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Investigators are pressing Administration officials to let journalists tell whatever they know about the leak of a CIA agent's identity FBI investigators looking into the criminal leak of a CIA agent’s identity have asked Bush Administration officials including senior political adviser Karl Rove to release reporters from any confidentiality agreements regarding conversations about the agent. If signed, the single-page requests made over the last week would give investigators new ammunition for questioning reporters who have so far, according to those familiar with the case, not disclosed the names of administration officials who divulged that Valerie Plame, wife of former ambassador...

He says the Bush administration violated his wife's privacy by revealing that she worked for the CIA. But now Spygate accuser Joseph Wilson is sharing with reporters intimate details about his relationship with the allegedly secretive Valerie Plame, offering an account of the couple's "heavy make-out" session just before she told him she worked for the CIA. Wilson, who said recently he would have sacrificed anything to guard his wife's privacy, offers the steamy details in the Jan. 2004 issue of Vanity Fair magazine. The move has even supporters wondering if he's blown his credibility as a White House whistleblower...

<p>WASHINGTON Dec. 30 ? Attorney General John Ashcroft will recuse himself from an investigation into who leaked the name of a CIA operative, Justice Department sources said Tuesday.</p> <p>The investigation will be headed by the U.S. attorney in Chicago, Patrick Fitzgerald, who will report to Ashcroft's new deputy, James Comey, the officials said. It was not immediately clear why Ashcroft made the decision.</p>

I sat between this incredible guy who had been on death row for eighteen years before being freed by the Innocence Project at Medill Journalism school (the winner of this year’s $100K Puffin/Nation prize) and Joe Wilson, winner of this year’s Ron Ridenhour prize. I asked Joe why Powell had turned out to be such a wimp—failing to use any of his prized credibility to put the breaks on his lying colleagues, and instead telling all those falsehoods at the UN and convincing a boatload of gullible reporters of a whole mess of stuff that just ain’t so. Wilson—whose speech...

Just a few short months ago Uraniumgate whistleblower Joseph Wilson was complaining that his wife's life was endangered by a gabby White House aide who outed her as a CIA employee to columnist Robert Novak. But if shy spy Valerie Plame-Wilson is still troubled by her newfound celebrity, she's doing a good job of hiding it. First there was talk of a movie deal from Mr. Wilson himself, who revealed to the Washington Post in August that the couple had discussed who would play her should a suitable screenplay materialize. Then there was the book deal - real, not imagined,...

The CIA spy at the centre of a row over allegations that the White House endangered national security by leaking her identity appears to have undermined her supporters' case by appearing in Vanity Fair. Valerie Plame and her husband, Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador, are pictured in next month's edition looking glamorous in their Jaguar car. Sunglasses and a headscarf provide the only disguise for the woman the celebrity magazine calls "the most famous female spy in America". Just two months ago Mr Wilson said his wife had authorised him to say that she would "rather chop off her right...

Who outed Valerie Wilson as a CIA secret agent? Clue: her husband, Joseph, had just criticised the Bush administration. Julian Borger talks exclusively to the man who may have started a new Watergate It is early autumn in Washington. The leaves are falling, another election season is limbering up, and the nation's capital is once more embroiled in a gale-force scandal. It is an extraordinary affair that combines espionage, political dirty tricks and weapons of mass destruction - a heady mix normally found only in airport thrillers. But fact has had a knack of trumping fiction in Washington lately. In...

<p>Democrats began running a television ad yesterday saying the Bush administration's purported leaking of the identity of a CIA officer is another in a series of scandals from this White House.</p> <p>"It keeps getting worse. Scandals in the Bush White House," the ad announcer says as the screen flashes news headlines about leaks. "Now they illegally leaked the identity of an American CIA agent, all to hide Bush administration deceptions about the war in Iraq."</p>

Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administration’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered. The committee is concentrating on the last ten years’ worth of reports by the C.I.A. Preliminary findings, one intelligence official told me, are disquieting. “The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily,” he said. The problems range from a lack of quality control to different agencies’ reporting contradictory assessments at the same time. One finding, the official went...

LIKE MANY FORMER and active-duty case officers of the Central Intelligence Agency, I often find it painful listening to outsiders talk about the clandestine service. Operations are usually rather straightforward, earthy affairs between consenting adults--espionage is seldom a seductive recruitment plan played out in the shadows. But outsiders routinely depict clandestine intelligence collection as a sexy, dark, and dangerous profession. Intelligence officers, too, often can't resist exaggerating the importance, the sleuthful methods, and the risk attached to a normal career in the Directorate of Operations. The common man, the journalist on the intelligence beat, and the spooks at Langley all...

