The identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame was compromised twice before her name appeared in a news column that triggered a federal illegal-disclosure investigation, U.S. officials say.
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. In a second compromise, officials said a more recent inadvertent disclosure resulted in references to Mrs. Plame 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.
For Plame’s outing to have been illegal, the one-time deputy AG explained, “her status as undercover must be classified.” Also, Plame “must have been assigned to duty outside the United States currently or in the past five years.”
Case closed.
So, there you go. The bizarro world version of the Plame case brought to you by the Washington Times and Newsmax.
Oh, and there’s one more interesting little bit of speculation that I think we all need to think about. (These freepers are sharp.)
And we’re to believe that Judith Miller went to jail to protect Karl Rove?
Really. I am so very interested to know what the Prosecutor knows about Judy Miller that we don’t. Is this going to end up with The Plame-Wilsons in jail?
I’ve read that elsewhere. There really is a theme on the right that Fitzgerald is actually going to indict Joseph Wilson and his wife. This is understandable. In their experience federal prosecutors are all Republican hacks who work hand in glove with Drudge and Lucianne Goldberg. In their view the rule of law says that only Democrats are criminal. (And note the derisive “Plame-Wilson.” Does Karl know his people or does Karl know his people?)
And then you have to really love this one:
and I’m sure he’ll go right ahead and shut the whole thing down.
And end his lucrative gig?
Fitzgerald’s in it for the money.
Remember, this is the base that Karl and Junior have so carefully cultivated and are valued over any other constituency in the country. Doesn’t it make the hair on the back of your neck stand up?
I’m just curious about something and maybe my readers can help me out. In yesterday’s NY Times article it says:
Asked whether New York Times reporter Judith Miller might have provided information about Plame to government sources, George Freeman, an assistant general counsel of The New York Times Company told Liptak: “Judy learned about Valerie Plame from a confidential source or sources whose identity she continues to protect to this day. If the suggestion is that she is covering up for her source or some fictitious source, that is preposterous.
Has Miller ever said before that the source she’s protecting told her about Valerie Plame? She didn’t write a story, she hasn’t turned over her notes and she hasn’t talked about who or what the prosecutor wants to question her about, to my knowledge.
Certainly, it seems clear that someone else must have told Fitzgerald that Miller was a party to the information, but until now I didn’t know she had admitted it or that she had so explicitly said that she was protecting someone who told her about Plame. Am I wrong?
If you are in New York in August, plan to check out the “Year Of Living Rudely” starring everybody’s favorite dirty talker (and my personal inspiration) The Rude Pundit. Guaranteed to blow your mind. Or blow something. Bring cigarettes and bottled water.
It occurs to me as I read the pithy Charles Pierce piece I’ve been yearning for, that it’s quite wonderful that Karl Rove makes it a practice to warn reporters off of stories he thinks will embarrass them. I guess he must have been out of town the day CBS submitted its National Guard story to the white house for comment.
New detail about what Fitzgerald knows from the LA Times:
Prosecutors investigating whether White House officials illegally leaked the identity of Wilson’s wife, a CIA officer who had worked undercover, have been told that Bush’s top political strategist, Karl Rove, and I. Lewis Libby, chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, were especially intent on undercutting Wilson’s credibility, according to a person familiar with the inquiry.
While lower-level White House staff members typically handle most contacts with the media, Rove and Libby began personally communicating with reporters about Wilson, prosecutors were told.
A source directly familiar with information provided to prosecutors said Rove’s interest was so strong that it prompted questions in the White House. When asked at one point why he was pursuing the diplomat so aggressively, Rove responded: “He’s a Democrat.” Rove then cited Wilson’s campaign donations, which leaned toward Democrats, the person familiar with the case said.
[…]
Activities aboard Air Force One are also of interest to prosecutors — including the possible distribution of a State Department memo that mentioned Wilson’s wife. Prosecutors are seeking to find out whether anyone who saw the memo learned Plame’s identity and passed the information to journalists. Telephone logs from the presidential aircraft have been subpoenaed; among those aboard was former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, who has testified before the grand jury.
The source familiar with the investigation said Saturday that prosecutors had obtained a White House call sheet showing that Novak left a message for Fleischer on the afternoon of July 7, 2003, the day after Wilson’s op-ed article appeared and the day that Fleischer left with the president for Africa. Fleischer declined to comment for this article, but has flatly denied that he was the source of the leak.
