There’s a rather problematic article in Tuesday’s Times on the subject of Robert Novak’s new column about the Plame matter.
It’s by Anne Kornblut.
The question the article seeks to answer is the mystery of why Novak referred to Joe Wilson’s wife as Valerie Plame when she had already for several years been going to by Valerie Wilson. The question has never had any legal significance per se. But it does have evidentiary significance, as Kornblut notes, in as much as the use of the name may shed light on Novak’s sources and, as Kornblut doesn’t note, on their motives.
Along the way, Kornblut appears to buy into Novak’s absurd argument that the need to keep Plame/Wilson’s identity secret was in any way related to which name she went by.
Writes Kornblut …
Any request that he withhold Ms. Wilson’s name from his column of July 14, 2003, would have been “meaningless” once he had been told she was married to Mr. Wilson, Mr. Novak wrote on Monday, because she was openly listed in the directory. But Mr. Novak also wrote that he would never have used Ms. Wilson’s name had anyone from the C.I.A. told him that doing so would endanger her or anyone else.
Again, this is nonsense.
The disclosure was identifying Wilson’s wife as a CIA operative, not that he had a wife, which needless to say was not a state secret.
On these points my only criticism of the article is that Kornblut seems to go along with Novak’s diversion, making the issue of the name appear to have more legal consequence than it has.
The real problem, though, is that Kornblut doesn’t examine another series of potential motives and the abundant evidence of Novak’s mendacity on this subject.
Novak’s use of Plame’s name has been used to try to narrow down who his sources may have been — something that Novak has a strong interest in concealing. Many have also speculated that Plame/Wilson was identified by the name ‘Plame’ precisely to cause the most damage to her career and the clandestine networks she had been involved in, since this was name she’d used through most of her career.
In other words, there’s a very clear potential motive for referring to her by her maiden name. It’s not a meaningless distinction.
In his column yesterday, Novak suggests that anyone could have figured out Wilson’s wife’s name by looking him up in Who’s Who. And Kornblut, perhaps not unreasonably, takes this as a suggestion that this may well have been what Novak did.
That may be true. Someone could have done that.
But why should we believe Novak?
There is very strong evidence that Novak has been lying about his exposure of Plame from the start.
As I’ve noted here on a number of occasions, Novak’s claim that he used the word ‘operative’ either accidentally or through sloppiness is simply not credible — on the basis of simple logic and a review of his previous columns. Novak only came up with his ‘accidental operative’ story after a legal inquiry got underway.
And the same seems to be the case with his dust-kicking claims about discovering Plame’s name from Who’s Who.
Timothy Phelps and Knut Royce got to Novak a week after his original column ran. And he said nothing about having to track down Plame’s name himself or any second-guessing about the word ‘operative’.
He was quite clear. When Phelps and Royce asked him about his exposure of Plame he told them: “I didn’t dig it out, it was given to me. They thought it was significant, they gave me the name and I used it.”
Bear in mind that he made that statement in the context of an article that was all about how he came up with Plame’s name and why he had revealed her identity as a covert agent.
The bottom line here is that Novak is simply not a reliable source. By all indications he has already lied publicly in an effort to protect both himself and his sources. There’s simply no reason to take what he says at face value when he comes up with new and improbable stories which again have the clear effect of reducing the legal vulnerability of his sources and further damage to his own professional reputation.
