Alternative theories regarding the CIA leak scandal

The CIA leak scandal (also known as the Plame Affair and Plamegate) has resulted in a federal criminal investigation (also widely known as the "CIA leak investigation") into allegations that one or more White House officials revealed the undercover CIA status of , resulting in federal indictment of Lewis Libby and a civil suit filed by Mrs. Wilson and her husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson. Since Mrs. Wilson's identity as a "CIA operative" specializing in intelligence concerning weapons of mass destruction was first made public, in a column by Robert Novak published on July 14, 2003, some commentators in the mainstream press and in the alternative media, including the blogosphere, have developed accounts that question its principals' claims and that even engage in perspectives bordering on conspiracy theories. Some recurrent topics of speculation follow below:

Questioning Joseph C. Wilson's account of his trip to Niger
The United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence criticized Joseph C. Wilson for claiming that his trip to Niger proved that Iraq was not seeking uranium from Niger. Wilson reported that a former Minister of Niger told him that, during an OAU Ministers meeting in Algiers in 1999, the Nigerien Minister had an informal meeting with an official from Iraq, who wanted to talk about "trade" between the two countries. But their talk never came to any clear topic. The Minister let all matters drop because of UN sanctions against Iraq. And he told Wilson he didn't know if the official wanted to talk about uranium.

In March 2003, the IAEA declared certain documents alleging a sale of uranium from Niger to Iraq to be forgeries. The Senate Select Committee criticized Wilson for allegedly stating that his trip to Niger had proved that Niger documents may have been forged when acting as a source for a Washington post article.

Wilson told The Washington Post anonymously in June 2003 that he had concluded that the intelligence about the Niger uranium was based on the forged documents because "the dates were wrong and the names were wrong."

The Senate intelligence committee, which examined pre-Iraq war intelligence, reported, however, that Wilson "had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports." Wilson said that he "may have misspoken to the reporter when he said he concluded the documents were forged" (Report 44).

Similarly, an article May 6, 2003 article by Nicolas Kristof on May 6, 2003, for which Wilson was one of the sources, states that "that envoy reported to the C.I.A. and State Department that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged."

In a later article Mr. Kristof confirmed that Wilson was the source for this statement, but defended Wilson, stating that although Wilson may not have had the documents in his possession, he may still have provided information necessary to debunk the documents. In that article, Mr. Kristof also explained "Wilson has said that he misspoke when he made references to the documents to me and to two other journalists."

An editorial published in Washington Post on April 9, 2006 states:

High-ranking CIA officials told the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that they disputed the claim that Plame was involved in the final decision to send Wilson, and indicated that the operations official who made it was not present at the meeting where Wilson was chosen. On July 22, 2003, Newsday reports:

In the first chapter ("Sixteen Words") of his book The Politics of Truth, Wilson writes:

But press reports deleted key parts of that comment.

Nevertheless the Senate report in its main body found, based upon physical evidence and testimony, that Valerie Plame "offered up" his (ambassador Wilson's) name to her superiors, with a written memo giving glowing recommendations.

Alleging wider knowledge of Plame's CIA job
On November 4 2005 Fox News analyst and retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul E. Vallely claimed that Plame's husband, Joseph C. Wilson had spoken to him about his wife's role with the CIA while they were waiting together in the green room before appearing on FOX News. He initially said this occurred on three to five occasions, first in February or March of 2002, more than a year before Novak's column was published. Vallely also said Wilson was proud to routinely introduce his wife as a CIA employee at cocktail parties.

Wilson has since demanded that Vallely retract these allegations, calling them "patently false."
Wilson wrote to his attorney, as quoted in electronic correspondence included in his demand for a retraction posted on the blog World Net Daily:

Indeed, Wilson and Vallely could have been together in the green room at most four times beginning in August, 2002. But a compendium of the times that Wilson and Vallely appeared on Fox News has revealed that there is only one possible date, September 12 2002, during which the two would have been in the green room within hours of each other.

