Byron York: There's a lot we don't know yet about the CIA flap

Please allow me to share with you some of the things I don’t know.

I don’t know what Valerie Plame’s status with the CIA was in July 2003 when Robert Novak wrote his column mentioning that she was an “agency operative” and had recommended her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, for a fact-finding trip to Niger. Was Plame a covert agent then? If not, how recently had she been a covert agent?

I don’t know.

I also don’t know what’s going on with The New York Times’ Judith Miller.

Since top presidential adviser Karl Rove and top vice-presidential adviser Lewis Libby signed strongly worded waivers releasing all reporters from any pledges of confidentiality, why hasn’t Miller testified? Does that mean her source was someone else who has not signed a confidentiality waiver?

I don’t know.

I also don’t know why Miller is involved in all this at all, since she never wrote a story about it. Was she some sort of “carrier,” as is now being theorized, and actually helped spread word of Plame’s identity?

I don’t know.

For that matter, I don’t know what Time magazine’s Matthew Cooper was doing either. Rove’s lawyer says Rove signed the waiver about a year and a half ago and has never changed it. Why was that waiver not acceptable to Cooper for 18 months and then, on the brink of going to jail, Cooper agreed to testify?

I don’t know.

I don’t know anything about the role the other journalists caught up in the case — Tim Russert, Walter Pincus and Glenn Kessler — played. Apparently on the basis of waivers signed by sources, they all gave information to special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. What did they say?

I don’t know.

And of course I also don’t know what is happening with Novak. Given Fitzgerald’s aggressiveness in dealing with all figures in this case, Novak must have made some sort of accommodation. Did he testify? Refuse to testify?

I don’t know.

I also don’t know why many in the press, most notably The New York Times, were once so enthusiastic about the Fitzgerald investigation. On Dec. 30, 2003, the Times published an editorial headlined “The Right Thing, At Last,” which said, “After an egregiously long delay, Attorney General John Ashcroft finally did the right thing yesterday when he recused himself from the investigation into who gave the name of a CIA operative to columnist Robert Novak.” Why did the Times do that?

I don’t know.

And then, why did the Times change its position and condemn Fitzgerald who, the paper said, “can’t even say whether a crime has been committed.” Why would the Times say that, when it had once been so sure that a crime had been committed?

I don’t know.

I also don’t know about the actions of Joseph Wilson. For example, in his book, The Politics of Truth, he wrote, “The assertion that Valerie had played any substantive role in the decision to ask me to go to Niger was false on the face of it. ...Valerie could not — and would not if she could — have had anything to do with the CIA decision to ask me to travel to [Niger].” But later, the Senate Intelligence Committee, in its bipartisan report, said that “interviews and documents provided to the committee indicate that [Wilson’s] wife, a CPD employee [a reference to the CIA’s Counterproliferation Division], suggested his name for the trip. The CPD reports officer told committee staff that the former ambassador’s wife ‘offered up his name’ and a memorandum to the deputy chief of the CPD on February 12, 2002, from [Wilson’s] wife says, ‘my husband has good relations with both [Niger’s prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity.’” So why did Wilson say his wife played no “substantive role” in it?

I don’t know.

I also don’t know why Wilson’s defenders accuse the White House of “smearing” him. What was the smear? Was it a smear to say that Wilson got the Niger assignment, at least in part, because his wife recommended him? If so, then the Senate committee “smeared” him, too. If not, what is the smear?

I don’t know.

And finally, I don’t know about Karl Rove’s public statements on the case. Last year on CNN, he said of Plame, “I didn’t know her name and didn’t leak her name.” Even if he hadn’t passed on Plame’s name — just mentioned her as Wilson’s wife — why not just say nothing, especially since the whole thing is under criminal investigation?

I don’t know.

The bottom line is, some of the most critical facts in the whole Wilson/Plame/CIA matter are just not known, at least not known by anyone outside of the Fitzgerald investigation.

But don’t worry. At least we can be sure that we will someday know them, right?

I don’t know.

York is a White House correspondent for National Review. His column appears in The Hill each week.
E-mail: byork@thehill.com

She worked for Joulware when Wilson was there. That's how they met.

It's General George Joulwan. Joulwan's background I think is Lebanese-American, by the way. While Wilson did work under him I haven't seen anything that indicates Valerie Plame worked for General Joulwan in any capacity. According to Maureen Dowd, Wilson told Dowd that he and Valerie met not in Europe or through the C-in-C's but in Washington at a cocktail party full of foreigners. She led him to believe she was an energy analyst- for whom he doesn't say- and by the time of their first kiss, whenever that was, she blurted out that she worked for the CIA.

