‘Twenty years of loyal service down the drain’

I had many questions for Novak: What did the inclusion of Valerie’s name add to his article? So what if she worked on intelligence related to weapons of mass destruction? There was nothing nefarious about that. All this had happened because Novak chose not to heed the entreaties of government officials to whom he spoke and who, by Novak’s own admission, asked that he not publish her name or employment. While Novak has since downplayed the request of the CIA that he not publish her name, I wondered which part of ‘NO’ he didn’t understand. Murray Waas, writing in the American Prospect, has a different take:

Two government officials have told the FBI that conservative columnist Robert Novak was asked specifically not to publish the name of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame in his now-famous July 14 newspaper column. The two officials told investigators they warned Novak that by naming Plame he might potentially jeopardize her ability to engage in covert work, stymie ongoing intelligence operations, and jeopardize sensitive overseas sources.

So what if she conveyed a request to me to come to the Agency to talk about Niger? She had played absolutely no part in the decision to send me there. Should an agency of the U.S. government not ask me about the uranium business in Niger, a subject that I knew well, just because my wife happened to work in the same suite of offices?

Lamely attempting to shirk responsibility, Novak claimed that the CIA no was “a soft no, not a hard no.” On the wings of that ludicrous defense, he soared to new heights of journalistic irresponsibility. But Novak has long since demonstrated that he is not so much a scrupulous journalist as he is a confirmed purveyor of the right-wing party line, whether it’s touting the truth or — as it all too often is, unfortunately — promoting the big lie. In this instance, in addition to buying into the big lie, Novak was slavishly doing the bidding of the cowards in the administration who had decided that the only way to discredit me was to betray national security. I will defend his First Amendment rights as a journalist, but I don’t have to like what he did. In fact, watching Valerie’s face fall as she realized that her life had been so irreparably altered, I felt that punching the man in the nose would not have been an unreasonable response.

I decided that I would not rise to Novak’s bait or dignify his article with a published response, and that I would not speak about Valerie other than hypothetically. It was not up to me to confirm or deny her employment; it was up to the CIA. A few days later, Newsday reporter Timothy Phelps, whom I had met in Iraq twelve years earlier, informed me that he had heard from the CIA that what Novak had reported vis-à-vis Valerie’s employment was not incorrect. I declined to be drawn into a confirmation even then.

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