In response, Brit Hume, managing editor of Fox News, reported:

Hume's unit of measure "on the same day" differs from the comparison's unit of measure "within hours," according to Jeralyn Merritt, who went through the FOX transcripts to compile this information; she notes that on September 12:

On November 7, 2005, Vallely appeared on ABC Radio Networks' The Sean Hannity Show; on this occasion he stated that Wilson had disclosed Plame's employment while in the green room only once, but could not remember the precise date:

On November 8, WorldNetDaily posted that

Media Matters for America notes:

On The Sean Hannity Show of November 7, Vallely stated further: "I was asked, 'Why didn't you say this before?' Well, I figured Joe Wilson would self-destruct at some point in time."

According to ABC Radio Networks' John Batchelor on November 6, touting McInerney's scheduled appearance on Batchelor's show the next day, retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney, who has coauthored with Vallely a book about the war on terrorism, alleged that Wilson had also told him about his wife's job with the CIA while in the green room at FOX News studios:

But when McInerney actually appeared on the November 7 show, he did not mention any direct "memories" of any similar incident and limited his comments to very general support of Vallely:

Former CIA officer Larry C. Johnson questions the credibility of these retired generals:

Batchelor also suggested on November 6 that Hoover Institution senior fellow and National Review contributor Victor Davis Hanson had also reported being similarly informed of Plame's employment by Wilson:

On November 8 WorldNetDaily stated:

Instead Hanson merely described Wilson as very "indiscreet" and "unguarded" with personal information, rambling in a "stream of consciousness" manner.
These claims have been disputed by Wilson and his lawyer.

Fitzgerald concludes his indictment against Libby:

Libby's defense team has countered in court hearings that they have five witnesses from outside the intelligence community who will testify that Wilson told them before the Novak article was published that his wife worked at the CIA. Libby's legal team rested their case on February 14, 2007. There was no testimony from any witness that Wilson disclosed his wife's status prior to the Novak article.

According to a June 2006 ruling by United States District Judge Reggie Walton, Libby's defense team also sought "any notes from the September 2003 meeting in the Situation Room at which Colin Powell is reported to have said that (a) everyone knows that Mr. Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA and that (b) it was Mr. Wilson’s wife who suggested that the CIA send her husband on a mission to Niger."

Walton ruled against Libby regarding this request.

In a story published in The New York Sun on July 6, 2005, staff reporter Josh Gerstein states that former Time magazine White House correspondent Hugh Sidey claimed in an interview that Plame's identity was widely known well before Mr. Cooper talked to his sources.

In the National Review Online of September 29, 2003, Clifford May writes:

In an October 3, 2003, edition of the now-defunct program Capital Report on CNBC, Andrea Mitchell was quoted as having said:

In a November 2005 appearance with radio host Don Imus, however, Mitchell clarified that she had been misquoted:

During Libby's trial, Libby's defense lawyers wanted to call Mitchell to the witness stand to further explain her comments. After hearing arguments on the matter, U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton ruled Mitchell's testimony about statements she made about Plame would have amounted to hearsay and, thus, nullified her subpoena.

Questioning the covert nature of Plame's CIA status
There are various disputes concerning the covert nature of Plame's status with the CIA. This issue is complicated somewhat by a variety of definitions of covert. While it appears to be clear that Plame's employment status was formally classified by the CIA as "secret" and not for disclosure to foreign nationals, and that her employment was therefore "undercover," and/or "classified," and that she had been classified as a NOC, or non-official cover agent of the CIA, various commentators have argued that on July 14, 2003, when Novak's column appeared, Plame did not fit the legal definition of "covert" as defined in the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.

