The CIA-Leak Fiasco

Back where it started, after three years of investigation.
By Byron York

On October 3, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell talked to reporters after meeting with Laszlo Kovacs, the foreign minister of Hungary. The meeting went well, with nothing controversial to discuss. It went so well, in fact, that a reporter said to Powell, “Mr. Secretary, things are so smooth I thought I’d ask you about something else. The State Department is offering to help in the search for the person who leaked the CIA official’s name. Can you say something about that situation? How might the State Department help?”

“We have been asked by the Justice Department, those who are conducting this investigation, to make ourselves available for any purpose that they have,” Powell answered. Promising to cooperate fully, Powell added, “We are doing our searches in response to the letter we received yesterday, and make ourselves available. I’m not sure what they will be looking for or what they wish to contact us about, but we are anxious to be of all assistance to the inquiry.”

No one in the press corps knew it at the time, but if a newly published account of the CIA-leak case is accurate, Powell knew much, much more than he let on during that session with the press. Two days earlier, according to Hubris, the new book by the Nation’s David Corn and Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff, Powell had been told by his top deputy and close friend Richard Armitage that he, Armitage, leaked the identity of CIA employee Valerie Plame to columnist Robert Novak. Armitage had, in other words, set off the CIA-leak affair.

At the time, top administration officials, including President Bush, were vowing to “get to the bottom” of the matter. But Armitage was already there, and he told Powell, who told top State Department officials, who told the Justice Department. From the first week of October 2003, then, investigators knew who leaked Valerie Plame’s identity — the ostensible purpose of an investigation that still continues, a few months shy of three years after it began.

Justice Department officials also knew who else had spoken to Novak. In that same time period, October 2003, FBI investigators spoke to top White House aide Karl Rove, and Rove told them of a brief conversation with Novak in which Novak brought up learning of Plame’s place of employment and Rove said he had heard about that, too. So by October 2003 — more than two months before the appointment of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald — the Justice Department knew who had told Novak about Plame.

ONE FRENZIED WEEK
Given the most recent revelation about Armitage — no surprise to anyone watching the case — plus what was previously known about the leak, the question now is, why did the investigation go on? Why was it expanded, and why was Fitzgerald named, and why does it continue today? Some of the answers can be found in the events of a single, frenzied week at the end of September and beginning of October 2003.

Justice Department officials originally did not want to pursue the case. The CIA first contacted the Department about the Wilson leak shortly after Wilson’s identity was revealed in Novak’s column on July 14, 2003. Such referrals are often handled quickly by the Department, but it appears the Plame referral languished there for more than two months. And then, on Saturday and Sunday, September 27-28, all hell broke loose, when news leaked that George Tenet had written a letter to the Justice Department about the matter.

On Monday, September 29, 2003, the Washington Post reported that “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. CIA officials approached the Justice Department about a possible investigation within a week of the column’s publication. Tenet’s letter was delivered more recently.”

After the Tenet leak, Democrats in Congress, led by New York Sen. Charles Schumer, demanded an investigation. On September 30, 2003, the Post published a front-page story, “Bush Vows Action if Aides Had Role in Leak,” which reported that, “President Bush’s chief spokesman said yesterday that the allegation that administration officials leaked the name of a CIA operative is “a very serious matter” and vowed that Bush would fire anybody responsible for such actions.”

The furor prompted Novak to write another column on the Plame matter. “During a long conversation with a senior administration official, I asked why [Joseph] Wilson was assigned the mission to Niger,” Novak wrote. “He said Wilson had been sent by the CIA’s counterproliferation section at the suggestion of one of its employees, his wife. It was an offhand revelation from this official, who is no partisan gunslinger.”

According to Hubris, Armitage had gone through the weekend of September 27-28, and then the continued furor on Monday and Tuesday — not to mention the previous three months — without realizing he was Novak’s source. It was only upon reading Novak’s “no partisan gunslinger” column, allegedly, that Armitage knew he was the source and got in touch with Powell.

In any event, the Justice Department moved quickly. In the next two weeks, DOJ investigators interviewed Armitage, Powell, Rove, Lewis Libby, and others. According to Hubris, Armitage told investigators about his talk with Novak, but did not tell them that he had also told the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward about Plame. It appears that Armitage did not tell Fitzgerald about his Woodward conversation until November 2005, and then only after Woodward initiated the process.

