Valerie Plame

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For more detail on the political scandal and its consequences, see Plame affair

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Valerie E. Wilson, née Valerie Elise Plame, (born April 19, 1963 in Anchorage, Alaska) is a former United States CIA officer who once held non-official cover (NOC) status. She was identified publicly in a syndicated newspaper column by Robert Novak on July 14, 2003 as the wife of former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV and a CIA "operative" named Valerie Plame. Her legal and preferred name, however, has been Valerie Wilson since her marriage to Ambassador Wilson in 1998.^[1] Ambassador Wilson's Op-Ed critical of the George W. Bush administration published in the New York Times ("What I Didn't Find in Africa") on July 6, 2003, Robert Novak's responses to it in his column the next week (July 14), identifying Wilson's wife Valerie Plame as a "CIA operative," and the possible sources of the leaks leading to Novak's disclosure have become subjects of much extended controversy and still-ongoing investigations resulting so far in a five-count federal criminal indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney's former Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby by the United States Department of Justice Office of Special Counsel and a civil suit filed by the Wilsons against Libby and Cheney, presidential advisor Karl Rove, and former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage.

In late 2003 the political controversy commonly referred to as the Plame affair, the "Plame scandal," "Plamegate," and/or the "CIA leak scandal" resulted in the Justice Department referring the FBI investigation to the United States Office of Special Counsel, headed by US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, who convened a grand jury to probe alleged violations of criminal statutes, including the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982.

Special Counsel Fitzgerald's ongoing investigation has not determined that the public exposure of Plame's name violated any criminal statutes. No one has yet been charged specifically for leaking Plame's identity. "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff, however, has been charged with covering up facts about his role pertaining to the leaks. These are felony counts relating to impeding Fitzgerald's federal investigation. That five-count indictment of Libby includes obstruction of justice (one count), making false statements (two counts), and perjury (two counts), with the trial date in United States v. Libby set for early 2007.

On 5 September 2006, former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Novak's "primary source" for the disclosure of the identity of Wilson's wife as a CIA operative, publicly identified himself, after seeking permission to do so from Special Counsel Fitzgerald, to whom he had identified himself as the likely person at the start of the investigation.^[2] The Wilsons' civil action, which includes initially Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and Lewis "Scooter" Libby, has been amended to include Armitage.^[3]

Contents 1 Personal History 1.1 Education 1.2 Marriage & Family 2 Career 3 The "Plame affair" (The "CIA leak scandal") 4 The Fitzgerald Grand Jury investigation into the disclosure of Valerie Wilson's CIA "cover" 5 The Wilsons' civil suit 6 Public disclosure of Novak's "primary source" of "the leak" as Richard Armitage ("Official A") 7 Subsequent press reactions 8 "Book Deal" for Valerie Wilson's memoir, "Fair Game" 9 Notes 10 References 11 See also 12 External links

[edit] Personal History

[edit] Education

Plame graduated in 1985 from The Pennsylvania State University with a BA in Advertising. She also attended the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK, and the College of Europe, an international-relations school in Bruges, in 1995. Soon after graduation from college, she started working for the U.S. government in Washington D.C. During her time at Penn State, she had worked on the business side of PSU's student newspaper, The Daily Collegian. According to an article in the Collegian of October 9, 2003, before college, she attended Lower Moreland High School in Huntingdon Valley, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, graduating in 1981.^[4]

[edit] Marriage & Family

See also: Joseph C. Wilson

On April 3, 1998, Plame married former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. Plame met Wilson at a party in Washington, D.C, in early 1997. Unable to reveal her CIA role to him when they first met, she told Wilson initially that she was an energy consultant in Brussels.^[5] After they began dating and became serious about each other, however, Plame revealed her employment with the CIA to Wilson.^[6] At the time that they met, Wilson relates in his memoir, he was separated from his second wife Jacqueline, a former French diplomat; they divorced after twelve years of marriage so that he could marry Valerie Plame. Joseph and Valerie Wilson are the parents of twins, a boy and a girl, born in 2000. (Wilson and his first wife are parents of another set of twins, also a boy and a girl, born in 1979, who were already in college when he met and began dating Plame.)

