Valerie Plame Wilson - Continuing

Mark Kleiman points us to Timothy Noah at Slate. Our timeline is here; when last we looked, Ambassador Wilson had dramatically pointed the accusing finger at Karl Rove.

And the breaking developments - a member of the White House press corps used the Ambassador's statement as an excuse to ask WH Press Secretary Scott McClellan directly if Karl Rove was the source of the leak. Mr. McClellan was not fully responsive, as Mr. Noah documents. The Ambassador then backpedaled:

Wilson, for his part, denied today that he ever accused Rove. He told Chatterbox "Karl Rove" was simply a handy metonym for whatever two "senior administration officials" fingered Plame (correctly or falsely, Wilson still won't say).

Mr. Kleiman is disappointed by this behavior, and may be just slightly more receptive to the alternative view of the Ambassador that we have been pedaling for a while. As proof of the theory that if you write enough, something will seem prescient, I excerpt this:

OK, wild theory as to why there is so little media attention - probably the press can't find sources, but maybe they smell a rat.

I bet Tim Noah does. And I doubt that the reporter who staked his White Hose cred on the Ambassador's earlier statement won't be going back to that well again either.

Tim Noah suggests that someone put the question directly to Karl Rove. Since Mr. Noah spoke with the Ambassador, perhaps a question could be put to him - why should we take your hypotheticals seriously, and are there are others that are merely metonyms, synechdoches, metaphors, and allusions?

MORE: Boy, that will jinx me. Sort of like the way to produce more cars in five minutes than Detroit can produce in a month is to say "Hey, trafic is really light!"

MORE: My letter to Tim Noah (cc: Mark Kleiman) is below.

My letter to Tim Noah:

Dear Mr. Noah;

I read with great interest your recent article about Ambassador Wilson and Karl Rove. Mark Kleiman from the left, and I from the right, have been blogging extensively on this since July. Mark's excellent commentary can be found starting here; pride of authorship, and confidence in my new Movable Type site, oblige me to recommend my own timeline, which has links and commentary on every major and minor story I have seen on this.

I would like to comment on three points - the source of the leak, the credibility of Ambassador Wilson, and the question of whether a felony was committed.

Although David Corn does not emphasize it, the original Novak piece referred to both "senior Administration officials" and "the CIA" as sources. TIME magazine refers to "Administration" and "government" officials in a story attributing information about Ms. Wilson's CIA link to "government officials".

The key TIME passage:

"...some government officials have noted to TIME in interviews, (as well as to syndicated columnist Robert Novak) that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, is a CIA official who monitors the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. These officials have suggested that she was involved in her husband's being dispatched Niger to investigate reports that Saddam Hussein's government had sought to purchase large quantities of uranium ore, sometimes referred to as yellow cake, which is used to build nuclear devices."

You will have to take my word for it, but the parenthetical insertion about Robert Novak was not in the original story. It followed several days later, as I discuss in the timeline.

It may seem odd that officials in the CIA would be leaking info about one of their own. However, there is a possible explanation, which touches on the credibility of Ambassador Wilson.

In his NY Times piece on July 6, the Ambassador was quite clear that he had rebutted any suggestion that Saddam had purchased uranium from Niger. However, neither George Tenet of the CIA nor British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw considered Wilson's report to be conclusive, since Wilson had also reported **attempts** by Saddam's agent to purchase uranium.

Evidently, the Ambassador's report was not as conclusive as he depicted it to readers of the NY Times. This may have ruffled feathers inside the CIA. Further ruffling may have been due to the fact that the Ambassador confirmed what lots of folks suspect, and the US routinely denies - the Ambassador, in his trip to Niger, passed himself off as working for the US government (State? Commerce?) while working for the CIA.

We have a further question about the Ambassador's credibility, and it relates to the many hypotheticals presented by a fellow who simply won't say definitively whether his wife works for the CIA in a clandestine capacity. In an appearance with Katie Couric on "The Today Show", he said this:

COURIC: How damaging would this be to your wife's work?

