CHAPTER 44

The Plame Affair II

MY “MISSION TO Niger” column that ran Monday, July 14, 2003, caused no immediate stir. I had not considered the revelation of Valerie Plame Wilson’s CIA connection to be a major story, and it attracted no special attention at first—except from a mild-mannered Joseph C. Wilson IV.

Wilson called me Monday morning, exhibiting none of the rage toward me he was to manifest over television and on the lecture circuit in coming years. Our Monday telephone conversation—my second and last with Wilson—was cordial. He said he was calling because he was puzzled that my column attributed my information to “two senior Administration officials” while he said I had indicated in my conversation with him the previous Thursday that I had a CIA source. I did not remember saying that, but I guessed it was possible. I said: “If I said that, I misspoke.” It came out differently in Wilson’s 2004 memoir, The Politics of Truth, which quoted me as saying: “I misspoke the first time we talked.”

In the book, Wilson said “I had many questions for Novak,” but he listed only one and he did not actually ask it: “What did the inclusion of Valerie’s name add to his article?” Had he asked that question, I would have replied that it was incidental to divulging that she was a CIA employee who suggested his mission to Niger. In The Politics of Truth, he said he told me the reason for “my call [to Novak] was to question his sources.” I can only assume he was interested in making sure the Bush administration and not the CIA was at fault before he began his attack, although he could hardly assume otherwise on the basis of reading my column.

Wilson’s memoir does not mention the only other point he brought up in our brief Monday morning conversation. He told me his wife did not use her maiden name, so that I had made a mistake in referring to her as Valerie Plame. He did not ask where I got the name. If he had, I would have answered, truthfully, that he had given me the name via the entry he provided Who’s Who in America.

Two days later, on Wednesday, July 16, I received a clearer indication of what was ahead when David Corn, Washington correspondent for The Nation, phoned. After Geraldine Ferraro left Crossfire in 1997 to run for the Senate and Bill Press was the remaining permanent left-wing host, Corn became Press’s regular substitute. He was a fierce combatant who situated himself on the far left wing in keeping with The Nation’s ideology, but I enjoyed sparring with him and liked him better than many of my permanent Crossfire dueling mates.

Because I thought we had an amiable relationship, I was shaken by Corn’s accusative opening of his call to me July 16: “What in the world were you thinking of when you outed a CIA agent?” He told me my column was an outrage that violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. I thought Corn’s indignation strange, considering his and The Nation’s ideological orientation. The far Left never had been interested in protecting intelligence assets and had opposed the 1982 legislation enacted in response to leftists publicly identifying CIA secret agents. On Thursday, July 17, one day after Corn contacted me, he telephoned Wilson, according to Wilson’s book, “to alert me [that] what Novak had done, or at least what the person who had leaked Valerie’s name to him had done, was possibly a crime” because it violated the 1982 act.

Wilson surely was misrepresenting Corn in quoting him nearly a year later as suggesting I might have committed a crime. Writing in The Nation of August 4, Corn said of the federal law: “Journalists are mostly protected. Thus, Novak need not worry.” Wilson’s failure to make such a distinction contributed to years of demands, blogged on the Internet, that I be imprisoned without trial. Actually, anybody who had read the Intelligence Identities Protection Act should have known that my sources need not worry either. Many hurdles would have to be cleared for them to be liable, and this case failed on the lowest hurdle—the exposure of a covert agent. Valerie Wilson failed to meet the qualification that she had been assigned outside the United States during the previous five years.

Nevertheless, Corn in his column (just as he advised Wilson) speculated that senior government officials did “break the law in order to strike at a Bush Administration critic and intimidate others.” Corn also began laying down the heavy rhetoric that was to be so much a part of this case: “The Wilson smear was a thuggish act, a sign that with this gang, politics trumps national security.”

The only other journalist who contacted me soon after the column’s publication was someone I did not know: Timothy M. Phelps, the Washington bureau chief of the Long Island newspaper Newsday. I had not been on the phone with him more than a few minutes before I realized Phelps was not a friendly questioner.

I was not sufficiently on my guard in talking either to Corn, whom I then thought of as a friendly acquaintance, or to Phelps, whom I regarded as a journalistic colleague. I made one regrettable comment to each that came back to haunt me. I told Corn: “I figured if they gave it to me, they’d give it to others.” That was my blanket explanation over the years for printing leaked information, but it was inappropriate in this instance. Much worse was what I told Phelps, which he quoted in the twelfth paragraph of a seventeen-paragraph story in the July 22 issue of Newsday: “I didn’t dig it out, it was given to me. They [the sources] thought it was significant, they gave me the name and I used it.”

My Newsday quote was reprinted endlessly for years to come, as was Phelps’s introductory statement to what I said: “Novak, in an interview, said his sources had come to him with the information.” I said no such thing. As I have related in chapter one, nobody came to me with this information. I sought out the two administration sources as well as the CIA source. It was shoddy journalism on Phelps’s part, a faulty interpretation of what I actually said that was inexcusable for a senior newspaper reporter.

The New York Times and the Washington Post ignored the story for the time being. Nobody in the nation’s capital read Newsday. Hardly anybody paid any attention to The Nation. I thought I could forget about the column. Oh, if only that were true.

         

ON SATURDAY NIGHT, September 27, 2003, I returned home about eight twenty p.m. after the usual live hour-long broadcast of Capital Gang on CNN to find I had been called by Washington Post reporter Mike Allen, who covered the White House. When I returned the call, Allen told me the Post was running a story in Sunday’s paper that the Justice Department was investigating the CIA leak contained in my column two and one-half months earlier.

