The Corner’s Cliff May points to this Reuel Marc Gerecht Opinion Journal piece on the CIA’s institutional sloppiness:
[…] left-leaning liberals, not well known for their defense of the CIA, have charged forward to equate the maintenance of cover for Langley’s operatives (who are, let us be frank, probably overwhelmingly antiwar and anti-Bush) with the country’s national security. In their eyes, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, former chief of staff for the vice president, is thus guilty, at a minimum, of a politically motivated disregard for a clandestine public servant on the front lines of freedom.
Needless to say, Langley, which started this whole affair with its referral of Ms. Plame’s “outing” to the Justice Department, couldn’t agree more about the critical role of its secret operatives in the nation’s defense. (If it weren’t for the CIA’s use of rendition and secret prison facilities, a return of 1950s-era liberal love for the clandestine service might be in the works.)
Truth be told, however, the agency doesn’t care much at all about cover. Inside the CIA, serious case officers have often looked with horror and mirth upon the pathetic operational camouflage that is usually given to both “inside” officers (operatives who carry official, usually diplomatic, cover) and nonofficial-cover officers (the “NOC” cadre), who most often masquerade as businessmen. Yet Langley tenaciously guards the cover myth–that camouflage for case officers is of paramount importance to its operations and the health of its operatives.
Know the truth about cover–that it is the Achilles’ heel of the clandestine service–and you will begin to appreciate how deeply dysfunctional the operations directorate has been for years. Only a profoundly unserious Counter-Proliferation Division would have sent Mr. Wilson on an eight-day walkabout in Niger to uncover the truth about uranium sales to Saddam Hussein and then allowed him to give an oral report.
[…]
[…] The revealing of Valerie Plame’s true employer has in all probability hurt no one overseas. You can rest assured that if her (most recent) outing had actually hurt an agent from her past, we would’ve heard about it through a CIA leak.
Langley’s systemic sloppiness–the flimsiness of cover is but the tip of the iceberg of incompetence–has repeatedly destroyed agent networks and provoked “flaps” with some of our closest allies. A serious CIA would never have allowed Mr. Wilson to go on such an odd, short “fact finding” mission. It never would have allowed Ms. Plame potentially to expose herself by recommending such an overt mission for her mate, not known for his subtlety and discretion. With a CIA where cover really mattered, Mr. Libby would not now be indicted. But that’s not what we have in the real world. We have an American left that hates George W. Bush and his vice president so much that they have become willing dupes in a surreal operational stage-play. You have to give credit to Langley: Overseas it may be incompetent; but in Washington, it can still con many into giving it the respect and consideration it doesn’t deserve.
The Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes wrote a wonderful piece recently showing how the CIA’s fingerprints were all over the Plame affair, and yesterday, Jed Babbin furthered the case with this piece in the American Spectator:
There are just too many anomalies in the Wilson mission to Niger to believe that anyone who wasn’t planning to bash the president could possibly have chosen Wilson for the task. He had no expertise in WMD, hadn’t been in Niger since the 1980s, and had no intelligence training. One of the most revealing aspects of Wilson’s mission, relevant to showing it was part of a disinformation campaign, was that he wasn’t required to sign a CIA secrecy agreement before taking on the mission. In plainest terms, that meant his CIA bosses wanted him to go public on his return. And he did. The other point that proves Wilson’s mission was anything but serious is that, in Wilson’s own words, he told everyone he met that he was an agent of the U.S. government.
In his July 6, 2003 NYT op-ed, Wilson said, “The mission I undertook was discreet but by no means secret. While the CIA paid my expenses (my time was offered pro bono), I made it abundantly clear to everyone I met that I was acting on behalf of the United States government.” You tell everyone you’re speaking to that you’re in the government’s employ so they can feed you whatever line of baloney they want the U.S. government to hear? Wilson’s “mission,” in short, was a pathetic joke and not an intelligence mission by any definition. The CIA knew this. Who in the CIA authorized, paid for, and managed this mission? Why did they do it? There’s no plausible explanation other than the intent to embarrass and discredit the Bush administration.
A source who spoke on the condition of anonymity said Valerie Plame—who suggested her husband for the Niger mission—was too low on the CIA totem pole to have approved and paid for the mission. The source also told me that Judith (“Jami”) Miscik, then the CIA”s deputy director for intelligence, was the person who signed off on the Wilson mission. Plame’s WINPAC directorate was under Miscik in the chain of command. Miscik was fired by new CIA director Porter Goss late last year during Goss’s housecleaning in which Deputy Director John E. McLaughlin resigned and Deputy Director of Operations James Pavitt retired.
