Inside the 'Plame Affair'

It’s probably safe to assume that nobody who participated in the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson as a C.I.A. agent, in the summer of 2003, was mindful that the result of the process—the publication of Wilson’s name in Robert Novak’s syndicated column—might be a federal crime. The law that makes it one was passed in 1982, in response to the murder of the C.I.A.’s station chief in Athens, Richard Welch, after the turncoat agent Philip Agee and his journalistic allies began publishing the names of covert agents. It has been successfully invoked only once, in 1985. The people involved in the Wilson affair were thus behaving as they would normally behave, and not as people cognizant of the possibility of criminal prosecution would behave. The Justice Department investigation, which began in the early fall of 2003, and which a special counsel, Patrick Fitzgerald, took over that December, last Friday produced the indictment on five charges, including perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements, of Lewis Libby, Vice-President Cheney’s chief of staff, who resigned. It has also exposed a particularly light-resistant aspect of the dealings between journalists and their sources in Washington.