Meet Mr. Valerie Plame

In an August 2003 talk here, former diplomat Joseph Wilson offhandedly mentioned that it might be fun to see George W. Bush's key political adviser, Karl Rove, "frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs." Wilson later worried he'd put too fine a point on the then-nascent scandal over the outing of his wife as a CIA officer. Maybe he'd gotten caught up in the exuberance of the animated Shoreline Conference Center crowd. But with his return to Seattle for a sold-out talk at Town Hall on Wednesday, Oct. 26, Wilson's Shoreline remark two years ago seems like a classic understatement. The indictment noose this week was dangling over not only the leak uproar but a handful of Republican congressional scandals stretching from D.C. to Seattle. They're converging Watergate-like, replete with cover-ups and stonewalling, threatening to turn that one-man frog-march into a Pennsylvania Avenue perp walk.

"I've heard there will be from two indictments to two dozen, but it's all speculation," says Wilson by phone, speaking of the possible outcome this week of Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's 22-month probe into the leak. Conservative pundit Robert Novak first published the name of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, in his syndicated column, noting that she was an "operative" for the CIA, apparently clueless that she might—and did—sometimes work undercover. "Actually, her name is Valerie Wilson," the ex-ambassador corrects me as we talk, putting the kibosh to "Plamegate." (He personally refers to the scandal, he says with a chuckle, as "L'affaire Valerie.") The July 14, 2003, Novak column now appears to have been sourced by the White House, with Rove and Vice President Dick Cheney's top aide, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, evolving as prime suspects. A Tuesday, Oct. 25, New York Times report suggested this daisy-chain scenario: Then–CIA Director George Tenet told Cheney, who told Libby, who may have told Rove, and who both then leaked to reporters. Wilson thinks Libby is "involved up to his eyeballs in this," adding that it is clear from the grand jury testimony of Time correspondent Matthew Cooper "that Mr. Rove was a source, the primary source, exposing the identity of my wife. It is clear he was involved in the pushing of this story even before the Novak column. To me, that's a frog-march offense."

California-born, Wilson's a onetime Olympic Peninsula carpenter who got his foreign career start in Seattle, spurred by a meeting with influential University of Washington public-affairs professor Brewster Denny. "I owe it all to him," Wilson says. He went on to become acting U.S. ambassador in Iraq during Operation Desert Shield (the Gulf War build-up) in 1990, helped free 150 American hostages seized by Iraq, and was the last American official to meet with Saddam Hussein before that earlier Gulf War began. (Saddam offered all the oil the U.S. could ever want in return for his unfettered taking of Kuwait, which Wilson flatly rejected.) President George H.W. Bush called Wilson "a true hero," though George W. Bush hasn't been so complimentary. That might have something to do with Wilson's role in opposing Junior Bush's Iraq policy. Wilson says that, at one point, he was being followed on speaking tours by White House talking points, sometimes e-mailed in advance to interviewers, in an attempt to undermine his credibility. In recent talks, he cites the White House's "defamatory campaign" against him, arguing, "It is in the DNA of the people in the administration to go after anyone who questions them."

Though polls indicate a lack of widespread public interest in Wilsongate due to its confusing story line, that's likely because at times it seems written by Lewis Carroll. Fitzgerald, who once prosecuted terrorists, now finds himself in the wonderland of the Oval Office, interviewing the president and vice president over a case with elements of possible treason. At least seven White House officials and staffers have appeared, some repeatedly, before Fitzgerald's grand jury, including Susan Ralston, Rove's secretary, who formerly worked in the D.C. lobbying offices of the Seattle-based Preston Gates Ellis law firm. Novak, the guy who started it all, continued to roam free while Judith Miller of The New York Times, who didn't write a Plame story, went to jail. Most boggling, Libby admits discussing Plame with Miller, who, even after 85 days behind bars to protect one source, Libby, now says she's unsure who first gave her Plame's name. In the midst of this, White House counsel Harriet Miers, who might have been advising Rove and/or Libby, emerged from the rabbit hole to become a Supreme Court nominee, only to withdraw her name this week, ostensibly to avoid having to reveal internal documents related to her role as White House counsel. Curiouser and curiouser!

Wilson had no idea he was starting this firestorm, he says, when he wrote a 2003 op-ed piece for The New York Times, headlined "What I Did Not Find in Africa," debunking Bush claims that Iraq tried to buy uranium in Niger. That was just one misleading claim, Wilson says, that Bush gave for going to war—which, at the cost of 2,000 U.S. military and tens of thousands of civilian lives, is the biggest scandal of all. "I would say the president, when he spoke to the nation on this issue, misstated the facts," Wilson says. "Who is responsible? Certainly somebody on his staff. The whole world knows about Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame, but no one knows who put misleading information into the president's [State of the Union] address?"