Judging from what Allen used in his story, the only interest in questioning me was my conversation with the CIA’s public affairs officer, Bill Harlow. Allen recorded faithfully (in the twenty-first paragraph of the long Sunday article) my explanation to him of why I did not grant a CIA request to refrain from mentioning Mrs. Wilson in my column, a request made to me at the end of a conversation with Harlow about the mission to Niger:

“They said it’s doubtful she’ll ever again have a foreign assignment,” he [Novak] said. “They said if her name was printed, it might be difficult if she was traveling abroad, and they said they would prefer I didn’t use her name. It was a very weak request. If it was put on a stronger basis, I would have considered it.”

I arose at six a.m. Sunday, September 28, fearing the worst from the Post account. The fear was well-founded. The page one story by Mike Allen and Dana Priest, who covered the CIA, reported accurately the hard news of the Justice Department investigation. But the sensational material came in the form of quotes from somebody identified as “a senior Administration official”:

Yesterday, a senior Administration official said that before Novak’s column ran, two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and disclosed the identity and occupation of Wilson’s wife….

“Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge,” the senior official said of the alleged leak.

Sources familiar with the conversations said the leakers were seeking to undercut Wilson’s credibility. They alleged that Wilson, who was not a CIA employee, was selected for the Niger mission partly because his wife had recommended him. Wilson said in an interview yesterday that a reporter had told him that the leaker said, “The real issue is Wilson and his wife.”

A source said reporters quoted a leaker as describing Wilson’s wife as “fair game.” The official would not name the leakers for the record and would not name the journalists….

Asked about the motive describing the leaks, the senior official said the leaks were “wrong and a huge miscalculation, because they were irrelevant and did nothing to diminish Wilson’s credibility.”

A close reading made clear that this remarkable account hinges on a single anonymous source. That makes it a reckless piece of journalism that would never be confirmed in the years ahead. Instead, the amazing account of the leak being shopped to at least six journalists faded and then disappeared from future retellings of the story.

Preposterous as talk of six contacted journalists seemed, it paled in comparison to such a confession from a “senior” official in an administration that prided itself on tight-lipped loyalty. On Monday, I called one of my best Bush sources to ask for an explanation of these quotes. I half expected him to brush them off as imaginary, but he did not. Instead he named Adam Levine, a middle-level White House press aide who, he said, he was sure had said those things. He advised me Levine would be gone before long, and that prophecy proved accurate. I decided it was not prudent for me to launch a personal inquiry to confirm the identity of a confidential Washington Post source. I am using his name now only because he virtually revealed his role in Hubris, the 2006 book by Michael Isikoff and David Corn.

Levine, a former television journalist (who once worked for Chris Matthews), seemed out of place in the Bush White House. Appearing to be neither Republican nor conservative, he was much freer with information than his colleagues when I tried to use him as a source. But I found the tidbits he delivered were mostly irrelevant and self-serving, and I stopped contacting him.

In the Post’s follow-up story on Monday under a single byline, Allen quoted the source—who suddenly had become a mere administration “aide” without the “senior” adjective, accurately describing Levine—as saying “the two White House officials had cold-called at least six Washington journalists and identified Wilson’s wife.” Allen reported that “more specific details about the controversy emerged yesterday” in a Wilson telephone interview in which he said “four reporters from three television networks called him in July” and said White House officials had urged them to go public with his wife’s identity. If these accounts were accurate, why did these multiple reporters never appear in the subsequent multimillion-dollar federal investigation that went to court to get testimony from a newspaper reporter who was sentenced to jail and from a magazine reporter who nearly was?

I have no interest in critiquing the work product of colleagues except as it affected me personally. But the Sunday and Monday accounts in the Post gave the impression that two White House aides were “cold-calling” reporters without success until they came to me. The truth, as related in chapter one, is that I initiated contact with my two sources.

The further damage done by the Allen-Priest story was contained in the account of the CIA request not to use Mrs. Wilson’s name:

When Novak told a CIA spokesman he was going to write a column about Wilson’s wife, the spokesman urged him not to print her name “for security reasons,” according to one CIA official. Intelligence officials said they believed Novak understood there were reasons other than Plame’s personal security not to use her name, even though the CIA has declined to confirm she was undercover.

Not even thinly disguised, the source for this paragraph was clearly Bill Harlow. While I hate to use the l-word, it was a lie to say that “security reasons” were cited. But it was not immediately clear to me why Harlow would do this.

The clue to this puzzle was contained in Allen’s Monday story that reported “CIA officials approached the Justice Department about a possible investigation within a week” of my column’s publication on July 14. He did not note that such CIA leak reports to Justice number around fifty a year, or about one a week. The letter from Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) George Tenet formally asking Justice to launch the investigation, Allen wrote, “was delivered more recently.” But why the delay?

Unexplored in Allen’s story were the tensions at Langley. CIA officials, unhappy with President Bush and his policy, were demanding that Tenet take action. It seems obvious to me that Harlow wanted to get off the hook for letting me go with the story and consequently fabricated statements to me that he never made.

Finally, the Allen-Priest story contained this claim, obviously made by Dana Priest’s CIA sources: “After the column ran, the CIA began a damage assessment of whether any foreign contacts Plame had made over the years could be in danger. The assessment continues, sources said.” Only later did I learn that Mrs. Wilson had not been stationed abroad in over five years and had not been engaged in covert operations since she was outed by the Soviet agent and traitor Aldrich Ames. Claiming that my column necessitated a damage assessment, therefore, was disingenuous at best.

