I accuse

In the book, you name several people in the White House whom you consider to be likely suspects in this conspiracy against you and your wife. Among them is Lewis "Scooter" Libby. You write, "The man attacking my integrity and reputation -- and I believe, quite possibly the person who exposed my wife's identity -- was Scooter Libby," the vice president's chief of staff. What makes you suspect Libby?

It's not so much a matter of my suspecting as of my being told by people close to the White House who have been following this assiduously and doing a fair amount of sleuthing on their own. For a long time I was kind of at the intersection of this information flow. Every time anybody got a piece of information, they would call me to find out what I knew, or just share it with me. So I've gathered a fair amount of stuff from a fair number of sources, all of whom wish to remain anonymous. And I think you can understand that after the publication of Bob Woodward's book, in which he interviews 75 people, only two of whom were prepared to be quoted on the record.

Gleaned from all those crosscurrents of information, the most plausible scenario, and the one that I've heard most frequently from different sources, has been that there was a meeting in the middle of March 2003, chaired by either Scooter or the vice president -- but more frequently I've heard chaired by Scooter -- at which a decision was made to get a "work-up" on me. That meant getting as much information about me as they could: about my past, about my life, about my family. This, in and of itself, is abominable. Then that information was passed at the appropriate time to the White House Communications Office, and at some point a decision was made to go ahead and start to smear me, after my opinion piece appeared in the New York Times.

You mention two other names: John Hannah, who works in the Office of the Vice President, and David Wurmser, who is a special assistant to John Bolton, the undersecretary of state for arms control and national security. Last Wednesday, their names both appeared on a chart that accompanied an article in the New York Times about the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans and the war cabal within the Bush administration. Did these people run an intelligence operation against you?

I don't know if it's the same unit, but it's very clear, from what I've heard, that the meeting in March 2003 led to an intelligence operation against my family and me. That's what a work-up is -- to try to find everything you can about an American citizen.

Do you know whether you and your family were ever under surveillance?

I have no idea.

Have you swept your house for bugging devices?

No, I haven't. I have no secrets. I have nothing to hide. I have heard one story that quotes [former Republican spokesman] Cliff May saying people have seen Valerie Plame leave her house and go to CIA headquarters every day. So perhaps they were following her.

If you're right that they started to look at you as early as March 2003, that means either they were anticipating that you were going to tell what you knew about the Niger uranium question or they were upset because you were speaking out against the drive to war anyway.

I think it's the former. As best I can figure out the timelines on this, I had gone on CNN and answered a question about the forged Niger documents and the State Department spokesman's response that "we fell for it." I said I believed that if the U.S. government looked into its files, it would discover that it knew far more about this than the State Department spokesman was letting on. My understanding is it was that statement that led to the so-called work-up meeting and what you called the intelligence operation against me.

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