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Blame the Plame Game
09/29/2003

I've laid off the Plame Affair because I haven't seen anything new since I first addressed it, and I think my characterization still stands: "a whole lot of speculation presented as evidence for a lynching."

But a Washington Post article on the subject bothers me because it seems to be setting up a big-time spin. Here are the offending passages:

But the aides said Bush has no plans to ask his staff members whether they played a role in revealing the name of an undercover officer who is married to former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, one of the most visible critics of Bush's handling of intelligence about Iraq. ...

The controversy erupted over the weekend, when administration officials reported that Tenet sent the Justice Department a letter raising questions about whether federal law was broken when the operative, Valerie Plame, was exposed. She was named in a column by Robert D. Novak that ran July 14 in The Post and other newspapers. ...

More specific details about the controversy emerged yesterday. Wilson said in a telephone interview that four reporters from three television networks called him in July and told him that White House officials had contacted them to encourage stories that would include his wife's identity. ...

Novak published her maiden name, Plame, which she had used overseas and has not been using publicly. Intelligence sources said top officials at the agency were very concerned about the disclosure because it could allow foreign intelligence services to track down some of her former contacts and lead to the exposure of agents. ...

Wilson said that in the week after the Novak column appeared, several journalists told him that the White House was trying to call attention to his wife, apparently hoping to undermine his credibility by implying he had received the Niger assignment only because his wife had suggested the mission and recommended him for the job.

The common theme is that the offense is the release of Plame's name. However, as I noted last time, every bio that I found of Wilson on the Internet (example) identifies him as "married to the former Valerie Plame." If Cliff May is correct that Plame's career in the CIA was common "insider" knowledge, the scenario that sparked the controversy begins to take shape. Let's look at the relevant paragraph from the infamous Robert Novak column:

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.

There are two pieces of information that constitute the breach: Plame's occupation and her name. Her name was readily available to anybody smart enough to use Google. Her career is another matter, one that justifies investigation into who moved it beyond "insider" common knowledge. I don't intend to spin for anybody who's broken the law and risked the cover of agents; nothing excuses that. Nonetheless, the question that's bugging me is why the administration's foes are emphasizing the name aspect.

Suppose the two administration officials did no more than say what Novak has attributed to them: "Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report." Where does that fit into the controversy? Cliff May implies that Novak could easily have already known that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA, and if necessary, he could have Googled for Wilson's biography and gotten "Valerie Plame." If Novak didn't know that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA, perhaps somebody at the Agency told him when he asked why she would have any influence over Wilson's trip. And that raises another question: if the matter was so sensitive, did the CIA ask Novak not to put all the pieces together for the public?

Here's my current take: somebody from the administration called Novak (and others) to mention the curious datum that Wilson's wife fingered him for the Africa trip, perhaps with some innuendo about who his wife was (although it didn't have to go even that far). Novak called the CIA, and the official there, fearing controversy over the appearance of impropriety, clarified Plame's role in that affair. Over the next couple of weeks, dismissing the importance of Wilson and Plame's relationship (because the result was the 16-words controversy), open enemies of the administration began to make noises about their take on the implications of Novak's piece. Writing just two days after Novak's column appeared, the always reliable David Corn was first to market with accusations of foul play, but note this:

His wife's role--if she had one--has nothing but anecdotal value. And Novak's sources could have mentioned it without providing her name. Instead, they were quite generous.

Of course, Wilson himself was "quite generous" with his wife's name. And Paul Krugman illustrates that the question of who, exactly, "identified [Plame] as a CIA operative" disappeared almost immediately, even though it remained (and remains) a valid question.

I'm willing to wait for more, and I'll condemn anybody who broke the law, especially if it undermined intelligence work. But I still find something fishy in the forward march against the White House. And I still think that if the White House is "attempting various smear campaigns, the administration is doing so in about as bumbling a manner as possible, something that it can ill afford in a nation with a hostile press."

Posted by Justin Katz @ 01:22 PM EST