Independent Online Edition > More embarrassment for Bush as hero of Watergate enters row over 'outed' agent

By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles
Published: 20 November 2005
The White House faced deepening political embarrassment - and possible new criminal indictments - over its justification of the war in Iraq yesterday following the announcement of a new grand jury to examine the outing of a politically inconvenient undercover CIA agent in the months immediately following the invasion.

Patrick Fitzgerald, the no-nonsense special prosecutor who has been making life miserable for the Bush administration for months, announced on Friday that the investigation was not only continuing but warranted the impanelling of a second grand jury. The first grand jury, whose term expired at the end of October, fingered Vice-President Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff, I Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on five counts of obstruction of justice and lying to investigators.

Until last week, the most vulnerable member of the administration appeared to be Karl Rove, President Bush's most valued political adviser, who has acknowledged being one of the officials who discussed the CIA agent Valerie Plame with reporters shortly before her identity was made public.

Now, however, the case has taken on an explosive new aspect following the revelation that Bob Woodward, the veteran Washington Post reporter and hero of Watergate, had been told about Ms Plame before any other journalist but kept the information to himself - even after the scandal broke and every news junkie in Washington was hungering after every last detail.

Mr Woodward himself does not appear to be in legal trouble, although he has taken a considerable hit to his journalistic reputation, but his source may well be. To judge by the text of Mr Libby's indictment and Mr Woodward's public statements in the past few days, it appears the source did not initially tell Mr Fitzgerald about his conversations with Mr Woodward in June 2003 but hurried back to the special prosecutor about two weeks ago, after Mr Woodward "reminded" him about them. The journalist then testified to Mr Fitzgerald himself last Monday.

Washington now has a new guessing game on its hands, which is to figure out who the source might be and what kind of political damage he or she represents to the floundering Bush administration. The naming of Ms Plame appears to have been an act of low political revenge against her diplomat husband, Joseph Wilson, who went public in the summer of 2003 to say he had investigated claims that Saddam Hussein had purchased yellowcake uranium from Africa, and found them to be bogus.

Her exposure may not be as politically significant, however, as what the case reveals about the half-truths and deceptions the Bush administration employed to cajole a frightened nation into supporting the military campaign to unseat Saddam.

Despite insisting for weeks that it will not comment on an ongoing criminal investigation, the White House was quick to issue a statement last week listing people it said were not Mr Woodward's source. These included the President himself, White House Chief of Staff Andy Card, former secretary of state Colin Powell and former CIA chief George Tenet.

The leading suspect, meanwhile, appears to be Stephen Hadley, currently the President's National Security Adviser, who pointedly failed to issue a clear denial when asked if he was Mr Woodward's source. Pressed during a presidential trip to South Korea whether his convoluted initial answer meant yes or no, he replied: "It is what it is."

The White House faced deepening political embarrassment - and possible new criminal indictments - over its justification of the war in Iraq yesterday following the announcement of a new grand jury to examine the outing of a politically inconvenient undercover CIA agent in the months immediately following the invasion.

Patrick Fitzgerald, the no-nonsense special prosecutor who has been making life miserable for the Bush administration for months, announced on Friday that the investigation was not only continuing but warranted the impanelling of a second grand jury. The first grand jury, whose term expired at the end of October, fingered Vice-President Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff, I Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on five counts of obstruction of justice and lying to investigators.

Until last week, the most vulnerable member of the administration appeared to be Karl Rove, President Bush's most valued political adviser, who has acknowledged being one of the officials who discussed the CIA agent Valerie Plame with reporters shortly before her identity was made public.

Now, however, the case has taken on an explosive new aspect following the revelation that Bob Woodward, the veteran Washington Post reporter and hero of Watergate, had been told about Ms Plame before any other journalist but kept the information to himself - even after the scandal broke and every news junkie in Washington was hungering after every last detail.

Mr Woodward himself does not appear to be in legal trouble, although he has taken a considerable hit to his journalistic reputation, but his source may well be. To judge by the text of Mr Libby's indictment and Mr Woodward's public statements in the past few days, it appears the source did not initially tell Mr Fitzgerald about his conversations with Mr Woodward in June 2003 but hurried back to the special prosecutor about two weeks ago, after Mr Woodward "reminded" him about them. The journalist then testified to Mr Fitzgerald himself last Monday.
Washington now has a new guessing game on its hands, which is to figure out who the source might be and what kind of political damage he or she represents to the floundering Bush administration. The naming of Ms Plame appears to have been an act of low political revenge against her diplomat husband, Joseph Wilson, who went public in the summer of 2003 to say he had investigated claims that Saddam Hussein had purchased yellowcake uranium from Africa, and found them to be bogus.

