In Plame Leaks, Long Shadows

Administration officials set out to rebuff their critics, Wilson in particular. By the time The Washington Post published Wilson's allegation questioning the intelligence (but not citing his name) on the front page on June, 12, 2003 -- one month before the Plame affair was public -- Wilson was on the administration's radar screen.

The more Wilson pushed, the more the White House was determined to push back against a man they regarded as an irresponsible provocateur.

Up until this point, Wilson had worked mostly behind the scenes, but on July 6, he penned an op-ed in the New York Times, writing, "Some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons programs was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat." A story detailing the allegation also appeared that day inside The Post as Wilson appeared on NBC's "Meet the Press."

The White House response was swift. There is a simple rule in politics: Kill a story before it kills you. The Bush team spread word to reporters that Wilson was a Democrat, a supporter of Bush's political opponents who was sent on an inconclusive mission that people in power knew nothing of.

Then, they went a step further.

Two days after Wilson went public, columnist Robert D. Novak told Rove that he was hearing that Wilson had been sent on the mission at the suggestion of his wife, who was working in the CIA, a lawyer familiar with the conversation said. "I heard that, too," Rove replied, according to the lawyer. Rove said Novak had told him Plame's name and that that was the first time he had heard it, the lawyer said.

This could be seen as being at odds with Rove's comments to CNN on Aug. 31, 2004, when he said, "I'll repeat what I said to ABC News when this whole thing broke some number of months ago. I didn't know her name. I didn't leak her name."

The next day, July 7, Bush took off for a trip to Africa. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who was on the trip, carried with him a memo containing information about Plame, as well as other intelligence on the yellowcake claim. It is on this trip that, prosecutors believe, some White House aides might have learned about Plame.

The origin of the Plame information is central to the case. Prosecutors are trying to determine if White House officials shared information about Plame based on the State Department memo, or from conversation with reporters, as Rove has testified, or somewhere else. If it turns out Plame's identity was learned from the memo, it would undermine the GOP defense that Rove and other administration officials were simply discussing information they had learned from reporters.

Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, said he can say "categorically" that Rove did not obtain any information about Plame from any confidential source, such as a classified document. A lawyer familiar with Rove's testimony hedged a bit on who precisely told Rove about Plame, saying it may have come secondhand from another aide, as well as from Novak.

In Washington, Rove and others were discrediting Wilson's story even as then-CIA director George J. Tenet said that the yellowcake allegation should never have been included in Bush's speech. "This did not rise to the level of certainty which should be required for presidential speeches, and CIA should have ensured that it was removed," Tenet said in a July 11 statement.

In a conversation that same day, Rove told Time magazine's Matthew Cooper that Wilson's wife was in the CIA and authorized the mission to Niger; but he did not use her name. Afterwards, Rove e-mailed then-deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley to tell him he had waved Cooper off Wilson's claim.