WASHINGTON — Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson is offering his best guess about who leaked the name of his CIA operative wife, but so far the federal investigators looking into the incident are mum.
Seven months into the probe to determine which Bush administration official disclosed Valerie Plame's name to syndicated columnist Robert Novak last summer, little is known other than it's continuing.
FBI and Justice Department officials refused Friday to discuss any aspect of the investigation, which began in September 2003.
Disclosure of an undercover officer's identity can be a federal crime. A federal grand jury in Washington has heard from witnesses and combed through thousands of pages of documents turned over by the White House, but returned no indictments.
The probe is being handled by Chicago U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, appointed after Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself from the case because of his political ties to the White House.
Absent a breakthrough from the documents or a cooperating witness, prosecutors may be forced to try to identify the leaker through Novak or other reporters. However, journalists pressed by the prosecution could assert a First Amendment privilege to protect their sources.
"The reason these investigations often don't go anywhere is that the reporters don't talk," said Julie Rose O'Sullivan, a former federal prosecutor in New York and now a law professor at Georgetown University.
But, she said, such privilege claims may not hold up in court if a judge believes the leak caused a serious breach of national security "where someone's life could be endangered."
"If there's any gray area here, it may be in the newspapers' best interests to try and see if there's a way to cooperate," O'Sullivan said.
In a book released Friday, Wilson suggested Lewis "Scooter" Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Cheney, was the leaker. But Wilson's book, "The Politics of Truth," give no conclusive evidence for the claim.
The White House flatly denies the claim and accuses Wilson of seeking to bolster the campaign of Democrat John Kerry, for whom he has acted as a foreign policy adviser.
"I don't plan on any book review of somebody who has clearly stated that his main objective is a political agenda," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said. "We are cooperating with the officials overseeing the investigation."
Plame's name surfaced after Wilson criticized Bush administration claims that Iraq had tried to obtain uranium from Niger, which Wilson investigated for the CIA and found untrue. Wilson has said he believes his wife's name was leaked — and her career as an undercover operative destroyed — as retribution for his criticism.
In the book, Wilson contends that Libby was "quite possibly the person who exposed my wife's identity." His evidence is largely circumstantial — an unidentified source "close" to the House Judiciary Committee who said Libby was involved in a White House decision to do a background "workup" on Wilson, which would have uncovered his wife's secret CIA employment.
Libby, Wilson writes, "is one of a handful of senior officials in the administration with both the means and the motive to conduct the covert inquiry that allowed some in the White House to learn my wife's name and status, and then disclose that information to the press."
Wilson also said it's possible the leak came from Elliott Abrams, a figure in the Reagan administration Iran-Contra affair and now a member of Bush's National Security Council. And Karl Rove, Bush's chief political adviser, may have circulated information about Wilson and Plame "in administration and neoconservative circles" even if Rove was not himself the leaker, Wilson writes.
Another possibility is that two lower-level officials in Cheney's office — John Hannah or David Wurmser — leaked Plame's identity at the behest of higher-ups "to keep their fingerprints off the crime," Wilson speculates.