At the Time & Life building in Manhattan, the leaders of the world’s largest magazine company reign from the 34th floor. They’ve been there so long, since the days of Time founder Henry Luce, that the executive suite has become a persona, as in “34 wants” or “34 is pissed.” On June 27, 2005, 34 was very nervous.

It was the end of the Supreme Court’s term, the day the justices would decide whether or not to take the case that Time Inc. and I—along with Judith Miller of the New York Times—had brought to their marbled steps. A lower court had ordered Miller and me to testify in the case of who had leaked Valerie Plame’s employment by the C.I.A. We had refused to disclose the names of our confidential sources to Patrick Fitzgerald, the relentless special counsel. If the court denied our motion and we continued to resist, Miller and I would be sentenced to jail and Time Inc. could face substantial fines, even the imprisonment of company officers.

When I arrived on 34, I went to the office of Norman Pearl­stine, the editor in chief of Time Inc.’s 100-plus magazines, where we waited for the court to announce whether it would take our case. My late father-in-law, Henry Grunwald, had occupied this same office, so I felt an odd kinship with the room and increasingly with Pearlstine. Once the editor of the Wall Street Journal, the then-62-year-old executive was a slightly endearing combination of nerd and hip A-lister. Together, we watched CNN, awaiting the Supreme Court’s ruling, but like a kid who retreats into his Game Boy while the world around him collapses, I was obsessed by a loose button on my jacket. I asked Pearlstine’s secretary for needle and thread. My cell phone rang; it was a TV producer asking if I’d like to appear on the air now that I was going to jail. As Pearlstine and I discussed what to do, I kept sewing.

The C.I.A. leak case began for me, and America, back in July 2003. I was a White House correspondent for Time when former ambassador Joseph Wilson wrote that New York Times op-ed, the one saying that he’d been dispatched to Niger by the C.I.A. to investigate British intelligence claims that Saddam Hussein was trying to buy uranium to make nuclear weapons. Wilson famously found no evidence for this. But it was the White House’s response to Wilson that caused the media frenzy. The administration said that the African-uranium claim should not have been in the president’s State of the Union address in January 2003. Then, with the deftness of Inspector Clouseau, it proceeded to trash Wilson publicly and, as we all know now, his wife privately.

I was curious about this contradiction when I spoke to Karl Rove a few days after the Wilson article appeared. Rove told me that a lot would be coming out about Wilson’s trip, that Wilson had been sent by “his wife,” who works on weapons of mass destruction at “the agency.” I knew he didn’t mean the Environmental Protection Agency and thought, They’re simultaneously agreeing with Wilson and calling him a girlie man for letting his wife send him out for information on uranium. Rove added to the mystery by ending our conversation with the sentence “I’ve already said too much.” (This winter, Plame told Congress that she neither sent nor recommended her husband for the Niger mission. If anything, she said, she was reluctant to have him go, because she’d be stuck at home alone with their two-year-old twins.)

The day after interviewing Rove, I spoke to I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff. He gave me an on-the-record statement distancing Cheney from Wilson’s trip; off the record, I asked if he’d heard that Wilson’s wife had sent him. Libby replied with words to the effect of “Yeah, I’ve heard that too.” I didn’t write the line down, but I remembered it because it confirmed what Rove had told me.

The following week, I co-authored a piece for Time.com—“A War on Wilson?”—which was the first to show the behind-the-scenes effort to discredit Wilson. These two conversations—one with Rove, one with Libby—and the resulting Web piece put Time Inc. and me on a collision course with the law.