Go to Original
Leaking With a Vengeance
By Michael Duffy
TIME Magazine
Sunday
05 October 2003
Did
someone in the Bush Administration unmask a CIA spy to punish
her husband for challenging the case for war? A classic tale of
whispers, retribution and rivalries
It is
easy to imagine that Valerie Plame had it all, even if no one was
allowed to know it. She was smart and beautiful and disarming,
married to a former ambassador and the 40-year-old mother of
3year-old twins. Best of all, she had a job that let her try to
save the world. At least she did until July 14. That's when her
role as a CIA spy tracking weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was
revealed by columnist Robert Novak after two Bush Administration
officials leaked her identity to him. Her exposure was more than
just a personal tragedy, though it was certainly that too. "Her
career as an undercover operative is over," says former CIA
officer Jim Marcinkowski, now a prosecutor in Royal Oak, Mich. He
was a classmate of Plame's during the year rookie spies spend at
the Farm, the Camp Peary, Va., school where CIA recruits learn how
to read code and sneak through checkpoints and memorize secret
documents. At the Farm, Plame stood out, he recalls, for being the
best shot with an AK-47 in the entire class. "She will no longer
be safe traveling overseas," he says. "I liken that to the
knee-capping of an athlete."
But the
reverberations of the latest scandal to rattle a presidency go far
beyond the destruction of one covert officer's career. The charge
on the table is that the White House leaked her name as an act of
revenge, to punish her husband Joseph Wilson for suggesting in
public that the Bush Administration had stretched the evidence
about Saddam Hussein's nuclear arsenal in order to justify a new
kind of war. With the latest polls showing support for that war
waning and anger over its price tag rising, the Wilson flap fueled
the perception that the White House cared more about selling its
case for war than ensuring that the case was right in the first
place.
What
shook up the intelligence community also roiled the capital and
set in motion the now familiar chain of scapegoating and
backstabbing that has poisoned the past two presidencies. Having
fumbled around in the drawer for months looking for a weapon to
use against Bush, the Democrats saw an opening. On top of a moody
economy, a messy war, a swelling budget deficit and a deeply
polarized electorate, the leak charges came as Bush's poll numbers
had sunk to the lowest point in his tenure. Indeed, with the
presidential election a little more than a year away, only 37% of
Americans believe the country is on the right track, according to
the latest New York Times/CBS poll. When word spread last week
that the Department of Justice (DOJ) was launching a full criminal
probe into who had leaked Plame's identity, Democrats immediately
raised a public alarm: How could Justice credibly investigate so
secretive an Administration, especially when the investigators are
led by Attorney General John Ashcroft, whose former paid political
consultant Karl Rove was initially accused by Wilson of being the
man behind the leak? A TIME review of federal and state election
records reveals that Ashcroft paid Rove's Texas firm $746,000 for
direct-mail services in two gubernatorial campaigns and one Senate
race from 1984 through 1994. White House spokesman Scott McClellan
said accusations of Rove's peddling information are "ridiculous."
Says McClellan: "There is simply no truth to that suggestion."
Recalling the torture inflicted on Bush's predecessor by a squad
of special prosecutors, congressional Democrats demanded that a
special counsel be appointed in this case. By Wednesday some had
christened the scandal Intimigate and were trying to link it to
every political issue in sight. New York Democratic Senator
Charles Schumer, who had been among the first to call for an
investigation back in July, announced that he would offer a
nonbinding amendment to be attached to the Administration's bill
for the $87 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan, calling for the
naming of a special prosecutor. It is a vote Republican Senators
dread. "You can't ignore the political side of this," says a
Senate Democratic aide. "Yeah, we're going to play it up. And so
long as the Republicans continue to assert that this is going to
be handled by Ashcroft, I don't think the scandal will end." In
reality, even if a special prosecutor is appointed, the scandal
will continue to fester.
Democrats know they could overplay their hand if they appear too
partisan, a line they came close to crossing last week. House
Democratic leaders canceled a meeting with Wilson this week
because they realized its politics could potentially backfire on
them. "The issue for Democrats is not to make this look like it's
partisan," insists a senior Senate Democratic staffer, "because it
really is serious."
