From MSNBC, 7/17/05:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8600106/
In Plame leaks, long shadows
Rove’s knowledge of CIA agent at odds with denial of role
WASHINGTON -
Karl Rove had a secret.
In public, he was masterminding President Bush's reelection and
brushing off suggestions he had played any part in an unfolding drama:
the unmasking of CIA operative Valerie Plame.
In private, the senior White House adviser was meeting, on five
occasions, with federal prosecutors to tell what he knew about the
matter.
The story he would tell prosecutors did not seem to square with the
White House's denial that it had played any role in one of the most
famous leaks since Watergate.
Rove told prosecutors he had discussed Plame in passing with at least
two reporters, including the columnist who eventually revealed her
name and role in a secret mission that would raise questions about
Bush's case for war against Iraq.
At the same time, other White House officials were whispering about
Plame, too.
Tracing the leak
It is now clear:
There has been an element of pretense to the White House strategy of
dealing with the Plame case since the earliest days of the saga.
Revelations emerging slowly at first, and in a rapid cascade over the
past several days, have made plain that many important pieces of the
puzzle were not so mysterious to Rove and others inside the Bush
administration.
White House officials were aware of Plame and her husband's
potentially damaging charge that Bush was "twisting" intelligence
about Iraq's nuclear ambitions well before the episode evolved into
Washington's latest scandal.
But as the story hurtles toward a conclusion sometime this year, there
are several elements that remain uncertain.
The most important -- did anyone commit a crime?
This article, based on interviews with lawyers and officials involved
in the case, is an effort to step back from the rapidly unfolding
events of recent weeks and clarify what is known about the Plame
affair and what key factors are still obscure.
Those people declined to be identified by name because special
prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has asked that closed-door
proceedings not be discussed.
The yellowcake incident
It all started in the early days of 2002 with Joseph C. Wilson IV, a
flamboyant ex-diplomat who had left government for a more lucrative
life of business consulting.
Wilson was a veteran of the diplomatic wars of Iraq and Africa, so it
seemed logical to some in the CIA, including his wife, Plame, to send
him on a secret mission to Niger.
Wilson's task was to determine if Iraqis had tried to purchase
yellowcake uranium from Africa to build nuclear weapons.
To a Bush administration intent on selling the American public on war
based on the threat posed by Iraq's weapons program, the yellowcake
was no small deal.
The White House would soon cite it as evidence that Saddam Hussein was
pursuing nuclear weapons.
Wilson spent a week in Niger chatting with locals about the
allegation, coming to the conclusion that the yellowcake charges were
probably unfounded.
He reported his findings to the agency -- but they never made their
way to the White House.
The story might have ended there, but Bush, Vice President Cheney and
other officials decided to make the yellowcake charges a central piece
of the administration's evidence in arguing Hussein had designs on a
dangerous program of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear
bombs.
On the march to war, Bush officials rebuffed concerns from some at the
CIA and included in his January 2003 State of the Union the now-famous
16 words:
"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently
sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
Wilson was floored, then furious.
Wilson set out to discredit the charge, working largely through back
channels at first to debunk it.
He called friends inside the government and the media, and told the
New York Times's Nicholas D. Kristof of his findings in Niger.
Kristof aired them publicly for the first time in his May 6, 2003,
column but did not name Wilson.
This caught the attention of officials inside Cheney's office, as well
as others involved in war planning, according to people who had talked
with them.
Defending the war
The White House, hailing the lightning-quick toppling of Hussein,
suddenly found itself on the defensive at home over its WMD claims.
It was not just Wilson, but Democrats, reporters and a few former
officials who were publicly wondering if Bush had led the nation to
war based on flimsy, if not outright false, intelligence.
Administration officials set out to rebuff their critics, Wilson in
particular.
By the time The Washington Post published Wilson's allegation
questioning the intelligence (but not citing his name) on the front
page on June, 12, 2003 -- one month before the Plame affair was public
-- Wilson was on the administration's radar screen.
The more Wilson pushed, the more the White House was determined to
push back against a man they regarded as an irresponsible provocateur.
Up until this point, Wilson had worked mostly behind the scenes, but
on July 6, he penned an op-ed in the New York Times, writing, "Some of
the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons programs was
twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."
A story detailing the allegation also appeared that day inside The
Post as Wilson appeared on NBC's "Meet the Press."
On the offensive
The White House response was swift.
There is a simple rule in politics:
Kill a story before it kills you.
The Bush team spread word to reporters that Wilson was a Democrat, a
supporter of Bush's political opponents who was sent on an
inconclusive mission that people in power knew nothing of.
Then, they went a step further.
Two days after Wilson went public, columnist Robert D. Novak told Rove
that he was hearing that Wilson had been sent on the mission at the
suggestion of his wife, who was working in the CIA, a lawyer familiar
with the conversation said.
"I heard that, too," Rove replied, according to the lawyer.
Rove said Novak had told him Plame's name and that that was the first
time he had heard it, the lawyer said.
That could be seen as being at odds with Rove's comments to CNN on
Aug. 31, 2004, when he said, "I'll repeat what I said to ABC News when
this whole thing broke some number of months ago. I didn't know her
name. I didn't leak her name."