[edit] Career

Due to the nature of her clandestine work for the CIA, details about Plame's professional career are still classified. While undercover, she described herself as an "energy analyst" for the private company "Brewster Jennings & Associates," which the CIA later acknowledged was a front company for certain investigations. According to Boston Globe reporters Ross Kerber and Bryan Bender, who searched for "Brewster Jennings" in Dunn & Bradstreet, the New Jersey operator of commercial databases, "Brewster Jennings" first entered D&B records on May 22, 1994; but, when contacted directly, D&B personnel would not discuss the source of the filing. Although D&B records list the company as a "legal services office," located at 101 Arch Street, Boston, Massachusetts, given the CIA's later acknowledgment and the dead end reached by Kerber and Bender in their attempts to learning more about it, one does doubt that Plame actually "worked" for it.^[7]

Valerie Plame was identified as a NOC by Elisabeth Bumiller, in an article published in the New York Times on 5 October 2003:

But within the C.I.A., the exposure of Ms. Plame is now considered an even greater instance of treachery. Ms. Plame, a specialist in non-conventional weapons who worked overseas, had "nonofficial cover," and was what in C.I.A. parlance is called a NOC, the most difficult kind of false identity for the agency to create. While most undercover agency officers disguise their real profession by pretending to be American embassy diplomats or other United States government employees, Ms. Plame passed herself off as a private energy expert. Intelligence experts said that NOCs have especially dangerous jobs.^[8]

In "NOC, NOC. Who's There? A Special Kind of Agent," an article published in the October 19, 2003, issue of Time magazine, Michael Duffy and Timothy J. Burger highlight that "The unmasking of Valerie Plame sheds light on the shadowy world of NOCs, spies with nonofficial cover," relating:

Plame worked as a spy internationally in more than one role. Fred Rustmann, a former CIA official who put in 24 years as a spymaster and was Plame's boss for a few years, says Plame worked under official cover in Europe in the early 1990s — say, as a U.S. embassy attache — before switching to nonofficial cover a few years later. Mostly Plame posed as a business analyst or a student in what Rustmann describes as a "nice European city." Plame was never a so-called deep-cover NOC, he said, meaning the agency did not create a complex cover story about her education, background, job, personal life and even hobbies and habits that would stand up to intense scrutiny by foreign governments. "[NOCs] are on corporate rolls, and if anybody calls the corporation, the secretary says, 'Yeah, he works for us,'" says Rustmann. "The degree of backstopping to a NOC's cover is a very good indication of how deep that cover really is." . . . . Though Plame's cover is now blown, it probably began to unravel years ago when Wilson first asked her out. Rustmann describes Plame as an "exceptional officer" but says her ability to remain under cover was jeopardized by her marriage in 1998 to the higher-profile American diplomat.^[9]

Larry C. Johnson, "a former CIA analyst who was in Plame's officer training class in 1985-86"^[10], left the Agency in 1989, and later served as Deputy Director for Special Operations, Transportation Security, and Anti-Terrorism Assistance in the U.S. State Department's Office of Counter Terrorism until October 1993, has posted as a "special guest" in a blog on 13 June 2005 that prior to Novak's column of 14 July 2003 Valerie Plame was indeed a "non-official cover operative" (NOC):

Valerie Plame was an undercover operations officer until outed in the press by Robert Novak. . . . Valerie Plame was a classmate of mine from the day she started with the CIA. I entered on duty at the CIA in September 1985. All of my classmates were undercover--in other words, we told our family and friends that we were working for other overt U.S. Government agencies. We had official cover. That means we had a black passport--i.e., a diplomatic passport. If we were caught overseas engaged in espionage activity the black passport was a get out of jail free card.
A few of my classmates, and Valerie was one of these, became a non-official cover officer. That meant she agreed to operate overseas without the protection of a diplomatic passport. If caught in that status she would have been executed.
The lies by people like Victoria Toensing, Representative Peter King, and P. J. O'Rourke insist that Valerie was nothing, just a desk jockey. Yet, until Robert Novak betrayed her she was still undercover and the company that was her front was still a secret to the world. When Novak outed Valerie he also compromised her company and every individual overseas who had been in contact with that company and with her.^[11]