Indeed,
the tale was setting some new records for political irony. On the
one hand, there was New York's Senator Hillary Clinton, who
steadfastly fought the appointment of an independent prosecutor to
investigate Whitewater when she was First Lady, calling on
Ashcroft to step aside. And on the other, there was President Bush
at the University of Chicago, asking reporters who covered him to
turn in anyone on his staff who had given up Plame. There was no
danger of that, because any reporter who might have learned
Plame's name in a leak is duty bound to shut up about it, even to
federal investigators, if the situation comes to that. Such
obligations did not stop hundreds of reporters and politicians who
thought they knew the identity of the leakers from buzzing about
it, exchanging winks and nods about the supposed culprits. The
ultimate irony is that the Administration may now be depending on
journalists' rectitude. In the prelude to and particularly in the
aftermath of the war, Bush's aides at times questioned the
patriotism of the press; that some of those officials may now be
depending on the silence of the media in the face of a
national-security investigation made some Bush allies
uncomfortable. Though she says she believes the White House
denials, longtime Bush adviser Karen Hughes tells TIME, "I don't
believe it's right to hide behind journalists."
Why did
the disclosure of a lone CIA officer's name seem to unhinge an
entire city so quickly? The answer is that Plame is just the
latest casualty in a low-grade war that has raged for more than a
year between the CIA and the White House about the nature and use
of intelligence. It has been a constant, under-the-radar struggle
between the ideological hard-liners of the Bush team against
career intelligence experts at the CIA - a fight over the validity
of the evidence that the U.S. and its allies gathered about Saddam
and his nuclear ambitions. For all its power and influence
peddling, Washington is still a city of ideas, and Bush's biggest
idea - that in a post-9/11 world, intelligence, even uncertain
intelligence, could be used to justify a pre-emptive war - is one
that many consider Bush's real faith-based initiative.
After
9/11 the Administration's hard-liners, led by Vice President Dick
Cheney, along with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his
deputy Paul Wolfowitz, believed the U.S. couldn't afford to wait
for perfect, bulletproof evidence to come in about the true extent
of Saddam's arsenal. In the new wars of this new world, they
argued, the U.S. must sometimes act before the jury is done
deliberating. The hard-liners advanced this new doctrine partly
because they thought the war on terrorism demanded it but also
because they became convinced over more than two decades that CIA
career analysts were slow, risk averse, too enamored of gadgets
and often the last to see the big picture. The hard-liners often
didn't trust them to do what was necessary. Rumsfeld grew so tired
of the CIA's skepticism that he set up his own intelligence shop
to get the evidence he wanted, in effect, sweeping aside the work
of an entire agency.
So when
Plame's husband tried to step in front of the shoot-first,
verify-later car that Bush had been steering, it was only a matter
of time before the hard-liners tried to flatten Wilson. A year
before the war began, he had been sent by the CIA to investigate
British intelligence claims that Saddam was trying to buy
yellowcake uranium in Niger. Wilson seemed like an understandable
choice for the secret CIA mission: he had been a diplomat in Niger
in the '70s and had been the last U.S. envoy to meet Saddam before
George H.W. Bush began the liberation of Kuwait in 1991. The
yellowcake story was tantalizing to hard-liners because it backed
their hunch that Saddam had been trying to acquire the makings of
a nuclear weapon. But after an eight-day trip, Wilson concluded
that the yellowcake claims were bogus. Throughout the summer of
2002, hard-liners ignored his findings and touted the tale anyway.
Tenet and the CIA tried to shoot down the story again last fall as
Bush was mobilizing for war. But the President made the charge in
his State of the Union speech in January. The commotion had for
the most part died down when Wilson broke a year's silence in July
and wrote a New York Times op-ed piece criticizing the
Administration for having "twisted" the intel in order to
"exaggerate" the Iraqi threat. Wilson had a revelation of his own:
it was Cheney who had approached the CIA, asking questions about
the implication of an intelligence report on Iraq's seeking
uranium in Africa. The CIA in turn responded by asking Wilson to
embark on his trip. Cheney's staff has adamantly denied initiating
the Wilson assignment, saying that midlevel CIA officials chose to
dispatch Wilson on their own. Indeed, not even CIA chief Tenet
knew of the trip.