The USA Today stated on July 14 2005 that Mrs. Plame hadn't been outside the United States as a NOC since 1997, when she returned from her last assignment, and married Joe Wilson and had her twins. The following day, in an article published in the Washington Times, Stephen Dinan and Joseph Curl cite Fred Rustmann, a former CIA covert agent who claimed that he supervised Mrs. Plame early in her career, took issue with her identification as an "undercover agent," and said that she worked for more than five years at the agency's headquarters in Langley and that most of her neighbors and friends knew that she was a CIA employee: "She made no bones about the fact that she was an agency employee and her husband was a diplomat."

Joe Wilson, Plame's husband, in a July 14, 2005 interview with Wolf Blitzer, broadcast on CNN on July 14, 2005, stated: "My wife was not a clandestine officer the day that Bob Novak blew her identity." This comment has been misinterpreted, but Wilson later explained his meaning to Associated Press, which issued a retraction: "In an interview Friday, Wilson said his comment was meant to reflect that his wife lost her ability to be a covert agent because of the leak, not that she had stopped working for the CIA beforehand. His wife's 'ability to do the job she's been doing for close to 20 years ceased from the minute Novak's article appeared; she ceased being a clandestine officer,' he said."

Reflecting some of the press commentaries cited above, conservative columnist Max Boot has called Joseph Wilson a "liar," also claiming that Plame's status was not "covert" at the time of her outing in the Novak column because she had been working in Virginia for more than five years.

Although he left the CIA in 1993, Larry C. Johnson attempted to clear up the confusion surrounding Plame's status in a column responding to Boot: "The law actually requires that a covered person 'served' overseas in the last five years. Served does not mean lived. In the case of Valerie Wilson, energy consultant for Brewster-Jennings, she traveled overseas in 2003, 2002, and 2001, as part of her cover job. She met with folks who worked in the nuclear industry, cultivated sources, and managed spies. She was a national security asset until exposed by Karl Rove and Scooter Libby."

Plame worked for the CIA for 20 years, and her status, according to the New York Times, was "non-official cover." (5 October 2003). U.S. intelligence officials confirmed that Plame was working undercover shortly after it had been revealed by Robert Novak. Senator Charles Schumer asked the FBI to investigate the leak because the CIA had identified Plame's status as covert.
John Crewdson of the Chicago Tribune interviewed several unnamed former and current CIA employees who doubt that Plame had NOC status in the CIA at the time her cover was blown by Novak.

A variety of arguments regarding Ms. Plame's status as "covert" have arisen as a result of Special Counsel Fitzgerald's investigation. In the Grand Jury indictment of Libby and his press conference on the Libby indictment, broadcast on October 28, 2005, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald would not state explicitly whether or not Plame was "covert.".

Nevertheless, in a 5 February 2005 concurring opinion, Circuit Judge David S. Tatel made two references to Plame's covert status: (1) on page 28 of the opinion, Judge Tatel refers to Plame as an "alleged covert agent"; (2) on page 38, Judge Tatel states that because Fitzgerald had allegedly referred to Plame as a CIA agent "who had carried out covert work overseas within the last 5 years," in footnote 15 of a recent affidavit, Judge Tatel inferred that Mr. Fitzgerald must have at least "some support" for that conclusion. Judge Tatel appears to have inferred from Special Counsel Fitzgerald's affidavit, which says that he is investigating whether or not Libby could have "intentionally" and "willfully" exposed the identity of "a covert agent" (italics added), that Fitzgerald had already concluded that Plame was an agent who had carried out covert work within the last five years.

In August 2005, Newsweek journalist Michael Isikoff reported that a "former government official who requested anonymity because of the confidential material involved" told him that the CIA's initial "crimes report" to the Justice Department requesting the leak probe never mentioned the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. During court proceedings pertaining to Libby's sentencing, Fitzgerald told the court "I wasn't appointed to investigate 50 U.S.C. 421. I was appointed to investigate violations of law arising out of the disclosure of classified information."

During the sentencing phase of Libby's trial, Fitzgerald submitted a memorandum that read in part "First, it was clear from very early in the investigation that Ms. Wilson qualified under the relevant statute (Title 50, United States Code, Section 421) as a covert agent whose identity had been disclosed by public officials, including Mr. Libby, to the press."

