We have asked before, how covert was Valerie Plame? But let's add a second question - how much of a clown show is the CIA? John Crewdson of the Chicago Tribune offers interesting evidence on both questions.
First, on the broader question of the CIA covert clown show:
Internet blows CIA cover
It's easy to track America's covert operatives. All you need to know is how to navigate the Internet.
By John Crewdson
WASHINGTON -- She is 52 years old,
married, grew up in the Kansas City suburbs and now lives in Virginia,
in a new three-bedroom house.
Anyone who can qualify for a subscription to one of the online services
that compile public information also can learn that she is a CIA
employee who, over the past decade, has been assigned to several
American embassies in Europe.
The CIA asked the Tribune not to publish her name because she is a
covert operative, and the newspaper agreed. But unbeknown to the CIA,
her affiliation and those of hundreds of men and women like her have
somehow become a matter of public record, thanks to the Internet.
Sidebar: Notice how that works - the CIA asked the Chi Trib not to publish her name and they withheld it. Funny how the CIA press office couldn't find the magic words ("Please"?) with Bob Novak on the line.
Right, then - on to the specific question of Valerie Plame, also addressed by the intrepid Mr. Crewdson in a different story:
Plame's identity, if truly a secret, was thinly veiled
BY JOHN CREWDSON
Chicago Tribune
WASHINGTON - The
question of whether Valerie Plame's employment by the Central
Intelligence Agency was a secret is the key issue in the two-year
investigation to determine if someone broke the law by leaking her CIA
affiliation to the news media.
Federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald contends that Plame's friends
"had no idea she had another life." But Plame's secret life could be
easily penetrated with the right computer sleuthing and an
understanding of how the CIA's covert employees work.
When the Chicago Tribune searched for Plame on an Internet service
that sells public information about private individuals to its
subscribers, it got a report of more than 7,600 words. Included was the
fact that in the early 1990s her address was "AMERICAN EMBASSY ATHENS
ST, APO NEW YORK NY 09255."
A former senior American diplomat in Athens, who remembers Plame as
"pleasant, very well-read, bright," said he had been aware that Plame,
who was posing as a junior consular officer, really worked for the CIA.
According to CIA veterans, U.S. intelligence officers working in
American embassies under "diplomatic cover" are almost invariably known
to friendly and opposition intelligence services alike.
"If you were in an embassy," said a former CIA officer who posed as
a U.S. diplomat in several countries, "you could count 100 percent on
the Soviets knowing."
That last bit about the porous cover of CIA officers ties in with this article by Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA case officer now with the AEI.
Let's have a second sidebar on behalf of the "Keep hope alive" gang that believes Special Counsel Fitzgerald is still working on the Really Big Case with Impending Momentous Revelations - just because an online subscription service had this Plame info in 2006, it does not follow that they had it in 2003. Just saying.
What else does Mr. Crewdson offer us?
Two years later, when Plame made a $1,000 contribution to Vice
President Al Gore, she listed her employer as Brewster-Jennings &
Associates, a Boston company apparently set up by the CIA to provide
"commercial cover" for some of its operatives.
Brewster-Jennings was not a terribly convincing cover. According to
Dun & Bradstreet, the company, created in 1994, is a "legal
services office" grossing $60,000 a year and headed by a chief
executive named Victor Brewster. Commercial databases accessible by the
Tribune contain no indication that such a person exists.
Another sign of Brewster-Jennings' link to the CIA came from the
online resume of a Washington attorney, who until last week claimed to
have been employed by Brewster-Jennings as an "engineering consultant"
from 1985 to 1989 and to have served from 1989 to 1995 as a CIA "case
officer," the agency's term for field operatives who collect
information from paid informants.
On Wednesday the Tribune left a voice mail and two e-mail messages
asking about the juxtaposition of the attorney's career with
Brewster-Jennings and the CIA. On Thursday, the Brewster-Jennings and
CIA entries had disappeared from the online resume. The attorney never
returned any of the messages left by the Tribune.
"Not a terribly convincing cover". The Boston Globe had similar reporting in Oct 2003, headlined "Apparent CIA front didn't offer much cover".
As to the "now you see it, now you don't" online resume, that almost surely refers to this story (dredged up by TS9):
Plame's employer, Brewster-Jennings, apparently has never tried very
hard to hide its activities. Former employees like Jean C. Edwards and
Robert Lawrence Ellman even advertise their association with the
company on the Internet! They were doing so before Brewster-Jennings
and Valerie Plame came to light and they still are.
...Plame's employer, Brewster-Jennings, apparently has never tried very
hard to hide its activities. Former employees like Jean C. Edwards and
Robert Lawrence Ellman even advertise their association with the
company on the Internet! They were doing so before Brewster-Jennings
and Valerie Plame came to light and they still are.
Edwards,
in her resume on the website of the Washington, D.C., law firm Akerman
Senterfitt, says she worked for "Brewster-Jenning [sic] and Associates"
in Boston as a consultant from 1985 to 1989.
She worked for Brewster-Jennings from 1985 to 1989? Per both Mr. Crewdson and the Globe, the firm registered with Dun and Bradstreet in 1994.
As to her resume - here is the Google cache of the non-airbrushed version with the Brewster-Jennings reference; here is the revised version (PollyUSA provides links and commentary, and says she saved a screenshot of the oldie - that cache won't last forever.)
Robert Ellman apparently revised his bio as well - here is the cached version (via MayBee), and the current effort.
Hmm, did these two really react that quickly to a few hits on the traffic monitor (noticed only by the site administrator), and a bit of publicity in a nearly-invisible outlet? Or might someone be spoofing someone else - the original story is at what would normally be considered a left-wing site. Trust No One.