It was one thing to be attacked frontally by Joe Wilson and sniped at in The Nation and Newsday. It was much more serious to be misrepresented in the Washington Post, the paper to which I owed so much. Those misrepresentations became the perceived truth about me.

         

AFTER READING Mike Allen’s follow-up story on Monday, September 29, I called my attorney, Les Hyman. He told me that I needed representation from his partner in the Swidler Berlin law firm, James Hamilton. I had never met Hamilton, but he was known to me as a Clinton lawyer and prominent backstage figure in national Democratic politics. Hamilton advised me to be quiet and ignore news media calls. I said I would shut up after writing a column and making some obligatory television appearances.

On Tuesday, I began that column by saying “I had thought I never again would write” about Joseph Wilson’s wife. But I protested that “my role and the role of the Bush White House have been distorted and need explanation.” I proceeded to explain:

To protect my own integrity and credibility, I would like to stress three points. First, I did not receive a planned leak. Second, the CIA never warned me that the disclosure of Wilson’s wife working at the Agency would endanger her or anybody else. Third, it was not much of a secret.

The current Justice investigation stems from a routine, mandated probe of all CIA leaks, but it follows weeks of agitation. Wilson, after telling me in July that he would say nothing about his wife, has made his investigation of the leak his life’s work.

Valerie Wilson’s identity, I continued, was given to me in an “offhand revelation” by a senior official “who is no partisan gunslinger.” I noted that the conservative commentator Clifford May, writing in National Review Online, said he had been told of Mrs. Wilson’s CIA identity by a non-government official and added that it was common knowledge. I also quoted an unofficial CIA source as saying she was an analyst and not in covert operations. “I regret,” I wrote, “that I referred to her in my column as an ‘operative,’ a word I have lavished on hack politicians for more than 40 years.” I regretted it because it gave the false impression that she was working as an undercover agent, which she was not.

My first TV appearance of the week was on Monday’s Crossfire, where I said: “I have been beleaguered by television networks around the world, but I am reserving my say for ‘Crossfire.’” After I delivered an abbreviated version of my column, liberal co-host Paul Begala claimed “a serious crime” had been committed by my leaker and expressed hope that “that person does a long stretch in a federal prison.” Begala was an unabashed Democratic partisan and he signaled a line of attack that would be repeated relentlessly.

I had hoped my comments on Crossfire would satisfy my CNN obligations, but I was told I also must be interviewed by Wolf Blitzer on his nightly program. Wolf first came to my attention as longtime (1973–89) Washington correspondent for the Jerusalem Post only because he was one of many younger journalists befriended by Rowly Evans. He was occasionally used on CNN as an expert on the Mideast, and was hired by CNN as Pentagon correspondent in 1990. His prominence in covering the 1991 Gulf War propelled him upward at the network. When Wolf came aboard at CNN, I learned that we were brothers in the Jewish fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi (he at the State University of New York, Buffalo). We each addressed AEPi’s national convention in Washington one year, and we occasionally exchanged the fraternity’s secret handshake.

Blitzer was a soft interviewer who seldom pressed on-air guests. Given that background and our personal relationship, I was surprised to hear Blitzer on Monday voice the canard that the White House had shopped the Valerie Plame story around to six journalists before finding one who would swallow it—me. But I assumed Wolf had just been reading what some harassed CNN staffer had put together hurriedly.

Blitzer on Tuesday evening launched an interrogation of me that was far more confrontational than his handling of big-time politicians. Blitzer took off on my statement that the CIA had informed me that Mrs. Wilson never would have another foreign assignment.

Blitzer: The notion…that she would never be able to have a foreign assignment—shouldn’t that alone have been enough to give you pause?

Novak: Oh, no. Let’s read what I said, Wolf. That’s not what I said.

Blitzer: This is in today’s column.

Novak: Yes. Read what I said.

Blitzer: “He asked me not to use her name saying she probably never again will be given a foreign assignment.”

Novak: Yes…whether I wrote anything or not, he said she would never be given a foreign assignment. That was a fact that she had moved on to a different phase of her career. It was not because of anything I was writing.

Wolf moved on to the much-quoted Newsday account on July 22:

Blitzer: The [Newsday] reporters said this: “Novak, in an interview, said his sources had come to him with the information.”

Novak: Now, these reporters made a bad mistake. They said they came to me with the information. I never told them that. And that’s not in quotes, is it?

Blitzer: That’s not in quotes.

Novak: So, then, they made that up…. You have to be very careful, Wolf, because…they’re saying they came to me. They did not come to me. There are people putting out stories that the White House was trying to find a pawn to put out this information. They went through six people—

Blitzer:—to smear Joe Wilson.

Novak: And finally came to me. That’s not true. As I have told you in detail…nobody came to me.

Blitzer: Other reporters are suggesting that they got these calls, and they didn’t do anything.

Novak: I don’t know if they did or not. But…I resented it when you said the other day, I really resented it, when you said they went to six people and finally found Novak. That’s just not the truth. Nobody came to me with this story. I was reporting on Joe Wilson.

Blitzer: That was your initiative?

Novak: Entirely.

Wolf had one more dart for me.

Blitzer: Had you known that this information, releasing the name, could have endangered her and her colleagues, you would never have reported this?

