more to come....most in here want this to go away...and expect it to....hA!
Secrets and Leaks
By Evan Thomas and Michael Isikoff
Newsweek
Issue 13 October 2003
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
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.
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."
Irked by Wilson’s public charges, administration officials promptly set about
undermining Wilson’s credibility. Unnamed administration officials told reporters that
Wilson was a Democrat, a Sen. John Kerry contributor and supporter. The administration
aides leaked that Wilson’s mission had not been authorized at the top, by CIA Director
George Tenet, but rather by some midlevel bureaucrats. Then someone-the mysterious
leaker or leakers at the heart of the story-went a step further. According to columnist
Robert Novak, "two senior administration officials" told him that the idea of sending
Wilson to Africa came from his wife-Valerie Plame, "an Agency operative on weapons of
mass destruction."
Novak is the perfect receptacle for such a leak. An old-time Washington insider known for his gruff
manner, black suits, conservative leanings and love of Washington intrigue, Novak has been jokingly
called "the Prince of Darkness." At first, Novak told reporters from Newsday, "I didn’t dig it out, it was
given to me." But after the story blew up, Novak played down the leak, saying that Plame’s CIA
identity was revealed to him "in passing," and that he thought she was an analyst, not an undercover
agent. Before printing her name, he checked with a CIA spokesman, who made only mild objections,
according to Novak.
Plame was, in fact, an NOC ("nonofficial cover")-a deep-cover agent posing as an energy consultant
as she traveled abroad. Exposing her was not a trivial matter. It ended Plame’s career as a secret
agent, blew the cover of her energy business and put every foreigner she had ever dealt with at risk.
Identifying an undercover agent is a federal offense.
At the time, a few reporters and lawmakers raised a fuss. Newsday reporters Timothy Phelps and
Knut Royce quoted an indignant Wilson as saying, "It’s a shot across the bow to these people, that if
you talk we’ll take your family and drag them through the mud as well." Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West
Virginia called the disclosure of Plame’s identity "vile" and a "highly dishonorable thing to do." But
most news organizations ignored the story, and it seemed to fade away.Leak investigations often
lumber slowly along before petering out. Government lawyers have to fill out forms asserting that the
information was true and damaging to national security. It was only two weeks ago that the CIA finally
got around to formally asking the Justice Department to investigate the leak blowing Plame’s cover.
The facts remain murky but tantalizing to students of the Washington game. Ambassador Wilson, a
shaggy-haired, camera-friendly presence, has been meeting the press on a regular basis. Showing a
New York Times reporter photographs of his striking blond wife (his third; he is 53, she is 40; they met
at a Washington party), he compared her to a real-life Jennifer Garner, the actress who plays an
undercover agent in the TV show "Alias." Wilson has repeatedly suggested that the chief culprit was
the White House’s political director, Karl Rove. "It’s of keen interest to me to see whether or not we
can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs," Wilson said at a public forum
about Iraqi intelligence failures on Aug. 21. "And trust me, when I use that name, I measure my
words."
Wilson’s comments clearly implied that he knew that Rove was the leaker, but last week Wilson
backtracked, saying only that he knew that Rove had "condoned" the leak. Whoever initially leaked
Plame’s name, the White House clearly had a hand in fanning the flames. Wilson told NEWSWEEK
that in the days after the Novak story appeared, he got calls from several well-connected Washington
reporters. One was NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell. She told NEWSWEEK that she said to
Wilson: "I heard in the White House that people were touting the Novak column and that that was the
real story." The next day Wilson got a call from Chris Matthews, host of the MSNBC show "Hardball."
According to a source close to Wilson, Matthews said, "I just got off the phone with Karl Rove, who
said your wife was fair game." (Matthews told NEWSWEEK: "I’m not going to talk about off-the-record
conversations.")
The White House spokesman dismissed as "ridiculous" the charge that Rove outed Plame. A
source familiar with Rove’s conversation acknowledged that Rove spoke to Matthews a few days after
Novak’s column appeared, but said that Rove never told Matthews that Wilson’s wife was "fair
game"-rather, that it "was reasonable to discuss who sent Wilson to Niger." Novak wrote last week
that the leaker was "no partisan gunslinger." That suggests that the original leak came from someone
in the White House national-security apparatus, which holds itself above politics. Many White House
staffers are potential suspects, but various press reports have suggested that the Feds will want to
interview I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, an aggressive consumer of
intelligence regarded by some CIA analysts as an intimidating figure.
When the CIA decided to send Wilson to Africa, the agency apparently approached him through his
wife, who was working at headquarters at the time. Mrs. Wilson’s identity was apparently known to the
White House inner circle: a senior national-security aide with responsibility for intelligence matters had
worked closely with Wilson’s wife at the CIA’s Counter-Proliferation division. Nonetheless, the leaker,
whether it was Libby or someone else, may not have meant to smear or intimidate anyone, or to reveal
that Valerie Plame Wilson worked undercover. In Joseph Wilson’s original op-ed, he wrote that Cheney
had asked the CIA to check out the Iraqis’ alleged attempt to buy uranium in Niger. Wilson went on to
say that the administration simply ignored his highly skeptical report. After reading Wilson’s column,
the veep’s office went to some effort to tell reporters that it had never heard of Wilson’s report until very
recently. It may be significant that both Rove and Libby deny leaking classified information. They may
say that in talking to reporters they used her name without knowing that she was undercover.
Libby was unavailable for comment, but a spokesperson for the vice president’s office, Cathie
Martin, told NEWSWEEK: "It’s irresponsible to make unsubstantiated allegations. The investigation is
going on and we should let the DOJ do their work." The White House spokesman, Scott McClellan,
later told NEWSWEEK that he had spoken to Libby, who told him that he "neither leaked the
classified information nor would he condone the leaking of it."
If the trail of the leaker does lead back into Cheney’s office, the irony will be too delicious for the
press to ignore. Cheney has been the most outspoken foe of leaks in the administration. The vice
president’s office is known for its secretiveness. Cheney has said on many occasions that he thinks
Congress encroached on the power of the executive branch after Watergate in the mid-’70s (Cheney
was President Gerald Ford’s chief of staff at the time). He has resisted turning over information, like the
private deliberations of his energy task force, to congressional committees.
Cheney has been an ardent fan of leak investigations. After 9/11, when CNN revealed transcripts of
ominous warnings from Al Qaeda made on Sept. 10, 2001, that were picked up (but not translated) by
the supersecret National Security Agency, Cheney called the chairmen of the House and Senate
Intelligence Committees and chewed them out. The NSA had briefed the committees only the day
before. Cheney was "very upset," recalls Sen. Bob Graham, who was then chair of the Senate
committee and is now a Democratic presidential candidate. If the committee did not take swift action,
Cheney warned, then the administration might just stop cooperating with the congressional inquiry into
intelligence failures that preceded the attacks. Called in to investigate for leaks, the FBI asked if
senators were willing to submit to polygraph tests (none volunteered). In recent weeks, NEWSWEEK
has learned, several Senate staffers have been subpoenaed before a grand jury.
The administration is saying that it will fully cooperate with the leak investigation that blew Valerie
Plame’s cover. White House aides were ordered to preserve records, and phone logs could reveal who
Novak was talking to last July. Wilson hired a lawyer and is thinking about bringing an
invasion-of-privacy suit, which means deposing White House officials. This may be just the beginning
of a grander inquisition. Officials in the intelligence community have been talking for some time about
whether there should be a leak investigation into Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward’s book
"Bush at War." The book brims with classified information-most of it leaked by administration officials.
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