Well, these two disappearing resumes are an interesting sidelight, but hardly critical to the main theme. We will let Mr. Crewdson tell us what it means:
Libby's lawyers, who now question whether Plame's CIA employment
really was secret at the time Novak's column appeared, have asked a
federal judge to provide them with documents that bear on that issue.
If Plame's employment was not a legitimate secret, and if the
national security was not harmed by its disclosure, Libby's lawyers
argue, their client would have had no motive to lie about his
conversations with reporters.
Fitzgerald has told the court he does not intend to introduce
evidence showing that Plame's career, the CIA's operations or the
national security were harmed by the disclosure of her CIA affiliation.
Nor, apparently, does Fitzgerald intend to charge the secret source who leaked to Woodward in mid-June, leaked to Bob Novak in July, and forgot to mention the Woodward conversation to investigators or in his testimony. Mightn't one think that such a man obstructed the investigation and harmed national security with his repeated leaking? Presumably Fitzgerald knows best.
As to the identity of the secret source, here is some forensic typesetting analysis of a redacted court document suggesting that Richard Armitage, former Deputy Secretary of State, is a good fit.
UPDATE: Mr. Crewdson was involved in outing some secret CIA planes in Jan 2005 (the Times provided a comprehensive summary).
And the ubiquitous Larry Johnson responds to the ""Internet blows CIA cover" article, apparently without even reading it:
Okay Mr. Crewdson (the author of this nonsense). Please search the
internet and identify 100 CIA officers for me. Go ahead. Give it a
shot. Oh, I forgot, first you need a name. You do not just enter a
random name and come up with a flashing sign that says, "this guy is
CIA".
Well, Mr. Crewdson claims to have identified over 2,600 CIA officers (not all of whom are covert). Is it Mr. Johnson's view that he winnowed this down from a list of 20,000 or 30,000 random names in the news? Per the article, the actual process seemed much simpler - the online service had apparently compiled a database of CIA employees:
When the Tribune searched a commercial
online data service, the result was a virtual directory of more than
2,600 CIA employees, 50 internal agency telephone numbers and the
locations of some two dozen secret CIA facilities around the United
States.
As to the specific case of Ms. Plame, any intel service that was intrigued to learn, via his July 6 op-ed, that Joe Wilson did consulting work for the CIA would have been likely to do a bit of research into the background of both Wilson and his wife. Such an investigation would have led quickly to the mysterious Brewster-Jennings, thanks to Ms. Plame's on-line filing with the FEC.
BATTLE ROYALE: Larry Johnson and Chi Trib deputy managing editor Jim warren slug it out on "Scarborough Country" on March 13. From LexisNews:
SCARBOROUGH: No doubt about it. It`s certainly a long way from what we
see on TV when we watch "24." Larry Johnson, you are skeptical, why?LARRY
JOHNSON, FORMER CIA AGENT: It`s a goofy article. What they imply in
"Tribune" is that just go onto Google, go on to Lexis-Nexis, go onto
Choicepoint autotrack. And just pick a name out and all of a sudden, it
will tell you that they`re with the CIA.The methodology they
used, and ask Jim about this, they were able to take, for example, the
indictments that were handed down in Italy that identified about 24
people. And admittedly that was lousy tradecraft on the part of the
CIA. But using that information backwards to identify companies,
individuals. But at no time are you able to go anywhere on the Web and
find somebody that says, hey, this is an undercover CIA operative.The
way these operatives are outed is what happened in the case of Valerie
Plame. She was outed by the administration. Once her name was out there
and the company she worked for, it then enabled people to go out and do
some of the work that Jim .
SCARBOROUGH: Larry, we got 2,600 CIA employees that are out there. You have some undercover people out there.
JOHNSON: Joe. Joe. No, Joe, what you have 2,600 employees, most of whom are not undercover.
SCARBOROUGH: But there are some covert people, according to the "Chicago Tribune". And Jim, let me ask you about it .
JOHNSON:
How do they know they know they are covert? Because here`s nowhere on
the Web. Joe, hang on for a second. There`s nowhere on the Web that you
are going to find a list of people that says, "Hi, I`m an undercover
operative."
SCARBOROUGH: Well, of course, you are not! That`s why
you have Pulitzer Prize winning guys piecing things together. That`s
not what I`m saying. And that`s not what the "Chicago Tribune" said.
Jim Warren, how do you respond to these attacks?
WARREN: Well,
obviously, we could not, for a variety of grotesquely obvious reasons
get into the specific methodologies we used. There was a substantially
greater amount of information and discoveries that we made that we did
not put in the newspaper and having been involved in the editing of
this and knowing the amount of time that the lawyers spent on this, I
can assure you everything that we wrote in the stories is absolutely
correct. And in due respect to Mr. Johnson, he simply doesn`t know
what`s talking about.
JOHNSON: No, sir. You are absolutely wrong.
WARREN: He doesn`t know what he`s talking about when he raises criticisms of the piece.
JOHNSON:
That`s absolutely wrong. I do know what I am talking about. I work with
these databases on a daily basis. I defy you. Come out and give me a
name right now of somebody that`s not undercover that you can just pick
out and automatically go there without having that name first divulged
by a public source.
WARREN: Joe, Joe, I mean, that sounds
dramatic, as a challenge but obviously one for lots of reasons that
we`re not going to do that.
Well, does Larry Johnson thinks the Admin leaked the name of Brewster-Jennings? He
says this:
The way these operatives are outed is what happened in the case of
Valerie Plame. She was outed by the administration. Once her name was
out there and the company she worked for, it then enabled people to go
out and do some of the work that Jim .
The more prosaic truth is that Ms. Plame identified her employer as Brewster-Jennings on a publicly available FEC filing detailing a 1999 contribution to Al Gore.
MORE: Mr. Crewdson got two other bylines on Saturday:
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