Novak: Had I known. You’re saying it would have endangered her and her colleagues. I still don’t know that to this day. I will tell you this. If a CIA official said, “You are endangering the life of Mrs. Wilson and her colleagues,” I never would have printed it.

I concluded by saying “the idea that this was some kind of carefully arranged plot to destroy this woman and her husband, as far as I am concerned, was nonsense.” I left the set furious at my colleague and fraternity brother but did not continue the debate off-camera. I had been alerted to the kind of treatment I would receive on the network where I had become a trademark and had worked for a quarter century.

Of the dozens of interview requests that week, I had one in addition to Wolf Blitzer’s that I felt obliged to accept. It was from Tim Russert on that Sunday’s Meet the Press. I had been a semiregular on the NBC program for nearly forty years, and Tim as producer-moderator had even increased the frequency of my appearances. I felt I owed it to him.

Russert informed me in advance that I would be preceded on the program by Joseph C. Wilson IV. When Wilson had appeared on Meet the Press on July 6 and triggered my fateful column of July 14, he was blessed with a softball interview by NBC’s Andrea Mitchell. On October 5 Wilson found that Tim Russert was no Andrea Mitchell. Russert’s tough style was based not on spewing harsh rhetoric but on marshaling devastating facts. He read in full a statement by DCI George Tenet. Contrary to the impression given by Wilson, Tenet said that he never had sanctioned the mission to Niger and that the resulting oral report by Wilson was inconclusive. Wilson danced, responding in bureaucratese: “He [Tenet] would not have approved of it. This is the sort of thing that would have gone from a briefer down to the operational level. The decision would have been taken at the operational level. The results would have been reported back…. It never promised to be the definitive report.”

Wilson faced a tougher question when Russert played the videotape of an August 21 speech by Wilson in the state of Washington:

Well, I don’t think we’re going to let this drop. At the end of the day, it’s of keen interest to me to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs. And trust me. When I use that name, I measure my words.

Under pressure from Russert, Wilson backtracked quickly on his accusation of Rove: “I don’t know if he leaked it. I don’t know if he authorized it.” But, he said, “I have every confidence” that Rove pushed the story (“gave it legs”) after the Novak column ran.

Russert next turned to the political orientation of Wilson, who had been claiming he was a nonpolitical former diplomat until Bush drove him into the arms of the Democrats.

My lawyers had urged me to stop writing about Joe and Valerie, but I could not resist following up a tip from a friendly Republican lawyer who regarded Wilson as a fraud. I was advised to take a good look at the Federal Election Commission (FEC) records of Mrs. Wilson’s contributions in the 2000 election. The contributions of Joe had been widely scrutinized, but Valerie’s had been ignored. I examined them and got a lead item for my Sunday column (available for Washington readers in the New York Post):

On the same day in 1999 that retired diplomat Joseph Wilson returned $1,000 he contributed to Democratic presidential [candidate] Al Gore a month earlier because it exceeded the federal limit, his CIA-employee wife gave $1,000 to Gore using a fictitious identification for herself.

“Valerie E. Wilson” identified herself in the federal report as an “analyst” with “Brewster-Jennings & Associates.” There was no Brewster-Jennings & Associates, and there never had been. Brewster Jennings was a famous oil tycoon of the previous generation who had died in 1968. He never had a firm in his own name but was president of Socony-Vacuum. Brewster-Jennings & Associates was no dummy corporation to shield Mrs. Wilson as a covert agent because she was not involved in clandestine activities. Instead, each day she went to CIA headquarters in Langley where she worked on arms proliferation. Some wag had given her the bogus Brewster-Jennings’s corporate name.

The thousand-dollar contribution in Valerie’s name, intended to cover Joe’s illegally excessive contribution, was made on April 22, 1999. That made a lie of Wilson’s assertion in The Politics of Truth that his Gore contribution was made after he claimed to be disgusted with Bush’s tactics in the 2000 South Carolina primary campaign. In my October 5,2003, column item, I did not mention (because I then did not know) that Wilson not only gave Gore money but also joined his foreign policy advisory group.

Given this background, Wilson’s answers to Russert’s questions were disingenuous. Asked whether he considered himself a Democrat, he said: “I certainly do now.” Asked whether he would work to defeat Bush for reelection, he replied, “Yes, I certainly will” because his administration was “the antithesis of everything he campaigned on in the run-up to the first election.” That glossed over the fact that he had worked against Bush in that first election, was employed by the Clinton administration, and for years had contributed mostly to Democratic candidates.

Wilson’s last lie on the program was that a publisher had sought him out to write his memoir. In the fact-filled little item about Wilson in my column that Sunday morning, I reported: “In July, when he revealed himself an author of a report commissioned by the CIA, Wilson sought a book agent. After being turned down by a prominent agent, he has now found one.” Contrary to what Wilson said in his book, my source was the prominent agent.

Russert’s interview of me necessarily went over much the same ground as Blitzer had five days earlier. But Tim, known for searing interrogation, was far more civil in questioning an old colleague than Wolf. I thought the Meet the Press interview generated less heat but more light in getting my side of the story.

         

ON THE MORNING of Wednesday, October 1, the day my second Valerie Wilson column was published, the CIA leak case was leading the nation’s newspapers and network news programs. I was walking in downtown Washington when my cell phone rang with one of the most peculiar calls I received in a half century in journalism.

