Valerie Plame and the Attack of the Paparazzi

Former covert operative speaks for the first time?and the D.C. press goes wild.

Photo: Jessica Savage

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


It was supposed to be a hearing on “White House Procedures for Safeguarding Classified Information,” read: White House involvement in the outing of former CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson. But what unfolded today before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform was nothing more than a media frenzy. As Republican Representative Lynn Westmoreland noted, “I was here during the steroids hearing with all those baseball players and even they didn’t get this much media attention.” Representatives literally couldn’t hear Wilson take her oath for all the camera shutters clicking.

But you can’t blame the media, can you? Today’s hearing was the first time Wilson has testified publicly about her outing; reporters have been starving for any tidbit from her as the celebrity buzz around her—book manuscript under review by the CIA; Warner Bros. working on a film; lawsuit against the Bush administration set for oral arguments in May—has been building. Not to mention that Wilson is a blond bombshell in the Capitol’s sea of bald heads and drab blue suits.

Despite the ruckus—cameramen and women climbing on tables, crowd noise leaking through the doors that constantly opened as photographers filed in and out to get their fix—Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) was determined to get down to business. “It’s not our job to determine criminal culpability,” he said, “but it is our job to understand what went wrong and to insist on accountability and to make recommendations for the future—to avoid future abuses.” (The abuse, of course, was the leaking of Wilson’s CIA identity, a move generally believed to have been payback for her husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, who exposed the Bush administration’s false claims about Iraq seeking yellowcake uranium from Niger; Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff, Scooter Libby, was convicted in the leak case earlier this month.)

Waxman wanted three questions answered. How had this happened, did the White House take the right steps to investigate the leak, and what changes needed to be made to prevent future breaches of conduct? And he wanted to hear from Wilson.

She did not disappoint. “My name and identity were carelessly and recklessly abused by senior officials in the White House and State Department,” she testified. “I could no longer perform the work for which I had been highly trained.” She testified that she “was involved in secret worldwide operations and traveled to foreign countries.” She said she was part of the CIA’s “counter-proliferation unit,” and that “It was not common knowledge on the Georgetown cocktail circuit who I was.”

In their questioning, Democrats mostly focused on Wilson’s covert status, with Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Maryland) the most direct. “Covert or no?” he asked. “Was Toensing correct?” “I was a covert officer of the CIA,” Wilson replied strongly. Victoria Toensing, a former chief counsel to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has argued in numerous op-eds, and in congressional testimony, that the outing of Wilson was not a big deal because she did not hold a sensitive position.

There were other attempts to discount allegations against White House officials for their transgressions. Ranking minority member Tom Davis sought to make clear that even if Wilson was covert, administration officials didn’t do anything wrong if they didn’t know that at the time they told columnist Robert Novak about her identity. Davis also blamed the disclosure on the CIA, arguing that Langley needs to get better at protecting agents.

In any case, Democrats had a field day expounding on the leak. Representative John P. Sarbanes (D-Md.) thundered that the scandal “paints a picture of an administration full of bullies, one that will justify any means for their ends. It is the result of a syndrome that’s developed. It is an arrogance of power run amok.” Representative Dennis Kucinich drew parallels between the Plame case and the purge of eight federal prosecutors now preoccupying Washington: “I can’t help but think of you when I think of the U.S. Attorney case,” he said.

Needless to say, that kind of debate was not what the paparazzi were there for, though. As soon as Plame’s testimony concluded, photographers and reporters stampeded out, literally tripping over each other to get to the door. Left behind were a cluster of men in blue suits, and a lot of empty seats.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate