http://www.davidcorn.com/
November 04, 2005
What Did Novak's Source Know About Plame?/Me and Triumph on Broadway: A Review
'Who is Mr. X and what did he know? That is, which administration official was the first source who told Bob Novak that Joseph Wilson's wife was a CIA operative, and what did this source tell Novak about Valerie Wilson? Special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald must know the answers to this question; otherwise Novak would be sitting in the slammer (as Judith Miller did for 85 days). But since this information is not critical to the question of whether Scooter Libby lied to FBI agents and grand jurors about how he had learned of Valerie Wilson's employment at the CIA, it was not included in the Libby indictment. But as I noted a few days ago, Fitzgerald placed a rather tantalizing fact in the indictment; he reported that on June 12, 2003--weeks before Joseph Wilson published his now-infamous New York Times op-ed about his trip to Niger--Dick Cheney told Libby that "Wilson's wife worked at the Central Intelligence Agency in the Counterproliferation Division." That was significant because the Counterproliferation Division is part of the operations directorate--aka the DO--which is the clandestine service of the CIA. This meant that Cheney and Libby had reason to believe--or at least suspect--that Valerie Wilson was an undercover employee of the CIA.
After I wrote about this small slice of the indictment (which Fitzgerald presented with no elaboration) a sharp-eyed reader emailed to point out an interesting line in a column that Novak published on October 1, 2003. Writing about his original article that included the Plame/CIA leak, he reported,
During a long conversation with a senior administration official, I asked why Wilson was assigned the mission to Niger. He said Wilson had been sent by the CIA's counterproliferation section at the suggestion of one of its employees, his wife. [Emphasis added].......'
Yes, I know of those reports. It's the Hanson story I am trying to track down .