The latest on Valerie Plame

The Valerie Plame story (she's the wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, and recently had her identity as a covert CIA operative blown in an article by Robert Novak, who appears to attribute the information to "two senior administration officials"), is getting rather interesting.

On the 21st, Newsday confirmed the central point of the story:

Intelligence officials confirmed to Newsday Monday that Valerie Plame, wife of retired Ambassador Joseph Wilson, works at the agency on weapons of mass destruction issues in an undercover capacity -- at least she was undercover until last week when she was named by columnist Robert Novak.

Both Tom Maguire and Mark Kleiman have been following the story closely, though with divergent viewpoints.

For Maguire, one of the primary issues thus far has been in determining who it is that passed the information to Novak. Novak, for his part, was a bit cagey in how he reported the leak.

Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him. "I will not answer any question about my wife," Wilson told me.

Note that the actual line stating that Plame is a CIA agent is not directly sourced to anyone. The presumptive sourcing comes in the next sentence where he refers to "two senior administration officials". This phrasing seems to have left open a great number of questions.

In most of the news reports about this situation, there seems to be a bit of switching back and forth between using the terms "senior administration officials" (who would be understood to be deputy-secretary-and-above level officials who work in the White House) and "senior government officials" (also deputy-secretary-and-above level official, but from other agencies and offices). David Corn's original piece about the Novak story seems to have started some of the confusion with the following paragraph:

Novak tells me that he was indeed tipped off by government officials about Wilson's wife and had no reluctance about naming her. "I figured if they gave it to me," he says. "They'd give it to others....I'm a reporter. Somebody gives me information and it's accurate. I generally use it." And Wilson says Novak told him that his sources were administration officials.

Note that he says Novak said "government" officials while Wilson - quoting Novak's conversation with him - said Novak's sources were "administration" officials. Furthermore, Time noted that they were given the information by "government" sources, and implied that Novak's sources were the same.

[Note: Time has run two slightly different versions of this story. A portion of the original version of this paragraph is available at Tom Maguire's "Just One Minute" blog, and is quoted below, but the original story has been removed from the web and the original URL no longer works. The story itself was moved to a new URL when it was updated. First is the current version, then below that, the quoted section of the original story. I'm not sure how significant the change was or what other changes were made to the story, but wanted to provide this comparison.

[Ed note: as currently published] And 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.

[Ed note: as originally published, before the above revision]...Some government officials, noting that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, is a CIA official who monitors the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, intimate that she was involved in his being dispatched Niger...

So, what are we to make of this? It's hard to say because Novak, himself, wasn't clear in his initial report on the story.

Maguire makes quite an issue of this difference, and says that from his analysis of the various stories, he believes that there is some consistency with the use of "government officials" as being the ones who actually spilled the beans regarding Plame being covert CIA, and "administration officials" as being the ones who allege that she recommended her husband be the one who goes to Niger. He has suggested that the leaking of Plame's CIA status may have been the result of an internal fight within the CIA, taking the fluctuation between "government" and "administration" officials as the main clue that the source may not be from within the White House.

I had noted, in my posts, that if the CIA outed one of their own as part of an internal feud on the handling of intelligence, that is still a big story and bad for Bush. Bad in a different way then if the source was the White House, arguably not as bad, but still bad.

Personally, I find that idea to be a bit hard to swallow. I could understand the CIA wanting to make Bush look bad, easy. They're not happy with him right now for trying to make them the fall guys for the whole Niger/uranium fiasco, and I can't say that I'd put it past them. I could even see the CIA maybe trying to smear the NSC - who until the last two days have been content to let their own part in the Niger/uranium story go by the wayside while the administration has piled on the CIA. Of course, that would presuppose that someone in the NSC would have had to have known that Plame was a covert officer or operative, which I suspect isn't very likely. But I just can't see the CIA burning themselves, even if they're undergoing some kind of internal feud.

In contrast, Kleiman has consistently referred to Novak's sources as "two senior administration officials", which I would tend to agree with since Novak's original column, while not directly sourcing the information that Plame worked for the CIA to the "two senior administration officials", he does cite them as the source of the information that Plame suggested her husband to the CIA. The only reason that the idea Plame had suggested her husband to the CIA is at all newsworthy is because of the particular combination of relationships here; specifically that Plame is a CIA agent, that she and Wilson have a romantic relationship and that she made a recommendation. Take any one of those three away, and the tidbit becomes meaningless.

Looking at just the employment angle for a moment, if someone who had no special status, had called the CIA to suggest her husband as an envoy to investigate a claim like this, not only would it not be newsworthy, but it also would probably have been tossed aside with a shrug. By the same token, if the wife of a former ambassador, who had no other special status, made the call, I can't imagine it would get any warmer of a reception. There simply wouldn't be any reason for the CIA to pay attention to it. At most, the CIA may be thinking that the woman wants her husband to get some kind of a feather in his cap, or that they, as a couple, have something else to gain from the assignment - but unless she holds some kind of status that would increase the odds that the CIA would listen to her, there's hardly anything scandalous, or newsworthy, about it.