WASHINGTON Oct. 14 — A federal judge has ordered five reporters, including one from The Associated Press, to reveal their sources for stories that portrayed Wen Ho Lee, a former nuclear weapons scientist, as a chief suspect in a Chinese espionage investigation. U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ordered the reporters to answer questions about their sources and to provide Lee's attorneys with notes and other documents from their reporting. "It does not detract from the importance of the First Amendment principle at stake to conclude, in the instant case at least," that making possible evidence of government leaks available...

The media frenzy over the alleged outing of Valerie Plame, a CIA employee, could be taking a new turn. Circumstantial evidence now suggests that Plame and her hubby, Joe Wilson, are not only using the incident to embarrass the Bush administration but they planned to embarrass it some time ago. What the media is deliberately overlooking is that it was Plame who recommended that Wilson be sent to Niger to determine whether Saddam was trying to buy uranium from that country. Both Plame and Wilson are partisan Democrats, with Wilson nursing an intense hatred of President Bush that runs so...

Who 'Blew' Mrs. Wilson's Cover? by Herbert Romerstein Posted Oct 10, 2003 The liberal press and the Democrat demagogues on Capitol Hill are having a hissy fit over "who blew the cover of Joe Wilson's wife." The answer is not hard to find. The culprit was Joe Wilson IV—with some help from his wife. When Wilson wrote an op-ed in The New York Times in July and revealed that he had gone to Niger on a CIA assignment, he called attention to his wife. CIA people who are really undercover are very careful about not identifying themselves or their families...

Mark Steyn says the CIA scandal is important not because it put an agent’s life at risk — it didn’t — but because it shows that US Intelligence is either obstructive or inept New Hampshire America now has its own version of l’affaire Gilligan. As in Britain, the story involves journalists, and sources, and the leaking of the name of a government employee, and an investigation into which high-up did the leaking, and how badly the country’s leaders will be damaged, etc. The details of the Kelly/Gilligan business never really held anybody’s attention over here: most people I’ve spoken to...

Joseph C. Wilson IV is having the time of his life. The former-diplomat-turned-Bush-administration-accuser spent last week ruminating over who might play his wife -- the now-famous CIA operative Valerie Plame -- when Hollywood comes knocking on the couple's door. "She is really quite amazing," Wilson told The Washington Post, which described Plame as a slim, 40-year-old blonde, possessing "the looks of a film star" herself. Somehow, this doesn't sound like a man worried that the leak of his wife's name and identity as a CIA employee by someone high up in the Bush administration might jeopardize her life. It sounds...

Intelligence analysts — like all detectives — find excitement in anomalies. An anomaly in conduct — action, reaction, and such — may be insignificant, but is often a clue to what is about to happen, or why something already has. In politics, as well as in intelligence, we ignore anomalies at our peril. Right now, the CIA is awash in them, and the president should be asking George Tenet some really tough questions about Joe Wilson In the long buildup to the Iraq campaign, the Bush administration turned virtually all of our intelligence assets to gathering information about Saddam's WMD...

Former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Joseph Wilson repeatedly dodged questions Tuesday morning about whether his wife was an undercover agent at the CIA, an issue that could determine whether the Bush administration committed a crime when it revealed her identity. Asked to settle once and for all the mystery of whether his wife was "a covert operative for the CIA," Wilson told national radio host Don Imus, "You ought to assume that the CIA would not have referred this matter to Justice if there was not some merit to the referral." "I don't understand that answer," Imus responded, adding, "Either...

Prosecute Wilson? A leading New York congressman is calling for an investigation into whether former U.S. diplomat Joseph C. Wilson IV violated CIA secrecy when he blew the lid off his role in a February 2002 mission to determine whether Iraq had sought uranium from Niger...

<p>A leading New York congressman is calling for an investigation into whether former U.S. diplomat Joseph C. Wilson IV violated CIA secrecy when he blew the lid off his role in a February 2002 mission to determine whether Iraq had sought uranium from Niger.</p>

A leading New York congressman is calling for an investigation into whether Leakgate accuser Joseph Wilson violated CIA secrecy when he blew the lid off his role in a February 2002 mission to determine whether Iraq had sought uranium from Niger. For the last week Wilson has been demanding an investigation into the Bush administration's role in revealing his wife's job as a secret CIA operative, a move that he contends was an act of retaliation for his decision to go public about the Niger mission in a July op-ed piece for the New York Times. But Rep. Peter King,...