Libby's lawyers responded to this by stating:
:"It is important to bear in mind that the IIPA defines “covert agent” differently. It states: "The term 'covert agent' means— (A) a present or retired officer or employee of an intelligence agency...(i) whose identity as such an officer, employee, or member is classified information, and (ii) who is serving outside the United States or has within the last five years served outside the United States." 50 U.S.C. § 426. The CIA summary of Ms. Wilson’s employment history claims that she "engaged in temporary duty (TDY) travel overseas on official business," though it does not say whether such travel in fact occurred within the last five years. Further, it is not clear that engaging in temporary duty travel overseas would make a CIA employee who is based in Washington eligible for protection under the IIPA. In fact, it seems more likely that the CIA employee would have to have been stationed outside the United States to trigger the protection of the statute. To our knowledge, the meaning of the phrase "served outside the United States" in the IIPA has never been litigated. Thus, whether Ms. Wilson was covered by the IIPA remains very much in doubt, especially given the sparse nature of the record."
Libby's lawyers argued "The government contends that the testimony by Mr. Libby the jury found to be false 'bore directly on the elements of the IIPA and the Espionage Act.' This is an unfair characterization of Mr. Libby’s testimony...Accordingly, his testimony was not 'in respect to' any actual violations of the IIPA or the Espionage Act, making the cross reference inapplicable."

In sentencing Libby to 30 months, Judge Walton stated that "The CIA believes one of its agents was improperly outed....They had a legitimate concern. So they contact the Justice Department and they say this needs to be investigated....And the Justice Department...goes to investigate and they make inquiries....And that person lies...When law enforcement officials...initiate an investigation...it is the obligation of the American citizenry to be honest and forthright." Walton rejected Libby's argument that Fitzgerald failed to establish any statute had been violated, ruling that Libby's perjury had obstructed a legitimate investigation.

With regard to whether Plame fit the statute, Judge Walton told the defense during sentencing he would have "entertained" the idea of holding a discovery hearing on the matter earlier during the trial, but that defense arguments pertaining to Plame's status came too late into proceedings to hold such a hearing.

In a review of her memoir, Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House, Alan Cooperman writes in the Washington Post "True, the CIA recalled her from Europe in 1997, fearing that her name might have been passed to the Russians by the mole Aldrich Ames. But, she writes, she still took different routes to work each day, 'traveled domestically and abroad using a variety of aliases' and continued to hope for another foreign posting."

Accusing Wilson's wife of greater involvement in his trip to Niger than Wilson acknowledges
Some commentators believe that Plame's outing was justified on the grounds that Plame had a greater role in arranging Wilson's trip than Wilson has publicly acknowledged and that, in the words of Vice-President Dick Cheney, written on his copy of Wilson's op-ed "What I Didn't Find in Africa," the trip was a mere "junket".

Some commentators have accused Mrs. Wilson of using her position in the CIA to influence the appointment of her husband in a case of nepotism.

Novak's July 14, 2003 column claims that Valerie Plame had a role in selecting Wilson, her husband, for his trip to Niger:

Wilson had been open about the CIA's sponsorship of his trip (which he called "discreet but not secret"), stating that he had been "informed by officials at the CIA that Vice President Dick Cheney's office had questions about a particular intelligence report" relating to the sale of uranium yellowcake from Niger.

Two other reports from Niger support Ambassador Wilson's view that the construction of the uranium consortium in Niger, with its difficult road connections, tight production schemes, and close relations to several countries and to several official departments in Niger, could not be a possible tool for export of "yellowcake" to Iraq. Yet the CIA viewed the report as bolstering the belief that Iraq was trying to acquire "yellowcake" because Wilson's trip was the first to confirm a trade meeting with Iraq.

