Reply #10: Novak is slicing and dicing his own quote with Harlow's

[Fridays Child]

From the above theconservativevoice.com article:

What he did say was, as I reported in a previous column, "she probably never again would be given a foreign assignment but that exposure of her name might cause 'difficulties.'"

Notice that "difficulties" is the only word in double quotation marks? And the immediate antecedent to the entire quote is "...as I reported in a previous column...." But that segment of the sentence is prefaced by "What he did say was...."

Novak is merely quoting his own Washington Post article of October 1, 2003 (see below), with the exception of the word "difficulties." Is it his intention to make the reader think the entire quote is from Harlow? In any case, the fact is that we don't know what Harlow really said, immediately before he used the word "difficulties."

From the Post article:

At the CIA, the official designated to talk to me denied that Wilson's wife had inspired his selection but said she was delegated to request her husband's help. The CIA official asked me not to use her name, saying that she probably never again would be given a foreign assignment but that exposure of her name might cause "difficulties" if she were to travel abroad. He never suggested to me that Wilson's wife or anybody else would be endangered. If he had, I would not have used her name. I used it in the sixth paragraph of my column because it looked like the missing explanation of an otherwise incredible choice by the CIA for its mission.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A30022-2003Oct1