CHAPTER 1

The Plame Affair

ON SUNDAY MORNING, July 6, 2003, I drove from my downtown apartment to the studios in far northwest Washington to appear on NBC’s Meet the Press for the 236th time. As I came to the door of the green room, where guests are parked before going on the air, I encountered a sight that, because of events that followed, is emblazoned on my memory forever.

Seated at the far end of the green room was a man I knew I had seen somewhere. What now made him extraordinary was his conduct. The NBC green room always had been quiet, almost hushed. Roundtable participants like me read the thick file from the Sunday newspapers and the weekly newsmagazines prepared for them by the Meet the Press staff. Conversation among guests and their aides was usually limited to small talk and avoided confrontational debate.

But this unknown gentleman was speaking in stentorian tones, as if delivering a speech to his silent companions in the green room. Because most of the seats were taken, I remained standing at the end of the room. Having come in the middle of his harangue, I could barely get the gist of it. He kept saying “We did this” and “We did that.” The “we,” I soon surmised, consisted of the National Security Council staff in the departed Clinton administration. He was making clear that “we” handled affairs better than “they”—the Bush NSC—did now. In view of what followed, I hope I can be excused for the vulgarism that crossed my mind: “What an asshole!”

After a few minutes of this, I was summoned to makeup. I then learned the identity of the green room orator. He was Joseph C. Wilson IV, a retired Foreign Service officer who had been chargé d’affaires in Baghdad in 1990 for the run-up to the Gulf War. His face was vaguely familiar to me because I had lately seen him being interviewed on television without paying close attention to exactly what he was saying.

But he had just made news, which is why the Meet producers had called the night before to book him as the lead guest, bumping two senators. Wilson had written an op-ed that morning in the New York Times. Sitting in the makeup room, I read it.

His big news went back to sixteen words in President George W. Bush’s State of the Union address on January 28, 2003, which were included as part of the justification for military intervention in Iraq that would come six weeks later: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium in Africa.”

On June 12 the veteran Washington Post investigative reporter Walter Pincus reported that an unnamed retired diplomat a year earlier had returned from a CIA-sponsored fact-finding trip to Africa with a negative report on the alleged uranium shopping by Iraq. The next day, June 13, Nicholas Kristof, a New York Times columnist with a decided anti-Bush slant, said an unnamed former ambassador had come back from Niger with intelligence that nearly a year earlier had contradicted Bush’s sixteen words. Wilson next went public by offering the New York Times what he said would be the full story in his op-ed piece.

A reader of the famous op-ed years later would find no trace of the flamboyant Joe Wilson the world soon came to know—throwing around the word “liar” and making unsupported accusations. Instead, Wilson used the language of diplomacy, carefully avoiding direct indictment of the president. He gave no hint that he was a fierce opponent of Bush, anxious to join the next Democratic administration.

Wilson affected to write more in sadness than in anger: “I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.” He related that the CIA had asked him to go to Niger to investigate Iraq’s alleged quest for yellow cake uranium used in nuclear weapons development. He gave this memorable exposition of how he functioned:

I spent the next eight days drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people: current government officials, former government officials, people associated with the country’s uranium business. It did not take long to conclude that it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place.

He disclosed he had never filed a written report. He added there “should be at least four documents” in government files based on his oral briefing, none of which he had ever seen. He was still the careful diplomat in the op-ed’s two-paragraph conclusion:

I was convinced before the war that the threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein required a vigorous and sustained international response to disarm him. Iraq possessed and had used chemical weapons; it had an active biological weapons program and quite possibly a nuclear research program—all of which were in violation of United Nations resolutions. Having encountered Mr. Hussein and his thugs in the run-up to the Persian Gulf War of 1991, I was only too aware of the dangers he posed.

But were these dangers the same ones the Administration told us about? We have to find out. America’s foreign policy depends on the sanctity of its information. For this reason, questioning the selective use of intelligence to justify the war in Iraq is neither idle sniping nor “revisionist history,” as Mr. Bush has suggested. The act of war is the last option of a democracy, taken when there is a grave threat to our national security. More than 200 American soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq already. We have a duty to ensure that their sacrifice came for the right reasons.

By the time I had finished my makeup, hastily read the op-ed, and entered the green room, Wilson had left to be interviewed by NBC’s Andrea Mitchell (subbing for Tim Russert) in the opening Meet the Press segment. We did not meet that day.