Mr. WILSON: Well, you know, what was left out of my interview with Andrea Mitchell was--was my comment that I would not answer any specific questions about my wife. But hypothetically speaking, as others have reported, including TODAY, it would be--it would be damaging not just to her career, since she's been married to me, but **since they mentioned her by her maiden name**, to her entire career. So it would be her entire network that she may have established, any operations, any programs or projects she was working on. It's a--it's a breach of national security. My understanding is it may, in fact, be a violation of American law.

Now, my reading of statement is that the damage done by releasing information about his wife's CIA status was compounded by mentioning her maiden name. In other words, "outing" her was bad; providing her maiden name made a bad situation worse.

However, the Ambassador probably ought to know that his wife's maiden name is available online as part of his own on-line biography. So, why the exaggerated claim of damage done?

He exaggerated the scope of his Niger report; he exaggerated the damage done by mentioning his wife's maiden name; he backpedaled from the Karl Rove accusation. Is it possible that no felony has occurred, and that "frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs" is simply a metonym for "did something I really don't like"? Well, yes - there is a lot of uncertainty about whether a felony was committed.

The first level of uncertainty is introduced by the Ambassador's persistent refusal to discuss his wife. The second layer comes from the relevant law itself. Since the CIA does not operate domestically, to be protected as "covert", and agent must be posted overseas currently, or within the last five years.

Hence, it is possible that Ms. Plame was clandestine, but not legally "covert". Perhaps she ran a network in Iran seven years ago, and intended to do similar work in Pakistan two years hence. "Outing" her redirects (OK, ruins) her career, and compromises her Iranian network if it is still active. However, given the five-year rule, no crime has ocurred. Which, BTW, does not suggest that the leakers should get off scot-free - I am all in favor of humiliating Congressional hearings where a variety of Senators compete to ask the most excruciating questions.

However, my main point - there still are plenty of questions.

Love your column.

Regards,

The MinuteMan

Comments

[Paul Zrimsek]

One thing that's puzzled me about this story from the first is: Why would Karl Rove or anyone else outside the CIA be given the identities of any of their agents in the first place? Where's the need-to-know?

[TM]

Well, there is a theory I will call the "innocent or inadvertent disclosure". It is possible that Ms. Wilson was operating covertly in Iran seven years ago, and expected to take up a covert assignment in Pakistan in 2005. Right now, however, WH staffers meet her (or hear about her work) as one more analyst working on WMDs. The WH staff ought to keep their mouths shut about CIA types as a general rule, but it is not obvious to anyone meeting her for the first time that she is secretly La Femme Nikita, and it is not a fact that anyone at the CIA broadcasts to the White House. Hence, a train wreck.

Other theories abound, natch.

[Jos]

I like to suggest the idea that the person who 'outed' Valerie Plame Wilson was the Ambassador himself. Oh, not with a call to Novak but with his editorial in the Times.

Consider the following scenario: Suppose Wilson had written an editorial in the Times about an errand he had run in Africa for the Russian mafia. Wouldn't every prosecutor & Interpol investigator in the world worth his or her salt then assume that Wislon was a full member of the Russian mafia, no matter how much he denied it? Wouldn't they further assume that his spouse, business associates, and graduate students were also working for the mafia until proven otherwise?

That sort of guilt-by-association may not occur to media types, but is the stock-in-trade of prosecutors and investigators.

Replace the mafia with the CIA and foreign proscutors with foreign intelligence agencies and you have the current affair.

The lesson would seem to be that if you don't want your spouse and associates to be associated with the CIA, don't write your own involvement with the CIA.

Wilson had no excuse not to know that.

[TM]

I haven't heard that before, but I have heard the speculation that the CIA (well, some people within it) might very well be irked that he blew his own cover with the CIA. His mission was, from his NT Times piece:

... discreet but by no means secret. While the C.I.A. paid my expenses (my time was offered pro bono), I made it abundantly clear to everyone I met that I was acting on behalf of the United States government.

