America Conor O'CleryA White House official leaks the name of a covert CIA operative to a conservative journalist, a potential crime. He prints it in his syndicated column. A New York Times reporter reads the column and makes a few phone calls to her own contacts, but she doesn't write anything. A special prosecutor is appointed to investigate the leak.
Progress so far? Not much, except that the New York Times reporter, Judith Miller, has been sent to jail for refusing to say whom she talked to about a story she didn't write. The case, as Bill Keller, New York Times managing editor, said, has sent a chill through the US media.
The pursuit of Miller seems less designed to seek the identity of the leaker than to discourage the publication of future leaks, says veteran commentator Daniel Schorr of National Public Radio. Leaks to reporters have played an important role in exposing wrongdoing in Washington. They helped bring to light Watergate, the Iran Contra scandal and the Monica Lewinsky affair.
Yet Nixon never threatened Woodward and Bernstein with jail if they did not expose Deep Throat. So how did it come to this?
The CIA operative at the centre of the affair, Valerie Plame, is the wife of former ambassador Joseph Wilson. They live in the Palisades district of Washington and have five-year-old twins, Trevor and Samantha, and a Jaguar car. None of their neighbours knew before the affair blew up that she worked for the CIA.
She was described by people living nearby as a typical working soccer mom. They were stunned to read in Robert Novak's column in the Washington Post on July 14th, 2003, that she was in the CIA. On her business trips abroad, it subsequently emerged, she had been posing as an analyst for a shell CIA company in Boston, Brewster Jennings & Associates, to investigate weapons proliferation.
She was a top operator, who spoke German, French and Greek and was said to be destined for higher things in the agency. Her husband was well known as a former diplomat who had served in Iraq and Niger. He had one secret however. He had made a special trip to Niger in 2002, some months before the invasion of Iraq, at the request of the CIA, to check out reports that Saddam Hussein was trying to buy uranium.
He reported back that the rumours were unfounded. He was then stunned to hear George Bush in his State of the Union address in 2003 repeat intelligence claims that Iraq had tried to buy nuclear weapon material from Niger. As the Niger claim became a topic of some controversy after the invasion, the diplomat decided to go public. He wrote an article for the op-ed page of the New York Times, writing that there was never any evidence of Iraqi uranium purchases from Niger.
Wilson's credibility was attacked by allies of the administration and the Washington Post reported that the White House was livid about his article which essentially said the president had misled America. Then a friend told Wilson of a conversation he had with conservative columnist Robert Novak.
The friend had been walking along the street with Novak and casually asked him about the uranium story. "Wilson's an asshole," Novak had replied.
"The CIA sent him. His wife Valerie works for the CIA... She sent him."
A couple of days later Wilson got a call from Walter Pincus, a veteran intelligence reporter from the Washington Post, to say "they're coming after you".
The following Monday Novak wrote his now infamous column. In it he disclosed that Wilson's wife "Valerie Plame is an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction." He said two senior administration officials had told him Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the uranium report.
The column brought her career of covert action over 20 years to a sudden end - and possibly compromised her sources. Plame was devastated. Wilson says she had nothing to do with the decision to send him to Niger and that he was an obvious choice because of his previous diplomatic work there.
Then MSNBC's Chris Matthews called Wilson to say that the president's political adviser, Karl Rove, had told him that his wife was "fair game". Andrea Mitchell, NBC's State Department correspondent, rang to say White House sources had told her the real story was not the president's comments in the State of the Union speech but "Wilson and his wife".
Another reporter told him that Karl Rove had been "retailing" the Novak article with approval.
An investigation by the Washington Post two months later claimed that before Novak's column appeared two administration officials "called at least six Washington Post journalists and disclosed the identity and occupation of Wilson's wife".
The chairman of the Republican Party, Ed Gillespie, went on television to call Wilson a partisan Democrat who had contributed to John Kerry's presidential campaign.
Wilson responded that he had also contributed to George Bush's 2000 campaign. The furore grew to the point where President Bush called for an investigation of the leak, saying "I want to know the truth".
Coincidentally, as an inquiry was getting under way the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board concluded that Wilson was basically right about Niger. There was no evidence.
A grand jury was selected to establish if a crime had been committed by the leaker. Among the witnesses summoned were Matthew Cooper of Time who had written about Valerie Plame after Novak's article appeared, and Judith Miller who had written nothing at all.
They refused to disclose their sources. A judge sentenced them to 18 months in jail for contempt. They asked the Supreme Court to take up their case but it declined. Fitzgerald urged a judge to send the two reporters to prison saying, "Journalists are not entitled to promise complete confidentiality - no one in America is" (a statement that overlooked the bond between priest and penitent and lawyer and client).
Time turned over Cooper's notes, and somewhat dramatically on Wednesday, the day of sentencing, Cooper's source called and relieved him of the right to confidentiality. Judith Miller got no such call. She stuck to her guns and she is now in jail. No one knows if Novak was called to testify, or what information if any he supplied to prosecutors.
The columnist, whom Wilson dismisses bitterly as a shill for the right, is not facing any apparent censure. In an ironic twist, Judith Miller is the journalist who before the Iraq invasion ran front-page stories in the New York Times about anonymous administration sources "confirming" that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction - for which the Times has made a rather shame-faced apology.
Her place in journalistic history will now be as the hero-reporter.
Through it all Valerie Plame has kept silent and out of sight, other than posing for a picture in Vanity Fair in which a scarf and sunglasses obscured her face. On June 1st, according to Scott Shane of the New York Times, she ended a year's leave and returned to a new job at the CIA. She will, however, no longer be working under cover.