Iraq already possessed a large amount of yellowcake that had been reported to the IAEA but lacked the means to transform it to the enriched uranium needed for bomb production. The UN had found no evidence before the war, through its inspections, that Iraq had any remaining nuclear program nor could it be confirmed in general that Iraq had disarmed as it was required to do under the U.N. resolutions. Rumors of Iraq's desire to acquire uranium from Africa appear to have been based partially on the documents delivered from Italy describing a Niger transaction, but these were very simple and primitive forgeries. Other evidence that has led the British government to continue to state that Iraq wanted to acquire African uranium is said to be classified, and therefore cannot be substantiated at this time. Only the false documents were given to IAEA when IAEA experts asked the US government for documentation of its claims.

Of his trip to Niger, in "What I Didn't Find in Africa," Wilson writes:

Wilson also notes that U.S. Ambassador to Niger Barbara Owens-Kirkpatrick "knew about the allegations of uranium sales to Iraq — and that she felt she had already debunked them in her reports to Washington." But British and US intelligence had been stating that Iraq was attempting to purchase yellowcake, not that such a transaction had been completed.

A Senate intelligence committee report issued on July 9 2004 refutes Wilson's claims about the extent of his wife's involvement in arranging the trip as well as the conclusions reached in his report. The Washington Post summarizes the committee report as follows:

High-ranking CIA officials told the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that they disputed the claim that Plame was involved in the final decision to send Wilson, and indicated that the operations official who made it was not present at the meeting where Wilson was chosen. Newsday reported:

Wilson writes:

Former CIA officer Larry Johnson elaborated:

Others argue that Wilson has said that his wife did not authorize the trip and that he cannot speak about the details. The Senate intelligence committee report and other sources confirm that Plame gave her husband a positive recommendation. However, they also seem to confirm that she did not personally authorize the trip, contrary to what Matthew Cooper reports having been told by Karl Rove.

Arguing possible involvement of the CIA in the Plame affair
Some critics of Plame/Wilson view the Plame affair as a covert operation by a rogue agent (or perhaps Agency) designed to pull down a sitting president. This point of view alleges that Wilson may have played a key role by "misrepresenting" the intelligence he gathered on his trip to Niger. Although Wilson's trip was not secret, proponents of this argument find it significant that Wilson was not required to sign a confidentiality agreement. Zell Miller has even called for a new rule that will prevent CIA employees from leaking classified information through their spouses. Nevertheless, there has been no evidence that either of the Wilsons leaked classified information.

The suggestion of a plot by CIA officers is countered by a series of articles in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica.

Investigative reporters Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d'Avanzo claim that Nicolo Pollari, chief of Italy's military intelligence service, known as Sismi, brought the Niger yellowcake story directly to the White House after his insistent overtures had been rejected by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2001 and 2002. According to them, Sismi had reported to the CIA on October 15, 2001, that Iraq had sought yellowcake in Niger, a report it also plied on British intelligence, creating an echo that the Niger forgeries themselves purported to amplify before they were exposed as a hoax.

According to the account, Pollari met secretly in Washington on September 9 2002, with then-Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley. Their secret meeting came at a critical moment in the White House campaign to convince Congress and the American public that war in Iraq was necessary to prevent Saddam Hussein from developing nuclear weapons.

Claiming possible involvement of the Saudis in the leak
Michael Ruppert offers a different perspective in his blog From the Wilderness, sharing a belief that the leak was intentional, but arguing that the motive of the leak was to forestall a possible investigation by Plame and the CIA into the reserve capacity of Saudi oil fields. In this view, Ruppert argues, the leak was part of a strategy to conceal a coming crisis in energy supply from the American people, known as the peak oil theory.

