Mystery Thickens in Secret Source Case

WASHINGTON — Was it Karl Rove, after all?

Or is President Bush's longtime political advisor getting a bum rap, fueled by wishful thinking of administration critics?

Nearly two years to the day after Robert Novak identified a CIA operative in his syndicated newspaper column, the mystery of who might have leaked the identity of Valerie Plame to Novak and other journalists seems only to be deepening.

The latest tantalizing clue involves Rove and a conversation he had with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper in the days before the Novak column appeared.

The conversation was revealed last week by Rove's lawyer, who added that his client didn't identify Plame or do anything wrong. Nobody has said precisely what the two men discussed. But special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald is apparently interested in questioning Cooper about the conversation before wrapping up his investigation.

Cooper narrowly avoided jail this week after saying that a source -- thought to be Rove -- had waived his pledge of confidentiality and that he was now free to testify before a grand jury investigating the leak.

The disclosure about the two men's conversation, combined with Fitzgerald's interest in Cooper's source, has prompted speculation about the identity and motives of the nation's most talked-about confidential source since "Deep Throat."

But unlike the recently revealed Watergate-era source, the Plame case has raised difficult questions for the news media, including whether journalists have ethical duties to protect sources whose own behavior is at issue.

The case has given ammunition to those who say the media are too liberal. And media groups have criticized Fitzgerald for playing hardball with Cooper and New York Times reporter Judith Miller for refusing to cooperate, but attacked him for failing to get to the bottom of possible wrongdoing by a Republican administration.

Some people close to the case theorize that the identity of Plame was introduced to administration officials by journalists who might have known of her status and mentioned it in the kind of back-and-forth that is common in reporters' conversations with sources. Repeating such gossip, however unseemly, would probably not be illegal, legal experts say.

Fitzgerald has been investigating since December 2003. The suspicion is that someone in the White House leaked the identity of Plame to the press in retaliation for an opinion piece her husband had written in the New York Times that attacked the Bush administration for intelligence failures. Novak revealed Plame's name in a July 14, 2003 column.