Overview
The sixteen words were in the State of the Union address of January 2003: the British government had learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. They were among the more alarming things said in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, because uranium implies a bomb.
Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador, had been sent to Niger by the CIA in February 2002 to look into precisely that claim, and had reported back that he found no evidence for it. On 6 July 2003 he said so in public, in a New York Times op-ed titled "What I Didn't Find in Africa."
Eight days later, Robert Novak's syndicated column identified Wilson's wife by name as a CIA operations officer working on weapons proliferation, attributing the information to two senior administration officials, and noting that she had suggested sending him.
Why It Mattered
An intelligence officer's cover is not a detail. Valerie Plame had worked under cover, which meant that publishing her name potentially exposed the front company that employed her, and by extension everyone who had been in contact with it abroad. The Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 made deliberate disclosure of a covert officer's identity a federal crime, though it set a high bar: the discloser had to know the officer was covert and that the government was actively concealing the identity.
The question that organised the next four years was whether the disclosure was retaliation — a message to Wilson and to anyone else in the government thinking about contradicting the case for war in public.
The Investigation
The CIA referred the matter to the Justice Department. Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself, and in December 2003 Deputy Attorney General James Comey appointed Patrick Fitzgerald, the US Attorney in Chicago, as special counsel.
What followed was, in large part, a fight with the press. Fitzgerald subpoenaed reporters for their sources. Judith Miller of the New York Times spent 85 days in jail for refusing to testify before agreeing to do so. Matthew Cooper of Time testified after his publisher turned over his notes. The case became a landmark in the long argument about whether journalists can protect confidential sources from a federal grand jury.
What Came Out
The first leaker was not who anyone expected. Richard Armitage, Deputy Secretary of State and a figure associated with the administration's more sceptical wing on Iraq, acknowledged in 2006 that he had been Novak's original source and said he had disclosed the information without realising Plame was covert.
That complicated the retaliation narrative considerably, and it is the fact most often left out of the shorter tellings. But it did not end the case, because Armitage was not the only one talking. Lewis Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Cheney, had discussed Plame with reporters, and Karl Rove had confirmed her to at least one.
Nobody was charged under the Identities Protection Act. Fitzgerald indicted Libby instead for what he did during the investigation. On 6 March 2007 Libby was convicted on two counts of perjury, one of obstruction of justice, and one of making a false statement, and was sentenced to thirty months.
On 2 July 2007 President Bush commuted the prison term, leaving the conviction and the fine in place. Libby received a full pardon in 2018.
The Unresolved Part
Fitzgerald's own account of why he could not reach the underlying question has been quoted ever since: the investigation was obstructed, and there was, in his phrase, sand thrown in the umpire's face. Whether the disclosure originated as a deliberate act of retaliation directed from the Vice President's office, or emerged from several officials talking loosely about a subject they were annoyed by, is the thing the prosecution did not establish and the trial did not settle.
That is the shape of the affair's afterlife. To one reading it is a case of political retribution against a whistleblower, exposed and then partially covered up, with the pardon as the final act. To another it is a leak that began with an official who opposed the war, a statute too narrow to reach it, and a prosecution that convicted a man of lying about a crime nobody was charged with.
Both readings survive on the same documented record, which is unusual and is why the case remains live. Plame's cover was blown, that much is not in dispute; the Agency has said the disclosure caused damage, though the assessment of how much has never been made public.