         

WHEN I WENT to my office the next day, Monday, July 7, Joe Wilson was not in the forefront of my mind. Frances Fragos Townsend was. She had just been named deputy national security adviser at the White House though her background was in liberal Democratic politics, including Attorney General Janet Reno’s inner circle during the Clinton administration. Her appointment was a political mystery of the kind I had been exploring for forty years in my column. While I was placing calls to wrap up the story on Monday, I asked the same sources—including administration officials—what they thought about the dispute concerning uranium in Africa. Everybody seemed to concede a mistake had been made in using the sixteen words in the State of the Union, a view that they said apparently was shared by the president. None of my sources attacked Joe Wilson. Nobody had much to say about him at all.

I wrote the Townsend column Tuesday morning because I had a busy schedule the rest of the day, including a 3 p.m. appointment with Richard Armitage, deputy secretary of state. I had no idea what a big event it would turn out to be.

Armitage was then fifty-eight years old and had spent much of his life in public service following graduation from the U.S. Naval Academy. During the Reagan administration, he held the important post of assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs.

When George W. Bush’s administration began in 2001, the new secretary of state, Armitage’s close friend Colin Powell, had sought to place Armitage at the Defense Department as deputy secretary. But he was blocked by the new secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, who felt one department under General Powell’s control was enough. Instead, Armitage became Powell’s deputy at State, where the two officials were described to me as joined at the hip—two men operating as one.

I asked to see Armitage early in their administration and repeated my request after the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. Powell and Armitage were widely perceived as being out of step with the rest of the administration about military intervention in Iraq. I had ready access to Powell, in person and over the telephone, but he was circumspect in what he said to me, while Armitage had a reputation for being less guarded in conversations with journalists. Armitage rebuffed me, not with the customary evasion of claiming an overly full schedule but by his secretary making clear that he simply did not want to see me. I assumed that Armitage bracketed me, a notoriously conservative columnist, with the Iraqi war hawks who were unsympathetic toward his views. If so, he had somehow missed my written and spoken criticism of the Iraqi intervention.

Then, in the last week of June 2003, Armitage’s office called to agree unexpectedly to my request and set up the appointment for July 8. No reason was given then or subsequently for this change of heart. However, he apparently was following the recommendation of his political adviser, Washington lobbyist Ken Duberstein, a longtime source of mine. It is important to note that Armitage reached out to me before Joe Wilson went public on the New York Times op-ed page and on Meet the Press.

I was ushered into Armitage’s big State Department inner office promptly at 3 p.m. Since we had no personal relationship and never before had had a conversation, I was surprised that no press aide sat in on our meeting. I carried no tape recorder for the session, and, as frequently was my practice, did not take notes. Armitage seemed relaxed and our hour together was more conversation than interview—precisely the kind of session I preferred. Nuggets of news are more likely to get dropped in an informal setting.

Neither of us set ground rules for my visit. I assumed, however, that what Armitage said would not be attributed to him but would not be off the record. That is, I could write about information he gave me but would not identify him by name. How could I be so precise about the ground rules if we never discussed them? During a long career, I had come to appreciate that sort of thing in countless interviews without putting it into so many words. I viewed what Armitage told me to be just as privileged as if he had made me swear a blood oath.

Armitage was giving me high-level insider gossip, unusual in a first meeting. About halfway through our session, I brought up Bush’s sixteen words. What Armitage told me generally confirmed what I had learned from sources the previous day while I was reporting for the Fran Townsend column. At that point, I had pretty well decided to write a column for the next Monday’s papers about the Niger uranium issue, which Wilson had turned into a big story.

I then asked Armitage a question that had been puzzling me but, for the sake of my future peace of mind, would better have been left unasked. Why would the CIA send Joseph Wilson, not an expert in nuclear proliferation and with no intelligence experience, on the mission to Niger? “Well,” Armitage replied, “you know his wife works at CIA, and she suggested that he be sent to Niger.” “His wife works at CIA?” I asked. “Yeah, in counterproliferation.”

He mentioned her first name, Valerie. Armitage smiled and said: “That’s real Evans and Novak, isn’t it?” I believe he meant that was the kind of inside information that my late partner, Rowland Evans, and I had featured in our column for so long. I interpreted that as meaning Armitage expected to see the item published in my column.

The exchange about Wilson’s wife lasted no more than sixty seconds. Armitage offered no interpretation of Wilson’s conduct and said nothing negative about him or his wife. I am sure it was not a planned leak but came out as an offhand observation.