The CIA, through one of its spokesmen, declined to comment on whether it was Miscik or someone else because of pending legal proceedings. And, in context with other information, it appears that Miscik would not likely have been the one. Logically the person who approved the Wilson mission would have had to be some senior person in the Operations Directorate, possibly the now-retired Pavitt.
Regardless of who started the mission, the CIA responded to the Novak column by sending a classified criminal referral—the allegation of criminal conduct requesting a formal investigation—to the Justice Department. When it did so, it had to have known that Plame’s status was not covert (as defined in the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982) and probably knew (it is an intelligence organization, after all) that Wilson had blabbed his wife’s identity around town. Why, then, was the criminal referral made? Who approved it? Such actions had to be approved at least by the CIA general counsel and probably by CIA Director Tenet or at least his deputy, McLaughlin. Why did they do that knowing what they must have known?
The December 30, 2003 letter from Deputy Attorney General Paul Comey appointing Patrick Fitzgerald special prosecutor, says, in part: “I hereby delegate to you all the authority of the Attorney General with respect to the Department’s investigation into the alleged unauthorized disclosure of a CIA employee’s identity.” What was the allegation? If it were made falsely—say with the knowledge that Plame’s identity wasn’t covert or had become public—the person who made the referral may have committed a serious crime.
The whole Wilson/Plame affair stinks to high heaven. And the smell is coming from Langley. Porter Goss should receive credit for working hard to fix the CIA. The Wilson affair isn’t his problem, it’s ours. Right now, the CIA’s disinformation campaign has cost Scooter Libby his future, threatens other White House staffers and—most importantly—burdens the credibility of the president in time of war. It affects our standing in the world, our relationship with our allies, and our strength in the eyes of our enemies. In short, this damned thing needs to be unraveled, publicly, and right bloody now.
The problem, as anyone with any intellectual honestly will be happy to tell you, is that the elected goverment of the United States—particularly when that government happens to be Republican—is forced to do battle with the entrenched bureaucratic elites who make up the bulk of CIA and State Department lifers, many of them hardcore foreign policy realists, many of them virulently anti-interventionalist.
Ironically, Democrats, as Gerecht points out, are providing cover for this unelected foreign policy cabal—a fact that illustrates just how topsy turvy the world of US politics has become since a Republican President began acting like a foreign policy idealist, and Dems, in a similar turnabout, have become Buchanan-esque isolationists and armchair Machiavelles trying their best for 5 years to undermine—if not overthrow—the elected leader of the United States.
Couple this with an “adversarial” press whose mandate for speaking Truth to Power has been replaced, it seems to me, by a mandate to invent Truth and wield Power, and what you have is dangerous anti-democratic movement within our democracy that will try to do with subterfuge and the control of information and narrative what they have as yet been unable to do through elections—namely, thwart the President’s foreign policy initiatives and work to regain power at any cost. And help keeps coming in suspicious ways from a lot of key institutions.
The question now is, how willing is the current administration to fight back? A failure to do so to this point—for whatever their reasons—has weakened them considerably, and we could, I’m afraid, see such weakening manifest itself in the 2006 elections if something isn’t done to beat back the bevy of unchallenged lies being foisted on a mostly disengaged populace.
The din on the right for investigations into the narrative makers themselves is growing. Recently, retired Maj Gen Paul Vallely, for instance, caused a minor stir by noting that Joseph Wilson had revealed his wife’s CIA connections to him a year before the Novak column; and today, the CIA, at the urging of Republican lawmakers and under the auspices now of Porter Goss, has made official its request for an investigation into the “black sites” leaks that revealed secret US prisons (Trent Lott may have suggested that the leaker is himself a Republican, though there is some confusion on this point; most maintain that the leaker was a source within the intelligence community).
This is hardly enough, however. Someone in the Bush administration simply has to begin making demands for investigations of its own, beginning with the entire Wilson affair and moving on to any connections between Democrats and leakers within the intelligence community who are actively furthering their causes (this is not meant to sound partisan; instead, it is meant to acknowledge that Dems and the press have been waging this kind of campaign against the administration for some time now already). Another question of interest is just how much the legacy media—on the whole, robustly anti-Bush—has allowed its eagerness to damage the Bush presidency be exploited by members of the intelligence community and foreign policy establishment.
This White House likes to handle these kinds of things internally. But they are clearly losing the PR battle, and there is only so much its defenders can do from cyberspace or political magazines. And so it is time for Bush to swallow his pride and fight back from the bully pulpit. Because the “culture of corruption” meme we’ve watched the Dems finesse into a rallying cry clearly does exist; and it’s time to expose where it actually lives.