Johnson, joined by ten other CIA officials, has presented a formal statement to the U.S. Congressional investigation into this matter dated July 18, 2005, addressing the consequences of disclosing Plame's identity in detail.^[12]

Special Counsel Fitzgerald affirmed further that Plame served in a classified position as a CIA officer and the necessity for protecting such classified information during his October 28, 2005 press conference:

Valerie Wilson was a CIA officer. In July 2003, the fact that Valerie Wilson was a CIA officer was classified. Not only was it classified, but it was not widely known outside the intelligence community. Valerie Wilson's friends, neighbors, college classmates had no idea she had another life. The fact that she was a CIA officer was not well-known, for her protection or for the benefit of all us. It's important that a CIA officer's identity be protected, that it be protected not just for the officer, but for the nation's security. Valerie Wilson's cover was blown in July 2003. The first sign of that cover being blown was when Mr. Novak published a column on July 14th, 2003.^[13]

"[T]he 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act . . . makes it a crime to knowingly disclose the name of a covert agent" (italics added).^[14] When asked if he could ascertain whether or not Libby had revealed Plame's covert status "knowingly," Special Counsel Fitzgerald responded:

Let me say two things. Number one, I am not speaking to whether or not Valerie Wilson was covert. And anything I say is not intended to say anything beyond this: that she was a CIA officer from January 1st, 2002, forward. I will confirm that her association with the CIA was classified at that time through July 2003. And all I'll say is that, look, we have not made any allegation that Mr. Libby knowingly, intentionally outed a covert agent. We have not charged that. And so I'm not making that assertion. (Italics added.)^[13]

Early in November 2005, posting in his own personal blog No Quarter, former CIA officer Larry C. Johnson responds further to the ongoing dispute about Valerie Plame's status as a CIA NOC:

There is the claim that the law to protect intelligence identities could not have been violated because Valerie Wilson had not lived overseas for six years. Too bad this is not what the law stipulates. The law actually requires that a covered person “served” overseas in the last five years. Served does not mean lived. In the case of Valerie Wilson, energy consultant for Brewster-Jennings, she traveled overseas in 2003, 2002, and 2001, as part of her cover job. She met with folks who worked in the nuclear industry, cultivated sources, and managed spies. She was a national security asset until exposed. . . .^[15]

On February 3, 2006, court papers were released to the public pertaining to arguments held a year earlier before the United States Court of Appeals for the Distict of Columbia regarding the need for testimony from Judith Miller and Matt Cooper. Also released was a August 27, 2004 affidavit of Patrick Fitzgerald. In the affidavit, Fitzgerald states "[Judith Miller's] testimony is essential to determining whether Libby is guilty of crimes, including perjury, false statements, and the improper disclosure of national defense information."^[16] In a footnote to that argument, Fitzgerald writes:

If Libby knowingly disclosed information about Plame's status with the CIA, Libby would appear to have violated Title 18, United States Code, Section 793 [the Espionage Act] if the information is considered "information respecting the national defense." In order to establish a violation of Title 50, United States Code, Section 421 [the Intelligence Identities Protection Act], it would be necessary to establish that Libby knew or believed that Plame was a person whose identity the CIA was making specific efforts to conceal and who had carried out covert work overseas within the last 5 years. To date, we have no direct evidence that Libby knew or believed that Wilson's wife was engaged in covert work.