Now if she were 'undercover' at the time, she would not have revealed that. In fact she was an energy analyst, considering that her job at Langley even recently was that of an analyst on WMD. Nukes are WMD, and nuclear power qualifies as energy, does it not? Hardly a secret operator...

Anyway, here's good ol' Dowd's spew on the matter:

Valerie Plame and Joseph Wilson both happened to alight in Washington, their jet-set schedules intersecting, and spotted each other across a cocktail party filled with foreigners."I saw this striking blonde," he recalled, still sounding smitten six years later. At first she said she was an energy analyst, but confided sometime around the first kiss that she was in the CIA. "I had a security clearance," grinned Wilson, then a political adviser to the commander of U.S. forces in Europe. - "Maureen Dowd : Ambassador Wilson and the Spy Who Loved Him, " NY Times, October 3, 2003 )

It was 11:07 on a Friday morning, July 11, 2003, and Time magazine correspondent Matt Cooper was tapping out an e-mail to his bureau chief, Michael Duffy. "Subject: Rove/P&C," (for personal and confidential), Cooper began....

It was July 9, 2003, less than 48 hrs after the bogus "CIA agent T J Wilkinson" popped up as a named source in a Capital Hill Blue article that, through a Truthout.org submission to "Japan Today," propelled the Wilson story back into the lime light and into the MSM when CNN picked up the scent of the disredited story, edited it, and ran with it.

July 9 was the date that Greg Thielman came out with his rant against colin Powell and Bush.

Remember this apology from CHB on that TJ Wilkinson story?

Recently, this web site [Capitol Hill Blue] discovered it has been played as a sucker by a source that was used in seven stories that ran in Capitol Hill Blue from September 2002 until July of 2003. The person in question was quoted as an unnamed source in six of the seven articles and by name (Terrance J. Wilkinson) in the seventh. We later learned the name was bogus even though I had known (or thought I knew) the person by that name for more than 20 years.
We have turned all our information on this source over to the appropriate law enforcement agencies and, at their instruction, will not discuss the matter publicly until they have concluded their investigations. When those investigations are complete, we will publish a full accounting with every piece of detail that we can produce or uncover about the individual involved. We owe that to our readers....
...But we live in a different era now. Technology makes it easier for people to pull together enough information to create a story that sounds credible on the surface but still have hidden agendas underneath.
Many journalists have told me they cannot do their job without unnamed sources. I used to agree with them but events of this past week have caused me to rethink that philosophy.
---- - "A message from Capitol Hill Blue. . .No more "unnamed sources," DOUG THOMPSON, Jul 10, 2003, 11:51

Note that under the same law that pertains to the alleged outing of Plame, this T J wilkinson tale would also require investigation since the guy was claiming to be CIA.

Hmmm, what else occurred on July 11, 2003 while Cooper was jotting down his email to his bureau chief? Was it something in the UK like this, where a reporter by the name of Watts tells her bosses at the BBC she can't go along with their request for her to back up the BBC's correspondent Gilligan's claims about what the late wmd expert Dr. Kelly told him?:

JULY 11, 2003 : (UK : NEWSNIGHT SCIENCE EDITOR WATT'S LAWYER WRITES THE BBC TELLING THEM THAT WATTS WAS PREPARED TO COOPERATE WITH THE BBC ONLY IN LINE WITH HER DUTIES AS AN EMPLOYEE, BUT NOT IF IT MEANS VIOLATING HER ETHICS AND RESPONSIBILITIES AS A JOURNALIST : See HUTTON INQUIRY ) Documents released by the [Hutton] inquiry show that Fiona Campbell, of Finers Stephens Innocent, wrote to the BBC on 11 July saying that Watts was prepared to cooperate only in line with her duties as an employee. 'Such duties, however, do not extend to "co-operating" where her ethics and responsibilities might conflict or in circumstances where she is being asked to participate in statements with which she cannot agree.' - "Email kept from BBC board; said that Gilligan had been guilty of 'loose use of language'," by Kamal Ahmed and Martin Bright, UK observer, 08/17/03 and "Email kept from BBC board : · Governors split over 'dumbing down' of Today programme · Gilligan accused of being 'too distant' from colleagues ," by Kamal Ahmed and Martin Bright, The Observer, Sunday August 17, 2003

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