NY Times omitted Plame neighbors' statements that they didn't know she worked for CIA; Drudge regurgitated baseless report that they did

In an October 26 article about the investigation into the alleged leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity, The New York Times reported that FBI agents questioned Plame's neighbors in an effort "to determine whether it was commonly known that she was a C.I.A. officer." But unlike The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Associated Press, and Reuters, New York Times reporters Richard W. Stevenson and Anne E. Kornblut did not report that Plame's neighbors told investigators that they had not known before syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak's July 14, 2003, column that Plame worked for the CIA. The New York Times' omission is particularly odd, given that the newspaper ran an article July 5 devoted to the very question of the extent to which Plame's affiliation with the CIA had been known.

Also on October 26, the Drudge Report quoted from a three-month-old Washington Times article to baselessly suggest that "[m]ost of her [Plame's] neighbors and friends knew that she was a CIA employee." As Media Matters for America noted at the time, the article mentioned only one of Plame's neighbors by name: David Tillotson, who told The Washington Times that he "absolutely didn't know" Plame worked for the CIA. Instead, the Washington Times article relied upon the word of Fred Rustmann, a former CIA agent who had left the agency in 1990, had supervised Plame for a year early in her career, and was not her neighbor.

From the October 26 New York Times article by Richard W. Stevenson and Anne E. Kornblut:

In a sign that the prosecutor is continuing to build a case that Ms. Wilson's covert status was ended when she was named in Mr. Novak's column, F.B.I. agents questioned neighbors of the Wilsons in northwest Washington in the last few days, seeking to determine whether it was commonly known that she was a C.I.A. officer, a person involved in the case said. Ms. Wilson was identified in Mr. Novak's column by her maiden name, Valerie Plame.

As the Los Angeles Times noted in its October 26 article, "Critics of the leak investigation have said it was an open secret that Plame worked for the CIA." But the Los Angeles Times added that "neighbors contacted by The Times said they told the FBI agents that they had no idea of her agency life":

The agents "made it clear they were part of the Fitzgerald investigation, and they were basically tying up loose ends," said David Tillotson, a lawyer and neighbor who was among those interviewed Monday.

"They really only had one interest, and that was to know whether Valerie's identity, on what she did for a living, was known prior to the Novak article. It seemed they were trying to establish clearly that prior to the Novak article she was not widely known on the cocktail circuit," Tillotson said.

"And I pointed out, we were good friends, we socialized with them, and we just had no idea" until her status was made public in the Novak column, Tillotson said. "To that moment, we had no idea whatsoever that Valerie did anything for the government."

[...]

Some neighbors said they had been interviewed before by the FBI.

"They basically asked me if I knew what she did prior to the leak," said Marc Lefkowitz, another neighbor. The answer, he said, was an unambiguous no.

Similarly, The Washington Post reported on October 26 that Lefkowitz and Tillotson "said they told two FBI agents they had no clue that Plame, whom they knew by her married name, Valerie Wilson, worked for the agency until Novak's column appeared."

Reuters reported on October 26 that when asked by FBI agents if he knew about Plame's CIA work before Novak revealed it in his column, Lefkowitz responded, "I didn't know." And in its October 26 account, the AP reported that Tillotson said he was asked by the FBI: "Did we know anything about her position before the story broke?" He responded, "Absolutely not."

The New York Times' Scott Shane had spoken to Tillotson more than three months ago, for the July 5 article. Shane quoted Tillotson as saying, "Before this whole affair, no one would ever have thought of her as an undercover agent." That New York Times article also quoted another of Wilson's neighbors, Christopher Wolf, who described his reaction to reading in Novak's column that Plame worked for the CIA: "I said: 'This is amazing! I had no idea.' "

The New York Times' October 26 omission comes as conservative media figures such as Rush Limbaugh are insisting that Plame's identity as a CIA operative "was known by everybody before all this anyway."

On October 26, The Drudge Report linked to two articles that discussed Plame's neighbors. The first link, which Drudge titled, "CIA leak investigators hold last-minute interviews with Plame neighbors ...," was to Reuters' October 26 article. Posted immediately below it was a link to a July 15 Washington Times article, which Drudge titled, "FLASHBACK: 'Most of her neighbors and friends knew that she was a CIA employee' ..." (Later on October 26, Drudge switched his Reuters link to a version of the article that did not quote any of Plame's neighbors.)

From The Washington Times:

"She made no bones about the fact that she was an agency employee and her husband was a diplomat," Fred Rustmann, a covert agent from 1966 to 1990, told The Washington Times.

"Her neighbors knew this, her friends knew this, his friends knew this. A lot of blame could be put on to central cover staff and the agency because they weren't minding the store here. ... The agency never changed her cover status."

The quote Drudge used -- "most of her neighbors and friends knew that she was a CIA employee" -- was The Washington Times' apparent paraphrasing of Rustmann's comments. However, the article contained no explanation of how Rustmann arrived at this conclusion more than a decade after leaving the agency. Rustmann acknowledged on the July 15 edition of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes that he had supervised Plame for "about a year" near the beginning of her career.