Senate Intel Committee: What Valerie Plame Didn’t Tell Us
The differences between her House testimony and the Senate’s findings.
By Byron York
National Review Online
During her testimony Friday before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, former CIA employee Valerie Plame told how her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, came to travel to Niger to investigate claims Iraq had tried to buy uranium there.
It started in February 2002, Mrs. Wilson testified.
<<< “A young junior officer who worked for me came to me very concerned, very upset. She had just received a telephone call on her desk from someone, I don’t know who, in the Office of the Vice President, asking about this report of this alleged sale of yellowcake uranium from Niger to Iraq.” >>>
It was not clear from Mrs. Wilson’s testimony why the junior officer was upset. But as the young officer told her story, Mrs. Wilson continued, an element of chance intruded.
<<< “As she was telling me what had just happened, someone passed by, another officer heard this. He knew that Joe had already — my husband — had already gone on some CIA missions previously to deal with other nuclear matters. And he suggested, ‘Well, why don’t we send Joe?’” >>>
That, Mrs. Wilson testified, was the beginning of her husband’s mission to Africa.
As Mrs. Wilson told her story, some members and staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee watched with great interest. As part of its probe into pre-war intelligence, the committee interviewed Valerie Plame Wilson for the portions of the committee’s report dealing with the Niger uranium matter. At that time, as now, the question of how the CIA chose Joseph Wilson for the Niger trip was a subject of great interest. But Missouri Republican Sen. Christopher Bond, vice chairman of the committee, says Mrs. Wilson did not tell the committee about the young junior officer, the call from the vice president’s office, or the passing CIA official who suggested Joseph Wilson’s name.
“Friday was the first time we have ever heard that story,” Sen. Bond said in a statement to National Review Sunday evening. “Obviously if we had, we would have included it in the report. If Ms. Wilson’s memory of events has improved and she would now like to change her testimony, I’m sure the committee staff would be happy to re-interview her.”
For those who followed the Senate investigation, the young-junior-officer story was not the only surprise in Mrs. Wilson’s House testimony. In addition to saying that her office received a call from the vice president’s office, Mrs. Wilson flatly denied playing a role in choosing her husband for the trip to Niger. “I did not recommend him. I did not suggest him,” she testified. The Senate Intelligence Committee report, which concluded that she had indeed suggested her husband for the trip, was simply wrong, Mrs. Wilson testified. In particular, what she called a “quick e-mail” describing her husband’s qualifications for the trip was “taken out of context” by the committee to “make it seem as though I had suggested or recommended him.”
In response to an inquiry from National Review Online Friday, Sen. Bond disputed Mrs. Wilson’s memory.
“We have…checked the memorandum written by Ms. Wilson
suggesting her husband to look into the Niger reporting,”
Bond said in a statement. “I…stand by the Committee’s
finding that this memorandum indicates Ms. Wilson did
suggest her husband for a Niger inquiry. Because the quote
[the portion of the memo quoted in the Senate report]
obviously does not represent the entirety of the
memorandum, I suggest that the House Government Reform
Committee request and examine this memorandum themselves.
I am confident that they will come to the same conclusion
as our bipartisan membership did.”
In addition, Mrs. Wilson testified that a CIA reports officer, who the Senate committee says told investigators that Mrs. Wilson had “offered up” her husband’s name for the trip, later told her, Mrs. Wilson, that the committee had got it all wrong. “He came to me almost with tears in his eyes,” she testified. “He said his words have been twisted and distorted.” She testified that the reports officer wrote a memo to correct the record — it is not clear to whom the memo was given — but that the CIA would not let him speak to committee investigators a second time.
Bond responded to that description of events, too.
“We have checked the transcript of the comments made to
the committee by the former reports officer and I stand by
the committee’s description of his comments,” the senator
said. “If the reports officer would like to clarify or
change his remarks, I’m certain that the committee would
welcome his testimony.”
Finally, Bond said flatly,
“I stand by the findings of the committee’s report on the
Niger-Iraq uranium information, including the information
regarding Mr. and Mrs. Wilson.”
On other issues relating to the CIA-leak affair, in her House testimony Mrs. Wilson provided sketchy information, but the fault lay not so much with her as with listless questioning by the two Republicans who showed up for the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing. For example, she was asked briefly about her presence, before her CIA identity was revealed publicly, at a May 2003 conference sponsored by the Senate Democratic Policy Committee. “I attended that conference simply as a spouse of my husband who was invited to speak,” Mrs. Wilson testified. “I had no discussions other than purely social in nature.”