Hunting for the source
On July 7, Bush took off for a trip to Africa. Secretary of State
Colin L. Powell, who was on the trip, carried with him a memo
containing information about Plame, as well as other intelligence on
the yellowcake claim.
It is on this trip that, prosecutors believe, some White House aides
might have learned about Plame.
The origin of the Plame information is central to the case.
Prosecutors are trying to determine if White House officials shared
information about Plame based on the State Department memo, or from
conversation with reporters, as Rove has testified, or somewhere else.
If it turns out Plame's identity was learned from the memo, it would
undermine the GOP defense that Rove and other administration officials
were simply discussing information they had learned from reporters.
Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, said he can say "categorically" that
Rove did not obtain any information about Plame from any confidential
source, such as a classified document.
A lawyer familiar with Rove's testimony hedged a bit on who precisely
told Rove about Plame, saying it may have come secondhand from another
aide, as well as from Novak.
Full court press
In Washington, Rove and others were discrediting Wilson's story even
as then-CIA director George J. Tenet said that the yellowcake
allegation should never have been included in Bush's speech.
"This did not rise to the level of certainty which should be required
for presidential speeches, and CIA should have ensured that it was
removed," Tenet said in a July 11 statement.
In a conversation that same day, Rove told Time magazine's Matthew
Cooper that Wilson's wife was in the CIA and authorized the mission to
Niger; but he did not use her name.
Afterwards, Rove e-mailed then-deputy national security adviser
Stephen J. Hadley to tell him he had waved Cooper off Wilson's claim.
A day later, Cheney's top aide, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, told Cooper
he had heard the same thing about Plame, and a senior administration
official flagged the role of Wilson's wife, almost in passing, to The
Washington Post's Walter Pincus.
On July 14, Novak's column ran, naming Plame for the first time and
saying two senior administration officials had provided him the
information.
The White House anti-Wilson campaign continued, but legally it did not
matter, because once Plame's name was in the public domain, Rove and
others were free to gossip about her.
White House offers public denials
Rove told MSNBC's Chris Matthews that Plame was fair game, even as
White House spokesman Scott McClellan was denying any White House role
in the leak.
"I'm telling you flatly that that is not the way this White House
operates," the spokesman told reporters July 22.
McClellan was usually careful to stress involvement in any illegal
leak, though his public statements clearly left an impression of a
White House aloof to the affair.
CIA officials believed that the revealing of Plame's identity was a
potential crime and contacted the Justice Department to investigate.
CIA officials maintain that Plame never ordered up the trip.
It is not clear when the White House realized Plame might have been a
covert operative, but Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) called for an
FBI probe 10 days after the Novak column was published.
It would be a crime to reveal her name only if a government official
knew that Plame had covert status and knew that the government was
actively concealing her identity.
The uproar over the leak was ephemeral, as the story seemed to wilt in
the summer heat.
But in late September, a senior White House official was quoted as
telling The Post at least six reporters had been told of Plame before
Novak's column, "purely and simply out of revenge."
Two days later, Bush was told that the Justice Department was
investigating whether someone had unlawfully leaked the identity of an
undercover agent.
Leak becomes a federal case
Chicago U.S. Attorney Fitzgerald was named special counsel three
months later, setting in motion an aggressive investigation that would
soon force about a dozen administration officials to testify, compel
the Supreme Court to consider the age-old question of how much
protection a reporter can provide a source, and land one reporter, the
New York Times's Judith Miller, behind bars for refusing to testify.
Her role remains a mystery, because she never wrote a story.
Fitzgerald subpoenaed White House phone records and e-mails, guest
lists for parties and information about the State Department memo
reportedly brought aboard Air Force One.
What started out as a simple investigation into a leak evolved slowly
at first, swiftly in the early days of 2004, into a wider probe of
other potential illegalities.
Bush and Cheney were asked to talk to investigators informally, while
a parade of officials from Powell to Rove to McClellan appeared before
the grand jury.
Lawyers who have sat in on the prosecutors' interviews said Fitzgerald
cast a wide net, adopting a broad view of the case.
Some witnesses were asked only about the initial disclosure, others
about possible misstatements during the investigative phase.
Some were brought in several times.
Rove, for example, was grilled by FBI agents twice in formal meetings
and asked to respond to questions in informal settings, and appeared
three times before the grand jury -- all between October 2003 and
October 2004, said a person familiar with his testimony.
Reporters obtained releases from sources such as Libby to discuss
confidential conversations, while others refused.
Cooper and Miller, in a case that reached and was rejected by the
Supreme Court, refused to reveal sources and were held in contempt.
Cooper was released by Rove to talk; Miller is sitting in an
Alexandria jail.
The showdown over sources has already impeded at least two major media
outlets.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer, fearing criminal prosecution, has decided
against publishing two investigative pieces not related to the Plame
controversy because they were based on anonymous leaks.
And Time reporters have said that at least two sources have told them
they would no longer provide information because the company turned
over documents in the Plame case.
As for the Bush administration, the investigation has exposed how an
administration that publicly deplores leaking has engaged aggressively
in the practice to advance its goals.
Yet much of the case remains a mystery.
Did the White House leak the identity of a CIA operative?
Is it a crime?
Did Bush have any knowledge of it?
Will Fitzgerald have spent this much time pressuring officials and
reporters and not deliver an indictment?
Those questions may be answered soon, as the grand jury's term is set
to expire in October.
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Harry
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