THE MATT AND JUDY SHOW.(The Talk of the Town)(Investigative reporting)

It's beginning to look, in retrospect, as if Novak buried the lead.

In his column for July 14, 2003, Robert Novak, the cable-TV growler and syndicated inside-dopester, wrote about backbiting within the Bush Administration over one of the more egregious intelligence fiascoes of the runup to the Iraq war: the claim, as the President himself had put it six months earlier, in his State of the Union address, that "Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." This claim, one of two specific pieces of evidence presented in that speech as proof of an urgent Iraqi nuclear threat, quickly fell apart; it turned out to have been based entirely on crudely forged documents provided by someone described in the newspapers as a "con man" working through "Italian intelligence"--irresistibly suggesting a cross between Groucho and Chico. (Bush's other piece of evidence, which had to do with aluminum tubes, proved bogus, too.)

Bush should have known better. About a year before his speech, the Central Intelligence Agency had dispatched a retired Foreign Service officer, Joseph C. Wilson IV, to Niger to assess the reliability of the uranium rumor. Wilson knew the territory, having served the first President Bush as charge d'affaires in Baghdad and as Ambassador to Gabon, and President Clinton as the National Security Council's Africa specialist. Wilson's findings cast serious doubt on the truth of the rumor. They were ignored. Then, after the United States went to war, Wilson went public on the op-ed page of the Times, concluding that "some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."

Novak's column came out a week later. For the first few hundred words, it rambled on about "finger-pointing between Bush Administration agencies" in the wake of Wilson's op-ed. The "nut graf," as they say on the copy desk, came halfway through:

Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me his wife suggested sending Wilson to Niger to investigate the Italian report.

Now, that was news, given that the names, identities, and assignments of covert C.I.A. operatives (as Valerie Plame has been) are supposed to be a secret. Someone, it seemed, had been talking out of turn, and not just to Bob Novak. Three days later, on Time's Web site, Matthew Cooper, the magazine's White House correspondent, and two colleagues wrote that "some government officials have noted to Time in interviews (as well as to syndicated columnist Robert Novak) that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, is a C.I.A. official who monitors the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction." Cooper's angle was the reverse of Novak's--the import of the latter's story was to discredit Wilson, of the former's to discredit Wilson's discreditors--but the officials doing the talking were almost certainly the same. And they were talking to others, too, including Judith Miller, of the Times, who gathered string but never wrote a story.

That was the beginning of an extraordinary politico-journalistic drama, which, nearly two years later, is approaching its climax. In the effort to discover the leakers, a special prosecutor was appointed; a grand jury was impanelled; witnesses, ranging from President Bush on down to lowly scribes, were called or subpoenaed. Cooper and Miller, citing a common-law and, they argued, First Amendment privilege of confidentiality, declined to name their sources. A federal judge found them in contempt and ordered that they be imprisoned for up to eighteen months, a directive that has since been upheld twice. Now all that stands between jail and the two reporters, who were merely doing their jobs and keeping their promises, is the Supreme ...