The caller was lobbyist and former White House chief of staff Ken Duberstein, who happened to be on the street in New York and called my office from his cell phone (which was patched through to my cell). I name him because the incident was reported by Isikoff and Corn in Hubris. Duberstein was a political adviser to Richard Armitage and indicated he was calling me on the deputy secretary of state’s behalf. Since we both were on cell phones, he did not mention Armitage by name but referred to him in a cryptic way that he knew I would decipher.

He said Armitage “wondered whether he had inadvertently given me some information” in the CIA leak case and that he wanted to check with me to see whether that indeed was the case. Armitage had a mind like a steel trap, and it was inconceivable that he would not have remembered what he told me. I surmised that Duberstein’s use of the word “inadvertently” was to reinforce with me what I had said on CNN that week: that this was not a planned disclosure by the Bush administration. I figured Duberstein’s question did not demand an answer, and I replied that my lawyers had told me to keep quiet about the case.

Next Duberstein told me Armitage was considering resigning from the government because of what he had divulged to me. “Oh, I wouldn’t do that,” I blurted out. Whether he kept his government post or not was none of my business, but I reacted reflexively against unintentionally forcing him out of office. It occurred to me only later that Armitage did not consider resigning after Valerie’s name appeared in my column—only after the CIA referred the case to the Justice Department for investigation. His later statement, that he did not really think he was the source until I identified him on October 1 as “no partisan gunslinger,” defies belief.

It was two and one-half years before it was revealed that Armitage, soon after Duberstein’s conversation with me, identified himself to the Justice Department but apparently not to the White House and certainly not to the public. He did not resign.

         

A FEW DAYS after my conversation with Duberstein, I sat in the large, elegant conference room of the Swidler Berlin law firm at the Washington Harbour, overlooking the Potomac River on the edge of Georgetown. Seated across the huge table from me were my old lawyer Les Hyman, my new lawyer Jim Hamilton, and their young associate Kevin Amer, who was taking notes.

This case would cost me more than $160,000 in legal fees, a larger drain on my bank account than any previous legal representation. I realized I could not count on much help from the Chicago Sun-Times with F. David Radler as publisher grasping the purse strings (though John Cruickshank, who succeeded the disgraced Radler, generously paid for $30,000 of my legal bills).

Les Hyman had been my attorney for three decades and was a personal friend. Jim Hamilton’s words of advice were valued by his clients—including the Democratic Party. Hamilton had led the vice presidential searches for candidates Bill Clinton and Al Gore, and he had vetted judicial nominees in the Clinton administration. He had kept out of the headlines while representing famous Democrats, and he would keep out of the headlines representing a right-wing columnist.

Shortly after it became known that the CIA had sent the case to the Justice Department, the FBI requested an interview with me. Hamilton suggested I comply with the request but not publicly disclose my compliance. That differed from advice given to reporters by New York Times and Time lawyers that ended in protracted legal proceedings and one jail sentence. Hamilton told me I had no legal grounds for noncooperation so that resistance in the courts probably would fail while financially devastating me. I told Jim I would not reveal my sources under any conditions. Hamilton said he understood that and advised me to keep their identity secret from him and his associates.

At two thirty p.m. on Tuesday, October 7, 2003, I was seated in the Swidler Berlin conference room for my first government interrogation about the case. My lawyers were at my side and across the table was FBI Inspector Jack Eckenrode, accompanied by two agents. Eckenrode was friendly, informing me that we occasionally attended mass together at St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in downtown Washington.

Eckenrode’s two-hour interrogation was thorough but polite and less inquisitorial than Wolf Blitzer or even Tim Russert had been. I said I would not give up the names of my sources, and the inspector did not press me for them. I did not realize that Eckenrode already had been told by Armitage that he was the source.

         

TO THE STREAM of reporters asking to interview me, I declined even to get on the phone (pleading advice of counsel). Being journalists, most wrote about me anyway.

One would-be interviewer I brushed off was a Baltimore Sun reporter I had never met named David Folkenflik. He rushed out a long piece about me in the October 3, 2003, Sun with a lead paragraph packing a lot of misinformation into a small space: “In the privacy of his Pennsylvania Avenue penthouse, Robert D. Novak must be loving this.” Our apartment, on the tenth floor of a thirteen-story building, was not a penthouse. Since this reporter had never exchanged a word with me, he had no idea whether I was “loving this.” In fact, I hated the whole mess. Folkenflik’s long piece was typical of what was being written about me by journalistic colleagues. He repeated the stupid quote I had given to Newsday instead of using a complete and cogent explanation from me that I made that week in my column and on television.

But the Baltimore Sun article represented a pretense of balance by mainstream journalism. The new element in communications was blogging on the Internet, and the attacks on me there knew no restraint. I was daily accused of treason and denounced in the most obscene terms, with personal threats against me and my family—even my grandchildren. Thousands of e-mails were far worse than the negative letters I used to receive. This is a typical example:

You are the worst kind of traitor. I hope your children get cancer and die on your birthday, you faggot. It would be even better if you became depressed and killed yourself on your birthday. Do the country a favor and get in a fucking horrible accident or something. Just make sure everyone related to you is involved. Remember, God hates fags!

I think Joe Wilson was primarily responsible for encouraging this torrent of abuse. In his 2004 memoir, Wilson wrote of me: “To this day, I ask myself how his colleagues continue to tolerate him in their presence. Around Washington his critics call him Bob ‘No Fact’ for his sloppy tabloid-gossip articles that often stray far from the truth. Having long since prostituted himself to the Right as its uncritical shill, he offers little original thought.” On the lecture circuit, Wilson lost all dignity in publicly using the vulgar epithet that I had applied to him in private. Most of this did not get published, but a student reporter recorded Wilson in a 2004 lecture at Northeastern University in Boston calling me an “asshole” and talking about throwing me out a second-story window.

