The story supposedly hexing him is that in a July 14 column Novak wrote that "senior administrative officials" told him that Wilson had been recommended to serve on a CIA mission to Niger to investigate uranium transfers to Iraqi agents by his wife, Valerie Plame, whom Novak identified as a CIA "operative." Precisely what the term "operative" meant remains a mystery. However, two days later Novak's identification of Plame roused indignation from an unlikely source, the left-wing Nation, an otherwise anti-CIA publication that had never minded this sort of outing in the past.
Soon Plame's husband jumped in. He had suffered the inspiration that Novak's "two senior administration officials" were actually one official, the unsuspecting Rove. And he was even angrier than the Nation. Wilson announced that he would like "to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs." Revealing the identity of an undercover CIA agent is a crime. By the way, Wilson is a writer as well as a diplomat. In March, a very critical essay of the Bush foreign policy appeared under his name in the extreme left-wing Nation.
Wilson believes that his criticism of the Bush administration motivated Rove to expose his wife. Now Rove has been a brilliant political strategist for three decades, but the plot that Wilson attributes to Rove is so fanciful I cannot imagine it ever even being adopted for a prime-time television melodrama.
The White House denies that Rove was Novak's source, and for his part Wilson seems to have backed off a bit on his accusation, saying he has no evidence Rove was involved. Thus my guess is that if the White House hangs in there, this story, too, will die. Rove is too much the pro to have been involved in such a thing.
The only matter that troubles me about the episode is that the CIA would employ a man as left-wing as Wilson to go to Niger unless they planned to leave him there. Unfortunately, he has returned.