Correspondence
Correspondence That Dame Plame ... I was amused, to say the least, to see that my old friends at The Weekly Standard asked Bob Novak to review Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the...
...Novak writes that Hubris "never even mentions" a report that Valerie Plame "had been outed long ago" by Soviet spy Aldrich Ames...
...Novak portrays Corn as a left-wing polemicist more interested in furthering an ideological agenda than seeking the truth...
...But we interviewed a number of senior CIA operations officers familiar with the Ames case—including a counter-intelligence official with direct knowledge of the damage assessment report—and none could say with any certainty that Ames had specifically fingered Plame to his Soviet handlers...
...If only some conservative journalists showed the same willingness to report stories that conflict with their initial assumptions...
...I can only hope that over time Novak will reflect on this and show some gratitude, perhaps in his forthcoming and long-awaited mem-oirs—which I (or better yet, David Corn...
...Novak writes that he is "disappointed" that the book did not probe more deeply into what Plame actually did at the CIA...
...In that capacity, Plame flew to Jordan in 2001 to assist the CIA operation that seized aluminum tubes intended for Saddam's regime—a clandestine operation that, like others she worked on, undermines the claim by some partisans that she was little more than a pencil-pushing desk analyst...
...Wilson...
...I was amused, to say the least, to see that my old friends at The Weekly Standard asked Bob Novak to review Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, the new book I coauthored with David Corn ("Who Said What When," Oct...
...I'll resist the temptation to be snide about this (was Scooter Libby unavailable...
...My overall point was that the book does not delve deeply into matters that might contradict the Joseph Wilson conspiracy theory...
...Finally, while I appreciate Novak's laudatory words about my reportage, I must offer a word of defense for my coauthor...
...Yet the book describes Wilson as an "imperfect critic" who at times garbled facts and "overstated his case"—hardly a blanket defense...
...Yet in the course of our collaboration, Corn showed not the slightest hesitancy about pursuing and including prominently in our book the information that has gotten Hubris its most attention: the disclosure that then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, not a White House official, was Novak's original source about Valerie Plame...
...Wilson, which I found accepted in intelligence circles...
...Robert D. Novak responds: I erred in saying Hubris "never even mentions" Aldrich Ames outing Mrs...
...Michael Isikoff Silver Spring, Md...
...As we document, at the same time Armitage was leaking to Novak, Libby and Karl Rove were spreading the same information about Wilson's wife to other reporters in an effort to discredit an Iraq war critic who had clearly become a nuisance...
...This is by no means the whole story, of course...
...But Novak also must have missed the introduction to Hubris (and much of Chapter 15) where we report for the first time Plame's actual job: chief of operations for the Joint Task Force on Iraq within the Counterproliferation Division of the Directorate of Operations...
...But Novak must have missed page 284 where we note that, before his arrest in 1994, Ames had served on a promotion panel for CIA officers, including those, like Plame, who had nonofficial cover (NOC) status...
...I should have said the book "never seriously considers" Ames outing Mrs...
...Novak writes that our book "comes close" to being "an unmitigated apologia" for Joseph Wilson...
...Maybe Novak has better sources on this, but absent hard confirmation, we chose to be cautious and write that "within the CIA, some officers later came to believe" that Plame's return to agency headquarters in 1997 was prompted by the Ames affair, "but it was never clear if Ames told the Russians about her...
...Still, at the end of the day, our reporting confirmed Novak's initial assertion that his first source was a senior official who did not have a reputation as a "partisan gunslinger...
...will be happy to review in The Weekly Standard...
...I regret that my friend Mike Isikoff, in his letter, is still peddling the story of Scooter Libby and Karl Rove attempting to discredit Wilson by revealing his wife's intelligence background...
...Apparently, he joins David Corn in not being able to accept that the conspiracy theory was demolished by his own book...
...As we report, agency officials who conducted a post-mortem on the Ames affair feared that he may have tipped off the Soviets to the identities of CIA officers whose careers he was evaluating, and, as a result, some NOCs were brought home...
...The book details each of Wilson's misstatements—including his erroneous claim to have debunked documents he never saw—even as it concludes that on larger points, such as the administration's twisting of intelligence on Iraq, he was basically right...
...The revelation about Armitage undercut some of the political left's theories about the Plame case...
...in order to gently point out a few of the inaccuracies and misrepresentations in the esteemed columnist's critique...
Vol. 12 • October 2006 • No. 7
