The Rove Problem
By DAVID BJERKLIE,
NANCY GIBBS, time.com magazine Online, July 17, 2005
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CHIP SOMODEVILLA / GETTY
STILL IN THE
PICTURE: Bush ducked questions about Rove but kept "the Architect" close. |
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Did Bush's top aide commit a crime
talking to reporters about a spy? Here's what the case is really about --
and why it grows more fascinating
Valerie Plame had no reason to welcome a reporter into her home last week.
Reporters tell stories and trade secrets, and her life, once a state secret, had
become one of the most widely told stories in years. As if anyone could
resist it: beautiful blond mother of two whose identity as a CIA spy is
compromised by a political vendetta against her husband.
She opens the door of her brick house on the leafy Washington side street, a few
turns from the German embassy. A Jaguar convertible sits in the driveway,
the toys and bikes in the garage. There are children playing on the floor
inside, and her look is icy as she asks, "Is my husband expecting you?" A
British journalist had recently turned up at the door unannounced, and she's
still angry. "I almost tackled you," she admits to TIME's Massimo
Calabresi, and you have to wonder what a trained covert operative who was known
as a crack shot with an AK-47 would care to do at the moment to the reporters
and Administration officials who had laid her secret bare.
But she seems harmless now as she goes about making her grocery list. It's not
as if she's a woman of mystery anymore: she has gone back to work at CIA
headquarters in Langley, Va., after a leave of absence; she has been
photographed for Vanity Fair, snapped at the Tribeca Film Festival; she has
stood beside her flamboyant husband, the former ambassador, bestselling author,
all-around gadfly Joe Wilson, as he accepted accolades from liberal groups for
being among the first to puncture President George W. Bush's case for war.
But her friends at the agency tell TIME that the furor around her "destroyed her
career. And it's put her at risk." All she'll say is, "Things have
been busy. I have 5-year-old twins."
Nor is it a mystery any longer who had a hand in revealing where Wilson's wife
worked to TIME White House correspondent Matthew Cooper and at least confirming
it for columnist Robert Novak. Wilson had never been shy about his
suspicions: he had dreamed aloud of seeing the President's chief
strategist Karl Rove "frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs."
Only now it was official: last Wednesday, Cooper had testified to the
grand jury investigating the leak that it was indeed Rove who told him Wilson's
wife worked at the CIA, though without using her name. That Rove was a
secret source was already public knowledge after Newsweek published the contents
of one of Cooper's e-mails that Time Inc. had given to special counsel Patrick
Fitzgerald after resisting all the way to the Supreme Court, which declined to
hear the company's appeal.
But that does not mean that all the mysteries are solved, or that Rove will be
tarred and feathered and fired. This has always been a tale in which what
is not known is as important as what is, and so the spotlight shifts once more,
to Fitzgerald and what he has learned about the motives and methods behind the
outing of Valerie Plame. It is no longer clear even what crime he is
investigating: the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act makes it a
federal offense to intentionally reveal a covert operative's identity. But
the law was designed to be hard to break, and last week lawyers with knowledge
of the case suggested that Fitzgerald might be investigating a different crime
-- perhaps perjury or obstruction of justice. It had to be something
serious, they suggested, for Fitzgerald to have interviewed the President and
Vice President, to have threatened Cooper with prison time if he didn't testify
and to have insisted that New York Times reporter Judith Miller go to jail for
contempt of court when she refused to. Much about Fitzgerald's hunt is
still a secret: in the court ruling demanding that the reporters reveal
who leaked Plame's name, several pages were blacked out for national-security
reasons.
In the vacuum of facts, partisans on both sides headed straight for their
armories; it felt like five years of political warfare in concentrated form.
