Defending Valerie Plame: Who Is This Punk?
News: How a Republican CIA alum came to Washington to testify on behalf of his spy-training classmate—and ran straight into a GOP buzz saw.
December 15, 2007
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[From the author's biographical afterword to Plame's memoir, Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House]
When Valerie Wilson was exposed in the summer of 2003, she was contemplating an offer to move from an operational to a more managerial role within the Directorate of Operations Counterproliferation Division. While she had initially turned down the offer to become the CPD's Chief of Personnel Evaluation Management, she accepted in the fall of 2003, just as the Justice Department was undertaking an investigation of the outing of her identity. "No sooner had I begun to get my arms around a branch . . . than the FBI paid me a visit," she writes.
At the same time, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was undertaking an investigation of pre-war intelligence. The Republican chair of the committee, Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican with close ties to the White House and in particular Cheney, demanded that the first part of the committee's investigation on prewar intelligence focus exclusively on the mistakes of the intelligence community. Only after the 2004 presidential election, Roberts insisted, would the committee investigate other factors, including the role of a Pentagon intelligence shop, the Office of Special Plans, Iraqi exile leader Ahmad Chalabi, and the Iraqi National Congress in influencing policy makers' misjudgments and misstatements about what would be found in Iraq. But Roberts stalled the second phase of the investigation for over two years, and argued for releasing it in pieces, diminishing its impact.
As Valerie Wilson and many colleagues from the CIA who testified before the committee would soon learn, some of its Republican members considered them fair game as well—for character and professional assassination and for attempted retaliation for offering testimony to the committee. Roberts would later be reported to have let the Office of the Vice President intervene repeatedly to influence and reduce the scope of the investigation, in order to prevent the White House and the Office of the Vice President itself from ever coming under any congressional oversight scrutiny. Cheney "exerted 'constant' pressure on the Republican former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee to stall an investigation into the Bush administration's use of flawed intelligence on Iraq, the panel's Democratic chairman charged Thursday," McClatchy newspapers' Jonathan Landay reported in January 2007. In an interview, the committee's new Democratic chairman "[Jay] Rockefeller said that it was ‘not hearsay' that Cheney . . . pushed Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., to drag out the probe of the administration's use of prewar intelligence. 'It was just constant,' Rockefeller said of Cheney's alleged interference. He added that he knew that the vice president attended regular policy meetings in which he conveyed White House directions to Republican staffers."
After Valerie was exposed in Robert Novak's July 14, 2003, newspaper column, her colleagues—some from her Career Trainee class days who had only known her as Val P.—were horrified-and outraged. They began contacting one another, to try to think of ways to offer their support. "We all knew somebody from our class had been exposed," says Jim Marcinkowski. "But we didn't know each other's last names and, of course, hers had changed."
Marcinkowski was an unlikely Bush White House antagonist. As the first chairman of the Michigan State University College Republicans, he had received an award from Jack Abramoff—the now-disgraced GOP lobbyist who was tight with the Bush White House—for heading the fastest-growing state College Republicans chapter in the country. He had helped run Reagan's 1980 campaign outreach to Michigan college students. Marcinkowski had been a CIA officer, an FBI clerk, a Navy enlistee, a public prosecutor, and by 2003, was deputy city attorney for Royal Oak, Michigan.5In 1992, he ran, unsuccessfully, as a Republican for a state office. Marcinkowski later donated to the Bush/Cheney campaign at a 1999 fund-raiser headlined by Laura Bush.
" ‘Hey, this is our Val,' " Marcinkowski remembers of an e-mail to their group by fellow classmate Larry Johnson. "‘We have to do something about it.' "A group of her classmates and colleagues wrote a letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times, which was published in October 2003. "The public identification, the ‘outing' if you will, of an undercover intelligence operative has never before, to my knowledge, been accomplished by the United States in a deliberate political act," Marcinkowski wrote in the letter published by the Times. "The exposure of Valerie Plame—who I have reason to believe operated undercover—apparently by a senior administration official is nothing less than a despicable act for which someone should be held accountable. This case is especially upsetting to me because she was my Agency classmate as well as my friend."
Shortly after that, the group went on ABC's Nightline, including a CIA colleague who, like Valerie, had formerly worked clandestinely, and had her voice disguised and face obscured in black shadow.