Her exposure may not be as politically significant, however, as what the case reveals about the half-truths and deceptions the Bush administration employed to cajole a frightened nation into supporting the military campaign to unseat Saddam.

Despite insisting for weeks that it will not comment on an ongoing criminal investigation, the White House was quick to issue a statement last week listing people it said were not Mr Woodward's source. These included the President himself, White House Chief of Staff Andy Card, former secretary of state Colin Powell and former CIA chief George Tenet.

The leading suspect, meanwhile, appears to be Stephen Hadley, currently the President's National Security Adviser, who pointedly failed to issue a clear denial when asked if he was Mr Woodward's source. Pressed during a presidential trip to South Korea whether his convoluted initial answer meant yes or no, he replied: "It is what it is."

Security adviser named as source in CIA scandal - Sunday Times - Times Online

Michael Smith and Sarah Baxter





THE mysterious source who gave America’s foremost journalist, Bob Woodward, a tip-off about the CIA agent at the centre of one of Washington’s biggest political storms was Stephen Hadley, the White House national security adviser, according to lawyers close to the investigation.

Woodward, the Washington Post reporter who broke the Watergate scandal that forced President Richard Nixon out of office, has refused publicly to divulge the name of his informant without permission, which has thus far been withheld.

The naming of CIA agent Valerie Plame as the wife of Joseph Wilson, the former US ambassador sent to Niger to investigate disputed claims that Saddam Hussein was trying to purchase uranium yellowcake for the manufacture of nuclear weapons, led to the indictment last month of Vice-President Dick Cheney’s top aide, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, for lying to a grand jury.

It is an offence in America to reveal the identity of a covert agent, although doubts remain about Plame’s precise status.

A spokeswoman for the National Security Council (NSC) denied that Hadley was the journalist’s source. However, in South Korea on Friday during an official visit with President George W Bush, Hadley dodged the question.

“I’ve also seen press reports from White House officials saying that I am not one of his sources,” Hadley said with a smile. Asked if this was a yes or no he replied: “It is what it is.”

A White House official said the national security adviser’s ambiguity was unintentional and repeated that Hadley was not Woodward’s source. But others close to the investigation insisted that he was.

If so, according to Woodward’s timeline, he will have disclosed the information in mid-June 2003, roughly a week before Libby talked to other reporters on June 23. Supporters of Cheney’s disgraced aide are jubilant that this casts doubt on special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s contention that Libby was the first to spread the word about Plame.

When Woodward realised this, he went back to his informant. “My source said he or she had no alternative but to go to the prosecutor. I said, ‘If you do, am I released?’ The source said yes, but only for the purpose of discussing it with Fitzgerald.” Woodward testified under oath to the special prosecutor last Monday.

Woodward said the unnamed official told him about Plame in “an offhand, casual manner . . . almost gossip” and “I didn’t attach any importance to it”. He never wrote up the story.

With more journalists in the loop than previously identified, it will be harder for Fitzgerald to prove Libby was deliberately lying when he said he first learnt of Plame from a journalist rather than the CIA.

Two years ago, when Plame’s identity was first revealed, Hadley was Condoleezza Rice’s deputy at the NSC. He is also thought to have been a key source for two books by Woodward on the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

Other potential suspects have been denying they are Woodward’s source. Cheney has come under suspicion, although sources close to the investigation claim he is not in the frame.

Fitzgerald may want to interview Woodward’s informant and declared in court filings on Friday that proceedings would continue under a new grand jury. Supporters of Karl Rove, the top White House adviser known as “Bush’s brain”, also fear Fitzgerald may still be investigating him.

Woodward declined to confirm or deny that Hadley had leaked him the information.

It is familiar territory for the Washington Post journalist, who kept the name of Deep Throat, his Watergate informant, secret for more than three decades until Mark Felt, the former deputy director of the FBI, outed himself this year.

Yet colleagues at the Washington Post have been criticising him on their internal message board. One accused Woodward of being the “800-pound elephant in the room”, adding: “I admire the hell out of Bob, but this looks awful.”

Woodward joins a decadent dance - Los Angeles Times

Tim Rutten
Regarding Media

November 19, 2005

Whatever impact the scandal surrounding the leak of former CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity ultimately has on the Bush administration, it continues to spread through the Washington press corps like a toxic plume.