In the February 15, 2005 ruling on the issue, the court's opinion states:

As to the leaks’ harmfulness, although the record omits specifics about Plame’s work, it appears to confirm, as alleged in the public record and reported in the press, that she worked for the CIA in some unusual capacity relating to counterproliferation. Addressing deficiencies of proof regarding the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, the special counsel refers to Plame as “a person whose identity the CIA was making specific efforts to conceal and who had carried out covert work overseas within the last 5 years”—representations I trust the special counsel would not make without support. (8/27/04 Aff. at 28 n.15.) (Italics added.)^[16]

An article published in Newsweek on 13 February 2006 construes the information in the released documents as implying that Fitzgerald had indeed determined Valerie Plame was a covert agent.^[17][18]

Plame's husband, Joe Wilson, stated in a July 14, 2005 interview with Wolf Blitzer of CNN that "My wife was not a clandestine officer the day that Bob Novak blew her identity."^[19] When asked by Wolf Blitzer "But she hadn't been a clandestine officer for some time before that?", Wilson responded by saying "That's not anything that I can talk about. And, indeed, I'll go back to what I said earlier, the CIA believed that a possible crime had been committed, and that's why they referred it to the Justice Department." Wilson later claimed to the Associated Press what he had meant was something different than the way the comment was received: "In an interview Friday, Wilson said his comment was meant to reflect that his wife lost her ability to be a covert agent because of the leak, not that she had stopped working for the CIA beforehand. His wife's 'ability to do the job she's been doing for close to 20 years ceased from the minute Novak's article appeared; she ceased being a clandestine officer,' he said."^[20]

In the Washington Times, Bill Gertz asserts that "Mrs. Plame's identity as an undercover CIA officer was first disclosed to Russia in the mid-1990s by a Moscow spy, said officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity."^[14] Gertz says that the Cuban government learned of Plame's CIA status "in confidential documents sent by the CIA to the U.S. Interests Section of the Swiss Embassy in Havana. The documents were supposed to be sealed from the Cuban government, but intelligence officials said the Cubans read the classified material and learned the secrets contained in them, the officials said."

This information about such prior compromises of Plame's CIA status was used in a court briefing filed on behalf of several news agencies seeking to prevent Judith Miller and Matt Cooper from going to jail for not disclosing their sources to Patrick Fitzgerald and the federal grand jury investigating her exposure by Robert Novak.^[21]

Further information: Plame affair legal questions

Some press accounts have raised questions about whether or not the CIA still considered Plame a "covert" agent––that is, the precise nature of her "classified" status or the type of "cover" that she had and whether or not it was "official" or "non-official"––at the time she was outed in the Novak column of July 14, 2003. Yet, as Johnson observes in his Congressional testimony previously cited:

These [disparaging] comments [by members of the press and others in the public debate] reveal an astonishing ignorance of the intelligence community and the role of cover. The fact is that there are thousands of U.S. intelligence officers who "work at a desk" in the Washington, D.C. area every day who are undercover. Some have official cover, and some have non-official cover. Both classes of cover must and should be protected.^[12]

According to a report published in USA Today (some of whose contents have been disputed by Media Matters for America), Plame worked in the Langley, Virginia, CIA headquarters since 1997, when she returned from her last assignment, married Joe Wilson in 1998, and gave birth to their twins in 2000.^[22][23]

On September 6, 2006, David Corn published an article entitled "What Valerie Plame Really Did at the CIA," citing information contained in the book Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, co-written by Corn and Michael Isikoff. According to Corn:

Valerie Plame was recruited into the CIA in 1985, straight out of Pennsylvania State University. After two years of training to be a covert case officer, she served a stint on the Greece desk, according to Fred Rustmann, a former CIA official who supervised her then. Next she was posted to Athens and posed as a State Department employee. Her job was to spot and recruit agents for the agency. In the early 1990s, she became what's known as a nonofficial cover officer. . . . She told people she was with an energy firm. Her main mission remained the same: to gather agents for the CIA. . . . In 1997 she returned to CIA headquarters and joined the Counterproliferation Division. (About this time, she moved in with Joseph Wilson; they later married.) She was eventually given a choice: North Korea or Iraq. She selected the latter. . . .
Her unit was expanded and renamed the Joint Task Force on Iraq. Within months of 9/11, the JTFI grew to fifty or so employees. Valerie Wilson was placed in charge of its operations group. . . . [Valerie] Wilson, too, occasionally flew overseas to monitor operations. She also went to Jordan to work with Jordanian intelligence officials who had intercepted a shipment of aluminum tubes heading to Iraq that CIA analysts were claiming — wrongly — were for a nuclear weapons program. . . .
When the Novak column ran, Valerie Wilson was in the process of changing her clandestine status from NOC to official cover, as she prepared for a new job in personnel management. Her aim, she told colleagues, was to put in time as an administrator — to rise up a notch or two — and then return to secret operations. (Italics added.)^[24]

