Wednesday, July 13, 2005 | 9:16 a.m.
A story that began quietly more than three years ago is today swirling about the Bush White House amid calls for presidential adviser Karl Rove to resign. In February 2002 American diplomat Joseph Wilson, whose career had included service in Iraq and Africa, was assigned by the Bush administration to what was then a low-profile mission. He was asked to travel to the Western African nation of Niger to investigate foreign intelligence reports that Iraq had purchased yellowcake uranium -- used in nuclear weapons -- from that country. Wilson found no verification.
There the matter would have rested but for President Bush's determination to build a case for invading Iraq. In the president's State of the Union speech in January 2003, he infamously included what became known as the "16 words." "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," the president said. The statement was quickly discredited and a Washington Post story in June 2003 reported that an American diplomat had debunked the uranium angle well before the president's speech.
On July 6, 2003, that diplomat, Wilson, went public. In a column printed by The New York Times, he wrote of his trip to Niger and raised the specter of Bush going to war under false pretenses. His column, headlined, "What I didn't find in Africa," fueled mounting criticism of Bush for citing misinformation in his justification for war.
Eight days later conservative Chicago Sun-Times columnist Robert Novak downplayed the significance of Wilson's findings in Niger. He wrote that "it is doubtful" that then-CIA Director George Tenet ever learned of Wilson's report and that "certainly President Bush did not." Novak justified this position by saying that the decision to send Wilson to Niger was made "at a low level." He then disclosed the low level, writing: "(Wilson's wife) Valerie Plame is (a CIA) operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger ..."
It was disturbing that any journalist would disclose the identity of an undercover CIA officer. Such a reckless revelation can endanger a CIA official's safety and even jeopardize national security. On July 17, Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper, using anonymous government sources, also disclosed Plame's name. In December 2003 the Justice Department named U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald as a special counsel to investigate the leak of Plame's name. A grand jury in 2004 subpoenaed Cooper and New York Times reporter Judith Miller. No story by Miller ever appeared in print about Plame, but she had done some interviews. Miller is now in jail for refusing to disclose her sources.
Cooper and Time fought court orders to divulge their sources but finally, two weeks ago, relented enough to release Cooper's notes and other papers, including an e-mail that implicates Rove as a source of the information about Plame. The Associated Press reports that Rove spoke with Cooper July 11, 2003 -- five days after Wilson's New York Times column was published and three days before Novak's column appeared. Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, acknowledges that Rove talked with Cooper but told The New York Times that any "information conveyed was not part of an organized effort to disclose Plame's identity." Luskin told the paper that Rove was "merely trying to warn Cooper against writing an inaccurate account of Wilson's involvement."
Bush said last June that anyone in his administration involved with leaking Plame's name would be fired. That pledge was well justified, as knowingly disclosing the identity of a CIA agent is more than a political outrage -- it's a federal crime. The Bush administration also has consistently denied that Rove was involved in the leak.
This week, as the focus of the leak centered more and more on Rove, who has been Bush's closest adviser for years, the White House has been silent. If Rove ultimately is determined to be a source of the leak, we believe that President Bush should live up to the pledge he made last year and fire him.
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