Suddenly, Scott McClellan, the hapless White House spokesman, started to sound like Ron Ziegler, his counterpart of three decades ago who had to explain away the "third-rate burglary" that would bring down President Richard Nixon.No one is suggesting Mr Bush is involved, but the previous assertions of Mr Rove's innocence are clearly "inoperative", to borrow an old Zieglerism. It quickly transpired that he had talked to Mr Rove and Mr Libby. The former, it seems, did not identify Mr Wilson's wife by name, but confirmed that she was a CIA employee "working in WMD". But the White House adamantly denied Mr Bush's adviser was the leaker and the affair soon faded. But Mr Fitzgerald was not to be deterred, and turned up the pressure on the reporters involved in the case to divulge their sources Some made deals, among them, apparently, Mr Novak By contrast, Judith Miller of The New York Times held out. She is now an inmate at the federal detention centre in Alexandria, Virginia.But Mr Cooper - or rather his employers at Time magazine - folded. He was said to have told reporters that Ms Plame was "fair game".
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Thus the Wilson article could be construed as an "I-told-you-so" CIA-inspired counterstrike. On 14 July, Mr Novak's column appeared, identifying Ms Plame by both name and job. The CIA was furious at what seemed a clear breach of the 1982 law which makes it a crime to deliberately disclose the name of a cover agent. Thus special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald launched the investigation which now laps at the innermost citadels of the White House.From the outset, Mr Rove was a prime suspect.
The report had never reached the desk of anyone who really mattered, they said. Mr Wilson himself was just a Democrat with a grudge.The onslaught also served the purposes of the White House hawks' running bureaucratic war with more sceptical CIA analysts, who had no time for Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi exile then the darling of Mr Cheney and the Pentagon, who was the source of much "information" about Saddam's WMD capabilities.Before the war, the CIA had come under fierce pressure from the Vice-President's office to come up with the scariest assessment possible of the threat posed by Iraq. In the next few days, Mr Rove and Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Mr Cheney's powerful chief of staff, talked to various journalists, including Matthew Cooper of Time magazine and the conservative columnist Robert Novak.Their message was plain: Mr Wilson had not been sent by Mr Cheney, but by low-level CIA people at the urging of his wife. An angry and embarrassed White House admitted that the yellowcake claim should not have appeared in the State of the Union address.And in its fury, it sought revenge by diminishing the stature of Mr Wilson.Thus began the Plame affair.