Moreover, Corn emphasizes, Plame worked for the CIA on determining the use of aluminum tubes purchased by Iraq.^[24] CIA analysts prior to the Iraq invasion have been cited as believing that Iraq was trying to acquire nuclear weapons and that these alumninum tubes could be used in a centrifuge for nuclear enrichment.^[25][26] According to Isikoff and Corn, as Corn presents their findings in "What Valerie Plame Really Did at the CIA" on September 6, 2006, however, the undercover work being done by Plame and her CIA colleagues in the Directorate of Central Intelligence (DCI) Nonproliferation Center ^[27] strongly contradicts those previously-reported beliefs:

"We knew nothing about what was going on in Iraq," a CIA official recalled. "We were way behind the eight ball. We had to look under every rock." Wilson, too, occasionally flew overseas to monitor operations. She also went to Jordan to work with Jordanian intelligence officials who had intercepted a shipment of aluminum tubes heading to Iraq that CIA analysts were claiming--wrongly--were for a nuclear weapons program. (The analysts rolled over the government's top nuclear experts, who had concluded the tubes were not destined for a nuclear program.)
The JTFI found nothing. The few scientists it managed to reach insisted Saddam had no WMD programs. Task force officers sent reports detailing the denials into the CIA bureaucracy. The defectors were duds--fabricators and embellishers. (JTFI officials came to suspect that some had been sent their way by Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, an exile group that desired a US invasion of Iraq.) The results were frustrating for the officers. Were they not doing their job well enough--or did Saddam not have an arsenal of unconventional weapons? Valerie Wilson and other JTFI officers were almost too overwhelmed to consider the possibility that their small number of operations was, in a way, coming up with the correct answer: There was no intelligence to find on Saddam's WMDs because the weapons did not exist. Still, she and her colleagues kept looking. (She also assisted operations involving Iran and WMDs.)
When the war started in March 2003, JTFI officers were disappointed. "I felt like we ran out of time," one CIA officer recalled. "The war came so suddenly. We didn't have enough information to challenge the assumption that there were WMDs.... How do you know it's a dry well? That Saddam was constrained. Given more time, we could have worked through the issue.... From 9/11 to the war--eighteen months--that was not enough time to get a good answer to this important question." ^[24]

[edit] The "Plame affair" (The "CIA leak scandal")

Main article: Plame affair

[edit] The Fitzgerald Grand Jury investigation into the disclosure of Valerie Wilson's CIA "cover"

Main article: CIA leak grand jury investigation

Further information: Plame affair criminal investigation

See also: United States v. Libby

In his press conference of October 28, 2005, Special Counsel Fitzgerald explained in considerable detail the necessity of "secrecy" about his Grand Jury investigation that began in the fall of 2003––"when it was clear that Valerie Wilson's cover had been blown"––and the background and consequences of the indictment of Lewis Libby as it pertains to Valerie E. Wilson.^[28] Fitzgerald's subsequent replies to reporters' questions shed further light on the parameters of the "leak investigation" and what, as its lead prosecutor, bound by "the rules of grand jury secrecy," he could and could not reveal legally at the time.^[29]

