It was August 2004, and special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was zeroing in on I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby as the leaker in the Valerie Plame case. Fitzgerald had been quizzing reporters, searching for evidence that the vice president's chief of staff had leaked the identity of the CIA covert operative to a news organization in an attempt to undermine her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had been an irritant to the Bush administration. Wary of identifying their confidential sources, reporters from big news organizations like The Washington Post and NBC were talking to Fitzgerald under strict ground rules aimed at narrowing the scope of his questions.
Matt Cooper, Time magazine's deputy Washington bureau chief at the time, agreed to tell Fitzgerald about his contacts with Libby--but not about his conversations with anyone else. Given permission to testify by Libby, who waived the usual reporter-source confidentiality agreement, Cooper met with Fitzgerald at the Washington office of Cooper's lawyer, First Amendment expert Floyd Abrams. Yes, Cooper acknowledged to the prosecutor, he had spoken to Libby. And, yes, Libby had confirmed that Wilson's wife had worked at the CIA and had played a role in sending Wilson to Africa on a fact-finding trip aimed at discovering whether Saddam Hussein's Iraq was trying to buy uranium from the country of Niger. But according to Cooper, Libby had been offhand, passive--"Yeah, I've heard that, too," Libby allegedly replied when Cooper asked him about the role played by Wilson's wife. In other words, Libby was not Cooper's original source. Well, then, who was?