Secrets of the Scandal

ike any good spy story, the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson is far more complex than it seems on the surface.

I know Mrs. Wilson, but I knew nothing about her C.I.A. career and hadn't realized she's "a hell of a shot with an AK-47," as a classmates at the C.I.A. training "farm," Jim Marcinkowski, recalls. I'll be more careful around her, for she also turns out to be skilled in throwing hand grenades and to have lived abroad and run covert operations in some of the world's messier spots. (Mrs. Wilson was not a source for this column or any other that I've written about the intelligence community.)

Those operations remain secret, but there are several crucial facts that can be made public without putting anyone at risk — and together, they leave everybody looking bad. The C.I.A. is now conducting a damage assessment, which will determine what networks and operations it will have to close down. But my sense is that Democrats exaggerate the damage to Mrs. Wilson's career and to her personal security, while Republicans vastly play down the enormity of the security breach and the danger to the assets she worked with.

First, the C.I.A. suspected that Aldrich Ames had given Mrs. Wilson's name (along with those of other spies) to the Russians before his espionage arrest in 1994. So her undercover security was undermined at that time, and she was brought back to Washington for safety reasons.

Second, as Mrs. Wilson rose in the agency, she was already in transition away from undercover work to management, and to liaison roles with other intelligence agencies. So this year, even before she was outed, she was moving away from "noc" — which means non-official cover, like pretending to be a business executive. After passing as an energy analyst for Brewster-Jennings & Associates, a C.I.A. front company, she was switching to a new cover as a State Department official, affording her diplomatic protection without having "C.I.A." stamped on her forehead.

Third, Mrs. Wilson's intelligence connections became known a bit in Washington as she rose in the C.I.A. and moved to State Department cover, but her job remained a closely held secret. Even her classmates in the C.I.A.'s career training program mostly knew her only as Valerie P. That way, if one spook defected, the damage would be limited.

All in all, I think the Democrats are engaging in hyperbole when they describe the White House as having put Mrs. Wilson's life in danger and destroyed her career; her days skulking along the back alleys of cities like Beirut and Algiers were already mostly over.

Moreover, the Democrats cheapen the debate with calls, at the very beginning of the process, for a special counsel to investigate the White House. Hillary Rodham Clinton knows better than anyone how destructive and distracting a special counsel investigation can be, interfering with the basic task of governing, and it's sad to see her display the same pusillanimous partisanship that Republicans showed just a few years ago.

If Democrats have politicized the scandal and exaggerated it, Republicans have inexcusably tried to whitewash it. The leak risked the security of all operatives who had used Brewster-Jennings as cover, as well as of all assets ever seen with Mrs. Wilson. Unwitting sources will now realize that they were supplying the C.I.A. with information, and even real agents may fear exposure and vanish.

C.I.A. veterans are seething, and rightly so, at the betrayal by their own government. Larry Johnson, who entered the agency at the same time as Mrs. Wilson, is a Republican who voted for President Bush — and he's so enraged that he compares the administration leaker to the spies Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen.

"Here's a woman who put her life on the line," Mr. Johnson said. "But unlike a Navy seal or a marine, she didn't have a gun to fight back. All she had to protect her was her cover."

We in journalism are also wrong, I think, to extend professional courtesy to Robert Novak, by looking beyond him to the leaker. True, he says he didn't think anyone would be endangered. Working abroad in ugly corners of the world, American journalists often learn the identities of American C.I.A. officers, but we never publish their names. I find Mr. Novak's decision to do so just as inexcusable as the decision of administration officials to leak it.

The first part of the story quotes a few lines from the fawning piece in the Wa Post that was featured on MSN for a day or so. I understand the frustration and anger in having covers blown for many people. BUT - she put herself at risk by first marrying a diplomat/politician who couldn't keep his mouth shut, and secondly getting him and her involved in this trip to Africa where he didn't know to really look for what there was to find. Finding nothing, he took the political view of some in the CIA and went public in a weird partisan way, inviting scrutiny into what he did and why he did it. So the CIA outed itself, with her blessing!