Naturally it would feature Rove, as brass-knuckled a player as has walked
onstage in a generation. But in addition there was John Kerry, promoting a
Fire Rove petition on his website. There was Republican National Committee
chairman Ken Mehlman declaring that it was not Plame or Wilson but Rove who was
the victim of "blatant partisan political attacks." There was White House
spokesman Scott McClellan, who had once called the notion that Rove was involved
"ridiculous," looking like a piñata as he
refused again and again in long and painful press conferences to comment on the
implications of Rove's being a source for reporters. President Bush, who
had vowed to fire anyone in his Administration who turned out to have leaked the
name of Wilson's wife and blown her cover, was left declaring that "this is a
serious investigation" and had nothing to say for the moment about Rove.
And all the while, Rove's defenders were artfully pivoting from saying he hadn't
done anything to saying he hadn't done anything wrong, that Plame wasn't really
a secret agent anyway, or if she was, Rove didn't know that, or if he did, he
only brought her up because he was trying to keep reporters from writing a bad
story based on Wilson's false charges, and besides, it was a reporter who blew
Plame's cover to him in the first place and not the other way around.
The whole thing felt at times like a half-glimpsed game of charades; but the
fight matters because the issues at stake matter: the ongoing struggle
between the Administration and the intelligence community, the debate over the
case for going to war, the tensions over the role and rights of a free press,
the eternal distinctions between what is legal and what is right. Until
Fitzgerald issues his report, there will be no way to know if anyone committed a
crime. But in the meantime, there is plenty of evidence of recklessness,
ruthlessness and political passion that have made the search for the truth all
that much harder.
ROVE'S REPERTOIRE
In the long and lively mythology of Karl Rove, whom Republicans see as a
fearless gladiator and Democrats view as the kind of operative who would put a
tarantula under an opponent's pillow, it is entirely plausible that he would try
to discredit an adversary by any means necessary. But outing a spy?
Compromising national security in wartime? It was the first President Bush
who once described anyone who exposed intelligence assets as "the most insidious
of traitors." Rove had long insisted that he didn't know Valerie Plame's
name or leak it and was cooperating fully with the probe. By last week,
that denial had come to seem Clintonian in its legal precision. It's true
Rove didn't tell Cooper her name but rather referred to her as Wilson's wife.
On the other hand, a simple Google search of Ambassador Wilson turned up her
name but not her affiliation. The evolving explanation of Rove's role was
enough to let Democrats dream that they might have snared him at long last,
while Republicans retorted that, far from incriminating Rove, the latest
evidence exonerated him.
Part of what has made Rove a legend is his passion for his work. He is not
the kind of political professional who does battle during the day and then
breaks bread with his adversary at night. When Rove assails an opponent,
he believes what he's saying. And it may be his capacity for convincing
himself that his adversaries are vile, corrupt, dangerous and stupid that makes
the job of destroying them come so easily. So when Joe Wilson emerged in
July 2003 as a well-credentialed critic of the Administration's case for going
to war, he placed himself squarely in Rove's sights.
Here was a former ambassador, an Africa expert, who could flaunt his pictures
with past Presidents, Democrats and Republicans alike -- including one with
President George H. W. Bush, who had called Wilson a hero for his service as
chargé d'affaires in Baghdad before the first
Gulf War. When Wilson wrote in the New York Times on July 6, 2003, nearly
four months after the war began, that "intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear
weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat," it represented the
most damaging charge yet against the Administration's handling of prewar
intelligence. Wilson explained that CIA officials recruited him to help
them answer questions raised by Vice President Cheney's office about an
intelligence report documenting the attempted sale of uranium yellowcake by
Niger to Iraq. The officials asked him to travel to Niger in February 2002
"to check out the story." His article suggested that when he failed to
come up with answers the Administration wanted, they ignored his findings, since
Bush went on to claim in his January 2003 State of the Union message that
according to British intelligence, Iraq had recently sought uranium from Africa.
Wilson's charge that top officials had deliberately distorted his findings set
off a furor in Washington. Fitzgerald has set out to learn how it was that
a week after the column appeared, Wilson's wife's cover was blown. How did
people in the White House learn of her status and connection to Wilson in the
first place, who shared it, and how did it come to be discussed with reporters?
