Valerie Wilson Sues
C.I.A. Over Memoir
By ADAM LIPTAK,
NYTimes on the Web, May 31, 2007
Valerie Wilson, the former Central
Intelligence Agency operative at the heart of an investigation that reached into
the White House, sued the agency in federal court in New York today over its
refusal to allow her to publish a memoir that would discuss how long she worked
for it.
Although that information is set out in an unclassified letter to Ms. Wilson
that has been published in the Congressional Record, the C.I.A. insists that her
dates of service remain classified and may not be mentioned in “Fair Game,” the
memoir Ms. Wilson hopes to publish in October.
Agency employees sign agreements requiring them to submit manuscripts to the
agency for permission before they are published. Ms. Wilson’s suit said
she worked with agency officials for 10 months to avoid disclosing national
security information. But the agency’s refusal to allow her to include
material already in the public domain, the suit said, violates her right to free
speech.
“The C.I.A.’s efforts to classify public domain information is an unreasonable
attempt at prior restraint of publication and a violation of our First Amendment
rights,” said Adam Rothberg, a spokesman for Simon & Schuster, which plans to
publish the book and is also a plaintiff in the suit.
Simon & Schuster is said to have paid about $2 million for the book, a figure
Mr. Rothberg would not confirm.
The agency acknowledged that the dates of employment had mistakenly been made
public, though a spokesman said that did not mean the information was no longer
classified.
“Frankly,” said Mark Mansfield, a spokesman for the agency, the release of that
information in February 2006, in response to a query from Ms. Wilson about
retirement benefits, was “an honest-to-goodness administrative error.”
“The letter contained classified information, and should not have been mailed to
her,” Mr. Mansfield said, referring to Ms. Wilson. “As soon as it was
discovered, we took steps to rectify the error, including notifying the clerk of
the House of Representatives.”
The letter was entered into the Congressional Record by Representative Jay
Inslee, Democrat of Washington, in January 2007. It said that Ms. Wilson
had worked for the government since November 9, 1985, for a total of “20 years,
7 days,” including “six years, one month and 29 days of overseas service.”
Christine Hanson, a spokeswoman for Mr. Inslee, said the congressman assured
himself that the document was not classified before disclosing it.
“It’s very much part of the public domain,” Ms. Hanson said. “If they’re
upset about it, they should have made that determination before they gave the
letter to her. They’re trying to get the cat back into the bag.”
The agency receives about 100 manuscript submissions a month for review, Mr.
Mansfield said, ranging from short opinion articles to lengthy books. “The
sole yardstick for prepublication review,” he said, “has been and remains that
their writings contain no classified information.”
Courts generally defer to the agency’s decisions. But the public
availability of information concerning Ms. Wilson’s tenure at the agency makes a
big difference, a spokesman for her publisher said.
The C.I.A. has been adamant in refusing to confirm the dates or details of Ms.
Wilson’s service before 2002. In July 2003, the syndicated columnist
Robert Novak disclosed her identity as “an agency operative on weapons of mass
destruction.” Mr. Novak referred to Ms. Wilson by her maiden name, Valerie
Plame.
The investigation into that disclosure led to the conviction of I. Lewis Libby
Jr., formerly Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, on charges of perjury
and obstruction of justice in March.
Last Friday, the special prosecutor in the case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald,
submitted an unclassified summary of Ms. Wilson’s “C.I.A. employment and cover
history” to the judge who will sentence Mr. Libby. It was limited to the
four years starting in 2002. In the summary, the agency said it chose to
make information about Ms. Wilson’s service public to aid Mr. Fitzgerald, but it
did not say why it chose 2002 as its cutoff.
The summary said that Ms. Wilson was a covert agency employee at the time of Mr.
Novak’s disclosure. Between the beginning of 2002 and Ms. Wilson’s
resignation from the agency in December 2005, the summary said, she traveled
overseas “under a cover identity, sometimes in true name and sometimes in alias”
at least “seven times to more than ten countries.”
(The suit says Ms. Wilson resigned in January 2006. Her service was
interrupted by an unpaid leave.)
The summary said that the agency did not acknowledge “any other period of
employment, if any, nor does it declassify the nature and details of Ms.
Wilson’s cover.”
Through a spokesman, Ms. Wilson declined to comment.
Asked if the dispute over the dates of Ms. Wilson’s tenure were the key to
allowing the book to be published, an intelligence official responded obliquely.
“Official acknowledgment of certain matters could cause some on whom we rely to
think that we do not take protecting sensitive equity seriously, or cause them
to think twice about assisting us in the future, and that could have serious
ramifications,” the official said.
There have been several other recent instances of attempts to withdraw
information previously made public. Legal experts said the phenomenon is
new and has not been seriously tested in the courts.
A widely circulated document concerning an National Security Agency surveillance
program was retrieved by F.B.I. agents in 2004. In December, federal
prosecutors subpoenaed the original and all copies of a classified document
concerning the treatment of detainees that had been provided to the American
Civil Liberties Union, though they ultimately dropped the demand. In
January, the F.B.I abandoned efforts to recover government documents leaked to
Jack Anderson, the late investigative reporter.
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