he not publish her name or employment. While
Novak has since downplayed the request of the cia that he not publish
her name, I wondered which part of ‘NO’ he didn’t
understand. Murray Waas, writing in the American Prospect, has a
different take:
Two government officials
have told the FBI that conservative columnist Robert Novak was asked
specifically not to publish the name of undercover CIA operative
Valerie Plame in his now-famous July 14 newspaper column. The two
officials told investigators they warned Novak that by naming Plame he
might potentially jeopardize her ability to engage in covert work,
stymie ongoing intelligence operations, and jeopardize sensitive
overseas sources.
So
what if she conveyed a request to me to come to the Agency to talk
about Niger? She had played absolutely no part in the decision to send
me there. Should an agency of the U.S. government not ask me about the
uranium business in Niger, a subject that I knew well, just because my
wife happened to work in the same suite of offices?
Lamely
attempting to shirk responsibility, Novak claimed that the CIA no was
“a soft no, not a hard no.” On the wings of that ludicrous
defense, he soared to new heights of journalistic irresponsibility. But
Novak has long since demonstrated that he is not so much a scrupulous
journalist as he is a confirmed purveyor of the right-wing party line,
whether it’s touting the truth or—as it all too often is,
unfortunately—promoting the big lie. In this instance, in
addition to buying into the big lie, Novak was slavishly doing the
bidding of the cowards in the administration who had decided that the
only way to discredit me was to betray national security. I will defend
his First Amendment rights as a journalist, but I don’t have to
like what he did. In fact, watching Valerie’s face fall as she
realized that her life had been so irreparably altered, I felt that
punching the man in the nose would not have been an unreasonable
response.
I
decided that I would not rise to Novak’s bait or dignify his
article with a published response, and that I would not speak about
Valerie other than hypothetically. It was not up to me to confirm or
deny her employment; it was up to the CIA. A few days later, Newsday
reporter Timothy Phelps, whom I had met in Iraq twelve years earlier,
informed me that he had heard from the CIA that what Novak had reported
vis-à-vis Valerie’s employment was not incorrect. I
declined to be drawn into a confirmation even then.
The
week was not without its drama, however. Even though I had been
avoiding the press since the day after my article appeared in July, I
had still been intently following the reporting about Novak’s
article in the media. Too intently. I was waking up in the middle of
the night and pacing the floor, as I had during that critical period in
Baghdad during Desert Shield. Back then, my mind would be going a
thousand miles a minute, trying to gain an edge on the thugs in the
Iraqi regime; now I was trying to predict what the thugs in my own
government would do, so I’d be ready to react effectively to
their next move. I would get up at 3:00 a.m., after only a few hours of
sleep, and review press reports from around the world. In Britain,
meanwhile, Prime Minister Tony Blair was under the gun for possibly
having “sexed up” the case he had made on Iraq’s
weapons of mass destruction. In Australia, Prime Minister John Howard
was subjected to similar hard questions as well; he would subsequently
be censured for having deceived his parliament. Howard and British
Foreign Minister Jack Straw were both obliged to tell their press that
they did not know Joe Wilson.
Four
days after Novak’s article appeared, Britain was convulsed by the
suicide of a former weapons inspector named David Kelly, a longtime
civil servant in the ministry of defense. Kelly had been a source for
the BBC’s exposé of the charge that the government had
exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam. He had been under increasing
pressure from the investigation and had apparently killed himself. I
received several calls from friends wondering, first, whether it had in
fact been a suicide; and, if not, was I watching my own security? They
also wanted to know how I was bearing up under the pressure. I, too,
wondered about Kelly’s death and later told a bbc producer that I
hoped the inquest into his death would be credible.
I
was horrified that I could actually harbor suspicions—ones that
were also being expressed by others—that a democratic government
might actually do bodily harm to a political opponent. I laughed it off
for my friends and pointed out that my golf handicap had gone down two
strokes in the two and a half weeks of my enforced vacation. And I
rationalized that in situations like the one in which I now found
myself, it was important to be either so visible that your adversaries
would be among the first to be blamed should anything out of the
ordinary happen to you, or so invisible that nobody really knew who you
were.