Alleging that Wilson contributed to the outing of his own wife
The Washington Post has criticized Joe Wilson for contributing to the outing of his own wife. Its editorial "End of an Affair" even opines that Wilson himself caused Plame's exposure as a CIA operative:

Calling into question the necessity of the Grand Jury Investigation into the leak
In an article published in The New York Times on September 2, 2006, David Johnson and Neil A. Lewis question Patrick Fitzgerald's "proper exercise of prosecutorial discretion" in going forward with the three-year investigation despite his knowing "from his very first day in the special counsel’s chair" that the initial and primary source for Novak's column of July 14, 2003 was Richard Armitage:

Yet, the article continues:

==Speculating about the "Air Force One Memorandum"==
In late July and early August, 2005, the press publicized a classified State Department memorandum which may have been the original source of the leaked suggestion regarding Plame and may help to identify those who were in a position to have and therefore to leak Plame's identity.

According to reports in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, that three-page memo was dated June 10, 2003 and addressed to Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman, who had asked to be briefed on the history of opposition by the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) to the White House's position that Saddam Hussein was attempting to obtain uranium from Africa. The memo summarized the notes (included with the memo) taken by an unnamed senior analyst, of a meeting at the CIA, on February 19, 2002, at which those in attendance discussed Joseph Wilson's trip to Niger.

The memo shows mainly that the State Department had already decided, on the basis of other evidence detailed in the memo, that Iraq was not seeking to acquire uranium from Niger, and that it therefore opposed Wilson's trip as unnecessary. Two sentences of background information in the second paragraph mention Wilson's wife, identifying her as "Valerie Wilson" and speculating that it was she "who had the idea to dispatch to use his contacts to sort out the Iraq-Niger uranium issue." Although the memo does not explicitly identify Valerie Wilson as a covert agent, that paragraph is marked with an (S), the code used in a U.S. classified document to indicate that a paragraph is classified at the "secret" level. Anyone with a U.S. security clearance is expected to be familiar with this notation.

According to the Washington Post, on July 6, 2003, shortly after the publication of Wilson's op-ed "What I Didn't Find in Niger" in the The New York Times and The Washington Post and his appearance on Meet the Press criticizing the Bush administration's statements regarding Saddam's attempts to acquire yellowcake, Secretary of State Colin Powell had asked Carl W. Ford Jr., at that time director of INR, to explain Wilson's statements. Ford re-addressed the classified memo to Powell, who received it on July 7, 2003 as he was about to leave for Africa aboard Air Force One with President Bush, White House senior adviser Dan Bartlett, then White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, and others. The memo was passed around on the plane and discussed. The Posts sources report that Ford described the details of the memo in 2004 for the grand jury investigating the leak.

On April 18, 2006, The New York Sun obtained a declassified version of the July 7, 2003 memo. In the second paragraph of the memo, marked with an (S//NF), it states:

One week later, on July 14, 2003, Robert Novak wrote his column outing Plame. Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, who received the leak later than Novak, stated that it was given to him by Karl Rove and confirmed by . According to Robert Luskin, Rove's attorney, Rove has stated that he had not seen the memo until it was given to him by prosecutors investigating the leak and that he learned of Plame from Novak.

To date, it is the only known public document linking Plame to the suggestion that Wilson be sent to Niger. Thus, the memo is viewed by some as the original source of the leaked exposure of Plame via someone who was on that flight of Air Force One. Others counter that the source of the information could have been the earlier June 10 State Department memo, the notes of the CIA meeting by the unnamed senior State Department analyst, the analyst and other attendees at that meeting, or the persons at CIA involved with arranging Wilson's Niger trip, and not somebody who read the memo aboard Air Force One.

In the grand jury indictment of Scooter Libby, it states:
:"On or about May 29, 2003, in the White House, LIBBY asked an Under Secretary of State (“Under Secretary”) for information concerning the unnamed ambassador’s travel to Niger to investigate claims about Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium yellowcake. The Under Secretary thereafter directed the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research to prepare a report concerning the ambassador and his trip. The Under Secretary provided LIBBY with interim oral reports in late May and earlyJune 2003, and advised LIBBY that Wilson was the former ambassador who took the trip."

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