Former CIA spokesman: Plame “an undercover operative”

Former CIA spokesman Bill Harlow told the Washington Post in an interview that at the time he spoke with columnist Bob Novak, a few days before Novak’s column outing CIA agent Valerie Plame, Plame was an undercover operative.

Harlow, the former CIA spokesman, said in an interview yesterday that he testified last year before a grand jury about conversations he had with Novak at least three days before the column was published. He said he warned Novak, in the strongest terms he was permitted to use without revealing classified information, that Wilson’s wife had not authorized the mission and that if he did write about it, her name should not be revealed.

Harlow said that after Novak’s call, he checked Plame’s status and confirmed that she was an undercover operative [emphasis ours]. He said he called Novak back to repeat that the story Novak had related to him was wrong and that Plame’s name should not be used. But he did not tell Novak directly that she was undercover because that was classified information.

One of the enduring arguments advanced by defenders of senior White House official Karl Rove is that Plame was not undercover when Rove leaked her identity to Time Magazine reporter Matt Cooper and confirmed it to Novak. That argument is now, as Ron Ziegler might say from the grave, no longer operative.

Other tidbits in the Post story include the news that “special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has asked not only about how CIA operative Valerie Plame’s name was leaked but also how the administration went about shifting responsibility from the White House to the CIA for having included 16 words in the 2003 State of the Union address about Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium from Africa.”

The story also says that National Security Council deputy Stephen Hadley (now the NSC chief) talked with then-CIA director George Tenet about the CIA taking responsibility for the State of the Union gaffe “even though both knew the agency did not believe Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger.”

That must have been an interesting conversation.

The new revelations serve both to roll back the increasingly demented arguments deployed in defense of Rove’s leak, and to tie the affair ever more tightly to the administration’s entire Iraq policy and the way that policy was sold to the public and to those in Congress whose reservoirs of credulity had yet to be drained.

Adding to the pressure of the Plame investigation is an apparently determined attempt by Republican senators to rein in the administration’s conduct in the “War on Terra^®,” which is itself about to undergo a rebranding.

The discovery of vertebrates on the Republican side of the aisle in Congress — let’s hope their example inspires some Democrats as well — is an indication of how thoroughly undermined public confidence in the administration’s national security activities has become during the past months. Republicans don’t lightly oppose a president of their own party, particularly these Republicans and this president, and that they’re finally willing to do so speaks volumes about their own insecurities heading into the 2006 elections. And the not-so-slow drip of revelations from the Plame investigation, coming on top of the Downing Street Memo and other indications of administration chicanery and cluelessness, is playing no small role in increasing those insecurities.

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