Mrs. Wilson was not asked anything else about the conference. Who did she meet? What did she say? What did they say? What did her husband say? No Republican — and needless to say, no Democrat — asked.
She was questioned a bit more extensively about a breakfast she and her husband shared with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. She had been at the breakfast “briefly,” Wilson testified. “I had nothing — I was not speaking to Mr. Kristof.” She said she “can’t imagine” that she could have been a source for Kristof on the Niger uranium matter because “I did not speak to him about it.” No one on the House committee asked what, if anything, she did say to Kristof, or what her husband said during the breakfast.
Finally on Friday, Mrs. Wilson, as well as California Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman, the committee chairman, addressed the issue of her status within the CIA. “I’ve served the United States loyally and to the best of my ability as a covert operations officer for the Central Intelligence Agency,” Mrs. Wilson testified. “In the run-up to the war with Iraq, I worked in the Counterproliferation Division of the CIA, still as a covert officer whose affiliation with the CIA was classified.”
At the hearing, Waxman said that he had spoken with CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden, who approved a statement Waxman read to the committee. “During her employment at the CIA, Ms. Wilson was undercover,” Waxman said. “Her employment status with the CIA was classified information…At the time of the publication of Robert Novak’s column on July 14, 2003, Ms. Wilson’s CIA employment status was covert. This was classified information.” A CIA spokesman later told National Review Online that Waxman’s characterization of the matter was “entirely correct.”
On a personal note, there have been accusations from supporters of the Wilsons that I have, at various times during the CIA-leak affair, declared that Mrs. Wilson was not a covert agent. I did report extensively on CIA leak prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s avoidance of the word “covert,” his refusal to say what Mrs. Wilson’s status was (beyond “classified”), the Libby trial judge’s declaration that he did not know if Mrs. Wilson was covert, classified, or other, and the testimony at the Libby trial from top officials in the CIA and State Department that they did not tell anyone in the vice president’s office that Mrs. Wilson was covert, classified, or anything else. I also reported, as the pre-trial phase of the Libby case got underway, that Libby defense lawyer Ted Wells asked, “Was she just classified because some bureaucracy didn’t declassify her five years ago when they should have?” On February 27 2006, I wrote:
<<< Wells’s speculation about Wilson’s status matches up with descriptions of Wilson’s employment offered by some knowledgeable sources. There appears to be no doubt that Wilson was a covert CIA agent at the beginning and during much of her career; people who trained with her and who served with her attest to that. But there are questions about whether Wilson was in any practical way operating undercover in the years leading up to her exposure in the Novak column. The Libby team seemed to be suggesting that Wilson’s classified status, if that is what she had, was vestigial — that her undercover days were over and she only retained that status on paper.
One knowledgeable source suggests that might be the case, but maintains that being technically undercover was still being undercover. “She was definitely undercover by agency standards at the time in question,” the source says. “That was a classified bit of information, and is sufficient as far as the agency is concerned to bring it to the attention of the Justice Department. You can argue whether she should have been, but as far as the agency was concerned it was classified.” >>>
There have been reports that Valerie Plame Wilson was changing jobs — and job status — at the CIA when the leak of her identity occurred. In their book Hubris, David Corn — a reporter for The Nation who has worked closely with Joseph Wilson — and Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff wrote that
<<< Prior to the leak, [Valerie Plame Wilson] had started to change her status from nonofficial cover to official cover. She was in the process of leaving the Joint Task Force on Iraq 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 [nonofficial cover] status had passed. The paperwork for this transition was in motion when Novak’s column hit. >>>
That passage, if correct, suggests that Mrs. Wilson was not performing in any deep-cover capacity, and perhaps not in any classified capacity at all, when the Novak column was published. But she nevertheless maintained a classified status, with the possibility — perhaps made somewhat remote by her husband’s increasingly high-profile actions — of returning to covert work in the future. That, together with her own actions like attending the Senate Democratic Policy Committee or meeting with Nicholas Kristof, fueled confusion and enormous controversy about her status. I think that, given all of what we know today, my description of her status was accurate.
— Byron York, NR’s White House correspondent, is the author of the book The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy: The Untold Story of How Democratic Operatives, Eccentric Billionaires, Liberal Activists, and Assorted Celebrities Tried to Bring Down a President — and Why They’ll Try Even Harder Next Time.
article.nationalreview.com |
