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CIA Agent 'Outed' by Bush Administration?

  
  

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Panic
12:49 / 29.09.03
The wife of former US Ambassador Joseph Wilson has been revealed to be a CIA operative by leaking White House staff. This is allegedly in retaliation for Wilson's criticisms of Bush and the war in Iraq.

On MSNBC

On the Beeb

AP/New York Times
 
 
Baz Auckland
13:34 / 29.09.03
From The Washington Post

President Bush's aides promised yesterday to cooperate with a Justice Department inquiry into an administration leak that exposed the identity of a CIA operative, but Democrats charged that the administration cannot credibly investigate itself and called for an independent probe.

White House officials said they would turn over phone logs if the Justice Department asked them to. But the aides said Bush has no plans to ask his staff members whether they played a role in revealing the name of an undercover officer who is married to former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, one of the most visible critics of Bush's handling of intelligence about Iraq.

An administration official told The Post on Saturday that two White House officials leaked the information to selected journalists to discredit Wilson. The leak could constitute a federal crime, and intelligence officials said it might have endangered confidential sources who had aided the operative. CIA Director George Tenet has asked the Justice Department to investigate how the leak occurred.

More specific details about the controversy emerged yesterday. Wilson said in a telephone interview that four reporters from three television networks called him in July and told him that White House officials had contacted them to encourage stories that would include his wife's identity. Novak attributed his account to "two senior administration officials." An administration aide told The Post on Saturday that the two White House officials had cold-called at least six Washington journalists and identified Wilson's wife.

Wilson had touched off perhaps the most searing controversy of this administration by saying he had determined on a mission to Niger last year that there was no clear evidence that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy "yellowcake" uranium ore for possible use in a nuclear weapon.

His statement led to a retraction by the White House, and bolstered Democrats' contention that Bush had exaggerated intelligence to build a case against Iraq. The yellowcake allegation became known as "the 16 words" after Bush said in his State of the Union address in January that the British government had learned that Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

An administration official said the leaks were "simply for revenge" for the trouble Wilson had caused Bush.
 
 
Hieronymus
14:48 / 29.09.03
Wow. I'm surprised this is being brought up again as it's been in the wind for a while now. I thought for sure the White House circle of silence would've buried it by ignoring it already. Good to know things are changing.

And I can just see Shrub and John Ashcroft sharing tea at his Crawford ranch.

BUSH: Soooo.... you want to check my phone logs and see if you can find where I criminally outed a CIA agent in payback for criticizing my Iraq saber rattling?

ASHCROFT: Eh..... maybe later. I hear Laura just baked us some fresh apple pie.

Justice Department inquiry, my ass.
 
 
Simplist
19:29 / 29.09.03
I was quite surprised to see this finally bubble up to the surface, ie. the major networks and wire services. Seems weblogs and other internet sources really are beginning to have an impact in the sense of keeping these kinds of stories alive in a way that previous forms of alternative media rarely if ever could. Now that this one's finally surfaced, it looks like the Bushies may finally be facing a feeding frenzy they can't wait out. Interestingly, it first emerged in the mass media late Thursday evening (on the MSNBC website), but neither the wire services nor any of the other major American networks picked it up until Saturday, just in time to impact on the Sunday morning news shows and be one of the main topics of this week's news cycle. So I wonder, did the newskeepers delay through Friday because they DIDN'T want to report the story, or were they strategically positioning it for this week's cycle?
 
 
Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo
12:42 / 30.09.03
Friday is when stories are typically "dumped" by politicians and companies in the US, since the Sunday paper is mostly put to bed on Friday afternoon (with room left for bigger stories), Saturday newspapers are the least bought and read, and news viewership drops on Fridays through Saturdays. It's a feeling that they can dump it and focus on an agenda for Sundays when it comes.

Doesn't always work.

And the reason for this coming back up has nothing to do with the US puppy media doing their job, but the fact that the CIA feels that they have been bullied into giving information they didn't agree with, have been ordered to take the blame, and are forcing the issue since it seems that Karl Rove outed an agent because a diplomat spoke his mind.

It's going to get ugly. And I couldn't be happier.
 
 
Baz Auckland
14:15 / 30.09.03
Justice Department launches full investigation

The Justice Department launched a full-blown criminal investigation into who leaked the name of a CIA officer, and President Bush directed his White House staff on Tuesday to cooperate fully.

The White House staff was notified of the investigation by e-mail after the Justice Department decided late Monday to move from a preliminary investigation into a full probe. It is rare that the department decides to conduct a full investigation of the alleged leak of classified information.

Even before the Justice Department investigation was announced, Democrats were calling for the appointment of a special counsel to insure impartiality. McClellan said the decision rests with the Justice Department.

