On July 6th former Ambassador Joseph Wilson chose to walk the dangerous path of a whistleblower. In the process he threw his political life to the mercy of the winds, likely hoping for the best and fearing the worst. Alas, the worst seems to have come. And little though he may have suspected it, Wilson wound up putting his wife’s literal life in jeopardy by inadvertently involving her in the dirty machinations of politics. But it might be the President who pays in the end.

Reads like the dust jacket of a Grisham pot-boiler, doesn’t it? Well, this story is quite real and, as usual, it is truth that trumps fiction for excitement and intrigue.

The strange tale kicks into gear in February 2002. During that month Wilson was asked to visit Niger as a diplomatic envoy and investigate a claim that the African country was selling enriched uranium, often known as yellow cake, to Iraq. His mission was initiated by a question from Vice President Cheney during a CIA briefing. In Italian intelligence report suggested that Iraq was making the alleged inquiries, and Cheney wanted more information.

Wilson was a fine choice. He had quite a bit of background in Iraq; the diplomat was the acting Ambassador in Iraq just before the first Gulf War and was the last American to meet with Hussein before the conflict kicked off. He helped evacuate thousands from the war zone and free American hostages. He sheltered 800 Americans in the embassy compound. George H.W. Bush commended him for his work there.

In the ensuing years Wilson was an Ambassador in Africa, specifically the Gabonese Republic and the Democratic Republic of Sao Tome. He has spent time working in the National Security Council as the senior director for Africa, and during his service he worked quite a bit with the Nigerian government. In all, the former Ambassador spent about 25 years living and working in the continent.

On his investigative assignment after a bit of sniffing around – speaking to the American Ambassador to Niger, various Nigerian officials and those involved with the uranium business – Wilson quickly realized that the claims of uranium inquiries or sales were bunk. He returned to the U.S. and gave his report (orally), saying there was no truth to the rumors. The former Ambassador thought no more of it until he heard, in the President’s State of the Union address the following year, an accusation that Iraq was attempting to import uranium from an African nation. This raised a Wilsonian eyebrow, but a friend in the State Department assured him there were three other uranium-producing countries that Bush may have been talking about.

Unfortunately, Bush was talking about Niger. The bad claim was exactly what the State of the Union was referring to, as the following months showed. That leads to our July 6th date, when former Ambassador Wilson wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times, the source of much of the above information. He accused the administration of either being careless with his report or of twisting it for political purposes. And that’s when the story really begins.

Instead of addressing the issues raised by Wilson – or simply ignoring them – the backlash was rather nasty. Numerous senior officials claimed that they never saw nor heard of the report until well after the war was underway (a claim they have since backtracked from). Ari Fleisher, in the waning days of his tenure as the Press Secretary, said Wilson misrepresented the report. Not only did Wilson neglect to investigate the famous forgery of a uranium transaction, but the report the Vice President received suggested that an Iraqi agent may have approached a Nigerian official about purchasing yellow cake. Wilson contends Fleisher mixed up his report with previous ones from the ambassador to Niger, and the envoy determined the Iraqi agent’s visit was for purely commerical and legal trade.

At the same time, two unidentified senior White House officials conducted an anonymous interview with Robert Novak, a conservative Chicago Sun-Times columnist who wrote about the conversation in his July 14th article. According to Novak, the officials suggested that Wilson got the assignment to visit Niger due to a suggestion by his wife, Valerie Plame Wilson.

Why would his wife have anything to do with it, being an energy analyst? Well, the answer to that, according to the anonymous tipsters, is that Valerie Plame Wilson is no energy analyst. She is a CIA agent working on weapons of mass destruction.

Should that indeed prove true, we are now heading into very serious territory. The outing of a CIA operative – unless the person’s identity is in the public domain – is a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a $50,000 fine under the Intelligence Identity Protection Act of 1982. It would undermine any present or future work the operative might be involved in, as well as any fellow operatives she might be connected to. A strand of a very important web would have been severed and the consequences would be difficult to predict, other than the surety that consequences would follow.

In other words, if Mrs. Wilson is a CIA spook, then lives have been put in danger and an important plank of national security has been breached. Novak, for his part, is saying that he has sources in the CIA who have told him that Plame Wilson is not a covert operative, but merely an analyst.

