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OH PUKE...

The following Monday, July 14, 2003, I read Novak's syndicated column in the Washington Post. The sixth paragraph of the ten-paragraph story leapt out at me: "Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report."

When I showed it to Valerie, she was stoic in her manner but I could see she was crestfallen. Twenty years of loyal service down the drain, and for what, she asked after she had read it. What was Novak trying to say? What did blowing her cover have to do with the story? It was nothing but a hatchet job. She immediately began to prepare a checklist of things she needed to do to minimize the fallout to projects she was working on. Ever efficient, she jotted down reminders to mask the emotions swirling through her body. Finally, as the enormity of what Novak had done now settled on her, she sat in the corner and wondered aloud if she would still have any friends left after they found out that the person they knew was not her at all but a lie that she lived very convincingly.

JOE WILSON IS LUNATIC!!!

I had received a call from Post reporter Walter Pincus, who alerted me that "they are coming after you."

Family members are expressly forbidden from accepting employment that places them in any direct professional relationship, even once or twice removed.

Dick Cheney might be able to find a way to appoint one of his daughters to a key decision-making position in the State Department's Middle East Bureau, as he did; but Valerie could not—and would not if she could—have had anything to do with the CIA decision to ask me to travel to Niamey.

There was no possibility of Valerie recovering her former life. She would never be able to regain the anonymity and secrecy that her professional life had required; she would not be able to return to her discreet work on some of the most sensitive threats to our society in the foreseeable future, and perhaps ever.

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.

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.

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.

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 was waking up in the middle of the night and pacing the floor, as I had during that critical period in Baghdad during Desert Shield. Back then, my mind would be going a thousand miles a minute, trying to gain an edge on the thugs in the Iraqi regime; now I was trying to predict what the thugs in my own government would do, so I'd be ready to react effectively to their next move.

I was horrified that I could actually harbor suspicions—ones that were also being expressed by others—that a democratic government might actually do bodily harm to a political opponent. I laughed it off for my friends and pointed out that my golf handicap had gone down two strokes in the two and a half weeks of my enforced vacation.

That same week, on Thursday, July 17, David Corn called to alert me that what Novak had done, or at least what the person who had leaked Valerie's name to him had done, was possibly a crime, in that it might represent a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982. Corn then published a detailed explanation of the law to ensure that other journalists, as well as regular readers of The Nation, understood all the legalities involved.

NBC's Andrea Mitchell, who had been guest-hosting Meet the Press when I'd been on the show two weeks earlier, reached me at home on the Sunday night after Novak's article appeared to ask for my reaction to "what White House sources were telling her about the real story being not the sixteen words but Wilson and his wife." I agreed to do an interview with her the following day in my office. Although I had planned not to appear on any television shows prior to Thursday, July 24, when I was scheduled to do The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, I felt I had no choice but to try to stop the White House from continuing to push this canard.

The White House was trying to fling dust into the eyes of the press and public while descending into what a Republican staffer on the Hill later called a "slime-and-defend" mode.

That afternoon I received the call from Chris Matthews tersely informing me that Karl Rove had entered the fray with the comment that my wife was "fair game." To make a political point, to defend a political agenda, to blur the truth that one of the president's own staffers had scripted a lie into the president's mouth, one of the administration's most senior officials found it perfectly acceptable to push a story that exposed a national security asset.

The next morning I appeared on the Today show. Katie Couric was the interviewer. Unfortunately, I was on remote location, in Washington—my one chance to sit face-to-face with "America's sweetheart," and all I could see was the unblinking eye of the camera in front of me.