So will some junior staffer take the blame for this? or does it have the potential to see some important heads roll?
 
 
zarathustra_k
15:38 / 30.09.03
Robert Novak wrote the article and surly knew what he was doing; yet I have yet to hear about anything against him criminal or otherwise. Why isn't he being blasted for his article and revealing the CIA agent, the only reason I can think of is because he is a conservative commentator?
 
 
grant
15:39 / 30.09.03
Talking Points Memo has been all over this.

Here's one excerpt of just one of the entries:

Point two.

We've heard a lot about how blowing Plame's cover was probably illegal and certainly dishonorable. But let's walk through what the implications are.

Plame's beat, if we can use that word, was weapons of mass destruction. And, of course, WMD is the big issue. It's why Iraq, why Joe Wilson, why Niger, why CIA referrals. That's what's at the bottom of all this stuff. Keeping WMD out of the wrong hands is, or was, Plame's job.

If that's her job you can figure that over the years she's been involved in various operations aimed at tracking proliferation, worked with various human sources, all sorts of stuff like that.

Now Plame's name has been splashed across papers all over the world. And the folks that leaked her name made sure that they used her maiden name, Plame -- the one she did most of her work under -- rather than Wilson, the name which I'm told she now goes by.

So now her name's out. You couldn't unlock everything just knowing her name -- covers are used and so forth. But once you know Plame is CIA, and what she looks like and so forth, you unravel most if not everything. And now every bad-actor and bad-acting government knows that anything that Plame was involved with, any operation, any company she was supposed to be working for, any people she worked closely with, are probably also CIA or at least work with CIA. WMD bad-guys now know to steer clear of them.

Let's say there's some operation Plame hasn't been involved with for a decade -- but it's still on-going. People will remember she used to be in on that operation and thus it's tagged as an Agency operation and it's useless. Everyone will know to steer clear.

Now, I have no knowledge of any operations Plame was involved in or covers she used. These are hypotheticals. But it gives you a sense of the sort of work she was involved in and the potential collateral damage of exposing her cover. And consider what her work was: protecting Americans from weapons of mass destruction. Chew on that irony.



Someone has already labeled this "Wilsongate".
 
 
Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo
17:03 / 30.09.03
I've heard it called "revengegate" since it was in revenge for the diplomat saying that the Administration was lying about the Niger/Uranium connection.
 
 
Hieronymus
17:55 / 30.09.03
On Karl Rove:

"And people in various corners of the wide room are retelling the story again—they’ll tell it forever—the moment when McCain surged in the New Hampshire primary, when he caught, and won the state in a walk. The Bush juggernaut had stalled. McCain, embraced by the media, to whom he gave extraordinary access—"just hang with me, boys, all day, everything on the record"—was seizing the high middle ground, where you win presidential elections. And someone points to a guy in the room—yeah, him over there near the curtains, tall, friendly-looking guy named John Weaver. He was the other genius wunderkind in Texas in the 1980s, along with Rove. They won campaigns left and right, those two. Rove was mostly a direct-mail fundraiser back then, Weaver more a strategist-manager type. Something happened that neither will talk about, and they stopped working together in 1988. Many of the people in this room followed Weaver, who was McCain’s political director in his bid for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination, to this side of the Republican party. Since their estrangement, Weaver’s relationship with Rove has gotten somewhat odd.

Weaver gets asked about Rove quite often; people know about their history. He always demurs. "Not worth getting into," he says. People around him, though, will talk. "John will never work in the Republican party again, thanks to Karl," says Salter. Weaver now works for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. It’s commonly held that Rove ran him out of the party. The word went out: Any Republican who hired Weaver would be held in disfavor by the president. "What can I say?" Weaver says quietly. "Like me, all the moderate Republicans have been run out of the party by the Right. I’m doing what I’ve always done politically; these guys just call themselves Democrats now."

Absolutely fascinating article.
 
 
Simplist
20:15 / 30.09.03
Good essay on this here. Here's the money quote:

And that is the greatest irony of all. Ms. Plame, who really was working to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction, has been ruined by persons who only pretended to do so for political gain, and whose invasion of Iraq did nothing to make the US one whit safer.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
00:52 / 01.10.03
Now if this had happened about four weeks ago, it would have coincided with the start of the Hutton inquiry, and could have done some SERIOUS damage. As is, I think both Mr George and Mr Tony may just manage to deflect this one.

shit
 
 
Baz Auckland
01:47 / 01.10.03
...depending on the memory of the electorate, of course. Watergate took years to end, and who knows how long Wilsongate can stay in the papers...
 
 
Ray Fawkes
03:05 / 01.10.03
Considering that it's an act of federal treason to blow an active CIA field agent's cover, one would hope that this issue remains in the papers at least as long as the investigation into the previous President's adultery.
 
 
sleazenation
15:39 / 01.10.03
You would like to think...