Nothing in his past experience as an FBI clerk, CIA officer, lawyer, and public prosecutor prepared Marcinkowski for what he faced when he went to testify before Pat Roberts's intelligence committee about the Plame leak. "We sent a letter to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, saying we want to tell them something," Marcinkowski recounted. The letter was signed by a half-dozen former CIA officers, including three from Valerie's 1985 Career Trainee class. "They blew us off. After that, nothing happened until [then Senate minority leader] Tom Daschle contacted us and said, ‘I am going to have a Senate Democratic committee hearing,'" and asked if they would appear.
The Democratic Policy Committee hearing was supposed to take place on Friday, October 24, 2003. Shortly after it was scheduled, Marcinkowski recounts, "my boss here in Detroit got a fax from a staffer on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Basically it said in some snotty way, 'Somebody claims in your office to have information.' [The staffer] made it sound like, 'Who is this punk? If he wants to say anything, he can come in at 1pm on Thursday'"—the day before the policy committee hearing was scheduled, Marcinkowski recounts.
He provided the fax sent October 20, 2003 by then Republican chief of staff to the Senate Intelligence Committee, Bill Duhnke—strangely, to Marcinkowski's boss. "The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has received a fax from your office sent by James Marcinkowski," Duhnke, Roberts's staffer, wrote in his e-mail to Marcinkowski's boss. "Mr. Marcinkowski claims to have ‘important information' he wishes to share with the committee. . . . The letter states that '[t]ime is of the essence.' Therefore, I respectfully request that Mr. Marcinkowski contact me at his earliest convenience to discuss an appearance before the Committee." It seems obvious that, under the guise of a backhanded invitation to say something to the committee, Duhnke intended to try to get Marcinkowski in trouble with his boss. But it failed, Marcinkowski says, because his boss is an old friend with whom he had worked for years, who recognized the virtue in Marcinkowski's desire to seek justice for their former colleague Valerie. "Like I told you, it was my classmate they exposed," Marcinkowski says he told his boss. "He said, 'OK, great. Go beat the shit out of somebody.'"
"The next evening I was on the plane to D.C.," Marcinkowski continues. As it turned out, various other colleagues were out of town and Marcinkowski ended up facing twelve senators from the Senate Intelligence Committee for the closed briefing on Thursday, October 23, 2003, all by himself.
Marcinkowski told the senators that the exposure of Plame by her own government was "unprecedented. It was our classmate. We had kept a secret for eighteen years. And we were all betrayed by this White House." Marcinkowski had prepared a statement to deliver in open session before the Senate Democratic Policy committee the next day. "I also said she was covert, and I knew it. And they were taking it very seriously."
He took questions after his statement. One of the committee's more moderate Republicans, Chuck Hagel, a Vietnam vet from Nebraska, asked him, do you think this White House can investigate itself?
As Marcinkowski responded that if the attorney general was trying to intimidate federal judges, why would you think they would not be prepared to intimidate a special counsel, a ranking Republican close to the White House, Christopher "Kit" Bond of Missouri, walked in.
"He went off," Marcinkowski said. "'I am not going to sit here and listen to this guy attack my good friend, the attorney general Ashcroft, of this country.' "A total "food fight" ensued, Marcinkowski said, with committee member Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein accusing Bond of trying to intimidate a witness.
After he finished with his testimony and the senators' questions, Marcinkowski went out the back door of the building and walked over to a little park between the Senate office building and Union Station. He sat down to think about what had just happened and his cell phone rang. It was Tom Daschle's staffer, who was setting up the hearing for the next day's Democratic Policy Committee meeting. "And she told me, ‘Jim, Pat Roberts just declared all your testimony to be secret. I don't know what you are planning on saying tomorrow, but he declared it secret.'"
Marcinkowski, the lawyer and deputy city attorney, was stunned. "I sat on the park bench, in a daze. I didn't know what the hell to do. Now it hits me, that is why the Senate Select Intelligence Committee had scheduled their testimony for the day before the Senate Democratic public hearing. Until that happened we didn't hear shit from the Senate Select Intelligence Committee. They slapped the secrecy thing on it, that was their intention," to try to prevent Valerie's CIA colleagues from testifying publicly about what had happened to her, and why it was a betrayal of everyone in the CIA.
