Plamegate: Mystery
Solved
By Kenneth R.
Timmerman
FrontPageMagazine.com | July
13, 2006
Finally some straight talk on the Valerie Plame case, thanks to
Robert Novak, the conservative columnist who first revealed the
identity of the not-so-covert CIA officer three years
ago.
Novak’s July 14,
2003, column on the much-disputed trip to Niger by Plame’s
husband, former U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson, triggered an FBI
investigation, a federal grand jury, and eventually the appointment
of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who indicted top White
House aid Scooter Libby for perjury along the way.
¬Ý
At issue was whether Saddam Hussein ever sent a buying team to Niger
looking for uranium yellowcake in the 1999-2000 period. After tea and
crumpets with former friends in the Nigerian government, Wilson
concluded that it never happened. At least, that’s what he says
today.
¬Ý
(The definitive Senate Select Intelligence Committee report on
pre-war intelligence on Iraq, released in November 2004, asserts
unequivocally that Wilson lied in public about the conclusions he
sent to the CIA about his Niger trip).
¬Ý
Despite all the sturm und drang over the past three years,
Novak kept silent about who said what regarding Wilson’s trip.
The Left has imputed all kinds of scurrilous motives to Novak’s
silence. They have accused him of cutting a special deal with the
special prosecutor. They have accused him of fingering Libby and
Rove. They have accused him of total disregard of the First
Amendment, preferring to violate the “sanctity” of
anonymous sources in favor of going to jail.
¬Ý
They have compared unfavorably to former New York Times
reporter Judith Miller, who went to jail instead of revealing her
sources in the same case.
¬Ý
But when the Left realized that Judy Miller had been close to Scooter
Libby and actually reported on the facts of Saddam Hussein’s
weapons programs, rather than the¬Ýcreampuff version
being put out by the anti-Bush crowd at the CIA, they dropped her
instantly. She was fired by the NY Times almost the minute she
was released from jail.
¬Ý
Fitzgerald finally has closed the leak case in so far as Novak is
concerned. “That frees me to reveal my role in the federal
inquiry that, at the request of Fitzgerald, I have kept secret,”
Novak wrote yesterday in an
account he published in Human
Events.
¬Ý
“Joe Wilson's wife's role in instituting her husband's mission
was revealed to me in the middle of a long interview with an official
who I have previously said was not a political gunslinger,”
Novak revealed. “After the federal investigation was announced,
he told me through a third party that the disclosure was inadvertent
on his part.”
¬Ý
The official who was Novak’s primary source did not even know
the name of Wilson’s wife. But it wasn’t a very
close-held secret. “I learned Valerie Plame's name from Joe
Wilson's entry in ‘Who's Who in America,’” Novak
wrote.
¬Ý
I have asked a number of former CIA clandestine operators about
Valerie Plame.
¬Ý
One former senior clandestine officer scoffed at the claim that
Valerie Plame had ever been truly covert. “How can you be
[covert] when you are married to an ex-U.S. ambassador and
work for the State Department overseas?” Somebody looking at
her from a hostile power (say, Iran) would have to have a brain the
size of a pea to miss her connection to the U.S. government, he
added.
¬Ý
And yet, former CIA officers who vigorously oppose this
administration have signed public letters and gone on network
television to protest the exposure of her identity as the greatest
national security breach of the century.
¬Ý
Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer who became a deputy director of
the State Department’s counter-terrorism bureau, has launched
an internet witchhunt against Karl Rove for allegedly “outing”
his former Camp Perry classmate, Valerie Plame. (Gee, Larry: Guess
everybody must have known about Val’s Camp Perry date with you,
so it’s okay to talk about that, right?)
¬Ý
Novak’s column takes the wind out of their sails. Not only was
Karl Rove not Novak’s primary source, but Valerie Plame’s
role at CIA was so well-known that a CIA spokesman, Bill Harlowe, was
able to confirm to Novak that Plame had suggested Wilson for the
Niger trip.
¬Ý
Like Novak and hundreds of others of reporters, I have had dealings
with Harlowe over the years. Even if you had nailed down the identity
of a covert CIA operator who had worked for the agency 20 years
earlier, Harlowe would never confirm that person’s existence.
The standard line was to neither confirm nor deny.
¬Ý
But if you asked if so-and-so who was posted overseas to a U.S.
embassy, and was now working as an analyst, could give you a
background briefing on their subject of expertise, he would at least
get back to you with a yes or a no.
¬Ý
And that is exactly what he provided to Novak. The CIA public affairs
office was his third source.
¬Ý
Larry Johnson and others had kvetched that Novak blew Valerie Plame’s
cover at her “top secret” CIA proprietary, Brewster
Jennings, in Boston.They allege that Plame was working undercover as
an energy industry analyst to penetrate Iranian nuclear procurement
networks.
¬Ý
But guess what? It wasn’t Bob Novak who revealed that Valerie
Plame may have been working undercover (with an alleged tie to the
alleged Brewster Jennings in Boston, which now hosts an Internet game
similar to “Where in the World is Carmen SanDiego”?)
¬Ý
It was left-wing columnist David Corn, writing in The Nation,
just two days after Novak’s first column.
¬Ý
It turns out that Corn is a close friend of the Wilson/Plame couple,
and knew all about their various foreign outings. Unlike Robert
Novak, he didn’t need to consult “Who’s Who in
America” to learn Valerie Plame’s name.
¬Ý
If any security breach occurred with the disclosure of Valerie Plame’s
name, look toward Joe Wilson, who posted his wife’s name to “Who’s
Who,” and to their circle of political and professional
friends.
My hunch: it was all
part of a carefully orchestrated public relations scheme, that netted
lying Joe Wilson prime time television appearances, a best-selling
book, and a $2.5 million contract for the memoirs of Madame.
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