What Kristoff conveniently leaves out of this article is that Larry Johnson said that Valerie Plame was an undercover operative for 3 decades before the White House blew her cover. Yet it has been reported that she is 40 years old, I doubt very seriously that the CIA is recruiting 10 year old children into the CIA as undercover agents :-)

The other under-reported detail of this so-called scandal is who in the CIA authorized a former diplomat with no experience in counter proliferation or any kind of investigative skills that would qualify him to be sent to Niger to look into the claims by the Brits that Iraq had sent several high level Iraqi military members on a trade mission to Niger.

CIA Director George Tenet has already testified that he had no prior knowledge of Joseph Wilson's trip to Niger and had never seen or heard of any report of his findings while in Niger. I know if I was Dir. Tenet, I would be ready to lop off the heads of whoever was responsible for this. All anyone has to do is consider the fact that the Vice President of the Unites States requested an investigation of the possibility that Niger were involved in an illegal sale of Uranium Oxide to a Rogue Nation like Iraq who has been in violation of every single resolution the U.N. had imposed on it, and the CIA's answer is to send a known critic of the Bush Administration on a assignment of such importance that it could be the difference between war and peace?

That my friend is the real scandal and if the Press had any credibility whatsoever, it would be all over these details. What's scary is that it's obvious that the entrenched liberals in the State Department and the DOD are worried that their 40 year strangle hold on these agencies is at risk, and this explains their vitriol hatred for George W. Bush and all he represents. Liberals are scared of strong leaders and GWB has them quaking in their boots

Some of the reasons for this not making sense include the fact that US citizens simply don't do that stuff.

Covert intelligence ain't like Alias or JAG; the US types are there to find, recruit, train, control, locals who do the shaky stuff. It's pretty simple, 007 was clearly a Brit, Ms Plame is clearly an American, US born Chinese are clearly not Taiwanese or Shanghainese ... to borrow a quote from "Patton", the idea is to get the other poor dumb (citizen) to risk his or her life. In the mean time, maintain plausable denial for the US asset.

It is fairly rare for a US person to unload a dead drop or do much more than provide bonafides for the locals. And in those cases the US person is either a) tightly bound to diplomatic immunity or b) in so deep that their cover would be have required more years than this lady ever spent in one spot. The idea is that the local asset, such as the guy lost when Toricelli blew his name, is either at risk or placed so highly that the risk to our guy is worth it (and there is a back door available).

She might have been a courier, or some other transient actor, but I really, really, doubt she had to prove she was "a hell of a shot with an AK-47,...(or)...skilled in throwing hand grenades".

On the same note, she and her hubby might well have been "assets" in the business of providing information they picked up along the way. (That's pretty common and I think some of the rules have been liberalized - journalists and doctors etc. being more in use than before.) For that matter, she might have had Mr. sweet tea assigned an asset number without his even knowing about it. Still, not risking a US citizen with any retribution other than the risk of a hasty persona non grata type departure from those "messy places".

At least on the surface, this thing looks like a couple of (typically) self serving and ambitious bureaucrats overplayed their combined hand and slipped into overt partisan politicsl: and were 'outed' for that.

What I found amusing about this article is this guy kind of rips Novak for disclosing the name of this woman, and then, in the same article he drops the name of a CIA front company ("Brewster-Jennings & Associates, a C.I.A. front company"), and, the name of another possible CIA agent that trained with this woman ("classmates at the C.I.A. training "farm," Jim Marcinkowski, recalls"). I my be knit picking a bit here, but didn`t he just do exactly what he accused Novak of doing?

Depends on his source.

Sounds to me more like Mr. Marcinkowski had an overwhelming need to stick his name into the news; kind of like a guy standing behind the candidate and mugging at the camera.
Not a lawyer or such, but I'd imagine that if Marcinkowski used those names in the interview, with Novak's story already in the media, the author felt it was 'a news story' rather than a new disclosure.
In any event, I doubt the author is in trouble. In part because the article made Ms. Plame into a lefty Emma Peal.

And, in case my analysis is correct, I'll say "Marcinkowski" one more time and link it to "Novak" (not to mention Dianna Rigg). There, Mr. Marcinkowski, you've made the big time on Free Republic.

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