Marcinkowski called a close friend, an attorney in Detroit, to get legal advice on what he should do, since what he had told the Senate Intelligence Committee was exactly what he planned to tell the Senate Democratic Policy Committee the next day, and Roberts had appeared to try to suppress that testimony by, implausibly, declaring it classified. "'Jim, I tell you what,'" his friend told him. "'I already know what you're going to do. I am going to call all your friends and start collecting bond money right now,'" Marcinkowski recounts. "I told him, 'You think this is funny. I'm sitting here in a park, by my lonesome, and they're saying I'm violating all kinds of laws.' And he said, ‘Yep, and I know exactly what you are doing tomorrow morning.'"
Gathering courage, Marcinkowski called Daschle's staffer back. "You call Roberts' office and you tell him, I said that he can go straight to hell," Marcinkowski says he told her.
Refusing to be intimidated (a Hill staffer says that Roberts doesn't have the power to classify anything), the hearing proceeded. Marcinkowski showed up to testify with fellow former CIA official Johnson and former CIA Counterterrorism Chief Vincent Cannistraro. They testified publicly before the Senate Democrats, and as Daschle was wrapping things up, Marcinkowski saw ranking Senate Intelligence Committee Democrat Jay Rockefeller whispering in Daschle's ear.
"Daschle says, ‘Senator Rockefeller has one more question,' " Marcinkowski recounts. "And Rockefeller looks straight at me. ‘I would like to ask Mr. Marcinkowski, who is an attorney, one more question: Do you think the White House can investigate itself?'" Asking the question that had caused the uproar in the closed Senate Intelligence Committee hearing the day before, Rockefeller had a "big-city grin" on his face.
Afterward, Marcinkowski said, Rockefeller grabbed his hand and asked, smiling, "What did you think of the food fight yesterday?"
In January 2007, after Democrats took control of both houses of Congress, Rockefeller became chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and Roberts was replaced as ranking Republican by Christopher Bond.
In the spring 2007 release of "Prewar Intelligence Assessments about Postwar Iraq"—one section of the Senate Intelligence Committee's long-awaited "Phase II" investigation of prewar intelligence that Roberts had gone to such lengths to stall—Bond would continue the campaign against the Wilsons. The report mostly consists of two declassified prewar National Intelligence Council assessments that focused on the postwar environment in Iraq. "The Intelligence Community assessed prior to the war that establishing a stable democratic government in postwar Iraq would be a long, difficult, and possibly turbulent challenge," the SSCI report found. "The Intelligence community noted that Iraqi political culture did ‘not foster liberalism or democracy' and was ‘largely bereft of the social underpinnings that directly support development of broad-based participatory democracy.' . . . The Intelligence Community assessed prior to the war that al Qaeda probably would see an opportunity to accelerate its operational tempo and increase terrorist attacks during and after a US-Iraq war."
Committee Republicans complained the report was "partisan" and Vice Chairman Bond, joined by senators Orrin Hatch and Richard Burr, set about in the "additional views" to turn their attention once again to the Wilsons. "While not directly related to the subject of the report released today," they wrote, "it is appropriate here to discuss some additional information that has come to light about an earlier prewar inquiry report . . . that deals with Iraq-Niger uranium intelligence. . . . Additional information . . . supports the Committee's finding that Mrs. Wilson is the one who originally suggested Ambassador Wilson to look into the Iraq-Niger uranium matter...."
The trio offered few thoughts on the report's evidence that the administration apparently ignored the prewar assessments about the difficulties the U.S. would encounter trying to establish a democracy in Iraq.
On July 2, 2007, President Bush commuted Scooter Libby's prison sentence. A pardon, close Libby trial observers note, would have eliminated Libby's ability to declare the right against self-incrimination to avoid testifying before Congress about not only his own role, but the role of the vice president and the president in authorizing the disclosure of Plame's identity to journalists. "If Bush were to pardon Libby, he and Vice President Cheney would give up the rationale they have used successfully for four years to avoid addressing their own roles in the case," wrote Jeff Lomonaco. "And Libby's trial made very clear that the President and Vice President played significant and troubling roles at the very heart of the case. . . . Published reports have indicated that Bush told Cheney something to the effect of ‘Get it out,' or ‘Let's get this out,' referring to information that would damage the case Joe Wilson was making against the administration. That means that if Bush and Cheney discussed Wilson's wife before the direction was given, the President was effectively authorizing his subordinate to disclose Plame's CIA identity to the press."
Plame formally resigned from the CIA on January 9, 2006. She had served the Agency and her country for more than twenty years.
In early 2007, as the trial of Libby got under way, she and Wilson moved with their children to New Mexico to try to re-create their lives.
Laura Rozen is Mother Jones' national security correspondent.