An opposing opinion here.
– The CIA is not Liberal. Not hardly. This argument looks at the results and comes to the wrong conclusions as to the real reason for the agencies antipithy toward the admin. I believe its all due to the dysfunctional, lethargic bureaucracy, that the agency has become in the past 16 years since the fall of the Soviet Bloc.
In truth, if you go all the way back to the root cause of failed intelligence, it lays squarely at Langleys doorstep. The worst failure of all was the way they got caught totally flatfooted, ignoring much of their own intelligence and warning signs leading up to 9/11.
– Admins come and go, but the quality, or lack there of, of the security services, rumbles on. The CIA doesn’t like being told it fucked up royally. So its aiding and abeting the left in this blame game to cover its own ass, pure and simple.
Ha! I beat you to it over at Dean’s world. Good thoughts. I’ll have to link to this.
It is a great piece by Gerecht, and bolsters what I’ve said here before: the Plae case forwarded to the DOJ was totally underious.
I don’t think Wilson’s Niger trip was part of a deliberate plot (I elaborate here.) I won’t try and argue that nobody in the CIA is working against the President’s foreign policy, I will say that I don’t believe Wilson’s trip is indicative of something like that. Even if it was a conspiracy we’ll never prove it and I think it will be counterproductive to reforming the CIA.
As far as Jed Babbin’s piece is concerned, first of all he makes a factual error in stating Wilson had not been to Niger since the ‘80s. The SSCI (pdf) stated he had traveled to Niger on behalf of the CIA in 1999. I disagree with his conclusion that “there’s no plausible explanation other than the intent to embarrass and discredit the Bush administration.” I’d say extreme incompetence is at the very least plausible. I think it’s likely.
I think the SSCI is enlightening, starting at pg. 36 (pg. 46 of the pdf).
I think wading into the CIA with the intent to unbury all the skeletons, regardless of whose ox is gored, is the best approach for this type of investigation. Simply focusing on Dems and their leaky buddies will seem to partisan. As seekers of TRUTH, rather than rabid partisans, we on the right should be willing to take a few lumps (as we have a tiny bit with the Scooter Libby thing) in order to root out the people who are doing the leaking. Given that the CIA has been utterly wrong about just about every major foreign policy issue it has been charged with collecting intelligence on in the last 30 years, and given the obvious (to me) fact that the entire Joseph Wilson farce was a set-up from day one, it would be best if the Bush Administration just went ballistic, publicly, against the CIA’s and State Department’s clear meddling with his foreign policy. The Administration should even go so far as to use language that suggests that the CIA and State Department have, in essense, attempted a bloodless coup against the president. The press will scream, but who cares? They’ll scream anyway, and they need to be handed their heads for participating in illegal leaks and for lying to the citizenry about the war, too.
I think more than mere incompetence is at work here.
Where’s the confidentiality agreement? Why refer to the DOJ a case you knew to be a non-starter (Plame undercover)? Why not vet his Op-ed?
I don’t know how much of this was planned. But Hayes’ argument that the CIA was acting to cover its own ass strikes me as pretty spot on.
TO be clear, Sharkman, I agree. I’m not worried about who gets caught up in the net. Why I mentioned investigating Dems is that the investigation of the administration (the Roberts report, Levin’s “revelations,” etc.) is already well underway.
Hell yes, investigate away. Nothing is quite so dumb and dangerous than a leaky intellegence agency.
Although I’ll be glad to see any leakers prosecuted, I personally tend to think the main problem currently is the ass-load of time-serving hacks that Bubba dumped on the company as payback for their political support.
But that’s just my take. YMMV.
Babbin may also be mistaken on the referral. It may not be the case that Plame was covert under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, but the referral involves a more general statute against release of classified information. I’ll have to try and track down a full copy of the referral to see if the Act is specifically mentioned.
– Ok. Now Amman Jordon has been attacked….
– 6th Crusade anyone?
Could be that they were required to pass it on, once Wilson made the claim. But that just draws a circle.
Bottom line is, Wilson lied, the CIA did not vet his op-ed and did not make him sign a confidentiality agreement, and they have not exactly been going out of their way to distance themselves from Wilson’s lies.
Nuke Langley from space, it’s the only way to be sure. Then start over. Make it like the old OSS. Real spies doing real work.
I keep thinking also how the lefty sites float conspiracy theories about Douglas Feith’s Office of Plans at the Pentagon, saying it was a secret spy agency. Yet can any sensible person fault Rumsfeld for trying to develop his own intelligence pipeline, rather than drinking the bilge that came out of the CIA?