         

THE BROTHERS AND sisters of the journalism fraternity normally band together when one of their own is hounded by the government demanding disclosure of sources. But not in my case. In the Wall Street Journal, editorial writer William McGurn bemoaned the lack of support by fellow journalists for my protection of sources. The reason was that in this case my sources were officials in the hated Bush administration who had given me information concerning a vocal critic of that administration. The blood of ideological solidarity was stronger than the water of journalistic togetherness.

The rationale for my fellow journalists abandoning me was contained in a February 6, 2004, op-ed in the New York Times by Geneva Overholser, a liberal high priestess of journalism. She was a former member of the New York Times editorial board, former editor of the Des Moines Register, and former ombudsman of the Washington Post. Now a professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, she took upon herself the task of explaining why the admonition “never burn a source” (which she called “a cardinal rule of journalism”) did not apply to Robert Novak.

My column about Wilson’s mission to Niger, she wrote, had “turned a time-honored use of confidentiality—protecting a whistleblower from government retribution—on its head, delivering government retribution to the whistleblower instead.” She had swallowed whole Joe Wilson’s dubious claim to being a whistleblower. Alleging “ethical lapses” on my part, she declared “journalists should call upon Mr. Novak to acknowledge his abuse of confidentiality and reveal his sources himself.”

I met Overholser for the first time a year after her op-ed piece. It was about eleven thirty p.m. on Saturday, March 12, 2005, at the Capitol Hilton, shortly after the annual white-tie dinner of the Gridiron Club had ended, as after-dinner drinking began. I was having a drink at the Hearst reception when a woman approached at a rapid pace. She had the crazed look with which I had become familiar in encountering cranks angry with me.

“I am Geneva Overholser,” she said without offering her hand. “Oh,” I said, “you’re the famous Geneva Overholser who’s been writing all these nasty things about me.” I was trying to lighten up the encounter in the breezy Washington style that can take the menace out of confrontations between antagonists, but Overholser was having none of it. Her eyes blazing, she said: “I don’t see how you can stand to see yourself in the mirror in the morning. You’re a disgrace to journalism.” I thought of something to say that she would resent. Her husband, a Washington newspaper bureau chief, had just been admitted into the Gridiron Club. “Geneva,” I said, “I don’t think your husband would approve of you talking that way to a fellow Gridironer.” Hardly anything could better antagonize a liberated woman. “That’s just the kind of thing you would say,” she said, then stalked off.

Journalists of Overholser’s stripe despised me for being a conservative. Support or opposition for me in the CIA leak case usually was a function of ideology. Conservatives, in and out of journalism, tended to back me up. But there were exceptions, including one notable one.

Shortly after the case exploded the first week of October 2003, I was in my office with C-SPAN turned on. An interview with Bill Kristol caught my attention when he was asked what he thought about my role in the CIA leak case. “Well,” Kristol said, “Novak is a friend—[pause]—an acquaintance.” An acquaintance? I could see Bill’s agile mind working a mile a minute, first calling me a friend and quickly deciding he better downgrade our relationship of seventeen years standing. We not only had been social friends, but he had been a super-source for me before he became a full-time journalist as editor of the Weekly Standard. Hardly a week had gone by that I had not talked at length to Bill. But after I called him on March 17, 2003, to ask what he thought of David Frum’s attack on me in the National Review and he never called back as promised, we did not speak to each other.

Now, in Kristol’s interview on C-SPAN, I could hardly believe what I heard. Kristol called my conduct in the CIA leak case “reprehensible.” He was the first conservative I know of to align himself with Joe Wilson, who took note of it. In The Politics of Truth, Wilson wrote: “Americans of all political professions, from William Kristol to Hillary Clinton, have expressed their outrage at what has happened to me and proffered their support.” I would think Bill would feel uncomfortable twinned with Hillary as Joe Wilson’s bedfellow. He was the sole conservative supporter cited in Wilson’s 496-page memoir, which lavished praise on the left-wing antiwar Moveon.org and even used two pages of the book to publish its “open letter” to President Bush opposing the appropriations bill to finance the war. Kristol was a neoconservative leader advocating a war policy that Wilson abhorred and denounced.

Why did Kristol align himself with Wilson against me? I cannot say for sure, because Bill and I no longer discussed this or anything else. But I believe it had nothing to do with Joe and Valerie Wilson. Kristol echoed the extreme neoconservative position of Norman Podhoretz that found my position on the Middle East intolerable. For Bill, that trumped considerations of longtime friendship.

         

UNTIL DECEMBER 30, 2003, I had harbored hopes the CIA leak case could be settled expeditiously. My friend, Republican lawyer Victoria Toensing, privately in conversations with me and publicly in op-ed articles, made a convincing argument that nobody in this case had violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. As chief counsel of the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1982, Toensing helped draft the legislation that was enacted in the wake of the potentially fatal outing by leftist activists of America’s secret agents.