I never spoke to Armitage again about Wilson. But he acknowledged to me nearly three months later through Duberstein that he was indeed the primary source for my information about Wilson’s wife. Shortly thereafter, he secretly revealed his role to federal authorities investigating the leak of Mrs. Wilson’s name but did not inform White House officials, apparently including the president.

After Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney in Chicago named as a special prosecutor in the case, indicated to me he knew Armitage was my source, I cooperated fully with him. At the special prosecutor’s request and on my lawyers’ advice, I kept silent about this—a silence that subjected me to much abuse. I was urged by several friends, including some journalists, to give up my source’s name. But I felt bound by the journalist’s code to protect his identity.

Later that Tuesday while I was walking up 19th Street on the way back to my office from the State Department, I engaged in a bizarre episode that later made me wonder whether I had lost my good sense at age seventy-two. A nondescript little man without tie or jacket approached and began walking alongside me. He said he had seen me on Meet the Press Sunday and wanted to ask me if I did not think Bush was in big trouble for taking the country to war on the basis of false information. He struck me as one of the liberal news junkies who infest Washington. I should have asked him to leave me alone. Instead, I let him walk with me and engaged him in conversation for a couple of minutes.

In answer to his question about the sixteen words, I suggested that the administration had not handled this issue well but that too much was being made of it. The man then goaded me with the criticism that I was soft on Bush, and argued that Ambassador Wilson “really had nailed the president on Meet the Press.” He then asked what I thought of Wilson. “I think he’s an asshole,” I said, using the same inelegant description that had crossed my mind when I saw him lecturing in the NBC green room two days earlier. The man responded that Wilson had gone to Africa on a CIA mission and discovered intelligence that the president ignored. I blurted out the information I had just learned, telling him Wilson was no intelligence expert but had been sent on the mission to Niger by his wife, who worked on counter-proliferation at the CIA.

I then broke away from the man and went on my way—as I should have done two minutes earlier. I knew, of course, that I had done something stupid by revealing the information about Wilson’s wife to a perfect stranger. I wondered whether it was old age, the fatigue of a busy day, or walking around in Washington’s midsummer heat in a heavy three-piece pinstripe suit (as I always did). But, I rationalized, it really did not make much difference. I was planning to include the nugget about Mrs. Wilson in my column for the following Monday. Then, everybody would know about it. Anyway, I did not consider it earth-shattering news.

I wanted to question Karl Rove about the story. I had known Rove since he was a young Republican political consultant in Austin, Texas, almost twenty years before. Now he was one of the most powerful men in the world. He was President Bush’s political adviser and architect of all his campaigns dating back to his run for governor of Texas in 1994. But he was much more. He was the effective leader of the Republican Party, and involved in all manner of policy throughout the U.S. government.

Karl and I had grown close since he began plotting Bush’s path to the presidency as early as 1995. In four decades of talking to presidential aides, I never had enjoyed such a good source inside the White House. Rove obviously thought I was useful for his purposes, too. Such symbiotic relationships, built on self-interest, are the rule in high-level Washington journalism, though journalists seldom are as candid about them as I will be throughout this book.

There were limits to our relationship. While I don’t believe Rove ever lied to me, he did not of course tell me everything. Nor did he ever give me any information that would hurt the president. He knew I was in sympathy with Bush’s conservative principles, and strongly supportive of his tax cuts. He also knew I opposed the president on his education and prescription drug programs and was deeply concerned about his military intervention in Iraq.

Rove returned my call late that Tuesday afternoon. I had several items to bring up, most of which I still consider confidential. Wilson’s wife came up at the end of our conversation. I relate this part of the talk because Rove himself broke the confidence, through his attorney.

I mentioned that I had heard that Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA in the counterproliferation section and that she had suggested Wilson be sent to Niger. I distinctly remember Rove’s reply: “Oh, you know that, too.” Rove and I also discussed other aspects of Wilson’s mission, but since he never has disclosed them publicly, neither have I.

At seven o’clock the next morning, I got a telephone call from Sam Feist, the young executive producer of CNN’s Crossfire, where I was a regular co-host. Sam had never called me that early. He told me he had an urgent message. Eason Jordan, CNN’s chief news executive, had called Sam at 6 a.m. He had asked Sam to call me at home immediately, to inform me that Joe Wilson desperately wanted to get in touch with me. “What’s going on?” Feist asked me. “You’ll find out in due course,” I replied.

