Plame Case Revisits an Old Battlefield

John Batchelor Radio Show ^ | Posted October 24, 2005 | By Jeff Stein from The Congressional Quarterly

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The old Washington refrain that "the coverup is worse than the crime" is in the air again. The reason: Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald faces a high legal bar in proving that the leak of Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA officer violated federal intelligence laws. Instead, he's more likely to try to show that there was a coverup, or an attempt to obstruct his investigation, according to legal experts.

The notion that the underlying offense is not what nails you in Washington has had a long shelf life. It can also be useful in attempting to change the subject from the original transgression, as Richard Nixon's camp did in calling the Watergate break-in a "third rate burglary." It was a stab at deflecting attention from the secret bombing of Cambodia, CIA mail openings, FBI break-ins, campaign slush funds and the other dirty tricks carried out by the infamous White House plumbers.

In this case, allies of the beleaguered White House and its occupants  particularly senior adviser Karl Rove; Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby; and the vice president himself  have gone a step further, arguing that there's been no crime committed in the alleged peddling of Plame's identity to reporters.

In an opinion piece in The Washington Post last January, Victoria Toensing, a deputy assistant attorney general in the Reagan administration and co-author of the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act, wrote that Plame wasn't really undercover to start with, because she wasn't stationed abroad and had a desk job at agency headquarters in Langley, Va.

A similar argument was made by "Counterspy" magazine and "Covert Action Information Bulletin" in the 1970s when they published the identities of hundreds of CIA operatives, spurring the law at the heart of Fitzgerald's probe. They said many of the agents were under such light diplomatic cover that even a casual perusal of their backgrounds in publicly available State Department guides gave away their identities.

In the current case, the outing of a CIA officer came by way of a different purpose. Supporters of the Iraq war wanted to neutralize the spy agency's doubt about a key piece of evidence in the White House case that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons.

There's nothing particularly new about that in Washington: The military services have been at war with the CIA as far back as the 1950s, when Air Force officials claimed there was "a missile gap" between the United States and Russia, with the U.S. lagging far behind. Only when the CIA sent its new U-2 spy plane soaring over the Soviet Union, taking pictures of air bases and missiles from 80,000 feet, did arms control advocates have the ammunition they needed to beat back the furor.

Of course, the motive behind the Plame leaks is not certain and won't be until the whole story has been told. But in the long struggle between the defense and intelligence communities, Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld are old hands.

Enter 'Team B' Back in the Ford administration, when the Nixon policy of détente was under attack by former defense officials and academics on the right, they took on the CIA, saying its estimate of military power was too soft. They wanted to create a "Team B," which would have access to the CIA's data on the Soviets and issue its own conclusions. Cheney, as White House chief of staff, and Rumsfeld, as secretary of Defense, championed Team B, whose members would include the young defense intellectual Paul Wolfowitz, who a quarter-century later would be an architect of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

CIA Director William Colby, who had cooperated with congressional investigations into CIA assassination plots, rejected the Team B idea and was fired. Colby's successor at the head of the spy agency, George Bush, the current president's father, accepted it.

Team B's conclusion that the CIA was indeed soft on the Soviets was leaked to sympathetic journalists and tilted the debate to the right, generating public support for a new round of defense spending, particularly in missiles. In a foreshadow of the out-of-channels Rumsfeld-Cheney intelligence on Iraq, the Team B conclusions turned out, years later, to be false, too.

"In retrospect, and with the Team B report and records now largely declassified, it is possible to see that virtually all of Team B's criticisms . . . proved to be wrong," Raymond L. Garthoff, a prolific author on Soviet affairs and former U.S. Ambassador to Bulgaria, wrote in a paper for the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence three years ago. "On several important specific points it wrongly criticized and 'corrected' the official estimates, always in the direction of enlarging the impression of danger and threat."

Jack F. Matlock, President Ronald Reagan's White House adviser on the Soviet Union and later U.S. ambassador to Moscow, added, "From my perspective, the intelligence community worked much better than many assumed."