Wilson said in an interview Saturday that he had known that Novak was interested in him a week or so before the column appeared. He said that a friend who saw Novak on the street reported that Novak told him, “Wilson is an (expletive) and his wife works for the CIA.”
[…]
There have been other indications of a concerted White House action against the former envoy. Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus has said that two days before Novak’s column, he was told by an “administration official” that the White House was not putting much stock in the Wilson trip to Africa because it was “set up as a boondoggle by his wife, an analyst with the agency working on weapons of mass destruction,” according to an account of the conversation Pincus wrote for the Summer 2005 issue of Nieman Reports, published by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Let’s suppose you are a straight shooting prosecutor or a grand juror. And let’s suppose an extremely powerful and arrogant asshole testifies that he thinks it’s perfectly ok to “discredit” his political opponents with derogatory information about them. Let’s assume that a whole bunch of people from the White House testify that this arrogant asshole was obsessed with smearing a critic “because he was a Democrat.”
Do you think he’d get the benefit of the doubt asbout whether he actually smeared this critic from either the straight shooting prosecutor or the grand juror?
I don’t either. If they can nail him they’re going to. He’s a pig.
Bob Novak, who is now Karl Rove’s howling bitch until the day his rotting cadaver finally admits it’s dead, says that Ed Gillespie (whom he pointedly calls a protege of Karl Rove) may be the new chief of staff. It appears they are easing Andy Card out.
I made these inquiries in part because last spring, when I spoke to White House chief of staff Andrew Card, he sounded an alarm about the unfettered rise of Rove in the wake of senior adviser Karen Hughes’s resignation: “I’ll need designees, people trusted by the president that I can elevate for various needs to balance against Karl. . . . They are going to have to really step up, but it won’t be easy. Karl is a formidable adversary.
One wonders if Karl may think he’s been disloyal more recently. After all, as Weldon Berger has been reminding us, there is still the question of who leaked to the Washington Post that the Plame leak was done “purely and simply for revenge.” I always speculated it was Andy, who’s not part of the Texas mafia.
In any case, it looks like the hankie twisting, pearl clutching Ed “political hate speech” Gillespie is being brought on to shore up Karl and “send a message.” That’s what they do. It’s only a matter of time before we see Ben Ginsberg on the scene.
When they call in James “divaaaaaahn” Baker, we’ll know the jig is up.
Via Crooks and Liars, I see that Bob Schieffer takes the president to task for not just hauling in his top aides two years ago and telling them he wanted to know who talked to the press. This is a good question and one which I think the press should be asking every day. But then, Bush has always been a little cagey on this, hasn’t he? Why you’d almost think he already knew all about it.
And then there’s David Broder who seems to have popped half a viagra this morning and actually condemns the White House for it’s ruthless behavior AND takes the press corpse top task for its wimpiness. Father Tim came close to giving Ken Mehman an Al Goring this morning.
The DC establishment has opened one droopy eye and they see that the Republicans might actually be vulnerable. So they pulled their guts from the storage box under the bed and tried them on for size. I wonder if they still fit after all this time?
Warning: Extreme parsing of arcane Rovegate evidence follows. Read at the risk of being put to sleep immediately.
Michael at Reading A1 suggests that I’ve misinterpreted the Fred Barnes piece I wrote about yesterday and that Cheney may have seen an earlier memo from an American diplomat rather than the now infamous June 10, 2003 classified memo that everybody’s talking about. He may very well be right. I even questioned whether there even were any earlier memos.
Well, there were, and a whole bunch of them. (See the SSCI Report on Pre-War Intelligence, here.) And there was an American diplomat who debriefed Wilson whose report Cheney very likely saw if he requested information about Wilson’s trip — Barbara Owens-Kirkpatrick, the Ambassador of Niger. It’s entirely believable that if the VP wanted to see a report on someone they’d send him the report of an Ambassador. He may have even picked up the phone and called her. In any case, it’s certainly true that Cheney could have seen earlier memos and probably did. (We don’t know when he saw those memos, but they do exist.) My speculation was probably off base.