As it does, it discredits not only individual reporters and damages their news organizations but also an entire style of reporting that has come to dominate the way Americans are informed — or misinformed — concerning their government's conduct.

This week's casualty was the Washington Post's Bob Woodward, who, as it turns out, has concealed for 17 months the fact that a Bush administration official he still refuses to name to his readers leaked Plame's identity to him before the vice president's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby — now under indictment for perjury — named the then-covert agent to New York Times reporter Judy Miller and others.

Woodward's disclosure was motivated not by a sudden pang of conscience, as it turns out, but by the sudden necessity of testifying under oath before a federal grand jury. Along the way, he incidentally revealed not only that he had concealed this information from his editors and readers for fear of subpoena, but also that he had in the interim gone on several television shows to trash the special prosecutor investigating the affair. Moreover, it now emerges, the reporting that went into his last best-selling book, "Plan of Attack," involved the submission of written questions in advance to Vice President Dick Cheney, a fact he never bothered to share with the book's readers.

There is something singularly appropriate about the fact that the Plame affair should involve Woodward, whose skillful and courageous use of the ur-voice among confidential sources virtually created a whole genre of Washington reporting. It's a journalistic strategy style dependent on the cultivation of access to well-placed officials greased by promises of "confidentiality." It's a way of doing journalism that still serves its practitioners' career interests, but less and less often their readers or viewers because it's a game the powerful and well-connected have learned to play to their own advantage.

Whatever its self-righteous pretensions, it's a style of journalism whose signature sound is less the blowing of whistles than it is the spinning of tops.

That's why the Washington press corps, whose ranks include so many alleged commentators that you can't spit without hitting one, steadfastly refuses to put the Plame affair and its participants in the context that explains the event. That context is the Bush administration's unprecedented — and largely successful — effort to bend Washington-based news coverage to its ends. The Washington press corps doesn't want to talk about this because it basically puts some of its most admired members in a line of venal patsies. But consider:

Who can forget the administration's payment of nearly a quarter of a million dollars in federal money to the hapless pseudo-columnist and television and radio commentator Armstrong Williams, to promote the president's "no child left behind" initiative?

Then there was the distribution to local television stations across the country of federally financed, pre-packaged video reports designed to support the administration's educational and energy policy initiatives. The videos were tricked up to look like regular news feeds and apparently ran on numerous small stations whose viewers never were informed that they were watching government propaganda.

This week, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's inspector general reported that PBS' former chairman, Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, appears to have violated federal law by trying to force a political slant onto the network's programming. The inspector's report alluded to e-mails between Tomlinson and a White House official. On Thursday, Bloomberg.com reported that "Presidential advisor Karl Rove" and Tomlinson "discussed creating a 'conservative talk show and adding it to the public television lineup.' " According to Kenneth Konz, PBS' inspector general, Tomlinson and Rove, President Bush's chief political advisor, also corresponded about "shaking up the agency" and "adding Republican staff."

Placed in this context, Woodward, Miller, Time magazine's Matthew Cooper and NBC's Tim Russert are less tragic figures in a grand journalistic drama than they are sad — but willing — bit players in somebody else's rather sorry little charade.

This is hardly the first administration intent on managing the press for its own convenience and advantage. Abraham Lincoln had no more compunction about shutting down Copperhead newspapers than he did about suspending habeas corpus. During World War I, Woodrow Wilson's Justice Department was ruthless in its treatment of our then-vast and vigorous foreign-language press and publishing houses.

The preternaturally charming Franklin Roosevelt found it easy to play the White House press corps like a violin, since most of its members — unlike their papers' proprietors — were favorably disposed toward the New Deal. Roosevelt, moreover, consciously used the new mass medium of radio to speak around the country's generally hostile editorial pages and directly to the people.

John Kennedy, who genuinely liked reporters and was fascinated by journalism, made famous and effective use of his warm friendships with White House correspondents, including Benjamin C. Bradlee, who would go on to be Woodward's editor. Richard Nixon — for whom charm was not an option — plotted to use the IRS against reporters, editors and cartoonists who irritated him. (An ill-advised digression into burglary short-circuited the plan.) Bill Clinton, who always thought he could sweet talk the chrome off a trailer hitch, was fond of making personal calls to reporters' homes. (This writer was the recipient of a couple of those, and found them — like cheap champagne — a mildly heady, if ultimately unconvincing, experience.)

Two things have distinguished this Bush administration's efforts at press manipulation from those that have gone before.