The conservatives made another run at controlling the CIA when Reagan dispatched businessman William J. Casey to Langley to ride herd on supposed agency "liberals." Casey despised the upper-crust elder Bush, who was then Reagan's vice president, according to former deputy CIA director Bobby Ray Inman. Casey cut Bush out of the loop when he set up the irregular, covert operation led by Marine Corps Col. Oliver North, which eventually ended in the Iran-contra scandal. Likewise, when Reagan's Secretary of State, George Schultz, wanted to secretly back Saddam Hussein against the Iranians, Schultz eschewed the CIA and sent Rumsfeld, then a businessman, to Baghdad to seal the deal.

The path to Plame's outing also led through Baghdad. In the late 1990s, leading conservatives rallied to the support of Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi. By then, however, the CIA had abandoned him as too troublesome, unreliable and corrupt.

Among Chalabi's key supporters were Rumsfeld, Cheney and Wolfowitz, who used Chalabi like a stick to beat President Bill Clinton for a "do-nothing" policy on Iraq. When the three came back into power in January 2001, the CIA and State Department still refused to back Chalabi.

Cheney began visiting CIA headquarters to challenge its analysts over their intelligence on Saddam's weapons. To Richard Kerr, the former chief of CIA analysis who later conducted a study of the agency's pre-war reporting on Iraq, Cheney displayed no anti-CIA animus.

"My experience was to the contrary," Kerr said by e-mail. "He would not accept all our analysis without skepticism and believed we were better on some subjects than others. But those are the characteristics of a good customer."

Over at the Pentagon, however, Rumsfeld was reprising Team B yet again by creating his own intelligence shop. The Chalabi organization's alarmist reports on Saddam's nuclear weapons, later proved to be false, bypassed the CIA and went directly to the White House.

"That's why they set up an intelligence unit in [Undersecretary Douglas] Feith's office," said intelligence historian James V. Bamford. "The whole purpose was to get that kind of information and send it to Cheney."

A Riled White House Army Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin L. Powell's longtime top aide at the Defense and State departments, backed up that view in a blistering speech last week before the New America Foundation, a Washington think tank.

"What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made," Wilkerson said.

In 2002, CIA analysts thought so little of a report that Saddam had obtained uranium "yellow cake" from Niger to build a bomb that they didn't even include it in the president's daily brief, Bamford said.

"The Pentagon got it and flagged it to get Cheney's attention," he added, riling the White House further. Then covert CIA officer Plame, a specialist on weapons of mass destruction, helped arrange for her husband, career diplomat Joe Wilson, to investigate the yellow cake claim in Niger, where he'd once been posted. As the world now knows, Wilson reported that there was nothing to it. And after President Bush offered the Niger "intelligence" as fact in his 2003 State of the Union speech, Wilson went public with his findings in an opinion piece in The New York Times later that year.

White House officials were upset, to say the least, and spread the story that Wilson went to Niger only because his wife arranged it.

That's not likely to add up to a federal crime for Fitzgerald, says a former White House lawyer who has dealt with special prosecutors. Taking into consideration the context of the conversations that at least two of those reporters have described to the grand jury, violations of the intelligence identities act or the Espionage Act of 1917 would be very hard to prove, the lawyer said.

"That leaves perjury, obstruction of justice or false statements," the lawyer said.

That may be enough to put someone in jail for a time, and it would shake up the White House in major ways. But as past episodes have shown, even that would probably not disarm the combatants in the long and ongoing war between the spies and the generals.

The above item appears in the Oct. 24 CQ Weekly.

Background Chatter Art Films: The Pentagon's Defense Security Service (DSS) says it "has received numerous reports of suspicious requests for foreign video crews to visit cleared U.S. companies" and film documentaries "on an advanced or critical (dual-use) technology." "Economic espionage" was suspected in two cases. No culprits named. DSS also said "foreign entities are attempting to collect classified, sensitive, or proprietary information" from Pentagon contractors by dispatching people who formerly had U.S. security clearances to chat up unwitting former colleagues. In one case "the former employee returned to the U.S. and visited the cleared company and coworkers several times each year. Each time she visited, she would go to dinner with a group of coworkers prior to leaving the United States" and elicit information from them, DSS said . . . In a new book called "Elimination Theory," author T.J. Byron says he was an informant for the CIA in the 1980s when, with its approval, he helped South African intelligence obtain U.S. chemicals that could be used against Nelson Mandela's African National Congress and other opposition groups. The CIA never comments on its agents, but South Africa's clandestine "Project Coast" biological weapons program was exposed and its onetime head Wouter Basson charged with murder after Mandela was elected.