If anything, Rumsfeld was to be commended for courage in fighting the bureaucracy; instead it is floated as the nexus of the secret Zionist, neo-con cabal wherein out elected leaders sought to overthrow the benevolent rule of the nameless, faceless bureaucrats and replace it with an objectively pro-American regime.
I’d fault Rumsfeld if there wasn’t a conspiracy; God knows he couldn’t rely on Tenet for anything more complicated than the information in the CIA world fact book—and even then, the request for info was likely to be leaked to the WaPo and the Times with snarky commentary about how stupid he is.
Toss in the hand, draw a new one. Only way to fix the mess.
Would pay to know the dolphin in the pea coat’s thoughts on all this, but we know he ain’t talking.
The big flaw to me in all this ‘War Against Bush’ stuff is that it’s proponents assume removing Bush from office will somehow please the world at large – AQ won’t be such a nuisance, Chavez will calm down, and everyone will play nice. The short-sidedness of this argument comes to bear when one realizes that these folks aren’t pissed at Bush, specifically – the hate America, they could care less if the pres has a D or an R after his name.
I think Stephen Hayes is the Man on this stuff. I also think that both the right, and the left, even with their newfound love of all things CIA/State, would be appalled at how many covert operations designed to weaken president Bush (and probably also president Klintoon) have occurred in the last 12 years, at the behest of a few bad apples high up in the CIA and State, with the active connivance of several congressional and party leaders on both sides of the aisle.
We need Hercules to come back in the form of either Cheney or Porter Goss, and clean out the Aegean Stables with a vengence. Now picture Cheney as Hercules, and fire up your photoshop machine.
In the wonderful spy novels of Len Deighton, when the British want to know if the East Germans are re-opening a nuclear plant for enriched uranium production, the novel’s hero (a spy) is tasked with the job. He hires out the task to his childhood friend, a native Berliner, who then finds out that only a skeleton staff is working at the plant, as a maintenance crew, by trying to sell the plant foreman a contract for food services. In other words, he “counted the lunch pails.” That is how one gets verifiable info, not by asking if anything nefarious is going on. And even when Wilson did just that, Wilson was told, and reported, that Iraq was interested in trade with Niger. I prefer the novel’s methods.
…it is time for Bush to swallow his pride and fight back from the bully pulpit.
I don’t understand the “pride” statement. There has to be something else behind the administration’s unwillingness to go full bore against the Demos and MSM lie machine, and especially the CIA—maybe just a fear it could tear the country apart in the middle of our war on terror? I think that kind of pragmatism is trade-mark Bush. Not that it’s the right approach.
And I wonder if anyone at the CIA is dumb enough to use proportional fonts when forging documents?
Could be a number of reasons for this fiasco.
simple
Bush was talking about a change in Government since his first campaign. Rumsfeld was activly shifting focus in the DoD. The Union could see this as the probability of losing jobs, and many of their employees see it as a threat, so their actions had no purpose, or conviction behind them. Sloppy work because they just didn’t care. I think that hard lines have been drawn since the Gingrich-led shut down.
more serious
The CIA was taking a lot of flack (deservedly) for their screw-ups. If all they gave was lip-service (there’s that Elvis Costello thing again) to answer concerns from the White House, they would not find much to confirm their ineptitude.
downright nefarious
They don’t like Bush, his policies, or his people, so they will do what they could to gum up the works.
What to do?
If you can’t realistically change the whole department in one shot, at least we should change the first line of folks who do the reason and interperatation of what comes in.
OT suck up:
Jeff, how do you do all this hunting, thinking and writing every day? Same to all you other bloggers who then roam around and elucidate on and about each other’s sites as well? Don’t you people work for a living?
“War on Bush.”
It’s because of the Patriarchy, right?
Ah, the usual sayanim chorus, whose sole merit consists in giving us tomorrow’s Likud’s position a day early.
Yeah. This was all about Israel. Good on your for breaking the code, Skip.
Hey, if Likud’s position is correct, no harm in channeling it into the discussion.
Death to Israel’s Enemies! Allahu Fuck-Barrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Fiasco : a small bottle of Italian wine
Damnit Jeff, you mean I’ve been hanging around a bunch of jews again?
Hey, Skip, can you loan me a spare hood?
[…] trial, which was built upon a shaky foundation sparked by Joe Wilson’s own transgressions and manipulations of the facts, had clear political motivations beyond the actual indictments themselves. Any […]