Michael sets forth a theory about Cheney’s revenge that I find quite persuasive. Along with him and Josh Marshall I would not be in the least bit surprised that this whole thing stemmed from the turf wars that characterized the run up to the invasion. I’m sure they are still fighting them. Negroponte may have to find some of his old friends in the Honduran Army to quell them.
Yesterday, like me, Marshall asked who wrote the June memo and why:
Who requested that the memo be written? Who actually wrote it? Why does it contain the inaccuracies the CIA claims it does? Who were the administration officials who continued to circulate the classified document to conservative news outlets even after Plame’s identity was initially revealed? And how did it get into the hands of Jeff Gannon?
I think I have discovered some answers:
The answer to the first question is that we don’t know who requested the memo.
The answer to the second question appears to be an INR analyst who is quoted heavily in the SSCI report and seems to be the only real source for the fact that Plame somehow finagled to get Wilson the trip.
In answer to the third, there is a big question as to whether anybody in the administration continued to circulate the memo to conservative news outlets (although they were certainly discussing it with mainstream news outlets.) Rather it appears that the CIA got the impression Jeff Gannon of Talon News had seen the memo (and rightly so, he acted as if he did) when he had in fact seen this article from October of 2003 in the WSJ (sorry can’t find working link) which said:
An internal government memo addresses some of the mysteries at the center of the White House leak investigation and could help investigators in the search for who disclosed the identity of a Central Intelligence Agency operative, according to two people familiar with the memo.
The memo, prepared by U.S. intelligence personnel, details a meeting in early 2002 where CIA officer Valerie Plame and other intelligence officials gathered to brainstorm about how to verify reports that Iraq had sought uranium yellowcake from Niger.
Ms. Plame, a member of the agency’s clandestine service working on Iraqi weapons issues, suggested at the meeting that her husband, Africa expert and former U.S. diplomat Joseph Wilson, could be sent to Niger to investigate the reports, according to current and former government officials familiar with the meeting at the CIA’s Virginia headquarters. Soon after, midlevel CIA officials decided to send him, say intelligence officials.
Classified memos, like the one describing Ms. Plame’s role, have limited circulation and investigators are likely to question all those known to have received it. Intelligence officials haven’t denied Ms. Plame was involved in the decision to send Mr. Wilson, but they have said she was not “responsible” for the decision.
Gannon played games for quite a while pretending he was protecting sources and the like but finally he admitted that he was actually referring to the WSJ story. (The CIA was misled by Jeff Gannon into thinking that this classified memo was making the rounds of conservative male prostitutes. You can understand why they were upset. Might as well plaster it all over the Web. In living color.)
They were also likely upset that this memo was being discussed (and in such detail) because it was still classified. (I’ll leave it up to the lawyers to figure out whether releasing new details of a classified document that has been preivously leaked contitutes a crime.)
In the end, it appears to me that there is only one primary source of the “Wilson’s wife sent him” story and it is a single INR (state department intelligence) analyst. I suspect he is the one who wrote the 2003 memo. The SSCI Report entry on this specific subject begins:
CPD officials could not recall how the office decided to contact the former ambassador, however, interviews and documents provided to the Committee indicate that his wife, a CPD employee, suggested his name for the trip. The CPD reports officer told Committee staff that the former ambassador’s wife “offered up his name” and a memorandum to the Deputy Chief of the CPD on February 12,2002, from the former ambassador’s wife says, “my husband has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activitv.” This was just one day before CPD sent a cable-requesting concurrence with CPD’s idea to send the former ambassador to Niger and requesting any additional information from the foreign government service on their uranium reports. The former ambassador’s wife told Committee staff that when CPD decided it would like to send the former ambassador to Niger, she approached her husband on behalf of the CIA and told him “there’s this crazy report” on a purported deal for Niger to sell uranium to Iraq.
(This allegedly unbiased SSCI report is big on the scare quotes when describing the Wilsons’s testimony.It tries to make a not very subtle case that she was trying to slant the evidence to favor Saddam even before the trip. It’s this biased language to which the Democrats on the panel rightly objected in their dissent.)
