Secrets and Leaks
Pssst ... You might think this Washington leak investigation will peter out like most others, with no culprits and no penalties. But here’s why this one may be different
By Evan Thomas and Michael Isikoff
NEWSWEEK
Oct. 13 issue — In Washington, so-called leak investigations—formal inquiries by the Justice Department into the publication of classified information—are like endless replays of the movie “Casablanca”: the authorities round up the usual suspects, nothing much happens, and life goes on.
WITHOUT LEAKS, arguably, the U.S. government could not function. Trial balloons could not be floated, political scores could not be settled, wrongs would go unexposed, policy could not be made. It is against the law to reveal government secrets that might harm national security, but as a practical matter, journalists (protected by the First Amendment) are very rarely pressed to reveal their sources. Leak investigations are launched about every other week in Washington, but only occasionally is the leaker caught, and it has been two decades since anyone was criminally punished.
It’s not likely that anyone will go to jail for outing Valerie Plame Wilson as an undercover spy for the Central Intelligence Agency. But the leak—from unnamed “senior administration officials,” allegedly in retribution for her husband’s accusing the Bushies of “twisting” intelligence—has stirred a scandal that casts light on a dark side of the Bush administration. All presidents deplore leaks in the strongest terms, and then wink at (or, in some cases, personally authorize) leaks that serve their purposes. No one is accusing George W. Bush of reincarnating Richard Nixon. Still, this administration has been particularly secretive and manipulative, at once condemning and seeking to stop “unauthorized disclosures” while putting out its own selective version of the truth.
Submit your questions to NEWSWEEK's Michael Isikoff on the probe into how a CIA operatives true identity was leaked out, then join the talk Thursday, Oct. 9, at noon ET.
There is more than a whiff of payback in the air as the media gleefully report on the finger-pointing, demands for a special prosecutor and the huffy denials of top administration officials. Many career bureaucrats and members of the press have chafed at the sometimes lordly attitude of Bush and his war cabinet, but quailed in the face of popular demand for strong leadership after 9/11. As Bush has begun to sink in the polls, however, his critics have become emboldened. The case of Valerie Plame Wilson is being offered up as one of those morality tales that have a broader meaning. Mrs. Wilson’s scandalous unmasking may be to the Bush administration what the $640 toilet seat was to the Reagan-era defense buildup in the 1980s: an easy-to-grasp symbol of arrogance and excess.
The administration is showing defiance, but not its characteristic cockiness. Appearing angry at times, Bush last week criticized press treatment of an interim report by David Kay, the former U.N. arms inspector sent by the Bush administration to look for WMD in Iraq. The headlines reported that Kay’s team had found none. But Bush testily noted that the press glossed over what Kay’s team did find during its still-incomplete search: signs of a nascent biological-weapons program, including a vial of a deadly toxin, and a surprisingly ambitious effort by Saddam Hussein to build a long-range missile.
Meanwhile, White House officials scram- bled to contain the leak scandal. FBI agents will be arriving at the White House this week, and the plot is likely to thicken, as some senior administration officials have some explaining (or bluffing) to do. As Washington whodunits go, this as-yet-unsolved mystery has an especially colorful cast and several intriguing, if puzzling, twists and turns. It begins with an unusually flamboyant diplomat on a secret mission to Africa.
In February 2002, the CIA sent former ambassador Joseph Wilson IV to the African country of Niger to check on reports that the Iraqis tried to buy yellowcake uranium to make a nuclear weapon. Wilson was known for his showy bravery. As the acting U.S. ambassador to Baghdad in 1990, before the gulf war, he had sheltered hundreds of Americans from becoming potential hostages. When Saddam threatened to execute anyone who did not turn over foreigners, Wilson met with reporters wearing a hangman’s noose rather than a tie. The message, Wilson said, was: “If you want to execute me, I’ll bring my own f—king rope.” Retired from the Foreign Service to become a business consultant, Wilson, an experienced Africa hand, eagerly took on the CIA assignment to poke around Niger. (He accepted no pay, other than expenses.) After drinking mint tea and talking to Niger officials for about a week, Wilson concluded that the reports of Iraqi uranium purchases were almost certainly bogus.
Wilson’s report seems to have vanished into the bureaucratic maw. In his January ’03 State of the Union address, President Bush, citing British intelligence reports, repeated the charge that the Iraqis were trying to buy uranium from Niger. The warning was one in a series of dire pronouncements from top administration officials. Beginning in the summer of 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney and national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice had repeatedly averred in speeches and TV interviews that Saddam was intent on building an atom bomb.
As the pressure grew to pre-emptively invade Iraq, media reports began to surface suggesting that the U.S. intelligence community was perhaps not quite so confident of Saddam’s arsenal as the true believers in the Bush administration. The hard-liners, especially neocons in the Defense Department and the office of the vice president, swept aside those doubts as the caviling of timid bureaucrats. Just because the CIA couldn’t produce solid proof of WMD was no reason to doubt that Saddam was a clear and present danger. “The absence of evidence,” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld liked to say, “is not evidence of absence.” Most reporters did not aggressively challenge Rumsfeld and Cheney & Co. at the time, a reticence some came to regret.
Then, last spring, the press, along with some Democratic congressmen and presidential candidates, began to question more assertively why no weapons of mass destruction were turning up in Iraq. Wilson, not one to shy from a fight or from publicity, decided to enter the fray with an op-ed piece describing his secret mission to Niger. Writing in The New York Times on July 6, he accused the Bush administration of “twist[ing]” intelligence to “exaggerate the Iraqi threat.” (continued....)
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