Fitzgerald has shown particular interest, legal sources told TIME, in a
classified State Department memo that was forwarded to the White House the day
after Wilson's article appeared. It was marked for delivery to then
Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was traveling with the President to Africa
that day. The memo, originally dated June 10, 2003, identified Plame and
discussed her role in recommending her husband for the mission to Niger.
It had been written by the State Department's bureau of intelligence and
research at the request of former Under Secretary Marc Grossman after the New
York Times and Washington Post began reporting on an intelligence-gathering trip
to Niger by a former U.S. diplomat, without naming Wilson. Sending it to
Powell "was directly in response to Wilson going public," says a senior
Republican Hill aide familiar with the document. "[It was] ... one of
those what-the-hell-is-this-guy-saying-and-what-is-he-talking-about? memos."
Fitzgerald has shown at least a part of the memo to some of the subjects of the
investigation with the appropriate security clearance, asking if they had ever
seen it before. The prosecutor believes that the memo circulated among
officials aboard Air Force One, according to sources familiar with Fitzgerald's
line of questioning. Some traveling reporters to Africa were told on
background that Wilson was sent to Niger by a low-level staff member at the CIA.
At one point, White House officials on the trip were saying, "Look who sent
him," as if to spur reporters to dig deeper.
According to sources close to the
investigation, Fitzgerald seemed most interested in whether officials who stayed
at the White House while the President was in Africa also had the memo that
week, when the first known calls to reporters took place. Details of the
memo, if not the memo itself, may have been shared with one or more White House
officials well before Wilson's article appeared. Rove and I. Lewis
(Scooter) Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, have told
prosecutors they had never seen the document, according to sources familiar with
their statements. But Rove had learned Plame's identity from someone:
a source who has been briefed on Rove's account to Fitzgerald, says Novak called
Rove the next day, July 8, and mentioned to him that Wilson's wife worked at the
CIA. According to the source, Rove replied, "I've heard that too," and
told Fitzgerald that he had heard it from a reporter -- or perhaps from someone
else in the Administration who said he got it from a reporter -- Rove just
couldn't be certain or remember which one.
All through that week, the Administration was on damage control. On
Friday, July 11, CIA Director George Tenet took the heat by declaring that the
CIA should not have okayed the uranium claim in the State of the Union address.
On that day, Rove took a call from Cooper, who was in his first weeks as a White
House correspondent for TIME. "Spoke to Rove on double super secret
background," Cooper e-mailed TIME's Washington bureau chief Michael Duffy and
his deputy James Carney afterward. "... his big warning....don't get too
far out on Wilson." Cooper wrote that Rove disparaged Wilson for
presenting a "flawed" and "suspect" explanation of the genesis of the trip.
What's more, Rove told Cooper, neither Cheney nor the CIA director had
authorized Wilson's mission in the first place -- a claim Wilson never made,
although the former ambassador would imply that the two knew of his trip.
Cooper described the conversation with Rove, adding that it was "wilson's wife,
who apparently works at the agency on WMD [weapons of mass destruction] issues,
who authorized the trip. ... he implied strongly there's still plenty to
implicate Iraqi interest in acquiring uranium from Niger ... don't get too far
out front, he warned. Then he bolted ..."
What was the point of Rove or anyone else bringing up Plame in the first place?
Was he saying Wilson was tainted by his close association with the CIA, WHOSE
ANALYSTS HAD GENERALLY BEEN TOO SKEPTICAL OF THE IRAQI THREAT FOR THE
Administration's taste? The tensions between the White House and the CIA
had been rising steadily in the months before the Iraq invasion, as CIA analysts
complained about evidence being distorted or ignored and the White House pushed
back with complaints about the quality of the Intel they were getting. "I
know the analyst who was subjected to withering questioning on the Iraq --
al-Qaeda links by Libby with the Vice President sitting there," says a CIA
analyst. "So I think there was an anger at the CIA for not getting it and
not being on board. The political side of the Administration was pissed at
the CIA. So I can see how they responded to that -- and Wilson -- by
implying he couldn't be trusted because, 'well, just look where his wife
works.'"
Or, more personally, was Rove suggesting that Wilson was chosen not for his
expertise but because his wife was trying to help him stay in the game?
