Get Karl Rove

The New York Times runs with this headline: Reporter Says He First Learned of C.I.A. Operative From Rove:

Matthew Cooper, a reporter for Time magazine, said the White House senior adviser Karl Rove was the first person to tell him that the wife of former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV was a C.I.A. officer, according to a first-person account in this week's issue of the magazine.

The lead paragraph gives lefties their red meat: Rove outed a C.I.A. covert agent. Reading down four paragraphs, however, gives us:

Mr. Cooper said in his article that Mr. Rove did not mention the name of Mr. Wilson's wife, Valerie Wilson, or say that she was a covert officer. But, he wrote: "Was it through my conversation with Rove that I learned for the first time that Wilson's wife worked at the C.I.A. and may have been responsible for sending him? Yes. Did Rove say that she worked at the 'agency' on 'W.M.D.'? Yes.

Here are some facts we never get in the article:

• The 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act defines the crime as applying only to "intentionally [disclose] . . . information identifying [a] covert agent . . . , knowing that the information disclosed so identifies such covert agent and that the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such covert agent's intelligence relationship to the United States." [emphasis added]
  
• According to Section 426, Paragraph 4 of the U.S. Code, a covert agent for the C.I.A. would have to be stationed outside of the U.S. sometime within the previous 5 years. According to Wilson's own book, Plame has lived in the Washington with Wilson since their marriage in 1997, six years before the revelations to Cooper and Novak.

This isn't semantic quibbling. The law was very specifically drafted to protect undercover agents from being targeted for killing by having their cover blown without restricting important freedoms of speech and the press. It's possible that Plame was a covert agent as defined by the relevant laws; however, that is far from apparent, and if it's far from apparent to us at this late date, it was likely not apparent to Rove, who didn't even know Plame's name.

But lefties who never had any use for the CIA during the Cold War, who routinely claim that the CIA a force of evil around the world, now have the cojones call Rove "treasonous" for possibly, inadvertantly doing what they have applauded when performed by men like Phil Agee intentionally.