That
same week, on Thursday, July 17, David Corn called to alert me that
what Novak had done, or at least what the person who had leaked
Valerie’s name to him had done, was possibly a crime, in that it
might represent a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection
Act of 1982. Corn then published a detailed explanation of the law to
ensure that other journalists, as well as regular readers of The
Nation, understood all the legalities involved.
Toward
the end of that week, network producers and television correspondents
were calling with rapidly mounting frequency. We had clearly entered a
new phase. The questions were no longer about whether or not Valerie
was CIA; rather, they sought to uncover some supposedly
as-yet-unexplained link between the two of us and the trip to Niger.
Over
the weekend, the calls became more insistent and more pointed. And the
sources being cited by the reporters were consistently “White
House officials or senior White House officials,” so I could only
conclude that the decision to push the story had been made at a high
level in the administration. At that point, I knew that I would have to
address the issue more publicly.
NBC’s
Andrea Mitchell, who had been guest-hosting Meet the Press when
I’d been on the show two weeks earlier, reached me at home on the
Sunday night after Novak’s article appeared to ask for my
reaction to “what White House sources were telling her about the
real story being not the sixteen words but Wilson and his wife.”
I agreed to do an interview with her the following day in my office.
Although I had planned not to appear on any television shows prior to
Thursday, July 24, when I was scheduled to do The Daily Show with Jon
Stewart, I felt I had no choice but to try to stop the White House from
continuing to push this canard.
The
principal question remained unanswered: Who had so badly served the
president? Who Valerie was and what she did, or who I was and what I
did, were merely the administration’s means of obfuscating the
real issue and confusing the public. The White House was trying to
fling dust into the eyes of the press and public while descending into
what a Republican staffer on the Hill later called a
“slime-and-defend” mode.
On
Monday morning, July 21, I sat down with Andrea and answered her
questions. I was scrupulous in speaking about Valerie only
hypothetically; I was careful to qualify my statements and to use the
subjunctive: “If she were as Novak alleged, then. . . .” In
response to Andrea’s questions regarding statements made by White
House officials about Valerie’s professional life and its
connection to me, I noted that the sources of the original leaks from
the administration to Novak might have violated the law.
When
the interview aired on the Monday evening news, NBC had systematically
edited out every one of my qualifiers regarding Valerie’s status,
no doubt because of time constraints. They thus substantively changed
the tenor of the interview and gave CIA lawyers cause to briefly
consider whether or not I myself might have been in violation of the
same law as the senior administration officials who had originally
leaked the information about Valerie to Novak. I later called Andrea to
request a copy of the full interview, so as to be able to defend
myself, but NBC policy disallows providing transcripts of interviews in
their unedited versions. I asked Andrea therefore to make sure that the
full interview was preserved on tape in the event legal questions arose
in the future. She agreed to do so.
That
afternoon I received the call from Chris Matthews tersely informing me
that Karl Rove had entered the fray with the comment that my wife was
“fair game.” To make a political point, to defend a
political agenda, to blur the truth that one of the president’s
own staffers had scripted a lie into the president’s mouth, one
of the administration’s most senior officials found it perfectly
acceptable to push a story that exposed a national security asset. It
was appalling.
The next morning I appeared on the Today
show. Katie Couric was the interviewer. Unfortunately, I was on remote
location, in Washington—my one chance to sit face-to-face with
“America’s sweetheart,” and all I could see was the
unblinking eye of the camera in front of me. At least the spot was
televised live, so the hypotheticals that I used to qualify what I said
about Valerie were not edited out. Again I made the point that the leak
might well have been a violation of the law.
Although
I received hundreds of phone calls from the national and international
press in subsequent days, not once did I again hear a reporter cite
White House sources in relation to that particular story. In the weeks
ahead, the attacks from the White House reverted to more typical forms
of character assassination.
[end of excerpt]
