tidbits about Washington characters, apparently hadn't thought
through the possible implications of telling Novak about Plame's
identity.
*The Man Who Said Too Much*
A book coauthored by NEWSWEEK's Michael Isikoff details Richard
Armitage's central role in the Valerie Plame leak.
*By Michael Isikoff*
Newsweek
Aug 27, 2006
Sept. 4, 2006 issue - In the early morning of Oct. 1, 2003,
Secretary of State Colin Powell received an urgent phone call from
his No. 2 at the State Department. Richard Armitage was clearly
agitated. As recounted in a new book, *"Hubris: The Inside Story of
Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War,"*
<http://www.amazon.com/gp
home reading the newspaper and had come across a column by
journalist Robert Novak. Months earlier, Novak had caused a huge
stir when he revealed that Valerie Plame, wife of Iraq-war critic
Joseph Wilson, was a CIA officer. Ever since, Washington had been
trying to find out who leaked the information to Novak. The
columnist himself had kept quiet. But now, in a second column, Novak
provided a tantalizing clue: his primary source, he wrote, was a
"senior administration official" who was "not a partisan
gunslinger." Armitage was shaken. After reading the column, he knew
immediately who the leaker was. On the phone with Powell that
morning, Armitage was "in deep distress," says a source directly
familiar with the conversation who asked not to be identified
because of legal sensitivities. "I'm sure he's talking about me."
Armitage's admission led to a flurry of anxious phone calls and
meetings that day at the State Department. (Days earlier, the
Justice Department had launched a criminal investigation into the
Plame leak after the CIA informed officials there that she was an
undercover officer.) Within hours, William Howard Taft IV, the State
Department's legal adviser, notified a senior Justice official that
Armitage had information relevant to the case. The next day, a team
of FBI agents and Justice prosecutors investigating the leak
questioned the deputy secretary. Armitage acknowledged that he had
passed along to Novak information contained in a classified State
Department memo: that Wilson's wife worked on
weapons-of-mass-destruction issues at the CIA. (The memo made no
reference to her undercover status.) Armitage had met with Novak in
his State Department office on July 8, 2003—just days before Novak
published his first piece identifying Plame. Powell, Armitage and
Taft, the only three officials at the State Department who knew the
story, never breathed a word of it publicly and Armitage's role
remained secret.
Armitage, a well-known gossip who loves to dish and receive juicy
tidbits about Washington characters, apparently hadn't thought
through the possible implications of telling Novak about Plame's
identity. "I'm afraid I may be the guy that caused this whole
thing," he later told Carl Ford Jr., State's intelligence chief.
Ford says Armitage admitted to him that he had "slipped up" and told
Novak more than he should have. "He was basically beside himself
that he was the guy that f---ed up. My sense from Rich is that it
was just chitchat," Ford recalls in "Hubris," to be published next
week by Crown and co-written by the author of this article and David
Corn, Washington editor of The Nation magazine.
As it turned out, Novak wasn't the only person Armitage talked to
about Plame. Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward has also said he
was told of Plame's identity in June 2003. Woodward did not respond
to requests for comment for this article, but, as late as last week,
he referred reporters to his comments in November 2005 that he
learned of her identity in a "casual and offhand" conversation with
an administration official he declined to identify. According to
three government officials, a lawyer familiar with the case and an
Armitage confidant, all of whom would not be named discussing these
details, Armitage told Woodward about Plame three weeks before
talking to Novak. Armitage has consistently refused to discuss the
case; through an assistant last week he declined to comment for this
story. Novak would say only: "I don't discuss my sources until they
reveal themselves."
Armitage's central role as the primary source on Plame is detailed
for the first time in "Hubris," which recounts the leak case and the
inside battles at the CIA and White House in the run-up to the war.
The disclosures about Armitage, gleaned from interviews with
colleagues, friends and lawyers directly involved in the case,
underscore one of the ironies of the Plame investigation: that the
initial leak, seized on by administration critics as evidence of how
far the White House was willing to go to smear an opponent, came
from a man who had no apparent intention of harming anyone.
Indeed, Armitage was a member of the administration's small moderate
wing. Along with his boss and good friend, Powell, he had deep
misgivings about President George W. Bush's march to war. A
barrel-chested Vietnam vet who had volunteered for combat, Armitage
at times expressed disdain for Dick Cheney and other administration
war hawks who had never served in the military. Armitage routinely
returned from White House meetings shaking his head at the armchair
warriors. "One day," says Powell's former chief of staff Larry
Wilkerson, "we were walking into his office and Rich turned to me
and said, 'Larry, these guys never heard a bullet go by their ears
in anger ... None of them ever served. They're a bunch of jerks'."
But officials at the White House also told reporters about Wilson's
wife in an effort to discredit Wilson for his public attacks on
Bush's handling of Iraq intelligence. Karl Rove confirmed to Novak
that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA, and days later offered the
same information to Time reporter Matt Cooper. The inquiry into the
case led to the indictment of Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis
(Scooter) Libby, on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice.
Armitage himself was aggressively investigated by special counsel
Patrick Fitzgerald, but was never charged. Fitzgerald found no
evidence that Armitage knew of Plame's covert CIA status when he
talked to Novak and Woodward. The decision to go to the FBI that
panicky October afternoon also may have helped Armitage. Powell,
Armitage and Taft were aware of the perils of a cover-up—all three
had lived through the Iran-contra scandal at the Defense Department
in the late 1980s.
Taft, the State Department lawyer, also felt obligated to inform
White House counsel Alberto Gonzales. But Powell and his aides
feared the White House would then leak that Armitage had been
Novak's source—possibly to embarrass State Department officials who
had been unenthusiastic about Bush's Iraq policy. So Taft told
Gonzales the bare minimum: that the State Department had passed some
information about the case to Justice. He didn't mention Armitage.
Taft asked if Gonzales wanted to know the details. The president's
lawyer, playing the case by the book, said no, and Taft told him
nothing more. Armitage's role thus remained that rarest of
Washington phenomena: a hot secret that never leaked.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id
