A strange encounter with Robert Novak

He cited not a CIA source, as he had indicated on the phone four days earlier, but rather two senior administration sources; I called him for a clarification. He asked if I was very displeased with the article, and I replied that I did not see what the mention of my wife had added to it but that the reason for my call was to question his sources. When we first spoke, he had cited to me a CIA source, yet his published story cited two senior administration sources. He replied: "I misspoke the first time we talked."

A couple of days before Novak's article was published, but after my friend's strange encounter with him, I had received a call from Post reporter Walter Pincus, who alerted me that "they are coming after you." Since I already knew what Novak had learned about Valerie, I was increasingly concerned over what else might be put out about her. I assumed, though, that the CIA would itself quash any article that made reference to Valerie. While not yet familiar with the specifics of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, I knew that protection of the identity of agents in our clandestine service was the highest priority, and well understood by the experienced press corps in Washington. Novak had still been trolling for sources when we spoke on the telephone, so I assumed that he did not have the confirmations he would need from the CIA to publish the story. I told Valerie, who alerted the press liaison at the CIA, and we were left with the reasonable expectation that any reference to her would be dropped, since he would have no way of confirming the information -- unless, of course, he got confirmations from another part of the government, such as the White House.

Quite apart from the matter of her employment, the assertion that Valerie had played any substantive role in the decision to ask me to go to Niger was false on the face of it. Anyone who knows anything about the government bureaucracy knows that public servants go to great lengths to avoid nepotism or any appearance of it. Family members are expressly forbidden from accepting employment that places them in any direct professional relationship, even once or twice removed. Absurd as these lengths may seem, a supervisor literally cannot even supervise the supervisor of the supervisor of another family member without high-level approval. Valerie could not have stood in the chain of command had she tried to. Dick Cheney might be able to find a way to appoint one of his daughters to a key decision-making position in the State Department's Middle East Bureau, as he did; but Valerie could not -- and would not if she could -- have had anything to do with the CIA decision to ask me to travel to Niamey.

The publication of the article marked a turning point in our lives. There was no possibility of Valerie recovering her former life. She would never be able to regain the anonymity and secrecy that her professional life had required; she would not be able to return to her discreet work on some of the most sensitive threats to our society in the foreseeable future, and perhaps ever.

I had many questions for Novak: What did the inclusion of Valerie's name add to his article? So what if she worked on intelligence related to weapons of mass destruction? There was nothing nefarious about that. All this had happened because Novak chose not to heed the entreaties of government officials to whom he spoke and who, by Novak's own admission, asked that he not publish her name or employment. While Novak has since downplayed the request of the CIA that he not publish her name, I wondered which part of "NO" he didn't understand.

Lamely attempting to shirk responsibility, Novak claimed that the CIA no was "a soft no, not a hard no." On the wings of that ludicrous defense, he soared to new heights of journalistic irresponsibility. But Novak has long since demonstrated that he is not so much a scrupulous journalist as he is a confirmed purveyor of the right-wing party line, whether it's touting the truth or -- as it all too often is, unfortunately -- promoting the big lie. In this instance, in addition to buying into the big lie, Novak was slavishly doing the bidding of the cowards in the administration who had decided that the only way to discredit me was to betray national security. I will defend his First Amendment rights as a journalist, but I don't have to like what he did. In fact, watching Valerie's face fall as she realized that her life had been so irreparably altered, I felt that punching the man in the nose would not have been an unreasonable response.

I decided that I would not rise to Novak's bait or dignify his article with a published response, and that I would not speak about Valerie other than hypothetically. It was not up to me to confirm or deny her employment; it was up to the CIA. A few days later, Newsday reporter Timothy Phelps, whom I had met in Iraq twelve years earlier, informed me that he had heard from the CIA that what Novak had reported vis-à-vis Valerie's employment was not incorrect. I declined to be drawn into a confirmation even then.

That same week, on Thursday, July 17, David Corn called 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, in that it might represent a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982. Corn then published a detailed explanation of the law to ensure that other journalists, as well as regular readers of the Nation, understood all the legalities involved.

Next Page: The White House goes into "slime and defend" mode

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