I had been on CNN since it began in the summer of 1980. But I was a well-paid independent contractor for the network, never a CNN employee. No CNN executive had ever attempted to supervise my non-CNN journalistic activity.

I telephoned Wilson when I got to my office, but he was not in. I next called Bill Harlow, chief of public information at the CIA. I had worked with Harlow periodically over the last year and a half, amiably but not intimately. He was sophisticated and clever, an accomplished novelist and an old hand at government press relations. I am sure he gave me only what his boss—George Tenet, director of Central Intelligence—wanted to give me.

When I got Harlow on the phone Wednesday, I asked him to confirm that Mrs. Wilson worked for the CIA and that she had suggested the mission to Niger for her husband. Harlow did not react immediately to my question but said he would get back to me. I was sure he was checking with higher authority, probably Tenet himself.

Wilson and I did not make telephone contact until the following morning, when I called him again. It was the first conversation ever between us, and he started it by revealing something that shocked me. The little man who had stopped me on the street Tuesday afternoon happened to be a friend of Wilson’s. Immediately after my imprudent comments, Wilson told me, his friend walked over to the office the former ambassador kept. The man then filled in Wilson on what I had said. Wilson was clearly reading from notes in relating my comments to the man. It was a pretty accurate account of my profane description of Wilson and my disclosure of his wife’s employment, but it omitted his friend’s goading.

After telling me he knew about Tuesday’s encounter on the street, Wilson apologized profusely in behalf of his friend. He told me that it was very poor behavior for a stranger to accost a well-known person to draw him into a debate and said that he had admonished his friend. Nevertheless, Wilson continued, he could not imagine what I was thinking when I blurted out the information about his wife to a perfect stranger. I said I agreed with him, and I apologized for my behavior. (His 2004 memoir The Politics of Truth reports my apology but not his.)

I then told Wilson I had heard about his wife’s CIA employment, and asked if he would confirm that she worked there. My distinct impression is that he reacted without anger. “I will not answer any question about my wife,” Wilson said, adding: “The story was never me. It was always the statement in his [Bush’s] speech.” He told me that once the White House admitted error in the sixteen words on July 6, he had declined all requests for television and radio interviews and would remain silent. (Wilson omits that statement from his memoir’s account of the conversation. The omission was prudent, considering that he would be omnipresent on television and radio, talking about his wife, in the coming years.)

Wilson next read to me this 1990 newspaper excerpt from Baghdad:

The chief American diplomat, Joe Wilson, shepherds his flock of some 800 known Americans like a village priest. At 4:30 Sunday morning, he was helping 55 wives and children of U.S. diplomats from Kuwait load themselves and their few remaining possessions on transport for the long haul to Jordan. He shows the stuff of heroism.

I suspected Wilson had something up his sleeve. He informed me that this excerpt was taken from an Evans & Novak column, written by my partner (and forgotten by me). Wilson told me sarcastically that I might well check my own column’s files before writing about him. He added that the description of him by Evans & Novak was treasured by his mother, yet another comment omitted from his memoir.

Finally, Wilson offered to send me everything he had written in the last year so that I could see he was not antiwar (“just anti-dumb war,” he recalled in his memoir, though I don’t remember his using those words). I did not take him up on his offer, but my staff did a search of all his writings. Oddly, he had not become really critical of Bush publicly until the day following his Meet the Press appearance, only after the White House admitted its mistake in Bush’s sixteen words. On that Monday, he suggested for the first time that the president had “misrepresented” facts and “lied.”

I closed the conversation by apologizing again for my encounter with his friend, and my recollection is that he apologized again for his friend’s behavior. It had not been exactly a convivial conversation, but it had been civil—and hardly a foretaste of the unpleasantness to come.

What did Joe Wilson have in mind when he called me? Was he trying to pressure me into not revealing his wife’s employment to my friends, much less total strangers on the street? He certainly did not ask me to refrain from putting this information in my column, or even express the worry that I might do so.

The CIA’s Bill Harlow telephoned me that afternoon. By now he obviously had been briefed on Wilson’s mission to Niger, and we had a relatively long conversation about it. In my previous contacts with Harlow, his comments implicitly had been not for attribution (a ground rule I had followed with official CIA spokesmen since the 1960s). Because Harlow later identified himself to the news media as my official CIA source on Mrs. Wilson’s CIA employment, I am relieved of keeping it confidential.

