Saturday, March 17, 2007

"Covert" To Whom?   [Andy McCarthy]

This morning, the New York Times reports Valerie Plame Wilson's assertion yesterday, in testimony before Rep. Henry Waxman's House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, that the leaking of her name as a CIA operative (which the Times calls "the security breach") might have “jeopardized and even destroyed entire networks of foreign agents, who in turn risk their own lives and those of their families to provide the United States with needed intelligence. Lives are literally at stake.”

It made me wonder, once again, about the media hypocrisy in reporting this story.  Though Times reporters Neil Lewis and Mark Leibovich make no mention of it in their dispatch (and, indeed, it has been absent from press coverage of this story), the Times, along with numerous mainstream media powerhouses, has long maintained in court that Mrs. Wilson's cover had been blown many years before Scooter Libby ever mentioned her.

Specifically, she was exposed by a Russian spy in the early 1990s.  Thereafter, the CIA itself "inadvertently" compromised Plame by not taking appropriate measures to safeguard classified documents that the Agency routed to the Swiss embassy in Havana. According to Bill Gertz of the Washington Times, "the documents were supposed to be sealed from the Cuban government, but [unidentified U.S.] intelligence officials said the Cubans read the classified material and learned the secrets contained in them."  

As I wrote here nearly two years ago, this is not my claim.  It is the contention made in a 2005 brief to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit by the Times along with ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, AP, Newsweek, Reuters America, the Washington Post, the Tribune Company (which publishes the Los Angeles Times and the Baltimore Sun, among other papers), and the White House Correspondents (the organization which represents the White House press corps in its dealings with the executive branch).  The mainstream media made the contention in an attempt to quash subpoenas issued to journalists — the argument being that if Mrs. Wilson's cover had already been blown, there could have been no crime when an administration official (who we now know to be Richard Armitage, not Scooter Libby) leaked her identity to journalist Robert Novak, and thus there was no need to compel reporters to reveal their sources.

Amazing how, when its own interests are at stake, the media manages to be very forceful in reporting relevant facts.  But now, when those facts are even more relevant because Mrs. Wilson and congressional Democrats are bloviating about ruined intelligence networks and threatened lives, the media won't mention them.  How can it be possible that a leak in 2002 "jeopardized and even destroyed entire networks of foreign agents" associated with Mrs. Wilson's covert assignment when, by the media's own account to a federal court, those networks had to have been blown for years?

It's very much worth reading this insightful post at Haft of the Spear from intelligence expert Michael Tanji.  As he points out, the real, untold story in this farce is the shoddy spycraft of the CIA.  Foreign intelligence professionals well know that, for an American, non-official cover overseas is easy to pierce, especially in places where proliferation (Mrs. Wilson's specialty) is a major issue.  As Tanji observes:

When a public records search — something anyone with a credit card can do — reveals affiliation with one of those laughable "cover" organizations, all the linguistic dancing in the world isn't going to help you if confronted about your non-governmental status. Any half-curious foreign intelligence service could have figured this out and probably did, which means Ms. Plame really needs to answer only one question of merit [from Rep. Waxman's Committee], though I doubt it will be asked [Tanji's right — it wasn't]:  "Given the ease with which any of your targets could have determined or at least suspected your affiliation with the US government, is it not reasonable to assume that some or all of the intelligence information you obtained while working under the Brewster-Jennings cover was false or misleading?"

03/17 08:44 AMShare