Too much detail
I don't know that Judith Miller is an intelligence officer employed in as a non-official cover (NOC) operative by the Defense Intelligence Agency, or the National Security Agency or the fourth floor (in the seventh corridor of D Ring) of the Pentagon, or in one of the 13 other elements of the Intelligence Community. She does have some of the characteristics of one, with the cover job of being a journalist.
It is hard to imagine someone who hangs out in the Aspen Conference Jet-Set who hasn't come across the ecological factoid that aspen propgates by root suckering to form groups of trees called "clones", and that individual clones can occupy an area from a few tenths of an acre to many acres in size. So a reference to connected-by-roots hardly needs to be temporally or spatially specific.
I'm mildly curious why I should should think about Scooter, and not any other particular person and why I should think about August 2003, and not any other particular point in time, and why I should think about Wyoming and not any other particular place in the US, the UK, even Iraq. There are lots of places and people in Judith Miller's ouvre as operative-as-reporter that are just as interesting and where nexi of acts and intents appear to exist -- the unexplored territory leading up to her exchange of email with Ministry of Defence scientist David Kelly on July 17th, 2003, his death hours latter, and the implications of Lord Hutton's investigation into the death, for one, and I'm sure there are lots of other.
Well, I've got melting kids and Mark Kleiman, Empty Wheel at the Last Hurrah, Jane at Fire Dog Lake, and Digby are the manditory Plame v Miller reads.
Update: The evidence taken before the Foreign Affairs Committee on Tuesday 15 July 2003 -- the interview Judy Miller is so ... oddly aware of, and wants David Kelly to know she, and the person or persons using her to signal Dr. Kelly, is here What is odd is how much effort David Kelly goes to to avoid answering the rather mild question of whether or not he'd recently communicated with journalists. He was asked to provide the investigating committee with a list of journalists he'd had communications with by Thursday, the 17th, which he agreed, or perhaps he didn't agree, to do via the MOD. And of course he died first.