Exclusive Book Excerpt: 'Sabotage' Part 4 -- How the CIA triggered Plame probe

WASHINGTON (Map, News) - John Dion, who runs the Justice Department's counter-espionage section, reviews scores of criminal referrals each year from the CIA. When secrets are exposed in the press, the Agency is required by law to contact Justice.

Not every exposed secret merits a referral, though, and few referrals lead to leak investigations. If Justice launched a criminal investigation based on every referral, it would need to hire hundreds more lawyers.

Even so, initiating a criminal referral is one of Langley's most powerful tools. Washington politicians know it, because senators and congressmen, by intent or inadvertently, sometimes discuss classified information in public. Right after the Sept. 11 attacks, Sen. Orrin Hatch disclosed classified evidence against al Qaeda he had just learned from the CIA. He later apologized. No one wants to be the subject of a criminal referral.

In July 2003, Dion reviewed one of about a hundred referrals he got each year. No bells went off. It did not appear to be an issue of grave national security. The CIA said one of its clandestine officers, Valerie Plame, had been named in a July 14, 2003, column by Robert Novak, an old Washington hand who mixes reporting with opinion.

The Novak column centered on Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, and his trip to Niger to investigate claims that Saddam Hussein approached that country to buy uranium. Wilson had written a now-famous op-ed in the New York Times that month revealing his secret mission. He said he found no evidence that Saddam had tried to buy uranium and maintained his mission rebutted a key line in President Bush's State of the Union address - the controversial "sixteen words."

But why would the administration send a former ambassador like Wilson to do intelligence work? Novak's column explained why: It quoted administration sources as saying his wife got him the job. Novak found her maiden name, Valerie Plame, in Wilson's Who's Who entry and mentioned her in his column.

The CIA cried foul. The Agency's general counsel office filed a referral describing an "unauthorized disclosure." The counsel informed Director George Tenet that the referral was headed to the Department of Justice. An Agency director has never stopped the process, but, in a sense, Tenet was tacitly approving an investigation of the White House.

The paperwork said the disclosure of Plame's name may have violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. Dion looked the referral over. His office sent the CIA an 11-point questionnaire, as is routine. One question was what effect the disclosure would have on national security.

A Justice source told me the CIA made a weak case that the unauthorized release of Plame's identity damaged national security. (In contrast, a subsequent leak from the CIA to the New York Times about the terrorist surveillance program did trigger an immediate probe.)

And it was unclear whether Plame qualified under the protection act because she worked under "non-official cover." She had traveled overseas in the guise of an employee of a marketing firm. Non-official cover is different than "official cover," which usually means the CIA officer is assigned to an embassy, and the host government is notified.

Dion, a prosecutor at Justice for more than 30 years, took no action on the CIA referral. He had no plans to start a formal investigation, a Justice source told me. The referral seemed so flimsy that the office of Attorney General John Ashcroft was not informed.

But then MSNBC broke the news of the referral on Sept. 28, two months after it was filed. The media and political pressure became intense. Before he went home that Friday, Dion decided to make the Novak column a criminal case.

Justice officials are certain that the CIA was responsible for the leak. Only Dion and a few others in his section knew of it. These people are perhaps the most-tight-lipped in government, because of the extremely sensitive matters they handle.

"I never talk to reporters," Dion once told a colleague. Once, at a Justice Department reception, a network news reporter introduced herself. Dion said, "Nice to meet you," and then walked away.

Justice officials also noted that the leak came just as the public learned that investigators had not found weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, making the CIA's intelligence wrong again.

Less than a week later, a news report based on one anonymous source implicated two White House aides in the leak. They supposedly wanted to ruin Plame's career as revenge against Wilson for his criticism of President Bush. The Novak column was part of a White House conspiracy, Democrats charged. They demanded an independent investigator.

At the end of 2003, Justice turned the probe over to Patrick Fitzgerald, a career prosecutor serving as the U.S. attorney in Chicago. Fitzgerald quickly made a decision with far-reaching consequences for Washington's power players.

Normally, it is up to the attorney general to approve any subpoena directed at a news reporter. Such action is rarely taken, and the Justice Department had guidelines in place against the subpoena of reporters. The Bush Justice Department approved only one: for the phone records of two New York Times reporters whose story, prosecutors say, tipped off an Islamic charity to an upcoming raid.

Fitzgerald decided that as the issue was who in the administration had leaked Plame's identity, he and he alone, not the administration, would decide whether to subpoena journalists. Fitzgerald's investigation suddenly ballooned into one of the most expansive criminal investigations of the White House since Watergate and Monica Lewinsky - all because the CIA leaked a referral that the Justice Department thought too inconsequential to merit investigation.

Bush's critics predicted that the administration would be rocked by scandal, with top aides certain to go to jail.

ABOUT "SABOTAGE": The articles in this series are drawn from “Sabotage,” a book appearing this week from Regnery Publishing. Author Rowan Scarborough, The Examiner’s national security correspondent, tells the story of a CIA bureaucracy that badly damaged the Bush administration with leaks, false allegations and sheer incompetency. He interviewed scores of intelligence and defense sources to paint a picture of an agency that fell into disarray under former President Bill Clinton and that is still rebuilding in the sixth year of the War on Terror. Scarborough is author of a previous book, “Rumsfeld’s War,” also published by Regnery.

Read other "Sabotage" excerpts | Order the book

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