But there has already been some major paper shredding here and unless there is a full INDEPENDANT investigation, this shows all the hallmarks of being swept under the carpet...
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
16:47 / 01.10.03
Doubtful. The CIA is most probably mightily and righteously pissed. This is the absolute sin in human intelligence terms; blowing an agent in play, which in turn endangers a whole list of contacts around the world - many of whom, of course, will be genuine civilians. The Agency seems to have a patchy relationship with the Bush administration anyway; just as SIS in the UK here doesn't appreciate being used for political ends (Scarlett is seen in some circles as unsalvagable after his staunch pro-government stance during the Hutton Inquiry) so the CIA probably doesn't like seeing its evaluations ignored or misquoted to support political agendas - but to be directly assailed... bad karma.

If the lady is a field agent, rather than an analyst, I'd expect this one to keep cropping up.

There's an interesting piece on the mechanisms of the Bush Whitehouse in DM's post to this thread, but in case you skipped the article DM quotes from, I'd advise you to read it... If I were in the Agency, and I thought Rove (or someone else in the Whitehouse) had done this on purpose, I would not let it go. Ever.
 
 
MJ-12
17:50 / 01.10.03
Though nothing may come of it, I do have to say that the notion of Rove doing 10 years in Lompoc is making my nipples hard.
 
 
grant
21:15 / 01.10.03
The CIA has been pissed on by the White House pretty much since 9/11. I don't think they're gonna let this one slide.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
22:07 / 01.10.03
The whole thing is just *astonishing* - more astonishing, perhaps, even than the Kelly affair. The idea that the administration could brief against its own intelligence agency to the extent of outing a field agent in order to settle a personal score... madness.

Unfortunately, I suspect that the person actually behind this will not be held accountable. One of the features of the current admninistration appears to be a belief that accountability is an unnecessary block on the due process of government, and it would be entirely coherent with that belief to protect somebody who had attempted to reign in the idea that opponenets of the administration should have the right to criticise it with impunity, even if the result was a general reduction in national and global security.
 
 
Hieronymus
04:55 / 02.10.03
It's certainly hooked the American public's attention
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
08:23 / 02.10.03
Haus - true enough, but one of the more admirable things about the US system is the number of ways in which it's possible to force the government to pay attention. Not all of them are applicable here, but some surely will be - though the mind boggles at the CIA bringing a Class Action against the Executive...
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
08:28 / 02.10.03
Bush aides began yesterday to adjust their response to the expanding probe. They reined in earlier, broad portrayals of innocence in favor of more technical arguments that it is possible the disclosure was made without knowledge that a covert operative was being exposed and therefore might not have been a crime.


From the Washington Post article DM linked to... What is that salty iron smell?
 
 
grant
12:12 / 02.10.03
I believe it's no longer premature to say that that would be blood, Nick.

Blood in the water.

And now Rush Limbaugh's been outed as a drug addict by the National Enquirer.

The pendulum is swinging, sharply.
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
16:14 / 02.10.03
According to an article in today's Guardian, one of the journalists who spoke to Wilson told him that Rove had describe Wilson's wife as "fair game".

I'm a little too fond of intelligence services sometimes, but this strikes me as mind-boggling.
 
 
grant
18:27 / 02.10.03
The fingers are starting to point in a specific direction:

From the Washington Post
As the White House hunkered down, it got the first taste of criticism from within Bush's own party. Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) said that Bush "needs to get this behind him" by taking a more active role. "He has that main responsibility to see this through and see it through quickly, and that would include, if I was president, sitting down with my vice president and asking what he knows about it," the outspoken Hagel said last night on CNBC's "Capital Report."

The Los Angeles Times:
Vincent Cannistraro, a former senior CIA official, said the circumstances of the leak suggested that it might have come from someone in Cheney's camp, although he acknowledged that he does not have direct evidence. A spokesman for Cheney declined to respond....

But the most widely discussed theory focuses on the high-stakes bureaucratic battle that raged around Bush and his top aides in July over a single 16-word sentence in the president's State of the Union address.

That battle pitted officials from Cheney's office and the White House's National Security Council, who argued that Iraq had been seeking nuclear weapons, against the CIA, which argued that some of the evidence was weak.
 
 
Simplist
16:00 / 03.10.03
Josh Marshall had more good commentary on this today. One highlight:

One of the failings of ideologues is their inability to see that everyone else isn't necessarily an ideologue like them. So when the analysts at Langley didn't find evidence to support the White House's brainstorms, the folks at the White House assumed that the analysts were just Saddam-hugging ideologues rather than trained professionals --- albeit with their own very real biases and assumptions --- who were in most cases acting on their own inability to find any evidence to substantiate what the White House was so desperate to prove.
 
