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June 1st,
2007 - Plame Sues C.I.A. for Blocking Her Memoir |
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Plame Sues C.I.A. for
Blocking Her Memoir By Adam Liptak New York Times June 1, 2007 Valerie Wilson, the former
intelligence operative at the heart of an investigation that reached into the
White House, sued the Central Intelligence Agency in federal court in New
York yesterday over its refusal to allow her to publish a memoir that would
discuss how long she had worked for the agency. Although that information is
set out in an unclassified letter to Ms. Wilson that has been published in
the Congressional Record, the C.I.A. contends that her dates of service
remain classified and may not be mentioned in “Fair Game,” the memoir Ms.
Wilson hopes to publish in October. C.I.A. employees sign
agreements requiring them to submit manuscripts to the agency for permission
before they are published, and Ms. Wilson’s suit said she spent 10 months
working with agency officials on the book to avoid disclosing national security
information. But the agency’s refusal to allow her to include material
already in the public domain, the suit said, violates her right to free
speech. “The C.I.A.’s effort to
classify public domain information is an unreasonable attempt at prior
restraint of publication and a violation of our First Amendment rights,” said
Adam Rothberg, a spokesman for Simon & Schuster, which plans to publish
the book and is also a plaintiff in the suit. First Amendment challenges
to decisions by the C.I.A concerning its former employees’ proposed books and
articles have not met with much success in the courts, which tend to focus on
the terms of the employment agreements and to defer to the agency’s judgments
about what information should be withheld from the public. But Ms. Wilson’s
suit, which is narrowly focused on information already published in the
Congressional Record, presents the more difficult question of when information
that was once secret has entered the public record. The C.I.A. acknowledged that
the dates of Ms. Wilson’s employment had mistakenly been disclosed, although
a spokesman said that did not mean the information was no longer classified. “Frankly,” said the
spokesman, Mark Mansfield, the release of the information in 2006, in
response to a query from Ms. Wilson about retirement benefits, was “an
honest-to-goodness administrative error.” “The letter contained
classified information and should not have been mailed to her,” Mr. Mansfield
said, referring to Ms. Wilson. “As soon as it was discovered, we took steps
to rectify the error, including notifying the clerk of the House of
Representatives.” The letter, from February
2006, was entered into the Congressional Record by Representative Jay Inslee,
Democrat of Washington, in January 2007. Mr. Inslee was introducing
legislation to allow Ms. Wilson to qualify for a government annuity. The letter said that Ms.
Wilson had worked for the government since Nov. 9, 1985, for a total of “20
years, 7 days,” including “six years, one month and 29 days of overseas
service.” Christine Hanson, a
spokeswoman for Mr. Inslee, said the congressman had assured himself that the
document was not classified before disclosing it. “It’s very much part of the
public domain,” Ms. Hanson said. “If they’re upset about it, they should have
made that determination before they gave the letter to her. They’re trying to
get the cat back into the bag.” Since the publication of the
letter in the Congressional Record, the C.I.A. has repeatedly demanded that
Ms. Wilson return all copies of it. The agency receives about
100 submissions a month from former employees and others who have had access
to classified information, Mr. Mansfield said, ranging from short opinion
articles to lengthy books. “The sole yardstick for prepublication review,” he
said, “has been and remains that their writings contain no classified
information.” The C.I.A. has been adamant
in refusing to confirm the dates or details of Ms. Wilson’s service before
2002. In July 2003, the syndicated columnist Robert Novak disclosed her
identity as “an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction.” Mr. Novak
referred to Ms. Wilson by her maiden name, Valerie Plame. The investigation into that
disclosure led to the conviction of I. Lewis Libby Jr., formerly Vice
President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, on perjury and obstruction of justice
charges in March. On Friday, the special
prosecutor in the case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, submitted an unclassified
summary of Ms. Wilson’s “C.I.A. employment and cover history” to the judge
who will sentence Mr. Libby. It was limited to the four
years starting in 2002. In the summary, the agency said it chose to make
information about Ms. Wilson’s service public to aid Mr. Fitzgerald, but it
did not say why it selected 2002 as its cutoff. A trip undertaken for the
C.I.A. in February 2002 by Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former diplomat and Ms.
Wilson’s husband, has been the subject of intense scrutiny. The summary said that Ms.
Wilson was a covert C.I.A. employee at the time of Mr. Novak’s disclosure.
Between the beginning of 2002 and Ms. Wilson’s resignation from the agency at
the end of 2005, the summary said, she traveled overseas “under a cover
identity, sometimes in true name and sometimes in alias” at least “seven
times to more than 10 countries.” The summary said that the
C.I.A. did not acknowledge “any other period of employment, if any, nor does
it declassify the nature and details of Ms. Wilson’s cover.” Through a spokesman, Ms.
Wilson declined to comment. Asked if the dispute over
the dates of Ms. Wilson’s tenure were the key to allowing the book to be
published, an intelligence official responded obliquely. “Official acknowledgment of
certain matters could cause some on whom we rely to think that we do not take
protecting sensitive equity seriously or cause them to think twice about
assisting us in the future, and that could have serious ramifications,” the
official said. In an April 19 letter, the
lawsuit said, the agency said that “with limited exceptions” the classified
information to which the agency objects “relates to a single issue,” although
it did not specify the issue. Mr. Rothberg, of Simon &
Schuster, said the dates of Ms. Wilson’s service were “just one item in the
publication review process, but it’s one we feel strongly about.” The
publisher is said to have paid about $2 million for the book, a figure Mr.
Rothberg would not confirm. Copyright 2007 The New York
Times Company External link: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/01/us/01plame.html |