As a CIA employee, however, Plame would have the kind of status that might give the CIA reason to consider her request. As such, its only makes sense that whomever told Novak that she suggested the CIA use her husband would also explain why that request would be worth reporting: the implication that Wilson used his connection to the CIA, via his wife, to pull the Niger assignment. To get that point across, her status had to be revealed.

At this point, it's likely that there will be an investigation. Senators Richard Durbin of Illinois and Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, both members of the Senate Intelligence Committee (Rockefeller is the vice chairman) have said they feel an investigation is necessary and Senator Orin Hatch of Utah has "agreed the committee will probably investigate the matter, but he dismissed the charges of White House strong-arm tactics as "typical political talk; unjustified political talk.""

In the meantime, I think bloggers can be counted on to keep spinning out theories as to what may have happened. Today, Maguire posits that perhaps one reason the story hasn't received much attention in the mainstream press (so far, coverage by the New York Times and Washington Post has been virtually non-existent) is that they may be "smell[ing] a rat", specifically in the form of Joseph Wilson. Maguire notes that during interviews about the outing of his wife, Wilson has commented that "...the release to the press of her relationship to him and even her maiden name was an attempt to intimidate others like him from talking about Bush administration intelligence failures." He says that this complaint is misleading, however, since Wilson's own biography on the Middle East Institute says that "He is married to the former Valerie Plame and has two sons and two daughters."

Even if the fact that they were married and her maiden name weren't exactly a total secret, I could understand that he might be upset about the way that information was published in the Novak column. The focus of the story as written was not that Plame worked for the CIA (though that was a necessary component as noted above), but that Wilson and Plame may have tried to use her position with the CIA as a way of getting him the Niger assignment. Mentioning that she was his wife served as a slur against him without actually having to make any kind of accusation, following the standard line of thought: "Why would she suggest her husband be given the assignment? I wonder what's in it for them?"

As for the use of her maiden name, I don't know if she typically used "Valerie Plame" or "Valerie Wilson", but from the use of "former Valerie Plame" on his biography, my guess would be that she was commonly known as "Valerie Wilson". For friends and family, then, to suddenly see her mentioned in print as "Valerie Plame" could raise a variety of questions about the status of their marriage. I could understand a man being upset about that. While this concern would have nothing to do with any aspect of the actual story, it is still a bit of a personal fallout for a family already under stress.

Neither of those theories, though, would explain why he would have said that releasing that information to the press would be part of their attempt at intimidation, not only of him but also of others who might be tempted to step foward, unless he was trying to imply that he believes the White House would release that kind of personal information about other targets it might have.

That is, of course, speculation, and while I don't know whether I consider it to be likely or not, it is, at the least, as plausible as Maguire's apparent implication that Wilson, himself, is somehow responsible for the leak, in an attempt to discredit the White House.

Kleiman suggests another possiblity altogether. He starts by noting that the story itself doesn't really make much sense.

We're being asked to believe that an Administration that makes a fetish of security deliberately blew the cover of a secret agent who was gathering information about the acquisition by foreign governments of weapons of mass destruction, merely as a way of getting back at her husband for having embarrassed Bush. And you have to believe that they did so in a way that was completely traceable back to the Administration, even though burning one of our spies in that way would constitute an aggravated felony. Even if you think that the people around Bush are that thuggish -- which, even for me, was a real stretch -- it's hard to imagine they could have been so reckless.

[The reason I find it hard to believe that the Bush people would burn a spook, even though I believe that they've done lots of things I find equally repugnant, is that I don't think they regarded, for example, accusing John McCain of fathering an interracial bastard as really evil: to Bush and Rove, that was just good, clean fun. But my understanding of the Team Bush ethic would make burning a spook just about the worst thing one could do.]

He suggest that possibly the incident is the result of gross incompetence and recklessness, but not maliciousness. Under this theory, someone in the administraiton was aware that the CIA has asked Plame to talk to her husband about possibly going on the trip (which seems to be what actually happened, rather than Plame lobbying "...to have her husband, the father of her two young children, sent to an unappetizing part of Africa on an unpaid secret mission."), but didn't realize Plame was a covert operative or official. As Kleiman explains it:

Then, two weeks ago, when the order went out from the center to slime Wilson, someone remembered that detail and thought that the suggestion that Wilson had only gotten the assignment through his wife's influence might reduce his credibility a little. Without checking back with the CIA -- with which the White House is not, at the moment, on very good terms -- whoever it was then peddled the tale to Novak, and had someone else (these are two senior officials we're talking about) confirm it when Novak called to check.

The purpose of the smear - that Wilson required his wife's assistance to get a job - would be to subtly suggest that Wilson isn't "a real man".

I have to say, I think it's more plausible than the idea that Wilson decided to damage the White House by blowing his wife's cover himself, but I'm not sure I'm convinced, either. Honestly, I'm not sure what I think is actually going on or what the "real story" is, but it's sure interesting to look at all the pieces and try to figure out where they all go.

Posted by thorswitch at July 24, 2003 01:56 PM | TrackBack