Certainly Rove distorted her role when he claimed she had authorized the trip.
"She was not in a position to send Joe Wilson anywhere except to bed without his
supper," says Larry Johnson, a Plame classmate at the CIA who later worked on
Central American issues for the agency and then moved to the State Department as
a counterterrorism officer. According to a declassified July 7, 2004,
report from the Senate Intelligence Committee, it was Plame's boss, the deputy
chief of the CIA's counter proliferation division, who authorized the trip.
He did so after Plame "offered up" her husband's name for the Niger mission,
according to the report. In a Feb. 12, 2002, memo to her boss, Plame wrote
that "my husband has good relations with both the PM [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."
That means Wilson was also shading the story: "Valerie had nothing to do
with the matter," he wrote in his 2004 book The Politics of Truth. "She
definitely had not proposed that I make the trip." When asked last week by
TIME if he still denies that she was the origin of his involvement in the trip,
he avoided answering. But he has maintained all along that Administration
officials conducted a "smear job" on him and outed his wife in revenge.
Not so, insisted Rove's surrogates last week when asked to explain why he was
talking about a covert operative at all. His warning to Cooper, Rove's
lawyer Robert Luskin told TIME, was not meant to encourage Cooper to write about
Plame; it was meant to deter him from writing credulously about Wilson or at
least from lending weight to charges that Cheney's office had deliberately
ignored Wilson's findings. "What he was trying to do was discourage Cooper
from printing allegations about the Vice President that were going to be proven
false," Luskin says. While it was true that the Administration ultimately
had to retract their claims about yellowcake, Wilson was seen as overstating the
importance of his mission; the yellowcake charge should not have been in the
President's speech because the evidence remained inconclusive. CIA
officials told the Senate Intelligence Committee that Wilson's trip had not
resolved the yellowcake question one way or the other. Cheney denied on Meet the
Press that he knew of Wilson's mission or had been briefed by him.
Furthermore, had Rove intended for Cooper to circulate any information about
Wilson's wife, "he certainly would not have extracted a promise that the
discussions were super double secret," Luskin notes with a laugh, referring to
Cooper's phrase.
What does it matter who put Plame's identity in play? That reporters may
have been part of a loop of information, not just receivers of it, has for some
time been one of the hypotheses in the case. The Washington Post reported
that Libby, who has been interviewed by the grand jury three times, learned
Plame's name from a reporter too. NBC News Washington bureau chief Tim
Russert spoke with Fitzgerald under oath in August about a call from Libby, who
gave Russert clearance to testify about their talk. Russert says he told
Fitzgerald that he was not Libby's source.
From legal and political angles, it looks better if Administration officials
were leakees, not leakers. If the blame for blowing the cover of a CIA
officer can be spread around, so much the better. And it suggests the
challenge that Fitzgerald may face in building a case. It is one thing if
Rove happened to hear from a reporter that Plame was a CIA officer, casually
confirmed that he had already heard that to another reporter (Novak) and
incidentally spread the word to a third (Cooper). It's perhaps something
else if Administration officials made an effort to gather information on Wilson,
discovered that his wife was a CIA officer and carried out a strategy to
discredit Wilson that included outing his wife to a number of reporters.
It is still another thing to do the second and pretend, under oath, that you had
done the first.
HOW MUCH DAMAGE?
For all the speculation about Rave’s fate and despite a failed attempt by Senate
Democrats to have Rove's security clearance revoked, within the White House
there was little sign of panic. "They think Karl is bulletproof," says a
former Administration official who is familiar with the issue and the players.
"They think, 'We won a second term. We control Congress.' They don't
think Karl is in any real jeopardy."
