Corn row: was it Joe Wilson who outed his wife?

National Review, August 8, 2005 by Clifford D. May

HERE'S the real scandal: On the question of whether Saddam Hussein was seeking to obtain uranium in Africa--a vital national-security concern--the Central Intelligence Agency did not send its most seasoned spies and experienced detectives. Instead, the CIA--which had failed to penetrate Saddam's government, the Iranian mullahs' regime, the Taliban, and al-Qaeda--sent a retired diplomat with no investigative experience and whose inquiry, by his own admission, consisted of spending eight days at an African hotel "drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people." What is the likelihood that one of those people, upon being asked by former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, "Did Saddam Hussein ever attempt to buy uranium from any of you chaps?" would have answered, "Funny you mention that. As a matter of fact, I sold a few kilos to one of his cronies just the other day"?

Wilson's supporters portray him as a moderate, non-ideological professional diplomat. But the facts--reported on National Review Online on July 11, 2003, three days before syndicated columnist Robert Novak first wrote about Wilson--are quite different: Wilson was an "adjunct scholar" at the Saudi-government-supported Middle East Institute, which advocates for Saudi interests. He had written in the March 3, 2003, edition of the left-wing Nation magazine that the Bush administration has "imperial ambitions"; he also wrote that the "new imperialists will not rest until governments that ape our worldview are implanted throughout the [Mideast], a breathtakingly ambitious undertaking, smacking of hubris in the extreme." Furthermore, he was the keynote speaker for a meeting of a far-left group that opposed not only the U.S. military intervention in Iraq but also the sanctions against Saddam's regime--and even the no-fly zones that protected hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Kurds and Shias from being slaughtered.

Seen in this light, sending Wilson to Niger on a sensitive mission for the Bush administration represented gross misjudgment on the part of the CIA. But that is not the topic convulsing Washington today: No, the brouhaha is over whether Karl Rove or someone close to the president revealed to reporters that Wilson had been assigned to go to Africa on the recommendation of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, who worked for the CIA and who was a covert agent at some point in her career--it's not clear precisely when or quite how secret.

In fact, the public still knows very little about Plame. Perhaps Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, has by now learned the relevant facts. Most of us first saw her name in Bob Novak's July 14, 2003, column. That column began to unravel the mystery of how the CIA came to decide to send Wilson to Africa--which had become a subject of some curiosity, after Wilson wrote a New York Times op-ed on July 6 accusing President Bush of lying when he cited British intelligence concluding that Saddam had been seeking uranium in Africa. (British intelligence stands by that conclusion to this day, and two independent British commissions have supported that conclusion.)

It has become conventional wisdom that Novak's sources intended to discredit Wilson. If so, based on Novak's column, there is not the slightest hint that they succeeded. On the contrary, Novak writes that as U.S. charg, in Baghdad in 1991, Wilson "risked his life to shelter in the embassy some 800 Americans." Novak quotes his partner, Rowland Evans, reporting from Iraq that "Wilson showed 'the stuff of heroism.'"

The decision to send Wilson "was made routinely at a low level without Director George Tenet's knowledge," Novak writes. He adds that Wilson "never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction." It was she, he reports, who "suggested sending him to Niger to investigate ... The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him." Novak, never himself a supporter of Bush's Iraq policy, goes on to say that until Wilson published his op-ed, the former ambassador "had taken a measured public position--viewing weapons of mass destruction as a danger but considering military action as a last resort." Tellingly, Novak does not raise any controversy about Plame or her role, concluding instead that the most pressing question is "whether the administration deliberately ignored Wilson's advice."

Does that sound like an attempt to discredit Wilson or Plame? And is it really obvious from what Novak wrote that Plame was some kind of secret agent? For his part, Novak has maintained consistently that his sources did not tell him that Plame was--or had ever been--undercover, and that he would not have named her had he realized it. According to Novak, his use of the word "operative" was not meant to imply covert status.

If Novak did not identify Plame as a secret agent, who did? The other day I realized that I didn't know the answer to that simple question. When I asked others who were following the Wilson story, I was surprised to learn they didn't know either. So I conducted a little research to find out who had been the first to use such words as "secret" or "covert" in regard to Plame. It turned out to be David Corn, writing on The Nation's website, two days after Novak's column appeared.