Official court documents released later, on April 5, 2006, reveal that Libby testified that "he was specifically authorized in advance" of his meeting with New York Times reporter Judith Miller to disclose the "key judgments" of the October 2002 classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE). According to Libby's testimony, "the Vice President later advised him that the President had authorized defendant to disclose the relevant portions of the NIE [to Judith Miller]."^[30] According to his testimony, the information Libby was authorized to disclose to Miller "was intended to rebut the allegations of an administration critic, former ambassador Joseph Wilson." A couple of days after Libby's meeting with Miller, Condoleezza Rice told reporters that "We don't want to try to get into kind of selective declassification" of the NIE, adding "We're looking at what can be made available."^[31] A "sanitized version" of the NIE in question was officially declassified on July 18, 2003, ten days after Libby's contact with Miller, and was presented at a White House background briefing on weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq.^[32] The NIE contains no references to Valerie Plame or her CIA status, but the special counsel has suggested that White House actions were part of "a plan to discredit, punish or seek revenge against Mr. Wilson."^[33] Bush had previously indicated that he would fire whoever outed Plame.^[31]

A court filing by Libby's defense team argues that Valerie Plame was not foremost on the minds of administration officials as they sought to rebut charges made by her husband, Joseph Wilson, that the White House manipulated intelligence to make a case for invasion. The filing indicates that Libby's lawyers do not intend to say he was told to reveal Plame's identity.^[34] The court filing also states that "Mr. Libby plans to demonstrate that the indictment is wrong when it suggests that he and other government officials viewed Ms. Wilson's role in sending her husband to Africa as important," indicating that Libby's lawyers plan to call Karl Rove to the stand. According to Rove's lawyer, Fitzgerald has decided against pressing charges against Rove.^[20]

[edit] The Wilsons' civil suit

On July 13, 2006, a civil suit was filed by Joseph and Valerie Wilson against Vice President Dick Cheney, his former Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, top Presidential advisor Karl Rove and other unnamed senior White House officials, for their role in the public disclosure of Valerie Wilson's classified CIA status.^[35]

In the first the ruling issued in the Wilson/Plame civil suit, plaintiffs had moved for permission to leave their residential address off the complaint. Judge Bates of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia gave the motion short shrift:

Plaintiffs ask that "[o]ut of respect for [their] privacy in light of their public visibility," Pls.’ Mot. at 1, they be excused from complying with rules requiring that each party to a civil action include his or her full residential address in the caption of the “first filing by or on behalf of” the party. See L. Civ. R. 5.1(e)(1), 11.1. This Court does not readily grant relief from the ordinary application of such rules, nor does the Court believe that a plaintiff’s mere invocation of privacy interests and public prominence, without more, warrants an exception to rules that apply to all other litigants. Moreover, the implicit premise of plaintiffs’ motion —- that their residential address is confidential —- is questionable. In less than thirty minutes, the Court was able to ascertain plaintiffs’ residential address from multiple publicly available sources, including a database of federal government records. Indeed, an attorney who filed this motion on plaintiffs’ behalf has stated in a nationally circulated newspaper that he is plaintiffs’ next-door neighbor, and the residential address of that attorney also is readily ascertainable. Based on the current record, then, the relief plaintiffs seek is not warranted.

Attorney Joe Cotchett, who successfully won a multi-billion dollar judgment (later reduced to $1.75 billion) on behalf of over 20,000 pensioners in the suit that the plaintiffs brought against Lincoln Savings and Loan in the 1990s, is "lead trial lawyer in the civil lawsuit filed by ex-CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson and her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV, against Vice President Dick Cheney; his former chief of staff, Lewis 'Scooter' Libby; presidential adviser Karl Rove; and former Deputy Secretary of Defense Richard Armitage," according to Aaron Kinney, a staff writer for Daily Review. Kinney quotes Cotchett's observation that the case "involves fundamental constitutional issues" that go "right to the heart of our national security. . . . Cotchett plans to reach into a dark chapter in the Clintons' life to propel the Wilsons' civil suit. The court ruling that required President Bill Clinton to testify in a lawsuit brought by Paula Jones serves as a precedent to compel testimony from Libby and his co-defendants, Cotchett said. . . ."^[36]

[edit] Public disclosure of Novak's "primary source" of "the leak" as Richard Armitage ("Official A")

In the first week of September 2006, after over three years of controversial speculation and an ongoing grand jury investigation, the general public learned initially from news reports and advance word of the book Hubris, by Michael Isikoff and David Corn, that Novak's "primary source" of information about Joseph Wilson's wife Valerie Plame being a "CIA operative" leaked in his column of 14 July 2003 was former Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage ("Offical A" of Special Counsel Fitzgerald's October 28, 2005 news conference).^[37]

