The Story (45 page)

I searched for the notes of my conversations with Fitzgerald before my testimony. He had asked me several times: What did Libby mean when he said “Bureau”? Did he mean the FBI? No, I had replied. While I normally used the word
Bureau
to refer to the FBI, Libby and I had been discussing the CIA and its faulty intelligence estimates.

I called William Jeffress, Libby's lawyer. Had Libby known that Plame had used the State Department as official cover? I asked him. No, Jeffress replied. Although Libby's lawyers had requested information about Plame's status and job, including the nature of her cover, Fitzgerald had refused to provide it. Her status wasn't relevant, the prosecutor claimed, which Judge Walton had upheld. So no one on Libby's defense team had learned about Plame's State Department cover until they, too, had read her memoir after Libby's conviction.
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“But Fitzgerald clearly knew,” Jeffress said. “I could have made good use of that.”

Prosecutors are required to provide potentially exculpatory information to defendants and witnesses who testify against them. Fitzgerald surely knew about Plame's cover at a State Department bureau when we discussed and rehearsed my testimony about that word before the trial.

Reading Plame's book had put my reference to that word—in parentheses and with a question mark—in a new light. Libby probably hadn't used it, or talked about Plame with me that day. But someone else had, perhaps one of the twenty or more nonproliferation experts I routinely spoke to at the State Department, the Pentagon, and other government agencies who dealt with Foggy Bottom's many bureaus. I thought hard. I still could not remember when and from whom I had first learned that Wilson had a wife at the CIA. But since Cheney had already told Libby that Plame worked in the CIA's nonproliferation office that had sent Wilson to Africa by the time Libby and I first met, Libby had probably not been the source of my reference to his wife's work for a bureau.

My testimony, though sworn honestly, might have been wrong.

I had always been troubled, as I had warned Fitzgerald, about my having surrounded that phrase with parentheses and a question mark. The format itself—my use of parentheses or, more often, brackets to reflect information I had already learned—suggested that I had intended to pursue the issue with Libby that day, rather than a reference to something that Libby and I had discussed. It may not even have struck me initially as all that important. I hadn't said anything about what would have been an intriguing tip to Jill Abramson the day after my initial meeting with Libby. If we had discussed Plame or her work, wouldn't I have mentioned it to her in June rather than July? Perhaps, like Bob Woodward, I had intended to ask Libby about Wilson's “wife,” but neglected to do so. Woodward had testified that Libby had not told him anything about Plame when they spoke. Novak had told the jury the same thing. I was the only journalist who testified that Libby had talked about Plame.

I reread the notebook containing the notes of my second interview with Libby on July 8. While there were ten notations of Plame's name, or versions of it, scattered throughout the notebook, none was part of my conversation with Libby. Nor, for that matter, was her name linked to any other source identified in the notebook. Given the placement of the doodles, however, I had clearly learned by then that Wilson's wife had worked at the CIA. Precisely when and from whom, I still could not recall.

The notes of that second interview with Libby also contained a comment inside parentheses: “(wife works at WINPAC).” The acronym stood for Weapons, Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control Center, the unit within the CIA that, among other things, tracks the spread of unconventional weapons. I believed this was the first time, I had testified, that I had heard—I said from Libby—that Wilson's wife worked in that office. I said that the notation had led me to conclude that Plame was an analyst, not a secret undercover operative. But while there were several additional references to WINPAC in my two-hour-long interview with Libby, there was no other reference to Wilson's wife.

Again, I was seized with doubt. Had I been told, incorrectly, that Plame worked at WINPAC before my meeting with Libby? Or if I had already been told that Plame worked at the CIA, and since Libby and I had been
discussing the WMD intelligence estimates that WINPAC had helped prepare, had I put two and two together and gotten five? Had someone else told me, or had I concluded on my own that Plame worked at WINPAC?

Only after the trial did I learn that Cheney had told Libby by phone in early June that Plame worked in the CIA's counterproliferation division. So why would Libby have told me that she worked at WINPAC? Suddenly the explanation I had given under oath—that Libby had identified her as a CIA weapons analyst in WINPAC—made no sense. No other witness had heard Libby associate Plame with that office.