Harlow confirmed that Wilson’s wife was indeed employed in the CIA’s Counterproliferation Division. That gave me a third source. But he contradicted one aspect of Armitage’s version of the story that Rove had seemed to confirm. Harlow denied that she had inspired Wilson’s selection for the African mission but said she had been delegated by her colleagues to contact her husband.

Harlow next asked me to keep Mrs. Wilson’s CIA connection out of my column. He said she probably never would be given another foreign assignment but added that revelation of her name might cause unspecified “difficulties” if she traveled abroad (not specifying traveling abroad on a government mission as he later claimed). He did not press the point and did not warn me that Mrs. Wilson’s or anybody else’s safety would be endangered if I used her name. I had had enough experience with CIA jargon to infer from what Harlow told me that Mrs. Wilson at one time had been engaged in covert activities abroad but was not now and never would be again. (I learned much later that Mrs. Wilson had been “outed” years earlier by the traitor and Soviet agent Aldrich Ames, which had ended her career as a covert agent long before I wrote about her.)

What troubled me on Thursday afternoon was not the prospect of revealing Mrs. Wilson’s CIA identity but the difference between Armitage and Harlow on whether she had suggested her husband’s mission or had just been a go-between. Much later I would learn from a public Senate Intelligence Committee report of a CIA memo showing that Mrs. Wilson had indeed suggested the assignment for her husband. I don’t believe Bill Harlow was lying to me. I think the officials who briefed him had lied to him. George W. Bush had lots of enemies in the bowels of the Agency.

         

I NORMALLY WROTE and e-mailed to Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles on Friday my column for Monday’s newspapers. On July 11, 2003, I got into my office at seven thirty a.m., and even though my afternoon schedule was filled from twelve fifteen on, I still had four and one half hours (more than twice as much time as I usually needed) to write a 690-word column that was a few notches above routine. I never dreamed that it would become the most personally fateful column I ever would write.

On Friday morning, I checked the current edition of Who’s Who in America. Joseph Wilson was listed, and his wife was identified as Valerie Plame. I used that name in the column, and that gave the ensuing controversy a label. Valerie Plame somehow sounded more exotic than Valerie Wilson, and the story became the “Plame Affair.” I was later told that in her covert days in Europe, she had used the name Valerie Plame. If that is so, Wilson’s putting that name in Who’s Who was either an act of recklessness or a sign that his wife was not now engaged in covert operations. I am sure the latter was the case.

As I sat down at my office computer that Friday morning, Valerie Plame Wilson was not my major concern. The real story for me then was the background of Joe Wilson’s mission that had not yet been revealed. By doing my regular style of reporting, I thought I could put the situation in perspective. I titled my column “Mission to Niger” and began it:

The CIA’s decision to send retired diplomat Joseph C. Wilson to Africa in February 2002 to investigate possible Iraqi purchases of uranium was made routinely at a low level without Director George Tenet’s knowledge. Remarkably, this produced a political firestorm that has not yet subsided.

Wilson’s report that an Iraqi purchase of uranium yellowcake from Niger was highly unlikely was regarded by the CIA as less than definitive, and it is doubtful Tenet ever saw it. Certainly, President Bush did not prior to his 2003 State of the Union address, when he attributed reports of attempted purchases to the British government. That the British relied on forged documents made Wilson’s mission, nearly a year earlier, the basis of furious Democratic accusations of burying intelligence though the report was forgotten by the time the President spoke.

Reluctance at the White House to admit a mistake has led Democrats ever closer to saying the President lied the country into war. Even after a belated admission of error last Monday, finger-pointing between Bush Administration agencies continued. Messages between Washington and the Presidential entourage traveling in Africa hashed over the mission to Niger.

Wilson’s mission was created after an early 2002 report by the Italian intelligence service about attempted uranium purchases from Niger, derived from forged documents prepared by what the CIA calls a “con man.” This misinformation peddled by Italian journalists, spread through the U.S. government. The White House, State Department and Pentagon, not just Vice President Dick Cheney, asked the CIA to look into it.

With Wilson assigned the mission to Niger, I provided a little background about him at this point in the column. I quoted from the favorable 1990 report from Baghdad by Rowland Evans that Wilson had cited to me. I noted that President George H. W. Bush had named Wilson as ambassador to Gabon in 1991 and that President Bill Clinton in 1993 had put him in charge of African affairs at the National Security Council.

Then came the column’s fateful sixth paragraph:

Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior Administration officials told me Wilson’s wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him.