David Martin, of CBS News, who interviewed Armitage about that public disclosure, reports as follows:

In July 2003, Armitage told columnist Robert Novak that Ambassador Wilson's wife worked for the CIA, and Novak mentioned it in a column. It's a crime to knowingly reveal the identity of an undercover CIA officer. But, according to his own recently-publicized accounts in the media, Armitage didn't yet realize what he had done.
So, what exactly did he tell Novak?
"At the end of a wide-ranging interview he asked me, 'Why did the CIA send Ambassador (Wilson) to Africa?' I said I didn't know, but that she worked out at the agency," Armitage says.
Armitage says he told Novak because it was "just an offhand question." "I didn't put any big import on it and I just answered and it was the last question we had," he says. . . .
"I told them that I was the inadvertent leak," Armitage says. He didn't get a lawyer, however.
"First of all, I felt so terrible about what I'd done that I felt I deserved whatever was coming to me. And secondarily, I didn't need an attorney to tell me to tell the truth. I was already doing that," Armitage explains. "I was not intentionally outing anybody. As I say, I have tremendous respect for Ambassador. Wilson's African credentials. I didn't know anything about his wife and made an offhand comment. I didn't try to out anybody."
. . . . Armitage says he didn't come forward because "the special counsel, once he was appointed, asked me not to discuss this and I honored his request."^[2]

According to Armitage, as interviewed by Martin and reported by CBS News online, "[w]hen Libby was indicted in October 2005 on charges of obstruction of justice, perjury and lying to investigators, Fitzgerald said Libby was the first official to discuss Plame in a conversation with New York Times reporter Judith Miller. . . . After Fitzgerald's comment about Libby at a news conference, Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward reminded Armitage that he had made a passing comment to him days before Libby's conversation with Miller. That meant that Armitage, not Libby, had been the first to mention it to a reporter, and he quickly informed the prosecutor of that recollection."^[3]

On September 13, 2006, Joseph and Valerie Wilson amended their original lawsuit, adding Armitage as a fourth defendant.^[3] Unlike their charges against Rove, Cheney, and Libby, "claiming that they had violated her constitutional rights and discredited her by disclosing that she was an undercover CIA operative," the Wilsons are suing Armitage "for violating the 'Wilsons' constitutional right to privacy, Mrs. Wilson's constitutional right to property, and for committing the tort of publication of private facts.'"^[38]

See also: Joseph C. Wilson

On October 30, 2006, MSNBC reported that Special Counsel Fitzgerald does not want to discuss Armitage in the pending federal court case against Libby:

Fitzgerald argues that his decision not to charge Armitage or anyone else with disclosing the name of a CIA operative should not be grounds to acquit Libby, "It is improper for the jury to consider, or for counsel to suggest, that the decisions by the government not to charge additional crimes or defendants are grounds that could support an acquittal on the crimes charged in the indictment," the special counsel writes.^[39]

On November 15, 2006, according to the Associated Press and The New York Times, the judge in the case has "outlined evidence in the CIA. Leak Case," suggesting that some of trial's parameters have been decided, though they have not yet been made public.^[40]

[edit] Subsequent press reactions

Like Isikoff and Corn, later journalists in the mainstream media, independent journalists, interviewed CIA agents, and other skeptics of the George W. Bush administration still vigorously dispute its frequently-repeated claims and earlier testimony of some CIA agents that the purchase of the aluminum tubes by Iraq constitutes proof of a renewed nuclear enrichment program for the eventual production of weapons of mass destruction. Such ongoing questioning of these controversial and hotly-debated claims tends to support Wilson's arguments about such rationales for the 2003 invasion of Iraq being part of a "fabric of lies, distortions, and misinformation that it [the administration] had woven and fed the world to justify its war" in his 2004 "Diplomat's Memoir" The Politics of Truth (414-15).^[41]

Robert Parry observes:

