Anonymous sources are in; anonymous sources are out. It depends on who your source hurts.
by Edward Morrissey
07/20/2005 12:00:00 AM
EARLIER THIS SPRING the journalistic world celebrated the most famous of all anonymous sources, Deep Throat. More than three decades after he inadvertently began the Age of Anonymous Sourcing, Mark Felt became the toast of media circles when he acknowledged his role in Watergate, the scandal that broke the presidency and gave birth to the modern era of investigative journalism.
The media, stung by recent debacles like the Killian memos at CBS and the ignominious departure of Eason Jordan, toasted Felt as a true American hero. Newsweek had just turned an anonymously-sourced and ultimately false story about Koran abuse at Guantanamo Bay into wild Muslim riots that killed 17 people, but reporters suddenly remembered how anonymous sources could help bring out truth and justice and hold the powerful accountable. Kurt Anderson informed us that "Journalism exists to get us closer to all sorts of truth, and anonymous sources are essential to the endeavor. Even now, they provide more social benefit than they extract in moral costs." Woodward himself told the Wall Street Journal that, fearing a "secret government," he thinks the press doesn't make enough use of anonymous sources.
Washington Post columnist David Broder wrote just last month that Mark Felt's nameless assistance to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein gave Americans a "chance to learn just how perverse were the values that infected the Nixon White House." He scolded Chuck Colson and Pat Buchanan for pointing out that Felt broke the law and claimed that they provide an example of why journalists have to have access to anonymous sourcing:
In these comments, Americans born in the 1970s, '80s and '90s can learn everything they need to know about the dangerous delusions of the Nixon era. The mind-set that created enemies lists, the blind loyalty to a deeply flawed individual, the twisting of historical fact to turn villains into heroes and heroes into villains--they are all there.
And yet, over the past week, we have an example of an anonymous source who warned a reporter about an abuse of power in a secretive government agency, involving an operative who deliberately spread misinformation about intelligence work--and the press has spent their energy castigating him for his efforts. The efforts to blame Karl Rove for the supposed "outing" of Valerie Plame in a Robert Novak column is hypocrisy from the same media that lauded an FBI agent for leaking material to the Washington Post to stop an abuse of power three decades ago.
Last week, Matt Cooper of Time testified that he spoke with Karl Rove on "double super secret background" shortly after an editorial written by Ambassador Joseph Wilson appeared in the New York Times. Wilson wrote that he had been sent to Niger based on a request from Vice President Dick Cheney to investigate claims that Saddam Hussein had attempted to purchase uranium, banned in the sanctions placed on Iraq after the Gulf War. Attempts by Saddam to acquire nuclear material would suggest that Saddam planned on rebuilding his WMD programs. Wilson claimed in his editorial that he had found no evidence of such an effort and that President George W. Bush had lied in his State of the Union speech by claiming Saddam had tried to buy the material.
Cooper called Rove--not the other way around--days after its publication, and after discussing an unrelated issue, asked him about the Wilson report. After ensuring that the conversation would remain confidential, Rove warned Cooper not to let his magazine get "too far out on Wilson." He told the reporter that Wilson, despite his claims, did not get authorization for the Niger trip from Cheney or CIA Director George Tenet, but instead got the assignment from his wife, who "apparently worked at the agency on WMD."
As it turns out, Rove gave Cooper a good tip. Not only did Wilson misrepresent the nature of his selection for the Niger mission, he lied about what he found there, as the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence later determined:
[Wilson's] intelligence report indicated that former Nigerien Prime Minister Ibrahim Mayaki was unaware of any contracts that had been signed between Niger and any rogue states for the sale of yellowcake while he was Prime Minister (1997-1999) or Foreign Minister (1996-1997). Mayaki said that if there had been any such contract during his tenure, he would have been aware of it. Mayaki said, however, that in June 1999,(REDACTED) businessman, approached him and insisted that Mayaki meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss "expanding commercial relations" between Niger and Iraq. The intelligence report said that Mayaki interpreted "expanding commercial relations" to mean that the delegation wanted to discuss uranium yellowcake sales. The intelligence report also said that "although the meeting took place, Mayaki let the matter drop due to the UN sanctions on Iraq."