The Plame memo in question here has been explained as one written about Wilson’s qualifications, but not one that suggested he go. The interviews mentioned indicate only two people, the person who said “she offered up his name” and the INR analyst who said the first meeting with Wilson was “apparently convened by [the former ambassador’s] wife who had the idea to dispatch [him.]” There appears to be no other corroboration although the meeting was full of people. The only other documentation the SSCI report provides is the INR analyst’s notes:
On February 19,2002, CPD hosted a meeting with the former ambassador, intelligence analysts from both the CIA and INR, and several individuals DO and CPD divisions. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the merits of the former ambassador traveling to Niger. An INR analyst’s notes indicate that the meeting was “apparently convened by [the former ambassador’s] wife who had the idea to dispatch [him] to use his contacts to sort out the Iraq-Niger uranium issue.” The former ambassador’s wife told Committee staff that she only attended the meeting to introduce her husband and left after about three minutes.
The CIA has disputed in press reports that this analyst could have been at the meeting in which sending Wilson was broached. And that meeting must have been before the one the analyst refers to, since Wilson attended the one he’s discussing. I don’t know if the analyst had attended any earlier meetings in which Wilson was discussed for the mission, but the report doesn’t mention it if he did. I think the press has been confused about this or deliberately misled.
What appears to have happened is that there was an earlier meeting in which it was decided (we don’t know how) that Wilson should be sent. Plame introduced her husband at a later meeting with a bunch of people from throughout the intelligence community and then left. The analyst’s impression was that she arranged the meeting and he put that in his notes. The rest is history.
Here’s the bottom line as I see it. It’s still quite possible that Cheney saw Wilson’s report. According to the SSCI report, the CIA issued one and sent it up the line specifically because they knew that Cheney had asked about the Niger question. They did not make a special delivery to his office, so there is no way to prove one way or the other if Cheney ever saw it short of subpoenaeing the VP’s records — which I’m sure have long since been “misplaced.” There were other reports issued as well, including the one written by this INR analyst called Niger: Sale of Uranium To Iraq Is Unlikely.
On the other hand, it’s entirely possible that Cheney didn’t see any reports. It’s clear that people were trying to give him information he wanted to see. Wilson’s report backed up Owen-Kirkpatrick and others who said Iraq was very unlikely to have been trying to buy yellowcake from Niger. Therefore, since it wasn’t dispositive in their view on that fact, they may not have wanted to draw Cheney’s ire by bringing it up.
One thing that’s intriguing, however, is that the CIA told Cheney’s briefer on March 5th that a source was coming back from Niger that day who could shed further light on the subject. That source was Joe Wilson. Either the briefer never gave Cheney that heads up or Cheney never followed up with it. Then again, maybe he did.
Whatever the case, Cheney says that he didn’t know anything about it until he started to read the anonymous quotes in the newspapers from “a former ambassador” at which point he got a debriefing from an American diplomat. At this same time a memo was requested by somebody about the provenance of Wilson’s trip (Wilson was saying it was to answer questions raised by Cheney.) It appears to me that at this point the INR analyst wrote up his notes about his involvement in the trip and those notes became the June 10th memo. And the White House seized on the fact that he said Wilson’s wife was involved.
I suspect that’s as far as they got. With the modern Republicans, all you have to do is mention that there might be some dirt on somebody’s wife and they are all over it like slavering wolves. This would be exactly the kind of smear they’d jump on. This, then, would be their counterattack.
If that’s so, the question then becomes, did they ever follow up with anyone to find out Plame’s status with the CIA? Did anyone ever even contemplate that she might be in a delicate position there? Did they ever ask anyone at CIA if it was true that she had “arranged” the trip? And then of course there are the pivotal questions of who saw this memo and when — and who leaked it to whom and when.
That’s my theory of how the June 2003 memo came to be. And I’m pretty convinced that it’s the real source of this whole thing. Judy Miller may complicate this, but I suspect that if she’s a source, she’s a cut-out for Libby (to whom we know she spoke during this period) not an original source herself. However, since I know fuck-all about what she knows, I can’t really speculate.
Given what we know today from news reports and the SSCI report, this single INR analyst’s notes, which people have conflated with a meeting he may never even have attended, seems like the simplest most believable source of this mess.