But even if Rove skates past any legal trouble, that still leaves the question
of means and ends. Although Democrats deplored what they viewed as an
Administration attempt to silence its critics, to the intelligence community
what mattered was that in the course of political warfare, a spy had been
sacrificed. Plame was one of the rare operatives to become an NOC, that
is, a CIA employee who operates under nonofficial cover. Such officers,
who may pose as businesspeople or students, have no diplomatic immunity and so
are much more vulnerable if caught spying. They often work abroad for U.S.
companies that have secret agreements with the CIA to take them in as employees
or for front companies the agency sets up. A former CIA station chief
tells TIME that it can cost the agency anywhere from $500,000 to $1 million to
establish an NOC overseas, depending on how deep and extensive the cover must
be.
CIA sources say Plame held highly sensitive jobs during the past two decades.
In the late 1990s she was serving as an NOC, working as an analyst with
Brewster-Jennings & Associates, a CIA front company that has been shut down.
"She was pretty and had brains and ambition and loyalty," says a former
clandestine officer who worked with her. "Everything was there." But
in 1997 she moved back to Washington. The New York Times has reported that
the CIA feared that her cover had been blown to the Russians by double agent
Aldrich Ames. Her marriage to a high-profile former diplomat further
limited her ability to fly under the radar. She began working at CIA
headquarters in Langley, assigned to the directorate of operations, the CIA'S
clandestine branch that manages its human spying overseas and is one of the
agency's most secretive directorates. "NCOs aren't supposed to come into
the building," said Fred Dustman, a former senior CIA official and a Plame
superior. "It doesn't serve cover well. It may serve the moment.
They break the rules for expediency. In Valerie's case, she's a bright
young woman. She has some experience in nuclear proliferation."
Thus Rove's defenders have claimed that he can hardly be guilty of outing a spy
who was effectively outed already. "She was done," says a senior
Republican Senate aide when asked whether Plame's career had been damaged by the
disclosure of her covert identity. "She'd had her two kids. She'd
come back to headquarters. And how do you maintain your cover when your
husband is saying, I was sent on a mission by the CIA?"
But while she may no longer have been a clandestine operative, she was still
under protected status. A U.S. official told TIME that Plame was indeed
considered covert for the purposes of the Intelligence Identities Protection
law. And even if the leak was not illegal, intelligence officials argue,
it is not defensible. "I'm beyond disgusted," a CIA official said last
week. I am especially angry about the b_______ explanations that she is
not a covert agent. That is an official status, and there are lots of
people in this building who are on that status. It's not up to the
Republican Party to determine when that status will end for an agent."
Whatever the damage to Plame, there remains the cost paid by the CIA generally.
In the wake of the disclosure, foreign intelligence services were known to have
retraced her steps and contacts to discover more about how the CIA operates in
their countries. Outside of a James Bond movie, spies rarely steal secrets
themselves; they recruit foreigners to do it for them. That often means
bribing a government official to break his country's laws and pass state secrets
to the CIA. "It becomes extremely hard if you're working overseas and
recruiting [foreign] agents knowing that some sloth up in the Executive Branch
for political reasons can reveal your identity," says Jim Marcinkowski, who
served four years in the agency and is now the deputy city attorney for Royal
Oak, Mich. "Certainly this kind of information travels around the world
very quickly. And it raises the level of fear of coming in contact with
the United States for any reason." On the other hand, some critics charge
that the agency tends to overstate the value of its undercover operations, whose
lapses in recent years have certainly been the subject of much debate.
Naturally that's not how Joe Wilson sees it. Back at the house, he has lit
a cigar and is sitting on the back porch, claiming vindication while defending
himself against charges that all along he has been a partisan hack with an
agenda and not a whistle-blower who ran afoul of the White House. "To have
my character and integrity impugned not on facts but on the volume of their
voice and blast faxes and blast e-mails is beyond the pale," he says. "All
Americans should worry about a government that reacts in such a fashion."
Later in the conversation, he offers, unsolicited, two copies of his book, one
of which he inscribes to Matt Cooper. Asked how it's doing, he says,
"Really well," and glances at the spot on the cover where it says THE NEW YORK
TIMES BEST SELLER. "And it's going to do even better in the next three
months."
--Reported by
Timothy J. Burger, Massimo Calabresi, James Carney, Sally B. Donnelly, Viveca
Novak and Douglas Waller/ Washington.
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