I next described Wilson’s oral report on his mission as saying an Iraqi uranium purchase was “highly unlikely,” though I said he “mentioned in passing that a 1988 Iraqi delegation tried to establish commercial relations” with Niger. I quoted CIA officials as not regarding “Wilson’s intelligence as definitive, being based primarily on what the Niger officials told him and probably would have claimed under any circumstances.”

Wilson obviously wanted me to take into consideration his overall outlook on Iraq. I think I did so:

During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, Wilson had taken a measured public position—viewing weapons of mass destruction as a danger but considering military action as a last resort. He has seemed much more critical of the Administration since revealing his role in Niger. In the Washington Post July 6, he talked about the Bush team “misrepresenting the facts,” asking: “What else are they lying about?”

In the last paragraph, I quoted Wilson’s remark to me that “the story” was not about him, and then I concluded the column this way:

The story, actually, is whether the Administration deliberately ignored Wilson’s advice, and that requires scrutinizing the CIA summary of what their envoy reported. The Agency never before has declassified that kind of information, but the White House would like it to do just that now—in its and in the public’s interest.

I defy anyone to read my column and agree with the claims by Wilson and his wife that I had defamed and ridiculed him and his wife or the subsequent assertion of their supporters that I was a slavish voice of the Bush administration.

         

IN THE YEARS since, I have been asked two questions repeatedly:

The first is: “Why did you reveal Valerie Plame Wilson’s CIA employment?” The answer is simple. One puzzle of Joe Wilson’s mission is why the CIA would choose for an African fact-finding mission a former Clinton White House aide with no track record in intelligence and with no experience in Niger since being posted there as a very junior Foreign Service officer in 1976–78. The answer that Wilson was suggested by his wife, a CIA employee, shows how peculiar events at a high governmental level in Washington can be. I reported this fact in my column without comment. But I thought it showed at the least incompetence within the CIA and at the most a poisonous hostility there to George W. Bush.

The second question: “If you had it to do over, would you still reveal her CIA employment?” The answer depends on whether I judge the case on its merits or from my personal interest.

Judging it on the merits, I would still write the story. There never was any question about its news value or its accuracy. I broke no law and endangered no intelligence operation. Mrs. Wilson was not a covert operative in 2003 but a desk-bound CIA analyst at Langley, Virginia. Her secret CIA identity had been outed long ago, and what I wrote was no danger to her or to anybody else. If Bill Harlow had told me that disclosure of Valerie Wilson’s employment would endanger her or anyone, I would not have mentioned her in the column. He did not tell me that because there was no such danger. If George Tenet had personally intervened to ask me not to identify her, I would have agreed. He did not do so because, I believe, he did not consider this a serious matter until Bush’s enemies in the Agency made it a cause célèbre.

Judging by personal interests, I probably should have ignored what Armitage told me about Mrs. Wilson. I am amused by people who described me as delighted by being in the spotlight, by being a newsmaker instead of a news chronicler. Those three little sentences resulted in a series of negative consequences for me. They eventually undermined my twenty-five-year relationship with CNN and kept me off Meet the Press for over two years. I had to pay substantial legal fees. I came under constant abuse from journalistic ethics critics, from some colleagues, and especially from bloggers. I have written many, many more important columns, but the one on the CIA leak case will forever be part of my public identity.

As a columnist for more than forty years, I often had to make quick decisions whether to report secret information with the advice only (for most of that time) of my partner Rowland Evans.

It is not a good idea for me to second-guess what I have decided. It is possible I might well have gone ahead with divulging the fact about Valerie Wilson even if I knew of the negative personal consequences that would follow. Those consequences were all material ones. They mean less to me as I near the end of my career and my life. I have not really suffered personally from the difficulties of 2003 and 2004 because they are less important than the love of my wife, my children, and my grandchildren. My conversion to the Catholic faith has put in perspective any petty personal difficulties. There was not really that much that can be done to me at this stage of my life. As the long-hidden details of the “Plame Affair” were disclosed, I felt a sense of vindication.

I am proud of my journalistic philosophy—to tell the world things people do not want me to reveal, to advocate limited government, economic freedom, and a strong, prudent America—and to have fun doing it. For the sober-sided younger generations of journalists, having fun may seem unserious. But it was the kind of journalism that prevailed when I started. I had a terrific time fulfilling all my youthful dreams and at the same time making life miserable for hypocritical, posturing politicians and, I hope, performing a service for my country.