My heart sank as I closed the notebooks. What if my testimony about events four years earlier had been wrong? Had I misconstrued my notes? Had Fitzgerald's questions about whether my use of the word
Bureau
meant the FBI steered me in the wrong direction?

Though I felt certain before the trial that Libby and I had discussed “the wife,” if only in passing, my memory may have failed me. Rereading those elliptical references and integrating them with what I had learned since the trial and with the information about Plame's cover that Fitzgerald had withheld, it was hard not to conclude that my testimony had been wrong. Had I helped convict an innocent man?

Memory can be treacherous. Daniel L. Schacter, the chairman of Harvard's psychology department, with whom Libby had consulted before his trial, told me when I called him years later that such memory “transgression” was common. Scientific research had shown time and again that “misattribution”—falsely remembering how or where we had heard or learned things—was normal, and far more common than people understood. But the judge had not permitted the jury to hear such evidence.

Schacter told me he was convinced that the jury lacked the information it needed about memory failure to make a reasoned opinion about Libby's guilt or innocence. Based on what the jury saw, he said, “I could not have rendered a fair decision based on the evidence. I do not believe that they could either.”
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In my
Times
story about my grand jury testimony in October 2005, I
described my chance meeting with Libby in August 2003 at that Jackson rodeo. The point of the story was that I hadn't recognized Libby when he had said hello to Jason and me partly because I had met him only twice before and because he was not wearing a suit, Washington's uniform, but jeans, sunglasses, and a cowboy hat. Jason, too, recalled our encounter and my embarrassment about not having recognized the senior official he called the “guy in a cowboy hat.” But those clear memories were wrong. Libby had not worn a cowboy hat that day. He did not own a cowboy hat, he told me when we later discussed our respective memory lapses and impressions of an episode that neither of us thought we would ever forget.

But I was sure about the hat, I told him. Libby permitted himself a tight smile. “Are you more or less certain about the cowboy hat than you were about our having discussed Valerie Wilson's CIA job?” he asked me.

I called Steve Sestanovich, a professor at Columbia and Bill Clinton's expert on Russia, and Jenny Mayfield, who had worked on Cheney's staff as what she called “Scooter's memory bank.” Both had been at the rodeo with Libby that day and told me that he hadn't worn a cowboy hat. “If he had,” Sestanovich told me, “I would have been talking about it for years.” In their six years working together, Mayfield told me, Libby had never worn a cowboy hat. “Scooter thought it was fine for cowboys to wear them,” she said, but “he was definitely not a cowboy hat kind of guy.”

The Libby trial and growing public furor over the Iraq War were interwoven. Jury selection began the week after the president enraged war critics by unveiling a new strategy for Iraq over the objections of most of his own senior staff, except Cheney, who had vigorously promoted a counterinsurgency approach for months. Rather than withdraw American forces, as an all-star bipartisan commission headed by Republican guru James Baker and Democrat Lee Hamilton recommended, America would “surge” its forces in Iraq. At the trial, antiwar protesters in front of the Capitol denouncing the “surge” and Bush's “lies” could be heard at the courthouse from blocks away.

At a press conference in October 2005, Fitzgerald said the trial would
not be about the war in Iraq but about whether one man had lied and obstructed justice. His closing remarks to the jury framed the issue more broadly. “What is this case about?” he asked them. Wasn't it about “something bigger” than perjury and obstruction of justice charges against Libby? “There is a cloud over the vice president,” Fitzgerald intoned, referring to Libby's assertion that Cheney had authorized him to discuss with me the Iraqi WMD estimates, which the president had declassified. “And that cloud remains because this defendant obstructed justice,” Fitzgerald claimed.

Apart from conservatives, few reporters protested Fitzgerald's expansion of an alleged conspiracy to Cheney. Fitzgerald, in fact, had placed Iraq at the center of the proceedings. The media elaborated. What was really on trial, wrote Michael Duffy of
Time
, was “the whole culture of an Administration that treated the truth as a relative virtue.”

