Plame Affair - Robert Novak

Robert Novak

In September 2003, on CNN's Crossfire, Novak asserted: "Nobody in the Bush administration called me to leak this. There is no great crime here," adding that while he learned from two administration officials that Plame was a CIA employee, " asked me not to use her name, but never indicated it would endanger her or anybody else. According to a confidential source at the CIA, Mrs. Wilson was an analyst, not a spy, not a covert operative and not in charge of undercover operators."

In "The CIA Leak," published on October 1, 2003, Novak describes how he had obtained the information for his July 14, 2003, column "Mission to Niger":

I was curious why a high-ranking official in President Bill Clinton's National Security Council (NSC) was given this assignment. Wilson had become a vocal opponent of President Bush's policies in Iraq after contributing to Al Gore in the last election cycle and John Kerry in this one. During a long conversation with a senior administration official, I asked why Wilson was assigned the mission to Niger. He said Wilson had been sent by the CIA's counter-proliferation section at the suggestion of one of its employees, his wife. It was an offhand revelation from this official, who is no partisan gunslinger. When I called another official for confirmation, he said: "Oh, you know about it." The published report that somebody in the White House failed to plant this story with six reporters and finally found me as a willing pawn is simply untrue. At the CIA, the official designated to talk to me denied that Wilson's wife had inspired his selection but said she was delegated to request his help. He asked me not to use her name, saying she probably never again will be given a foreign assignment but that exposure of her name might cause "difficulties" if she travels abroad. He never suggested to me that Wilson's wife or anybody else would be endangered. If he had, I would not have used her name. I used it in the sixth paragraph of my column because it looked like the missing explanation of an otherwise incredible choice by the CIA for its mission.

In that column Novak also claims to have learned Mrs. Wilson's maiden name "Valerie Plame" from Joe Wilson's entry in Who's Who In America, though it was her CIA status rather than her maiden name which was a secret.

Novak wrote in his column "It was well known around Washington that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA," though this assertion has been disputed.

According to Murray S. Waas in the American Prospect of February 12, 2004, the CIA source warned Novak several times against the publication: two "administration officials" spoke to the FBI and challenged Novak's account about not receiving warnings not to publish Plame's name; according to one of the officials, "At best, he is parsing words ... At worst, he is lying to his readers and the public. Journalists should not lie, I would think."

Novak's critics argue that after decades as a Washington reporter, Novak was well aware of Plame's CIA status due to the wording he used in his column. A search of the LexisNexis database for the terms "CIA operative" and "agency operative" showed Novak had accurately used the terms to describe covert CIA employees, every time they appear in his articles.

On March 17, 2007, Plame testified before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. She was asked how she learned of Novak's reference to her in his column. Plame told the committee "I found out very early in the morning when my husband came in and dropped the newspaper on the bed and said, 'He did it'.... We had indications in the week prior that Mr. Novak knew my identity and my true employer. And I of course alerted my superiors at the agency, and I was told, don't worry; we'll take care of it. And it was much to our surprise that we read about this July 14.... I believe, and this is what I've read, that the then-spokesman, Mr. Harlow, spoke directly with Mr. Novak and said something along the lines of, don't go with this; don't do this. I don't know exactly what he said, but he clearly communicated the message that Mr. Novak should not publish my name."

Novak has written that "the CIA never warned me that the disclosure of Wilson's wife working at the agency would endanger her or anybody else."

According to the Washington Post, Harlow conveyed in an interview that "he warned Novak, in the strongest terms he was permitted to use without revealing classified information, that Wilson's wife had not authorized the mission and that if he did write about it, her name should not be revealed." Novak published a column refuting Harlow's claim. In his book, George Tenet wrote "Bill struggled to convince Novak that he had been misinformed -and that it would be unwise to report Mrs. Wilson's name. He couldn't tell Novak that Valerie Wilson was undercover. Saying so over an open phone line itself would have been a security breach. Bill danced around the subject and asked Novak not to include her in the story. Several years and many court dates later, we know that the message apparently didn't get through, but Novak never told Bill that he was going to ignore his advice to leave Valerie's name out of his article."

In a December 2008 interview with the National Ledger, Novak was asked about his role in the Plame affair. Novak replied:

"If you read my book, you find a certain ambivalence there. Journalistically, I thought it was an important story because it explained why the CIA would send Joe Wilson -- a former Clinton White House aide with no track record in intelligence and no experience in Niger -- on a fact-finding mission to Africa. From a personal point of view, I said in the book I probably should have ignored what I'd been told about Mrs. Wilson. Now I'm much less ambivalent. I'd go full speed ahead because of the hateful and beastly way in which my left-wing critics in the press and Congress tried to make a political affair out of it and tried to ruin me. My response now is this: The hell with you. They didn't ruin me. I have my faith, my family, and a good life. A lot of people love me -- or like me. So they failed. I would do the same thing over again because I don't think I hurt Valerie Plame whatsoever."