Wilson, understandably, refuses to comment on his wife’s profession. He’s not happy about this attack though, and attributes it to a simple thuggish political hit. As he told David Corn of The Nation: "Stories like this are not intended to intimidate me, since I've already told my story. But it's pretty clear it is intended to intimidate others who might come forward. You need only look at the stories of intelligence analysts who say they have been pressured. They may have kids in college, they may be vulnerable to these types of smears."

In Congress this plot is starting to get attention. Senator Charles Schumer (D, NY), for instance, has asked FBI Director Rober Mueller to investigate, and it is rumored that the State Department is looking into the matter as well. In addition, CIA Director George Tenet recently sent a memo to the Justice Department requesting an inquiry into the matter. Senate Democrats are calling for an independent counsel to head the investigation, one from outside the Ashcroft-led Department. The White House has rejected the request.

Should the allegations prove true – should it turn out that Bob Novak’s sources were indeed senior administration officials – then the shock waves would be substantial. The White House, for its part, has said it does not tolerate the outing of undercover CIA operatives. Yet it appears that one of their own has done the dirty work.

But wait, it gets better. A senior White House official has confirmed that there was a leak from within the administration, telling the Washington Post that at least six journalists were given the information. When asked why the anonymous tipster was revealing this, the offical told the Post the leaks were “wrong and a huge mascalculation, because they were irrelevant and did nothing to diminish Wilson’s credibility.” The official, however, would not name the source(s) of the leak.

Wilson, however, has fingered one. The first journalist to break this story was Al Martin, of AlMartinraw.com. On his website Mr. Martin says that, during a Washington symposium, former Ambassador Wilson accused Karl Rove of being the man who outed his wife. On August 21 during a public forum in Seattle Wilson repeated his claim, saying “I don’t think we’re going to let this drop. At the end of the day it’s of keen interest to me to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs. And trust me when I use that name. I measure my words.”

This scandal doesn’t look like it’s going away anytime soon. Press Secretary Scott McClelland has said “if anyone in this administration was involved in it, they would no longer by in this administration.” By starting to distance the President from any possible perpetrators of this crime, the White House is proving they take this issue very seriously. Democrats on the hill are already starting to attack this issue, as are the presidential candidates.

That is likely bad news for Bush’s campaign. The one issue that the President has good control of is currently the most important one: National Security. If the heat continues to rise and this administration turns out to be harboring officials with such reckless regard for the safety of its own people, Bush suddenly is going to look rather weak on this plank

Putting together an argument that Bush is, in actuality, not hard on terror shouldn’t be particularly difficult. Iraq is turning into a horrid quagmire and is looking less and less like it is reducing terrorism; on the contrary, it appears to be feeding unrest (as a few democrats – specifically candidates like Rep. Dennis Kucinich on the floor, or Howard Dean on the stump – argued it would). Bush’s cabinet is made up by a number of founding members of the neo-con think tank Project for the American Century, a group which advocated removing Saddam Hussein from power for geo-political reasons, well before 9/11. There are no links between Iraq and terrorism, and the war is spreading the military very thin (and the budget is already well beyond thin); this war looks like it is reducing our ability to fight the terrorism present before Gulf II, let alone the dangers America’s unilateral action has created. Barring another attack distracting attention (either from or against us), the Iraqi problem is not going to look good in a year’s time.

Compound that with the gaffes that led us into war – foremost the 16 words in the State of the Union referring to the Nigerian yellow cake and the ensuing mess outlined above – and it looks as if Bush is going to be on the defensive a lot in the upcoming election. Bush is not good on the defensive.

The President wants to avoid attention moving to domestic issues, as that is, politely put, not a strong point. But if Bush cannot make a good case for all the mistakes, actions, and accusations swirling around the war in Iraq – assuming the public pays attention and the Democratic candidates come out with tough tactics – then the President is going to find himself with very little maneuverability.

Perhaps the biggest blow would come if the President lost Rove to trials or indictments. Rove was Bush’s campaign manager in the last election and is generally regarded as a brilliant political strategist, if a ruthless one. Remove him from the campaign trail and you may remove the President’s most important political partner. Given Rove’s removal would come from a crisis created by the White House damaging National Security it isn’t hard to imagine Bush’s position becoming disastrous.