Well, did he say "CIA" to everyone he met? If he told people he was asking on behalf of State, or Commerce, then every damn person who travels on honest to God State or Commerce business will be suspected of being a CIA lackey.

Emphasis added to buttress a weak point - maybe everyone is already suspected. But still, it can't help, and might hurt, to have the Ambassador confirm what lots of people suspect and we spend a lot of time denying.

Anyway, that is the theory.

[Paul Zrimsek]

Thanks for the theory, Tom. Everyone else I've heard from on this subject-- including, to the extent I understand his rather confusing testimony, Amb. Wilson himself-- seems to be assuming that of course there are people in the White House who are in a position to deliberately blow the cover of secret CIA operatives. While you could fit my knowledge of the spook world into a thimble and still have plenty of room left over for my knowledge of the inner workings of the White House, it seems an odd way of doing business just on general principles.

[Jos]

If anyone in the administration leeked Plame's status as a CIA whatever, if she actually has said status, they should be punished in whatever way the law allows.

But these hyperventilated notions spread that "Naming her this way would have compromised every operation, every relationship, every network with which she had been associated in her entire career[,]" is flat out silly.

She wouldn't be 'compromised' if WE think she's CIA, but if the Iranians, Syrians, etc. think she is CIA. And unless those folks' intelligence agencies suddenly became a lot more trusting, they must have started thinking about her CIA connections when the Ambassador wrote about his errand for the CIA.

Just because reporters didn't 'suspect' Plame's CIA association (if any) until they read it in Novak doesn't mean that the damage wasn't already done by the Ambassador himself.

[Nathan Zachary]

I was wondering if anything new was developing with this story.
Maybe the Democrats are also unsure of who to blame, so they are keeping quiet so as to not shoot down one of their own, or it is one of their own and they are keeping quiet....

[Kija]

It's amazing how convuluted your reasoning can become when the GOP screws up. Everyone screws up from time to time and this is truly a screw up of epic proportions, but rather than acknowledge the mistake and accept that your folks don't walk on water, you engage in the minutest of hair-spliting in order to blame the other side.

It reminds me of the time Rush Limbaugh was asked to comment on a representative accused of illegal activity. Before answering, he said, "It depends, is he a Democrat or a Republican?"

[Jon Henk]

I'm gonna have to go with Tom on the "Oops" theory.....it's the only thing I can think of to explain the lack of motive.

"Revenge" just doesn't hold water in my mind.
Generally people don't cut their own throats to tweak somebody else. It just doesn't make sense....and it doesn't seem like it would work.

Still a potential crime, but it would explain a few things.

[bob mong]

It reminds me of the time Rush Limbaugh was asked to comment on a representative accused of illegal activity. Before answering, he said, "It depends, is he a Democrat or a Republican?"

Do you have a source for this? Or, at least, a date? Because this sounds like an internet myth to me.

[Jack Kelly]

Has it been noted that covert operatives are unlikely to use their real names? If Plame is "outed" by publishing her real name, our intelligence agencies need to go back to Spy-101.

This issue seems to lack an ability to coalesce. Either the Ooops theory is correct or someone may be trying to create a US equivalent to Dr. David Kelly.

[Ben]

Kija, seems to miss a key point in all this, in their effort to show that the GOP does not walk on water.

Novak asked a very simple question, to the effect, given Wilson obvious amateurish job of investigation, limited to drinking tea poolside with a few businessmen and government officals in Niger, why was he given the job in the first place? This is a very baffling aspect of the entire affair.

The fact his wife worked as CIA was offered as a rational for giving what appears to be an incompetent bungler such an important assignment. It is a rationale that makes sense. Whether the party knew anything beyond the simple fact she worked there, is pure conjecture.

If she were covert, using her maiden name would be pretty dumb, especially being married to a US ambassador. And it appears that being married to Wilson would be pretty dumb for a covert agent as well, considering the fact that he published his findings in the NY Times.