Transcript for July 16

MR. NOVAK: That’s right. There’s a lot, a lot of people like that, but she was a person who went to work every day as an analyst because she—I am told, she had been outed by the traitor Aldridge Aimes many years ago. But the—but the—but as a matter of fact, I’m getting back to Harlow. What Harlow said to me was that if she were to make a trip overseas in the future, it might be embarrassing for her, but he also said before that, he said it is highly unlikely she will ever do—make a trip for the agency abroad. In other words, he was telling me that she was not going to do any covert activities. He never said she was in danger. And I have said before that if he had called me or if he had put George Tenet on the phone, who I’m sure was aware of what was going on, and said, “Please don’t run this, this woman’s life is in danger. We have secret operations going,” I wouldn’t have used—I would’ve knocked the paragraph out of the story. He didn’t do that.

MR. RUSSERT: As you know, Carlo—Harlow works as an NBC News consultant. I talked to him on Friday. He said that he told you, “It’d be really bad if you wrote her publicly.”

MR. NOVAK: He didn’t say that. He never said that. Now he may—he may, he may think he said it, but he, he never—he never said that to me. I don’t know if you know Mr. Harlow very well, he’s a very low-key guy. I like Mr. Harlow. He’s a novelist. He’s a very interesting man, but he’s very low key. He didn’t press me. He didn’t push it very hard and I—you probably have this, too. I have a lot of people in government say, “Please don’t run this,” and I run it anyway. But when they really say it’s a matter of life and death, I don’t run it.

MR. RUSSERT: In hindsight, do you regret writing this column?

MR. NOVAK: I don’t know. I try—I used to try to think about whether I would have put—I would have preferred not to be the center of news. I would have preferred not to be sitting with you and being an interviewee. I like to be an analyst, rather, and a commentator. But it’s very hard to go back and say, “What would you do if you had it to do over again?” I thought it was a valid news story of why in the world he got assigned that thing. I still believe, I don’t think there’s any question, he got assigned that because of his wife. And that was a small part of a very strange assignment. I—the answer to my—to your question, I don’t know.

MR. RUSSERT: But no regrets outing a CIA agent?

MR. NOVAK: I don’t think I outed her. I think she was outed by Aldridge Aimes before. I don’t think she was a, a covert operative.

MR. RUSSERT: Robert Novak, we thank you for joining us and sharing your views.

MR. NOVAK: Thank you very much.

MR. RUSSERT: And we’ll be right back.

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