The Plame Blame Game

Lee Ellis

A year ago, on July 17 of 2005 and again on October 31 of that same year, I wrote about the Valerie Plame –CIA leak story explaining why there had never been a leak nor was there a legitimate case to prosecute. The same columns are again cogent and timely today, thanks to what seems to be, according to many pundits on TV, a publicity-seeking civil law suit by Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV and his wife, Valerie Plame against the same people in the Bush administration. Perhaps just a few lines of updating are needed.

In October I asked, “Why was the CIA Leak Case two years, not two hours?” I did not understand how an independent prosecutor could be assigned to check out whether a "leak" about an employee of the CIA was against the law, based on the only law against such a crime. Then, how he could turn a simple task of two hours into a two year investigation followed by a Grand Jury probe? It seemed to me that Patrick Fitzgerald could have just checked the Internet or asked Victoria Toensing, who helped write the law, if this case fitted her law. Ms. Toensing had answered a similar question by Sean Hannity on his national radio program telling Sean that this law did not apply to anyone who revealed that Plame worked for the CIA or was based at Langley.

Victoria Toensing, a founding partner of diGenova & Toensing, is an internationally-known expert on white-collar crime, terrorism, national security and intelligence matters. While Chief Counsel for Senator Barry Goldwater, Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, 1981-1984, Toensing was instrumental in winning passage of two important bills: (1) to protect the identities of intelligence agents and (2) to protect certain classified information from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.

Last July, I wrote, "Outing a CIA agent is only a crime if the agent is under cover overseas or has been during the past five years. This law was created to prevent the assassinations of CIA agents on foreign shores as had been caused by Philip Agee in 1978 who listed CIA agents undercover in foreign cities, causing the murder of some."

"…It was Novak who actually put the name, "Valerie Plame" into the newspaper and he had called the CIA to be sure that it was OK to reveal her name. Since she was NOT a covert agent, the CIA did not stop him."

"Joseph Wilson, himself, was recorded as saying that Novak did not 'out' his wife wrongly as she was NOT a covert agent at the time. I heard this tape played on a national radio show. Actually, Plame had been employed as an analyst at the CIA and had been a known CIA employee since the days she dated and married Wilson!"

Later, we learned that "Scooter" Libby had also talked to reporters, whom, he said, told him about Plame, but the prosecutor told us that Libby's notes stated that he was told about her by the Vice President. Based on this difference in testimony before the Grand Jury, Fitzgerald indicted Libby for a lie, not for any "outing." Is it not possible that Libby had heard this from BOTH reporters and the Vice President? He only had to tell the Grand Jury and the FBI how he learned about it, not about everyone who alerted him to this afterwards. I can't recall who first told me something two or three years ago, can you?

Jack Shafer had written in Slate, "To win a conviction, the law requires, among other things: ...That the individual knew he was disclosing information that identifies a covert agent and that the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such covert agent's intelligence relationship to the United States. So far, we have no evidence that the United States is taking 'affirmative measures' to protect Plame's identity...”

Also Plame's husband, Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, told New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, last year that she surrendered her secret identity to him somewhere around the time of their first kiss! If Plame had been sloppy with her identity, should somebody else go to jail for leaking it? "

But the coup de grâce came from Robert Novak when he told Brit Hume on Fox News this July that it wasn’t very hard for him to learn the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame – all he had to do was consult "Who’s Who in America.” It was here that Ambassador Wilson had revealed the name of his wife. Novak also wrote in his New York Sun Column, “I considered his wife's role in initiating Wilson's mission, later confirmed by the Senate Intelligence Committee, to be a previously undisclosed part of an important news story. I reported it on that basis.”

If the independent prosecutor had to waste government resources back then for a political attack, and now a civil lawsuit is launched to promote fund raising by two former Kerry supporters just before two important political elections, one this November and the big one in 08, might these actions be the real "crime," rather than any supposed leak?

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Lee Ellis is a retired journalist and narrator, formerly with both CBS and Gannett (USA Weekend). He was also a combat veteran of WWII, having fought in the South Pacific invasions. He had the pleasure of interviewing Ronald Reagan as an actor and then later working to help him become Governor of California. At the age of 80, he is keeping busy writing and doing free lance narrations for radio and television. He is an active member of Rotary and the VFW.

indiolee@dc.rr.com