TRAITORS? NEVER MIND
Why did Armitage keep the information from Fitzgerald? In Hubris, Armitage’s allies hint at the same defense that Lewis Libby’s lawyers use to explain why he didn’t tell investigators everything: that Plame was a relatively inconsequential part of a big story and was not, as administration critics say, the focus of a White House conspiracy. “My sense from Rich is that it was just chitchat,” State Department intelligence head told Corn and Isikoff, saying that Armitage had simply “f—-ked up.”

Whatever Armitage’s motives, the fact that he was the Novak leaker undermines — destroys, actually — the conspiracy theory of the CIA-leak case. According to Isikoff, in an excerpt of Hubris published in Newsweek: “The disclosures about Armitage, gleaned from interviews with colleagues, friends and lawyers directly involved in the case, underscore one of the ironies of the Plame investigation: that the initial leak, seized on by administration critics as evidence of how far the White House was willing to go to smear an opponent, came from a man who had no apparent intention of harming anyone…”

It’s an extraordinary admission coming from Isikoff’s co-author Corn, one of the leading conspiracy theorists of the CIA-leak case. “The Plame leak in Novak’s column has long been cited by Bush administration critics as a deliberate act of payback, orchestrated to punish and/or discredit Joe Wilson after he charged that the Bush administration had misled the American public about the prewar intelligence,” Corn and Isikoff write. “The Armitage news does not fit neatly into that framework.”

No, it doesn’t. Instead, Corn and Isikoff argue that after Armitage “got the ball rolling,” his actions “abetted” a White House that was already attempting to “undermining” Joseph Wilson. That’s a long way from the cries of “Traitor!” that came from the administration’s critics during the CIA-leak investigation.

WHY LIBBY — AND NOT ARMITAGE?
Of course, investigators knew that all along. So why did the investigation continue? And why was Libby ultimately indicted, and not Armitage?

It appears that Libby’s early statements raised investigators’ suspicions. Early on, once the FBI started asking questions, Armitage told investigators he talked to Novak. Rove told investigators he talked to Novak. The CIA’s Bill Harlow told investigators he talked to Novak. Their stories, along with Novak’s description of how he learned about Plame (Novak talked to investigators at the same time, describing the process, but not naming sources), all lined up pretty well.

And then came Libby. During that same October time period, Libby — who was not Novak’s source — told investigators he learned about Plame from Tim Russert. According to the Libby indictment, Libby said that “Russert asked Libby if Libby was aware that Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA.” Although Libby wasn’t one of Novak’s sources, his story didn’t fit with the others, and that would most likely make investigators suspect that somebody wasn’t telling the truth. In this case, it probably appeared that person was Libby.

Ultimately, Libby was indicted on perjury and obstruction charges. But at the time Fitzgerald indicted Libby, at the end of October 2005, he did not know that Armitage had not told investigators about his, Armitage’s, conversation with Woodward. According to Hubris, Fitzgerald then re-investigated Armitage, finally deciding not to charge him with any crime.

Why? Certainly it appears that no one committed any crimes by revealing Plame’s identity, and one could argue that the Justice Department should not have gone forward with a wide-ranging investigation after it discovered Novak’s sources. But if Fitzgerald was going to indict Libby, then why not Armitage, too?

The answer may lie in the bitter conflict inside the administration over the war in Iraq that is the backdrop to the entire CIA-leak affair. Armitage’s allies have made it clear that they believe Armitage is a “good” leaker while Rove, Libby, and others in the White House are “bad” leakers. We do not know what CIA and State Department officials told Fitzgerald during the investigation, but we do know that fevered imaginings about the terrible acts of the neocon cabal were not the exclusive province of left-wing blogs; they were also present inside the State Department and CIA. Fitzgerald may have chosen the course that he did — appearing to premise his investigation on the conspiracy theorists’ accusations — because he was pointed in that direction by the White House’s enemies inside and outside the administration.

But now, after all the investigating, all the work, and the setting of terrible precedents for forcing reporters to testify in court or go to jail, the CIA-leak case hasn’t moved much beyond where it was in that frenzied week in October 2003. And unlike the old independent counsels, who were required by law to issue a report on their investigation, Fitzgerald has no obligation to explain his actions to anyone. Some questions that are unanswered now might well remain unanswered forever.