The rogues' gallery of those who acted badly in the CIA "leak" case turns out to be different from what the media led us to expect. Note that we put the word "leak" in quotation marks, because it's clear now there was no leak at all, just idle talk, and certainly no smear campaign against Joseph Wilson for criticizing President Bush's Iraq policy. It's as if a giant hoax were perpetrated on the country--by the media, by partisan opponents of the Bush administration, even by several Bush subordinates who betrayed the president and their White House colleagues. The hoax lingered for three years and is only now being fully exposed for what it was. Let's start at the top of the rogues' list:

* Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state under Colin Powell, was the first to reveal that Wilson's wife was a CIA employee. He blabbed carelessly to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, then to columnist Robert Novak, who mentioned it in a July 2003 column. Armitage, after admitting this to the FBI in October 2003, stood by silently year after year as Vice President Cheney, Cheney's chief of staff Scooter Libby, Karl Rove, and other White House officials were blamed for what he had done, and President Bush suffered politically. Loyalty is not Armitage's strong suit.

* Colin Powell, Bush's friend and secretary of state in the first Bush term, knew what Armitage had done and never let on. He met with Bush countless times as the White House was

* Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor in the "leak" case, was aware of the source of Novak's story when he began his still-ongoing investigation in December 2003. Yet finding that source was supposedly the object of his probe. Now working with a second grand jury, Fitzgerald surely knows the supposed conspiracy to defame Wilson is (and always was) a fantasy. Still he won't let go. Fitzgerald has proved once more why naming a special prosecutor is a colossal mistake.

* The Ashcroft Justice Department. Armitage brought his story to investigators after the CIA requested an investigation when the name of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, appeared in Novak's column. So when the department decided weeks later to appoint a special prosecutor, it already knew who had "leaked" Plame's name. Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself, leaving the decision to his deputy, James Comey. Rather than face a torrent of partisan recriminations for dropping the case, Comey passed the buck to Fitzgerald. There were no profiles in courage at Justice.

* Joseph Wilson, an ex-ambassador and National Security Council official in the Clinton and Bush I administrations, sparked the "leak" controversy in the first place by writing in the New York Times that Bush had lied in his 2003 State of the Union address about Saddam Hussein's seeking uranium in Africa for nuclear weapons. The CIA had sent Wilson to Niger in 2002 to check out precisely that point, and he claimed to have debunked it. Later, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that nearly everything Wilson wrote or said about Bush, Cheney, Iraq, and his own trip to Africa was untrue. Wilson was a fraud. "It's unfortunate that so many people took him seriously," the Washington Post editorialized sorrowfully last week.