Mayaki did not need telepathy to make this deduction. The CIA factbook shows that Niger has four exports: livestock, cowpeas, onions, and uranium. It takes a great deal of imagination and a certain degree of obtuseness to believe that Saddam Hussein would send a secret, back-channel negotiating team to get his hands on Nigerien cowpeas.
Wilson also repeatedly insisted that his wife had nothing to do with getting the Nigerien mission, but the SSCI found that Valerie Plame had verbally requested Wilson for the assignment on multiple occasions and had even written a memorandum formally submitting his name for consideration. Plame even acted as hostess for the meetings between the agency and her husband.
Nor was this the last of Wilson's prevarications. He later admitted to the SSCI that he leaked information about his report prior to his July 2003 editorial to Walter Pincus at the Washington Post (and later admitted to doing the same with Nicholas Kristof at the New York Times). The SSCI found that Wilson had not been truthful with Pincus, either:
The former ambassador also told Committee staff that he was the source of a Washington Post article ("CIA Did Not Share Doubt on Iraq Data; Bush Used Report of Uranium Bid," June 12, 2003) which said, "among the Envoy's conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because the dates were wrong and the names were wrong." Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the "dates were wrong and the names were wrong" when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports. The former ambassador said that he may have "misspoken" to the reporter when he said he concluded the documents were "forged." He also said he may have become confused about his own recollection after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported in March 2003 that the names and dates on the documents were not correct and may have thought he had seen the names himself. The former ambassador reiterated that he had been able to collect the names of the government officials which should have been on the documents.
SO IN SUM: In July 2003, a rogue CIA operative, hired by his analyst wife at the agency, was leaking false information about war intelligence to national newspapers. When that didn't raise enough eyebrows, he went public, misrepresenting his findings and the nature of his selection for the assignment. Having a CIA operative suddenly take political potshots at the administration called into question whether the White House had lied about intelligence or the ambassador was telling the entire truth himself. Cooper went to his best sources to find the answer to the question, and he got the right answer.
Sounds just like Watergate, except in this case, the White House told the truth while low-level elements at the CIA appear to have twisted intelligence reports into lies to undermine the government--a clear abuse of their power and position. An anonymous source had once again proven its value . . . right?
NOT EXACTLY. Suddenly, the media seemed to have acquired an allergy to nameless sources within administrations, guiding reporters to the truth. The New York Times, whose reporter sits in jail for refusing to talk about her sources, runs story after story about Rove while continually mischaracterizing Wilson's track record. They now also claim that Wilson's lies and misrepresentations--primarily in their own op-ed section--have nothing to do with Rove's whistle blowing. "In fact," their July 19 editorial states, "Mr. Wilson had excellent credentials for the mission, and the entire Niger story had already been pretty thoroughly debunked by the time Mr. Cooper and Mr. Rove spoke." As the SSCI report clearly shows, it hadn't.
And what does David Broder have to say? After all, just a few weeks ago, he defended the use of anonymous sourcing in Watergate to help reporters determine the path to truth. Surely Broder sees the service that Rove performed. Or perhaps not:
The obvious intent of the leak--and of the column, which ran in The Post and other newspapers--was to discredit her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had just published an op-ed article in the New York Times challenging a presidential claim that Saddam Hussein had tried to purchase nuclear material in Niger.
Wilson had been sent to Niger to see if that had been attempted. He concluded that it had not--knocking one more hole in the administration case that Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction. By exposing his wife's supposed role in sending Wilson on that mission, the White House was trying to link his finding to a well-publicized bureaucratic war in which elements of the CIA were doing all they could to undercut the case for going to war with Iraq. . . .
The only lesson I can draw is that reporters ought to be damned careful about accepting unattributed information. For every "Deep Throat," there are multiple Chalabis and Roves.
Anonymous sourcing seems to have gone out of style faster than a long hemline at a summer fashion show in Paris. Six weeks after pillorying the critics of Woodward and Bernstein for their use of an anonymous source who abused his power to leak information to the Post, Broder saves up his contempt for the man who attempted to tip off the press that Wilson needed more investigation. Broder also appears not to have read the committee report--a bipartisan report that contradicts Broder's assertions of Wilson's performance in almost every detail.
The media has made their position clear: Not all anonymous sources are created equal. Those who discredit Republican presidents, like Mark Felt and Joe Wilson, get celebrity treatment and the best rhetorical defenses. Others can expect contempt and ridicule.
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