Now, based on a new report about Armitage’s role in leaking Plame’s identity, the New York Times, the Washington Post and other leading U.S. news organizations are joining in a new campaign to disparage those who harbored suspicions about the Bush administration’s actions – from special prosecutor Fitzgerald to former Ambassador Wilson.
For these national journalists who act as if they are oblivious to all the evidence of a long-running White House smear campaign and cover-up, it might be time to pose the “Shawshank Redemption” question: “How can you be so obtuse?”
Of course, in the movie, the warden really wasn’t “obtuse.” He just wanted to keep benefiting from [his prisoner] [Andy] Dufrense’s financial skills and, most importantly, to protect his corrupt schemes. The motives of the Washington news media may be more of a mystery. ("How Obtuse Is the U.S. Press?")^[42]

On September 15, 2006, Parry presented some "new clues in the Plame mystery suggest[ing] that – contrary to Washington’s “conventional wisdom” which holds that Armitage’s confession clears Rove and the White House of wrongdoing – Armitage may have simply been another participant in the ugly scheme.^[43]

Ian Buruma argues, in his New York Times Book Review of Frank Rich's The Greatest Story Ever Sold:

Newspaper editors should not have to feel the need to prove their patriotism, or their absence of bias. Their job is to publish what they believe to be true, based on evidence and good judgment. As Rich points out, such journals as The Nation and The New York Review of Books were quicker to see through government shenanigans than the mainstream press. And reporters from Knight Ridder got the story about intelligence fixing right, before The New York Times caught on. “At Knight Ridder,” Rich says, “there was a clearer institutional grasp of the big picture.”

Intimidation is only part of the story, however. The changing nature of gathering and publishing information has made mainstream journalists unusually defensive. That more people than ever are now able to express their views, on radio shows and Web sites, is perhaps a form of democracy, but it has undermined the authority of editors, whose expertise was meant to act as a filter against nonsense or prejudice. And the deliberate confusion, on television, of news and entertainment has done further damage. ("Theater of War" 11, col. 1)^[44]

[edit] "Book Deal" for Valerie Wilson's memoir, "Fair Game"

In May 2006, the New York Times reported that Valerie Wilson agreed to a $2.5 million book deal with Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House. As reported initially, her memoir, currently entitled "Fair Game," has been scheduled for a fall 2007 release. Steve Ross, senior vice president and publisher of Crown, told the Times that the book would be Mrs. Wilson's "first airing of her actual role in the American intelligence community, as well as the prominence of her role in the lead-up to the war."^[45] Subsequently, the New York Times reported that the book deal fell through and that Mrs. Wilson was in exclusive negotiations with Simon and Schuster.^[46] Ultimately, the Simon and Schuster deal was confirmed, though financial terms were not disclosed to the public and no publication date has yet been set.^[47] As David Corn writes in "What Valerie Plame Really Did at the CIA," posted in the online version of The Nation on 6 September 2006:

Valerie Wilson left the CIA at the end of 2005. In July [2006] she and her husband filed a civil lawsuit against Cheney, Rove and Libby, alleging they had conspired to "discredit, punish and seek revenge against" the Wilsons. She is also writing a memoir. Her next battle may be with the agency––over how much of her story the CIA will allow the outed spy to tell.^[24]

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

[edit] See also

• Joseph C. Wilson
• Valerie Plame Wilson
• Plame affair
• Plame affair timeline
• Diplomacy#Diplomacy and Espionage

[edit] External links

• CNN Special Reports: CIA Leak Investigation compiled by CNN; incl. interactive timeline of Main Events and "Key Players" (click on photo captioned "Plame").
• Interactive Graphic: Timeline of a Leak compiled by The New York Times (double-click on photo captioned "Ms. Wilson").
• Joint Oversight Hearing on Security Consequences of Disclosing the Identity of a Covert Intelligence Officer.
• Patrick J. Fitzgerald United States Department of Justice Office of Special Counsel.
• Profile of Joseph W. Cotchett of the law firm Cotchett, Pitre, Simon, and McCarthy, representing the Wilsons in their civil law suit.