Interesting information on Victoria Toensing

One journalist had an interesting ... interaction ... with her. He relates the story of tracking down the terrorist who shot Leon Klinghoffer.

At NBC, with the help of our Mideast sources, we managed to find Abbas. With an NBC crew in tow, I flew to a Middle East country and interviewed Abbas. We got him to admit to ordering the hijacking, and the killing of Klinghoffer because, Abbas told me, Klinghoffer was attempting to incite other passengers to resist.

To get the interview we had made one commitment: That NBC would not reveal the meeting place.

Enter Victoria Toensing.

NBC was protecting terrorists, she said. And with that charge a huge public debate over freedom of the press broke out. People took sides. There were demands that the NBC reporter (me) and crew return to Washington to appear before a grand jury.

Changing the story

It always seemed to me that most people felt NBC had done a decent journalistic job in tracking down Abbas, that we elicited a confession from those involved and showed them for the thugs they were.

Still, the debate played for days. Toensing knew what she was doing. The NBC debate overshadowed the stories about American failures in the Mideast or screw-ups chasing terrorists.

The truth was any tinpot government security service would have been able to track a four-person television crew leaving Heathrow Airport for the Middle East. I met Victoria Toensing years later at a Washington function and she told me exactly where we had met with Abbas and who his henchmen were.

Now Victoria is testifying at the Valerie Plame hearing. Her job is still the same — to change the nature of the way the story is perceived.

This time she is saying that Valerie Plame was a low-level CIA employee, not a covert operative. As a result, no crime was committed when she was outed in a national newspaper column.