The outing of Plame, a CIA officer with classified status, Fitzgerald declared at the press conference, was “not widely known outside the intelligence community.” He also painted a specter of grave, if unspecified, harm to America's national security.

John Rizzo, the CIA's general counsel and a lawyer there for over thirty years, challenged both. In a memoir published in 2014, he wrote that “dozens, if not hundreds of people in Washington” knew that Plame worked for the CIA. By all accounts, he noted, Plame was a “dedicated, capable” employee who hadn't sought the limelight, unlike her “publicity-seeking, preening blowhard of a husband.” But she was hardly a female James Bond whom the Hollywood movie version of her book had portrayed running Iraqi agents and tracking down endangered WMD scientists before Israel's Mossad could kill them. Plame, Rizzo wrote, was an “obscure . . . mid-level agent” whom he had never heard of or met. He added that a CIA damage assessment of the leak, completed in late 2003 or early 2004, before I went to jail and Libby was indicted, had produced “no evidence” of harm to any CIA operation, agent in the field, or anyone else, including “Plame herself.”
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But this crucial CIA finding was disclosed only when Rizzo's book was published.

Given the CIA's internal assessment, Rizzo had predicted to colleagues there was “no way” that the Justice Department would pursue it. Because
the impact of Plame's outing was “negligible,” “I fully expected Justice to treat it the way it treated 99 percent of our crimes reports, which is to say, to do little or nothing.” George Tenet told Cheney that he estimated there were close to four hundred reports of possible criminal violations involving leaks of classified information that Justice had seldom if ever pursued.
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Rizzo's conclusion was that the department's pursuit of Libby could be explained only by “partisan political pressure being applied . . . by opponents of Bush administration policies in Iraq.” His view of that decision is harsh: “The crimes reporting process had never been trivialized and distorted like that in all my years at the CIA,” and the leak investigation was “a seemingly interminable distraction and a colossal waste of time and money.”

After reading his book and talking to Rizzo, I was glad that he had finally made public what my CIA sources had been telling me on background for years. The CIA had cleared Rizzo's book. But I couldn't help but wonder: Where was anyone from the CIA, when Americans were debating whether the leak had caused great harm?

Cheney and other former senior officials assert that the Libby investigation may have had consequences for American policy and, arguably, the course of the Iraq War. In an interview, Cheney said that Fitzgerald's four-year inquiry distracted and undermined the effectiveness of his chief of staff and adviser to the president, a skilled political infighter who recognized—long before other White House officials—the mistakes being made in Iraq and the need for a new war-fighting strategy there. Known in political shorthand as the “surge,” the crucial shift to a counterinsurgency strategy and the troop increase to implement it allowed the United States to stabilize Baghdad, curtail violence in most of the country, at least temporarily, and, under Obama, to leave Iraq with tattered dignity.

Meghan O'Sullivan, a former deputy national security adviser on Iraq and Afghanistan who worked in Baghdad and Washington between 2003 and 2007, said she doubted that the strategy shift could have occurred much earlier, given what she called the “facts on the ground” in Iraq and
Washington, a view echoed by several others who worked intensively on Iraq.
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Some experts disagree. Gary J. Schmitt, now a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who was Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's aide and staff director on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that in the summer of 2003, Libby invited him and a few other experts to a small meeting to discuss the deteriorating security situation in Iraq. Having encountered resistance to a course correction from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary Rumsfeld, Libby appeared quietly frustrated by Bush's passive response to the growing insurgency and his decision to let L. Paul (Jerry) Bremer preside over a two-year occupation. Schmitt said that Libby encouraged him to write an essay urging that a new strategy be adopted, and US troops surged, to restore stability against an insurgency. “Libby was discreet,” Schmitt said in an interview, “but he wouldn't have encouraged me to write unless he felt that the administration was on the wrong path in Iraq.” “The Right Fight Now: Counterinsurgency, Not Caution, Is the Answer in Iraq” was published in the
Washington Post
in October 2003.
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