Cooper to Disclose Grand Jury Testimony in 'Time'

Matthew Cooper
By E&P Staff
Published: July 13, 2005 3:15 PM ET
NEW YORK

Time's magazine's Matt Cooper today testified to a grand jury that White House aide Karl Rove was a source for a story about a CIA operative that has investigators deciding whether any laws were broken by the leak of the agent's identity.
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"Here's the bottom line: let’s imagine for a moment that Fitzgerald does not indict Rove. Does this in any way mitigate, excuse, or erase what Rove did? Does it take the onus off President Bush's promise to fire the White House leaker? Of course not. Rove leaked -- and he should be fired." From: Ariana Huffington blog: July 13th, 2005
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"President Bush said Wednesday that he will withhold judgment about top aide Karl Rove's involvement in leaking the identity of a CIA agent until a federal criminal investigation into the matter is complete." Associated Press : July 13th
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" "In short, Mr. Rove provided important background so Americans could understand that Mr. Wilson wasn't a whistleblower but was a partisan trying to discredit the Iraq War in an election campaign. Thank you, Mr. Rove."
Wall Street Journal: July 13th
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"The disclosure of the identity of Ms. Wilson, also known by her maiden name, Valerie Plame, raised questions about whether the White House was trying to retaliate against her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, after he criticized the president's Iraq policy in an Op-Ed article in The New York Times." NYT, July 13th
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From Congressional Record
Senator Tom Harkin
July 8th, 2004

"CIA AGENT REVEALED

Mr. HARKIN. Madam President, yesterday I stood before the Senate and noted that it had been almost a full year since the identity of a covert CIA agent was revealed in print by the columnist Robert Novak.

It has been 360 days and counting. Next Wednesday, it will be 1 full year. (Note: Asof July 2005 it will be two full years) It is time to ask, Why hasn't the White House cleared this up? Madam President, 360 days have gone by since a CIA agent's name was revealed by top White House officials. We know how agent Valerie Plame's coverage was blown.

Back in September, the Washington Post reported that two senior White House officials called at least six
Washington journalists and disclosed the identity of a covert CIA agent.

It has also become fairly clear why the agent's cover was blown. It was part of an ongoing effort to discredit and retaliate against critics of this administration, especially those who revealed that intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq was flawed or fabricated.

Now Ms. Plame, as we know now, is married to former Ambassador Joseph Wilson. Ambassador Wilson was sent on a factfinding mission to Niger to examine claims that Saddam Hussein had sought to purchase uranium from
that nation. He found no evidence to support the claim. But President Bush, nonetheless, made that claim in his State of the Union Address.

How those famous 16 words read by the President to the listening Nation about the efforts by Saddam Hussein to purchase uranium from Niger made it into the State of the Union Address remains a great literary mystery. Who lied in President Bush's State of the Union speech? We still don't know. We do know that Ambassador Wilson published an article disputing the uranium claim in the New York Times.

Apparently to discredit and punish Mr. Wilson, senior White House officials leaked the identity of Wilson's wife and the fact that she was a CIA operative.

Madam President, 20 years of training and experience and millions of dollars were invested in this agent. Leaking her identity violated the law and constituted a betrayal of this country. Yet, for all we know, the person responsible for this betrayal could at this very moment still be exercising a senior decisionmaking role in this administration. This apparently is an administration where the buck never stops, an administration where abuses occur, but no one at the
top is ever forced to accept responsibility.

In her 20-year career, Valerie Plame operated with unofficial cover, which means she had no diplomatic immunity. Effectively, her only defense was a painstakingly created and maintained cover. She worked closely with undercover operatives and a network of contacts. All were potentially placed in jeopardy and exposed to danger by the disclosure of her status.

Last November, we heard testimony from three former CIA experts. They all agreed on the far-reaching damage this disclosure represented for Ms. Plame's broader network of contacts and for the intelligence community as a whole. After all, what guarantee does any intelligence agent now have that they could not be the next victim of some
administration's smear campaign?

Vincent Cannistraro, former chief of operations and analysis at the CIA Counterterrorism Center, said of the Plame disclosure:

The consequences are much greater than Valerie Plame's job as a clandestine CIA employee--they include the damage to the lives and livelihoods of many foreign nationals with whom she was connected and it has destroyed a clandestine cover mechanism that may have been used to protect other CIA nonofficial cover officers.

James Marcinkowski, a former CIA operations officer, seconded this by saying:

The deliberate exposure and identification of Ambassador Wilson's wife, by our government, was unprecedented, unnecessary, harmful and dangerous.

Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst and State Department employee, said:

For this administration to run on a security platform and allow people in the administration to compromise the security of intelligence assets, I think is unconscionable.
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