Consequently, the way was open for Rich Armitage to identify himself as my source without fear of self-incrimination as a criminal defendant. What I did not know is that he already had identified himself to the Justice Department. My hopes for a judicious but relatively speedy settlement were dashed on December 30 when Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself in what he called “an abundance of caution.” He handed the case to Deputy Attorney General James Comey, who in turn named as special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney in Chicago. Unlike most federal district attorneys, Fitzgerald was a nonpolitical career prosecutor (a New Yorker) put in the Chicago post by the maverick Republican one-term senator Peter Fitzgerald (no relation). Pat Fitzgerald was politically untouchable, a modern Elliott Ness. People familiar with him told me to count on an investigation that was fair, thorough, and very long. For better or for worse, President Bush had lost control of how the case would be handled.

Fitzgerald immediately notified my attorneys that he wanted to interview me personally. He had a new twist that was worrisome for me and all other journalists involved. Fitzgerald had collected waivers, intended to relieve journalists of confidentiality restraints, signed by every Bush administration senior official who might have leaked information about Valerie Wilson. I did not consider that these blanket waivers relieved me from my vows of confidentiality (and neither did other journalists).

I faced a dilemma. Recent court decisions had indicated no inclination by the federal judiciary to recognize journalistic immunity. Jim Hamilton told me that carrying the case all the way to the Supreme Court would be expensive, futile, and damaging to press freedoms by strengthening case law against the reporter’s privilege. On the other hand, I felt I could not give up the names of sources under any conditions. I had declared vaingloriously on national TV that such a surrender would mean the end of my reporter’s career.

An appointment was set for Fitzgerald to come into the Swidler Berlin law offices to interview me on Wednesday, January 14, 2004. Fitzgerald wanted me to keep quiet about this and so did Hamilton. Nobody knew about my talking to the FBI back in October, and now nobody would know about my talking to the special prosecutor.

I met with Jim Hamilton and his young associate, Kevin Amer, at Swidler Berlin at one thirty p.m., January 12. Hamilton had news that changed everything. Although the special counsel had obtained confidentiality waivers from just about every administration official who could possibly have been my source, Fitzgerald told Hamilton he would be coming to his office with waivers signed by only two officials: Richard Armitage and Karl Rove.

What Hamilton told me constituted a shock too severe for a seventy-one-year-old man. I tried to stay calm as I said to my lawyers: “They have succeeded in identifying my sources.”

I agreed with Hamilton that I had no choice other than cooperating with Fitzgerald when I faced him two days hence. I would name Armitage and Rove since Fitzgerald already knew them. But I told Hamilton I would not go into all details of my conversation with Armitage or my confidential interviews with other sources.

Pat Fitzgerald, accompanied by lawyers and the FBI team, entered the Swidler Berlin conference room at ten a.m. He was polite, and the interview was businesslike. Fitzgerald arrived not with just two waivers, but a third one. It was signed by the CIA’s Bill Harlow (who subsequently would give other reporters an account of his conversation with me, relieving me from any restrictions on public disclosure).

Two hours of questioning by Fitzgerald covered the same territory as my FBI interrogation. The big difference was that now I was mentioning real names as my three sources. I drew the line at questions that delved into details of confidential discussions with the sources that did not directly concern the CIA leak. The special prosecutor did not press me to cross that line.

A month later I was subpoenaed to testify before the grand jury impaneled for this case. I dreaded this experience because of the many years that I had observed grand juries, with witnesses running a gauntlet of reporters, photographers, and TV cameramen on their way to and from the closed-door grand jury chamber. But Hamilton told me Fitzgerald assured him that he would protect my privacy. Jim thought that was a benefit in repayment for our being cooperative with the prosecutor.

Early on the afternoon of February 25, 2004, I drove to 3000 K Street (the Washington Harbour complex) and took the elevator to Suite 300, the Swidler Berlin law firm. At one thirty p.m. I entered an FBI sedan containing Inspector Eckenrode to be driven twenty blocks to the federal courthouse in downtown Washington, a couple of blocks from my apartment. The car entered a garage in the courthouse and I was hurried into a private elevator to be taken to a sequestered section of the courthouse that was journalist-free.

I was disappointed when I entered the inner sanctum of the grand jury. It was not nearly as nice as the building’s trial courtrooms, where I had been several times as a journalist and once as a libel suit defendant. It looked like a shabby classroom, with grand jurors sprawled in their seats. Most seemed dressed for a day off at home, instead of a federal judicial proceeding. A couple were dozing, and many did not seem to be paying attention.

I wanted to read to the grand jury a statement I had written explaining why I, as a journalist, was before them disclosing confidential sources. Hamilton obtained Fitzgerald’s permission. My statement—read after I took the oath—started by saying how uncomfortable I was being there. I explained that the special counsel already had discovered the identity of my sources, and it was pointless to pursue what my attorney had predicted would be a losing trip to the Supreme Court. The questioning, mostly by Fitzgerald, retraced my previous testimony in the law offices. It was not hard, because I told the truth as I remembered it. I mentioned in passing that the next day, February 26, would be my seventy-third birthday. When after two hours I finished testifying, the grand jury foreman wished me a happy birthday, and several grand jurors followed suit. It was nice to experience a little civility in a place where my very presence was a dark secret.

The federal courthouse in Washington is normally a wind tunnel of gossip and rumors, blowing straight onto the printed page and the TV screen. But not this time. Nobody knew that I even talked to the FBI, much less that I was cooperating and testifying before the grand jury. Pat Fitzgerald ran an extraordinarily tight ship (in contrast to leaky Independent Counsel offices I had covered over many years), Jim Hamilton was the tightest-lipped lawyer I ever saw, and I was not talking.

As months passed without leaks, Novak-bashers were enraged and expressed that rage on the Internet and in newspaper columns (including Bill Safire’s) across the country. Why was Novak not subpoenaed? Was Novak being given special treatment? Why was Novak getting off so easy? Journalists speculated in print or on the air that the prosecutors had decided to leave me alone or that I was taking the Fifth Amendment or that I had negotiated a plea bargain with Fitzgerald.

         

AFTER MY GRAND jury testimony, I rushed to the Capitol Hilton Hotel for that evening’s rehearsal of the Gridiron Club show for March 6. I had the juiciest part during twenty-six years in the club.

I loved showing off in gaudily costumed Gridiron skits. I could not sing or dance, I had neither the talent nor patience for writing parodies (I wrote but three all these years, and only one made the show) and I never helped produce a skit. But I had a loud speaking voice, and I was a big ham. Mostly, I was valuable as one of the club’s most recognizable members, thanks to television. The celebrity-studded audience would cheer when I suddenly appeared onstage dressed as Jesse Jackson, John McCain, a gorilla, or in drag (though Geraldine objected to my caveman’s costume in one of my first shows that exposed one breast. “No more nipples!” my wife told me.).

My 2004 Gridiron assignment was not only my biggest ever, but I was permitted to actually sing, not merely talk the song’s words as the producers made me do the last time I was given a singing role. I was to come onstage dressed in formal afternoon wear, including gray gloves and top hat. That was the Gridiron’s burlesque notion of a diplomat—Joseph C. Wilson IV being portrayed by Robert D. Novak.

To the strains of “Once I Had a Secret Love,” I sang:

Novak had a secret source,

Who lived within the great White House.

And one day his secret source

Told him about my darling spouse.

So, he outed a girl spy

The way Princes of Darkness do.

Cross the right wing you may try.

Bob Novak’s coming after you.

Now John Ashcroft’s asking who and how,

Could be headed for the old hoosegow.

And now his game is hem and haw.

’Cause Bob Novak’s source is hiding from the law.

When the audience at each of the three presentations—the Friday afternoon dress rehearsal, the Saturday night dinner, and the Sunday night reprise—realized it was I playing Joe Wilson, there were audible gasps (mixed with hissing Sunday night, which usually was the most liberal audience). I am sure many people who to my face congratulated me on my nerve muttered behind my back that the old boy had taken leave of his senses. My lawyers were not happy. Why did I do it? Because I could not give up what might be my last such theatrical opportunity. More seriously, I delighted in showing my contempt for a trivial incident that had been exaggerated into a scandal by the Left and its outriders in the news media.

         

MY SATIRICAL SONG at the Gridiron dinner, contrary to an AP report, did not constitute “comment” about the CIA leak. Following advice of my lawyers, I had written and said nothing about the case since October 2003. But in July 2004, I broke that silence of eight and one-half months because of two intertwined events. The first was a report by the Senate Intelligence Committee that effectively demolished the fabric of Joseph Wilson’s lies. The second was inattention to this report by the news media.

Senator Pat Roberts, an ex-marine officer from Dodge City, Kansas, was an old-fashioned midwestern Republican who had become the Intelligence Committee chairman. I occasionally talked to him and in 2003 asked what he knew about Wilson’s mission to Niger. I assumed he was just putting me off when he told me his Intelligence Committee was working on the case. I found how wrong I was the first week of July when Roberts’s committee released a report it had been preparing for a year.

The report demolished the insistence by Wilson, the CIA’s Harlow, and Democrats in Congress that Armitage was wrong when he told me that Wilson’s CIA-employee wife had inspired his mission to Niger. The report said: “Interviews and documents provided to the Committee indicate that his wife, a CPD [CIA Counter Proliferation Division] employee suggested his name for the trip.” The report also revealed that Plame wrote an internal CIA memo saying: “My husband has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines [of Niger] (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity.” The report quoted a State Department analyst as telling the Intelligence Committee that an interagency meeting in 2002 was “apparently convened by [Wilson’s] wife who had the idea to dispatch [him] to use his contacts to sort out the Iraq-Niger issue.”

Thus, the Roberts committee’s documentary and oral evidence proved that Wilson’s wife had suggested his mission to Niger. The committee’s Democratic minority did not challenge any of the evidence, though it abstained on the Republican majority’s conclusions.

The report concluded that the burden of Wilson’s claims “had no basis in fact.” I thought Pat Roberts had put a dagger through Joe Wilson’s heart, but the Intelligence Committee report received little attention in the news media—almost no page-one play in major newspapers and nothing on television, including the cable networks that had highlighted Wilson’s every utterance. I felt constrained to break my silence and write about the Roberts report in my column of July 15, 2004, “because it has received scant coverage except in the Washington Post, Knight-Ridder newspapers, the New York Times (briefly and belatedly) and a few other media outlets.”

At the time the Intelligence Committee report was released just before the Fourth of July holiday, Wilson appeared to have transformed himself from an obscure former diplomat into a national celebrity and a left-wing cause célèbre. He was much in evidence on Senator John Kerry’s presidential campaign. As Kerry clinched the nomination, I am sure Wilson anticipated addressing the Democratic National Convention in Boston.

Pat Roberts’s report deflated Wilson, even if it did not wind up on newspaper front pages or network television news. Wilson disappeared from the Kerry campaign and was nowhere to be seen at the Democratic convention late in July. He was confined for the time being to far-left precincts of cable TV, blogs, and the lecture circuit. However, I assumed that did not end my problems, and I was right.