1 Boring Old Man

The actual crime in the C.I.A. Leak case was the willful exposure of the identity of Valerie Plame who was an undercover C.I.A. Agent. No one was charged with that crime because it cannot yet be proved that any of the people who leaked her identity knew that she was undercover.

Leaked/Confirmed Valerie Plame’s Identity to Reporters

In addition, we learned late that President Bush authorized the leaking of the National Intelligence Estimate by declassifying it [according to Vice President Cheney] and approved leaking it to reporters in response to Joseph Wilson’s critical oped article in the New York Times.

Leaked the National Intelligence Estimate

In the course of this investigation, we’ve learned a lot about what happened back in the days leading up to and immediately following the invasion of Iraq.

We’ve learned that Vice President Dick Cheney and his Chief of Staff repeatedly went to the C.I.A. with intelligence gathered outside usual channels – from several different Agencies in the Department of Defense. One of those was a claim that Iraq was seeking to buy high grade Uranium from the african nation of Niger. We learned that Vice President Cheney personally asked the C.I.A. to investigate this allegation. We’ve learned that the C.I.A. asked former Ambassador Joseph Wilson who had connections in that country to go there and make inquiries. In February 2002, he went for several weeks and returned reporting that he thought the claims were without basis. We also know, all too well, that Joseph Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, was a C.I.A. undercover agent working in the C.I.A. on the very issue of Saddam Hussein’s attempts to obtain nuclear weapons.

Those of us who are not brain dead or ideologically challenged have learned that the invasion Iraq was hatched before George W. Bush was elected, before the 9/11 attack, and had little to do with intelligence of any kind. Whether the motive was the Neoconservative ideology of American Dominion, or the influence of pro-Israeli forces in our government, or the lust for the oil reserves under Iraq is not clear. But we know it had nothing to do with any threat to our national security. And we know it had nothing to do with al Qaeda/Saddam Hussein ties.

"Who killed Norma Jean?" asked Pete Seeger in his 60’s song after Marilyn Monroe died. And today, what have we learned about the "outing" of our equally beautiful spy, Valerie Plame, a No Official Cover C.I.A. Agent? Of course, the first answer to "Who outed Valerie Plame?" that comes to mind is her husband, Joseph Wilson. Wilson is a genuine whistle blower. In his January 28th, 2003 State of the Union speech, President George Bush said, "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." We now know a lot of things about that statement, but the biggest thing we know is that it was, at the core, a falsehood. Our intelligence community had already debunked the claim. The only reason Bush attributed it to the British was that they were still holding on to it. Who knows if Joseph Wilson’s reaction was that of an ignored person, or as a patriot, or both?

What we have learned in this investigation is that whatever his personal internal struggles, Joseph Wilson carried a painful truth. He knew that the sixteen words were being said in deceit. He knew that we invaded Iraq on false pretenses. He knew when we didn’t find weapons of mass destruction that the Administration had gambled on a lie and lost. A lot of us thought those thoughts, but he knew they were correct. That’s different. He tried to speak out indirectly and it didn’t work. Presumabely, he was aware that his speaking out moved his wife’s secret a step closer to the surface, but he did it anyway. I’m eternally grateful that he did speak out. A lot of us are. But it cannot be denied that his article was the first step in the outing of a secret agent.

But we learned something else in this investigation. Wilson’s early attempts to say what he knew set off a bomb in the White House, particularly in the nearby office of Vice President Dick Cheney. By early June, they knew who he was. They knew about his mission to Niger. And they knew his wife worked at the C.I.A. There were at least two leaks to reporters before Joseph Wilson ever wrote his article [Richard Armitage to Bob Woodward and Scooter Libby to Judith Miller]. We’ve learned that when Wilson’s article was published, the Office of the Vice President became the War room for retaliating, led by thje Vice President of the United States, Dick Cheney and put into action by his Chief of Staff, Scooter Libby. George Tenet, head of the C.I.A. took responsibility for the sixteen words, then Stephen Hadley. That was public. But privately Cheney mounted a smear campaign against Joseph Wilson culminating in his wife’s C.I.A. identity being leaked eight days after the article came out. What we’ve also learned from this investigation is that the repeated denials about this campaign from the involved parties [Rove, Libby, Cheney, Bush, Rice, etc.] were all lies, carefully crafted to be half truths that lied. When these denials became untentable, they claimed they were passing on gossip they heard from reporters, and we’ve learned that this was also not true.

So like Marilyn Monroe, lots of people were involved in "Who outed Valerie Plame?" But we’ve learned that the main culprit was Dick Cheney, the Vice President of the United States. The only real question left is "Why?" Why would the Vice President of the United States, a man who appears to be impervious to criticism, go to all the trouble of "outing" Valerie Plame? We know the answer, but we haven’t learned it all from this investigation. We’ve learned that answer in other ways, and it’s an altogether nasty story.

But, unlike Marilyn Monroe, the blonde beauty whose death may well have had it’s political overtones, our beautiful spy, Valerie Plame, was outed sight unseen. As Patrick Fitzgerald said, "Her name is Valerie Wilson. She had a life before Joe Wilson. But to them she wasn’t Val Wilson, she wasn’t a person, she was an argument, she was a fact to use against Wilson." Valerie Plame is alive and something of a celebrity. She didn’t die like Marilyn Monroe, a casualty of her looks and her association with people in high places. But Valerie Plame’s life was changed involuntarily from one of service to her country, a career she presumably chose for herself, to that of a pawn in a chess game she could neither control nor even speak about. The people she worked for turned on her without a second thought – and they killed a little piece of what America means in the process…