He said she said he said she said

Between the fact that all we know about the ongoing investigation into the Valerie Plame leak comes from yet more carefully leaked accounts attributed to anonymous sources, and Newsweek's new policy of always attributing a token reason for keeping secret the identities of its sources, you wind up with sentences like this one, from the August 1 issue:

A source close to Karl Rove, who requested anonymity because the FBI asked participants not to comment publicly, says the White House aide--who passed info about Wilson's wife to Time's Matt Cooper--only knew about her CIA job from either a reporter or "somebody" who heard it from a reporter; he can't remember which or who.

There are no less than seven pronouns in that sentence, three names, two definite descriptions, and three indefinite descriptions, referring to possibly as many as four different anonymous sources and three no-longer-anonymous sources. (This only counts expressions referring to persons; I have not included, for example, "the FBI".)

Besides issues of Newsweek that arrived while I was away for my sister's wedding, today I have been reading some Gareth Evans. In The Varieties of Reference (p. 305), Evans writes:

The characteristic [that almost all uses of referring expressions share] is this: in order to understand an utterance containing a referring expression used in this way, the hearer must link up the utterance with some information in his possession.

It is for this reason that I have decided it is useless to try and follow the stories about the Valerie Plame leak until special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald actually decides to tell us what he knows.