Strip away all the stress and fury on both sides of the aisle this week and you’ll find one key question at the heart of both the legal and political storm surrounding the president’s top political adviser.

That is, did Karl Rove and other top administration officials, for whatever reason, knowingly reveal the identity of a covert CIA agent or were they unaware of her covert status? As prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald would no doubt tell us if he were at liberty to speak, divining, let alone proving, knowledge and intent in such a case is a very tricky business. But there’s a good bit of circumstantial evidence pointing to the conclusion that Rove and others knew exactly what they were doing.

Allow me to explain.

The best evidence for the “they knew” version of events has always been the column that started it all — Robert Novak’s July 14 column in which he named Valerie Plame as “an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction.”

In intelligence jargon, “operative” has a very specific meaning. It means a covert or clandestine officer. Novak’s been a journalist for 50 years. So clearly he used that term because he knew Plame was covert. And if he knew, the logical assumption is that he knew because his sources — “two senior administration officials” — told him.

That much seemed clear. But not long after the Plame case stormed onto the front pages almost two years ago, Novak changed his story. He said that he made a mistake when he used the word “operative.” He didn’t know she was covert, and neither did his sources.

Here’s what he told Tim Russert in October 2003:

“The one thing I regret I wrote, I used the word ‘operative,’ and I think Mr. [David] Broder [‘Meet the Press’ panelist] will agree that I use the word too much. I use it about hat politicians. I use it about people on the Hill. And if somebody did a Nexis search of my columns, they’d find an overuse of ‘operative.’ I did not mean it. I don’t know what she did. But the indication given to me by this senior official and another senior official I checked with was not that she was deep undercover.”

Is that really true? Was it just Novak’s laziness or sloppiness that started this whole train running down the tracks? Quite a lot depends on the answer.

There’s a good deal of circumstantial evidence — thus far largely ignored — that points strongly to the conclusion that Novak is being much less than honest.

First, consider timing. What Novak told Russert was not only after the story had caught fire in the media but, probably even more important, after it had spawned a Justice Department criminal investigation.

What about what he said earlier? It turns out we have some good evidence for that.

The first newspaper article written about Novak’s role in exposing a covert agent was a July 22, 2003, Newsday article by Timothy Phelps and Newt Royce. That’s about a week after Novak’s column ran and well before the story caught fire in Washington. The article focuses squarely on the controversy over and damage caused by the exposure of covert agent. Phelps and Royce interviewed Novak for the column, too. And he said nothing about any misunderstanding about Plame’s status.

What he told them was this: “I didn’t dig it out. It was given to me. They thought it was significant. They gave me the name and I used it.”

If Novak then thought he or his sources didn’t know Plame was covert, he didn’t think to mention it. And it was the whole point of the article he was being interviewed for.

Then there’s another clue. Novak’s story has always relied on the belief that he committed a monumental act of sloppiness or carelessness — a claim hard to credit about a reporter who’s been doing this as long as Novak.

As I said above, “operative” has a very specific meaning in intelligence argot. So how does Novak usually use the word?

Not long after Novak’s appearance on Russert’s show, I used the Nexis database to find all the examples I could in which Novak used the word “operative” in the context of intelligence work or the CIA. Not surprisingly, in every example I found he used the term “operative” to refer to clandestine CIA officers. And that makes sense, since the term has a specific meaning in the context and he’s a veteran reporter.

Novak wants us to believe that on this one occasion he lapsed into the colloquial meaning of the word and used it to mean no more than you might if you were referring to a Democratic or Republican “operative.” With all due respect to Novak and his decades as a Washington reporter — indeed, precisely because of them — that’s just not credible.

There’s no way to get inside someone else’s mind. But all the available evidence points to the conclusion that Novak’s claims on Russert and elsewhere are an after-the-fact attempt to get himself and his sources out of a very uncomfortable bind.

Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com. His column appears in The Hill each week.
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