That was
news enough, but Wilson went a crucial step further. He implied
that Bush either was wrong about the yellowcake or ignored
information that "did not fit certain preconceptions about Iraq."
In the view of the hard-liners, the gravity of the charge demanded
a response in kind. In the days after Wilson's essay appeared,
government officials began to steer reporters away from Wilson's
conclusions, raising questions about his veracity and the agency's
reasons for sending him in the first place. They told reporters
that Wilson's evidence was thin, said his homework was shoddy and
suggested that he had been sent to Niger by the CIA only because
his wife had nominated him for the job.
The
double-barreled leak had two targets. One was to tag Wilson as a
tired, second-rate diplomat who couldn't get a job without his
wife's help. The leakers also wanted to drop the hint that the CIA
had purposefully chosen someone it believed would come back with a
skeptical finding.
To the
hard-liners, Wilson was exactly the wrong guy to send on a WMD
hunt, particularly when it concerned Iraq. He had worked on
President Clinton's national-security staff, contributed $2,000 to
John Kerry's presidential campaign and made a donation to Al
Gore's presidential bid in 2000 (as did his wife). And even though
Wilson had given money to Bush that year as well, the hard-liners
believed his instincts matched those of most people at the CIA -
moderate, internationalist and, above all, too slow to see the
enemy forming over the horizon.
When
Novak's column naming Plame appeared July 14, the pundit asked
whether the Administration had "deliberately ignored Wilson's
advice" and repeated the Administration charge that Wilson's wife
suggested her husband for the mission to Niger. Wilson, in a
report that appeared on TIME's website three days after Novak's
column, said his work with the CIA had nothing to do with his
wife. "That's bull____. That is absolutely not the case. I met
with between six and eight analysts and operators from CIA and
elsewhere [before his February 2002 trip to Niger]. None of the
people in that meeting did I know and they took the decision to
send me." Wilson then added, "This is a smear job."
Character assassination isn't a felony, but revealing the name of
a CIA officer is. It was the President's father, a former spy
chief, who called it treason to leak the name of an undercover
officer. And in this case, the officer was one who was working on
the most vital security issue of all, the proliferation of WMD. At
a time when good intelligence and successful spying has never been
more essential to the nation's defense, the deliberate unmasking
of a spy sent shudders through the secret web of spooks worldwide.
When a U.S. operative is unmasked, foreign spy agencies go back,
retrace his steps, review his contacts and try to figure out how
the CIA operated in their country. "Anyone who was seen with her
overseas is tainted now," warns a former officer who knew Plame.
"If she went to the grocery store and talked to the grocer, people
will say, 'I wonder if he was working for her?'"
In
Plame's case, the damage may go even deeper. Plame was an NOC,
meaning she did her job overseas under nonofficial cover and not
out of an embassy or government office. Many in her family did not
know she worked for the agency. Such unofficial covers are often
with private companies to further disguise an operative's real
work. Plame had worked with Brewster Jennings & Associates, an
obscure energy firm that may have been a CIA front company. Deep
covers take time, luck and work to develop; the outing of an NOC
also blows the cover of the involved business or private entity.
Word
that the CIA had asked the Justice Department to investigate the
White House, State Department and Pentagon for leakers threw the
West Wing into understandable confusion - not that it has been on
its game lately. For most of last week, Administration officials
felt their way carefully, hoping not to bump into anything sharp.
Spokesman McClellan spent several days back on his heels trying to
rejigger his original sweeping claims of innocence into more
elastic arguments that left open the possibility that this was all
a big misunderstanding.
Following procedure, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales told all
officials to preserve their documents relating to the leak. But
the mood in the West Wing was anything but normal. In that small
part of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue that is open to the press, staff
members were told to leave their doors open to show that everyone
was at ease. Instead of planning policy, aides were cycling
through their email in and out boxes back to February 2002 to meet
Gonzales' order. Aides who may have known about the Wilson leak as
it was happening were mulling whether to hire a lawyer, weighing
where personal interests might diverge from professional ones.
