ASHINGTON -- It was like a movie scene. But instead of
meeting cute, they met covert.
Valerie Plame and Joseph Wilson both happened to alight in Washington,
their jet-set schedules intersecting, and spotted each other across a
cocktail party filled with foreigners.
"I saw this striking blonde," he recalled, still sounding smitten six
years later. At first she said she was an energy analyst, but confided
sometime around the first kiss that she was in the C.I.A. "I had a
security clearance," grinned Mr. Wilson, then a political adviser to the
commander of U.S. forces in Europe.
Now Washington is consumed with the saga of how the glamorous C.I.A.
officer and the dashing California surfer-turned-ambassador went from
wedding cake to yellowcake.
The former diplomat sparked the White House shame spiral when he wrote
a Times Op-Ed piece questioning whether the Bush administration had
manipulated intelligence to justify the war in Iraq and buried his report
debunking the allegation that Iraq had tried to buy Niger uranium.
Unable to find weapons of mass destruction, the Bush team has turned to
weapons of personal destruction. It's bad enough that the administration
hasn't come up with any plausible reason for not having uncovered any
W.M.D., even as it's requesting $600 million more to find them; now it's
practicing Crawford McCarthyism.
At his office yesterday, a block from the White House that he has
turned into Bleak House, Mr. Wilson was calm, even as Republicans
continued to rip him. For Bush officials, who have wielded patriotism as a
bludgeon on critics, you'd think that doing something as unpatriotic as
outing Mr. Wilson's wife and endangering the lives of her C.I.A. contacts
would be enough. Nah.
The group that fights so ferally to keep everything secret, from the
cronies who met with Dick Cheney to the identities of the people it has
tossed into the brig at Gitmo, had no problem spilling the beans on its
own spy when self-preservation was at stake.
The issue is the administration's credibility, not Joe Wilson's.
The men who won the 2000 election by promising to restore honor and
integrity to the White House spent yesterday doing a pretty good imitation
of O. J. Simpson, looking for the culprit. You could just picture
President Bush with his Sherlock Holmes deerstalker, magnifying glass and
bloodhound Barney. Silly. The White House knows who did it. All Mr. Bush
has to do is roll heads.
Mr. Wilson spent yesterday at his office, wondering if he could return
the 49 messages on his relentlessly vibrating cellphone before going off
to a Dave Brubeck concert. His desk was covered with pictures of his wife
� one in a straw hat, one with a toddler on her hip. (They have 3-year-old
twins, a boy and a girl.)
Nearby was a photo of Mr. Wilson, acting ambassador in Baghdad during
Desert Shield, with Saddam Hussein. And a framed letter praising his work
for the country from the senior President Bush, strategically left facing
out toward reporters who come to ask Mr. Wilson if Republicans have a
point when they decry him as a politically motivated Democrat who has
counseled John Kerry and contributed to his campaign. He and his wife also
gave $1,000 each to the Bush-Cheney campaign "before South Carolina," he
said, "which was a real rude awakening about the way Ralph Reed & Co.
went after John McCain's wife and kid."
Mr. Wilson, 53, refers to his 40-year-old third wife as "the real-life
Jennifer Garner," the actress who plays an intrepid C.I.A. officer on TV
and who will star in an agency recruitment video. He teased his wife that
she would be better cast: " `You should get out there.' "
His wife, he said, "sees this as an out-of-body experience."
Ms. Plame and Karl Rove attend the same Episcopal Church, and she joked
to her husband that she should just go up to the president's strategist
and ask if he really considered her "fair game" to be outed � a phrase Mr.
Wilson says reporters told him Mr. Rove had used.
At his wife's request, Mr. Wilson has toned down his call to see Mr.
Rove "frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs." But he still
holds the man the president calls Boy Genius accountable.
"The act of leaking my wife's name was clearly a political act," he
says. "The White House has a political office that's headed by one Karl
Rove. That's where I would look. He certainly condoned
it."