One is their sweep and consistency. There has been bribery — as in the egregious case of the wretched Williams. There has been deception — as in the planting of phony news videos. There have been alleged violations of federal laws and regulations — as in Tomlinson's and Rove's efforts to subvert public television. There has been stealth — as in the whispering campaign to discredit Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

And, of course, there has been good old-fashioned bullying, as in the president's and vice-president's assertions that raising questions about their push to war or the torture of U.S. captives is somehow "reprehensible" and unpatriotic. It's a melancholy comment on the state of the American press that it takes a former director of Central Intelligence, Adm. Stansfield Turner, to identify Dick Cheney for what he has become — "vice president for torture" — and that he had to do it in a foreign forum, on Britain's ITV news, as he did Thursday.

The other reason all this has more or less succeeded and gone all but unremarked upon is that the administration has adroitly availed itself of the cultural complicity that prevails in a fin de siècle Washington press corps living out the decadence of an increasingly discredited reporting style. As the Valerie Plame scandal and its spreading taint have made all too clear, the trade in confidentiality and access that has made stars of reporters like Bob Woodward and Judy Miller now is utterly bankrupt.

It still may call itself investigative journalism — and so it once was — but now it's really just a glittering and carefully choreographed waltz in which all the dancers share the unspoken agreement that the one unpardonable faux pas is to ask who's calling the tune.

ABC News: Aide: Rice Was Not Woodward's Source

Secretary Rice Did Not Leak Valerie Plame's CIA Connection to Washington Post Editor, Aide Says
By ANNE GEARAN
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was not the senior Bush administration official who told Washington Post editor Bob Woodward that White House critic Joseph Wilson's wife worked for the CIA, a Rice aide said Saturday.

"Secretary Rice wasn't Woodward's source," Rice senior adviser Jim Wilkinson said.

Rice was President Bush's White House national security adviser in June 2003, when Woodward says a highly placed official told him of Valerie Plame's CIA connection. Woodward has said the source was someone other than I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff and the only person indicted in a federal probe of the leak case.

Rice took over from Colin Powell as the nation's top diplomat in January. She is traveling with Bush in Asia this week, as is her successor as national security adviser, Stephen Hadley.

Hadley won't say if he was Woodward's source. But Hadley volunteered on Friday that some administration officials say he's not the leaker.

Hadley was asked at a news briefing in Busan, Korea, whether he was Woodward's source.

Referring to news accounts about the case, Hadley said with a smile, "I've also seen press reports from White House officials saying that I am not one of his sources." He said he would not comment further because the CIA leak case remains under investigation.

Leaving the room, Hadley was asked if his answer amounted to a yes or a no. "It is what it is," he said.

Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor who has been investigating the leak of the CIA operative's identity, is continuing his probe and will present additional evidence to another grand jury, according to court papers filed Friday.

He declined to comment when asked whether his investigation was ramping back up after Libby's Oct. 28 indictment on perjury and obstruction charges. The term has expired for the grand jury that indicted Libby.

For nearly two years, Fitzgerald has been looking into whether top Bush aides leaked the classified information about Plame's covert CIA status and identity to reporters.

The investigation appeared to have cooled after charges were announced against Libby, who has pleaded innocent. But earlier this week, the Washington Post's Woodward disclosed that he had learned the CIA operative's identity from a top Bush administration official before another journalist had published Plame's name.

The revelations from Woodward, who shared this information under oath with Fitzgerald on Monday, contradict Fitzgerald's earlier portrayal of Libby as the first government official to leak Plame's identity to reporters.

Woodward, in a sworn deposition, said a senior administration official told him in mid-June 2003 that Wilson's wife worked as a CIA analyst on weapons of mass destruction.

Plame's identity was revealed in July 2003 by columnist Robert Novak, eight days after her husband, a former U.S. ambassador, accused the Bush administration of twisting prewar intelligence to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.

Libby, 55, was charged with lying to FBI agents and a grand jury about how he learned about Plame's identity and her work at the CIA and when he subsequently shared that information with reporters.

A former Pentagon official, Douglas Feith, said he never spoke to Woodward about Wilson, his wife or anything related. Feith, once the undersecretary of defense for policy, has helped shape strategies to stem the spread of weapons technology, devise the U.S. response to terrorism and frame the Bush administration's global peace initiative.

In another development, a person familiar with the federal investigation said that Vice President Dick Cheney is not the unidentified source who told Woodward about Plame's CIA status.

The vice president did not talk with Woodward on the day in question, did not provide the information that's been reported in Woodward's notes and has not had any conversations over the past several weeks about any release for allowing Woodward to testify, said the person, speaking on condition of anonymity because the federal probe is still under way.


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