 
Busigoth
19:37 / 03.10.03
MSNBC reports ties between Ashcroft & Rove which is emboldening the Dems to scream louder for an independent probe.

Over 100,000 people have responded to MSNBC's on-line poll about whether an independent probe is needed b/c the Justice Dept. can't be trusted to be impartial. The voting is running 66% yes, 31% no, 3% undecided--unscientific, but encouraging.
 
 
gridley
16:15 / 14.10.03
 
 
bjacques
07:47 / 15.10.03
Has anyone actually read the law concerning blowing CIA cover? I heard an interview last week on either Pacifica News or Democracy Now, with Phillip Agee, the former CIA man who directed some nasty operations in Latin America, had an attack of conscience and published the book Inside the Company. The book named a lot of agents and blew a number of operations. He lives in Havana now. Because of him, Congress made it a felony to reveal *multiple* names, not single ones.

So the leaker may not be facing actual charges, but would probably fall on his sword for the cause. It only looks like a Karl Rove job because he wouldn't shy from attacking an enemy's wife or kids, as he did to John McCain, who ran against Bush for the GOP nomination in 2000. Rove's a creep. I'm surprised nobody's payed much attention to that angle. Bush makes a big deal of being Texan (and Cheney's Halliburton is headquartered in north Houston. I make a point of shooting it the finger when I drive by it when going to or from Bush International Airport (IAH)). But going after an enemy's family ain't the Cowboy Way; it's what corrupt local strongman Gene Hackman would do in The Unforgiven or the Quick and the Dead. It's a small thing, but it may cost Bush a little support in the South.

In a tiny coincidence, an American friend of mine here attended, as a Young Republican in the 1970s, a dirty tricks seminar given in Iowa by Donald Segretti, Nixon's chief dirty trickster. Rove also attended that seminar, but a different session. It's not exactly a conspiracy, but these things do have a history. Similarly, at my old university (Rice), the student Republicans turned the mob against RicePIRG, a Naderite group, leading to a student vote to defund the organization over a possibly misspent $100. One of the guys involved in that 1981 caper got busted years later for forging signatures to get independent paleo-Republican gold-standard advocate Jack Kemp on the 1988 Texas ballot.

My friend is no longer a Republican, nor young.
 
 
Baz Auckland
17:12 / 14.01.04
Just a small interesting comparison from Talking Points Memo that deserves quoting:

Number of days between Novak column outing Valerie Plame and announcement of investigation: 74 days.
Number of days between O'Neill 60 Minutes interview and announcement of investigation: 1 day.
Having the administration reveal itself as a gaggle of hypocritical goons ... priceless.
 
 
Hieronymus
04:25 / 16.01.04
And former US Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill becomes kneecap victim number 2. Speak out about the sick nature of the White House and you better expect revenge:

The revelations of former US Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill about the inner workings of the Bush administration, featured on CBS’s 60 Minutes program January 11 and providing the substance of formerWall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind’s new book, The Price of Loyalty, have further laid bare the divisions within the American political establishment. O’Neill’s assertion, backed up by extensive documentation, that the Bush government was plotting a war against Iraq from its first days in office in January 2001, is a particularly devastating exposure.

Treasury Department officials made it known January 12 that they had instructed their Inspector General to investigate whether O’Neill had divulged the contents of secret documents in his television and book interviews, a charge he vehemently denies.

Damn good article taking on the Washington Post and its defense of Bush's dirty tricks for whistleblowers.
 
 
Doctor Singapore
00:56 / 17.01.04
...kneecap victim number two...

Meanwhile,
Ashcroft recuses self from leak case

We'll have to see how much good that will do...Rove in handcuffs is looking unlikely, but the underlying issue of there being no WMD's in Iraq is becoming increasingly obvious. I'm looking forward to whoever gets the Dem. nomination bringing that problem up in the debates.
 
 
Baz Auckland
18:06 / 05.02.04
Just posted on Talking Points Memo: Evidence seems to have been found pinning the leak on some of Cheney's staffers!

Federal law enforcement officials said that they have developed hard evidence of possible criminal misconduct by two employees of Vice President Dick Cheney's office related to the unlawful exposure of a CIA officer's identity last year.
 
 
Hieronymus
16:10 / 11.08.04
*bump*

Seems a TIME magazine journalist may be facing contempt charges for keeping the CIA leak source secret.
 
 
Hieronymus
20:55 / 07.02.05
Sonuvabitch.

(Use Bugmenot.com if you need a registration pass.

It looks like Alberto Gonzales, the new attorney general and one time right-hand legal bulldog for Bush, may have flunkees lined up to politically influence the Plame investigation.
 
  

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