The error, moreover, was no small thing: by confusing the timing of phone calls made by White House officials attempting to discredit former U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson, the anonymous official stoked the scandal, mistakenly portraying what was a crass case of political hardball into one of potential criminality.
The “senior administration official” is not the original leaker who first told columnist Robert Novak that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA “operative” specializing in weapons of mass destruction. That as-yet-unidentified official remains the target of Justice Department investigators who today are awaiting stacks of White House records–including phone logs, e-mails and other material relating to the possible dissemination of information about Wilson and his undercover spouse.
Instead, it is another “senior administration official”–the one quoted in a Sept. 28 Washington Post article as saying that “before Novak’s column ran” two top White House officials “called at least six Washington journalists” and disclosed the identify and occupation of Wilson’s wife. “Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge,” that senior administration official told the Post’s Mike Allen and Dana Priest.
The Post story may have been the most eye-popping development in the leak story: it suggested for the first time that there was a big-league dissenter within the upper ranks of the Bush administration, someone who was genuinely appalled at crude White House attempts to discredit a critic. (Novak’s small point was that Wilson was dispatched by the CIA to check out claims that Saddam Hussein was seeking to buy uranium from Niger only because his agency wife recommended him.) It also was the strongest evidence that the disclosure of Plame’s identify was done with malicious intent and not, as Novak has since insisted, a passing reference in the course of a lengthy conversation about a wide range of matters.
But more than 10 days after the story exploded, an alternative theory is emerging among those who are directly involved in the leak case: that the “senior administration official” quoted in the Washington Post piece simply got it wrong. There were indeed White House phone calls to reporters about Wilson’s wife. But most, if not all, of these phone calls, were made after the Novak column appeared, some government officials now believe. They were placed as part of a blundering effort to persuade journalists to concentrate on Wilson’s presumed lack of credentials as a critic of pre-Iraq war intelligence rather than the substance of his critique.
New evidence for this view emerged today from a surprising source: Wilson himself. The former ambassador, who originally called for Bush’s top political director Karl Rove to be “frog-marched” out of the White House, acknowledged to NEWSWEEK that he got no calls from any reporters asking about his wife until he heard from Novak. If he had, he said, he would have vividly remembered it. One reporter, he said, did call him and say “watch out, they’re coming after you”–but that journalist is uncertain whether any reference was made to Wilson’s wife’s employment at the CIA.
But after the Novak column ran, Wilson says, he got plenty of calls. As NEWSWEEK reported in this week’s issue, Andrea Mitchell called him on Sunday, July 20, and told him that she “heard in the White House that people were touting the Novak column and that was the real story.” The next day, July 21, Wilson got a call from MSNBC’s “Hardball” host Chris Matthews, who told him that “I just got off the phone with Karl Rove, who said your wife was fair game.” (A source familiar with Rove’s conversation acknowledged the call but insisted that Rove put it differently: that it was “reasonable to discuss who sent Wilson to Niger.”) The efforts by Rove and perhaps others to fan the flames after the Novak column has been seized on by critics as evidence enough that the White House was directly involved in a trash-and-burn attempt to slime a critic. Rep. John Conyers, senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, yesterday wrote Rove a letter asking for his resignation, saying that Rove’s comments as reported by NEWSWEEK were “morally indefensible” and an indication that he was part of “an orchestrated campaign to smear and intimidate truth-telling critics.” (White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan has repeatedly refused to answer direct questions about Rove’s conversation with Matthews.) But even Conyers acknowledges that pointing reporters to an already published newspaper column is hardly a federal crime. And if all the White House attempts to promote stories about Wilson’s wife took place after July 14, most of the records being turned over to Justice Department investigators may lead to nothing but a prosecutorial dry hole.
That still leaves open the question of Novak’s original source–and at this point, White House statements are more carefully hedged than most of the public probably realizes. The administration has steadfastly refused to answer direct questions about whether certain high-level officials ever talked to Novak about Wilson’s wife. (“I don’t know the answer,” said Catherine Martin, communications director for Vice President Dick Cheney, when asked today whether Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis [Scooter] Libby, ever had such a discussion with Novak.) Instead, White House spokesman McClellan has denied only that three senior officials–Libby, Rove or National Security Council official Elliot Abrams–leaked any “classified” information to Novak. One possible translation: whatever they may or may not have said to Novak, nobody passed along anything they knew to be classified at the time.
And that may make all the difference in the world. As former CIA director James Woolsey points out, the 1982 law that makes it a federal crime to disclose the identify of an undercover CIA agent was carefully written to target witting perpetrators. Congress had in mind actors such as ex-CIA agent turned left-wing critic Philip Agee who, for political reasons, wrote a book “outing” many of his former colleagues, leading to considerable and justifiable concern about their safety. The law “was quite narrowly drafted,” notes Woolsey, and much will depend on “whether there was criminal intent” by the leaker. If the leaker did not know that Wilson’s wife was undercover at the time of the conversation with Novak, that alone may get him or her off the hook. (It is worth noting in this regard that Wilson’s wife was not identified as an “undercover” agent for the CIA until a July 22 Newsday story that called attention to the harm that might have been done by Novak’s column identifying Plame. The story quoted “intelligence officials” as confirming Plame’s undercover status.)
All of that may mean that no White House official actually committed a crime, but that doesn’t mean they’re in the clear. Woolsey said what White House officials did do was worse than a crime, “it was stupid.”
A JIHADI WALKS FREE
When he made his case for the war in Iraq to the United Nations Security Council last February, Secretary of State Colin Powell spent considerable time dwelling on the terrorist activities of Ansar Al-Islam. But today, even though many officials believe Ansar terrorists are implicated in the continuing attacks against U.S. troops, Ansar’s one time leader, Mullah Krekar, is walking freely on the streets of Oslo–and the Bush administration is powerless to do anything about it.
In two interview sessions with NEWSWEEK last week, Mullah Krekar unapologetically affirmed his support for any attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq. “It’s like any other occupation that happened in history,” he said. “It’s like Hitler against France. England in America. Russia in Afghanistan. Everyone knows that Muslims must do jihad against occupation everywhere.”
But sources tell NEWSWEEK that Bush administration officials have been frustrated because they have been unable to come up with sufficient evidence to persuade Norwegian authorities to keep Krekar under arrest (he was detained upon entering the country but then released) or to extradite him to another country to face charges that he has been involved in terrorist activities. One U.S. official told NEWSWEEK that Krekar was “big” and was believed by U.S. authorities to be involved in plotting attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq. Last month, Attorney General John Ashcroft, during what was described as a “family” visit to Norway, met with Norwegian ministers; sources say the Krekar case was high on the agenda. But U.S. officials acknowledged that during those meetings, U.S. officials were unable to come up with the hard evidence that would enable the Norwegians to take Krekar off the streets. For now, Krekar remains free–and waging, at a minimum, rhetorical jihad against the United States.