"This is big and scary," said a staff member who is intimately
involved.
Bush,
who has lacked a sense of command in public for some weeks now,
looked a little steadier than his aides, but the steely
hang-the-guilty determination he reserves for terrorists and other
evildoers was missing when it came to discussing the possible
leakers in his midst. Asked about the accusations concerning Rove,
his political alter ego, Bush said, "Listen, I know of nobody - I
don't know of anybody in my Administration who leaked classified
information." Bush seemed to emphasize those last two words as if
hanging on to a legal life preserver in choppy seas. "If somebody
did leak classified information, I'd like to know it, and we'll
take the appropriate action." Then he added, "This investigation
is a good thing."
But the
White House was already shaping the outline of a defense in the
event any leakers are found by the FBI or come forward on their
own. White House officials argued privately that it was possible
that whoever leaked Plame's identity may not have known she was
undercover, as the law requires for prosecution. While the
Administration suggested that perhaps hundreds of people knew of
Plame's spywork, some in the White House admitted that the West
Wing was on the hunt for Clinton-like technicalities to skate
through. "I did not have conversations with that man," one wry
aide quipped.
Bush has
seldom been in this position before - that is, on the political
defensive. Republicans watching the White House wondered last week
how long it would take for Bush to get his mojo back, and several
even reminisced fondly about the way Bill Clinton would fight
hardest when all seemed lost. "Bush is the opposite of Clinton,"
said one, trying not to sound worried. "He's all offense and no
defense. Clinton was awesome when his back was against the wall.
Bush doesn't know where to turn."
The
Justice Department is trying to make a swift start, perhaps to
forestall calls for a special counsel. The clamor faded a bit last
week, but it will be back. So half a dozen agents are on the case,
government sources told TIME, led by Inspector John Eckenrode, a
seasoned veteran of leak probes and other sensitive
investigations. Plame was interviewed by the FBI for the first
time last Friday. But if the probers narrow their scope to a
shortlist of possible leakers, the handling of the case could
become very controversial very quickly. FBI agents have already
been asking reporters for their voluntary cooperation - it never
hurts to try - but what happens if everyone in the White House
denies being the leaker and all the reporters involved refuse to
name their sources?
One
irony here is that a special counsel might actually help the White
House keep the story off the front page. Damaging as they were in
the Clinton years, well-managed special counsels have the one
advantage of theoretically putting everything under a cone of
silence and allowing a President to move on. Some legal experts
have noted that special counsels are needed not to open probes but
to end them. "DOJ won't be able to make this case," says a former
Clinton Justice official, noting the difficulty of leak hunts,
"but it also won't be able to close it because nobody will believe
them." That's why, notes George Terwilliger, a former deputy
attorney general in the first Bush Administration, "in some cases,
it's absolutely true that due to personalities and circumstances,
the perception of the integrity of the resulting judgment will be
enhanced if some outside person ... is brought in."
Just
because most experts predict the legal damage to be limited does
not mean the political fight will end soon. One of the reasons the
fight feels even uglier and more desperate than usual is that it
comes at a time when almost every political institution seems
tarnished. To the extent that the Bush Administration has to
answer for David Kay's failure to find any WMD in Iraq, its answer
is that fault lies with the shortcomings of the intelligence
community. The spies, for their part, have been quick to remind
their allies on Capitol Hill of the White House's and hard-liners'
refusal to listen to their footnotes, warnings and caveats last
year. And the Democrats, who had forgotten what it was like even
to glimpse the political upper hand, seem just a little bit too
happy that the WMD hunters have come up empty-handed and the
situation in Iraq is becoming an ever greater liability for the
President. With the White House, the CIA, Democrats and
Republicans so busy covering their tracks, it is no wonder that
public confidence in their judgments and motives is shaken when
the nation's challenges seem only to be growing.
-------
Jump to
TO Features for Tuesday 07 October 2003