Update: Clarification on the Plame memo in which she discusses her husbands qualifications. TIME magazine says today:
Or, more personally, was Rove suggesting that Wilson was chosen not for his expertise but because his wife was trying to help him stay in the game? Certainly Rove distorted her role when he claimed she had authorized the trip. “She was not in a position to send Joe Wilson anywhere except to bed without his supper,” says Larry Johnson, a Plame classmate at the CIA who later worked on Central American issues for the agency and then moved to the State Department as a counterterrorism officer. According to a declassified July 7, 2004, report from the Senate Intelligence Committee, it was Plame’s boss, the deputy chief of the CIA’s counterproliferation division, who authorized the trip. He did so after Plame “offered up” her husband’s name for the Niger mission, according to the report. In a Feb. 12, 2002, memo to her boss, Plame wrote that “my husband has good relations with both the PM [Prime Minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity.”
It’s highly unlikely that her boss was involved in the classified state department memo that made the rounds because well … he actually knew she was clandestine. If he was consulted by the White House on this matter, and told them (as I assume he would) that she was undercover, then they are criminal scumbags for outing her. If they didn’t bother to consult they are stupid scumbags for outing her. Either way, they’re scumbags.
So it’s finally been revealed that Libby and Rove were Cooper’s sources. What a coincidence. And both of them “heard” about Wilson’s wife sending him on the mission from a reporter. Man oh man, what are the odds? It’s even more shocking that the two most powerful political operatives in the White House were so out of the loop because we now know that on the trip to Africa on AF One, for reasons unknown, Rove subordinates Dan Bartlett and Ari Fleischer “prompted clusters of reporters” to look into how Wilson got his job while classified memos on the subject were being faxed back and forth to Condi to prepare her to go on television. Colin Powell was reported to be waving another secret classified memo around the cabin, a memo prepared more than a month earlier, that contained the information that Wilson’s wife sent him on the trip.
And yet we are supposed to believe that Karl and Scooter never saw or heard about any of this classified information, but rather heard about it from a reporter. And I’m assuming that Bartlett and Fleischer are supposed to have heard all about this from reporters too, or maybe second hand from Rove or Libby. None of these people in the white house political and press operation who were aware of Wilson’s wife’s alleged involvement had ever seen the classified document that was all over the place. They just heard the “gossip” and had nothing to do with planting it.
(I had not heard this business about Fleischer and Bartlett throwing out hints to the press corps on the Africa trip. Certainly, the press corps knew it, but I guess they were protecting their super-double deep backround confidential communal gaggles with the White House Press Office by not telling anyone.)
And if we are to believe they all got this information from reporters who told Libby and Rove (who because there exists no political assassin shield law are forced to say they don’t recall who they were) we must also then believe that throughout all of these very innocent exchanges of water cooler gossip among the press corps and the White House, neither Rove nor Libby nor anyone else thought to check with the CIA about Plame’s actual job in WMD and whether it was appropriate that her job become public. Even Novak now denies that he thought of it and only used the word “operative” by accident. Nobody anywhere had a second thought that there might be a reason not to publicize the identity of someone who works in weapons of mass destruction at the CIA. This is what we are supposed to believe.
It seems more likely to me now that Fitzgerald is building an obstruction and conspiracy case. Unless he’s stupid, which no one has ever said he is, he cannot believe these laughable excuses. If he has evidence that ties Novak into it after he shot his mouth off then that’s a real cover-up.
And, yes,to answer those readers who think that it’s a big waste of time to be talking about Rove in this detail, I think we all know the real story here is that “Karl Rove and others in the White House outed an undercover CIA operative to cover-up their lies about Iraq.” I’ve been saying that for some time. John Podesta said so this morning. Frank Rich wrote it yesterday. Even Monsignor Russert seemed to be seeing the bigger picture when he brought Woodward and Bernstein on to talk about how the Watergate burglary was part of a bigger story of White House corruption. (Woodward is spinning pretty badly, but then what would you expect? He wrote the allegedly definitive story of “Bush at War” and didn’t really get the story did he?)
But there is value in parsing the Rove stories in meticulous detail (besides being fun.) It feeds the scandal beast and if you don’t feed that beast it dies. So, I’m going to keep writing about both aspects of this story — the big picture and the detail about Rove — because that’s how you sustain a scandal. See, I learned this at the feet of the Mighty Wurlitzer. You just keep pounding in whatever way you can — relentless, focused and loud.
And I truly believe that Rove and his antics in this case are symbolic of the whole corrupt political machine that he has built — and the outing of a CIA agent is symbolic of the reckless desire to invade Iraq and roll over anyone who stood in their way. I think people are starting to get this in their gut.