Richard Schmitt of the LA Times - Turn Over That Coin!

Richard Schmitt of the LA Times covers the Libby trial and indulges a rich fantasy life to the benefit of the CIA and the detriment of I. Lewis Libby.  However, his failure to examine a simple alternative hypothesis turns his piece into a comedy classic.  His theme is that Valerie Plame's CIA affiliation was a deep, dark secret, but he fails to consider the possibility that it was simply not that big a deal.  Here we go:

WASHINGTON — From their earliest days, U.S. intelligence agencies have made it an article of faith to protect the identity of their secret agents. And in 1982, following a rash of malicious exposures, the CIA prevailed on Congress to make it a crime to knowingly disclose the identity of such operatives.

An "article of faith"?  There must be a lot of lapsed religionists at the CIA, if we can believe the research by John Crewdson of the Chicago Tribune or this report by Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA case officer now with the AEI.  From the Chi Trib:

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.

... Not all of the 2,653 employees whose names were produced by the Tribune search are supposed to be working under cover. More than 160 are intelligence analysts, an occupation that is not considered a covert position, and senior CIA executives such as Tenet are included on the list.
 
But an undisclosed number of those on the list--the CIA would not say how many--are covert employees, and some are known to hold jobs that could make them terrorist targets.

And from Mr. Gerecht:

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.

Mr. Schmitt is embracing the myth, since it helps his story line.  Let's press on alongside him:

But last week, as former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby went on trial in connection with the leak, it appeared that neither the CIA nor some other intelligence community insiders were all that tight-lipped about such supposedly sensitive matters.

When it came to talking to outsiders, the agent's identity was often treated as not much more than water-cooler dishing or cocktail party chatter.

...In theory, sensitive intelligence is highly compartmentalized and shared only on a need-to-know basis with people who have been cleared to receive it.

That was hardly the case with Plame.

So, Mr. Schmitt's theme is that Ms. Plame's classified status was sensitive and should have been highly compartmentalized, yet, incredibly and inexplicably, folks who should have known better blabbed about it casually.

I'm thinking hard here - is there any other possible explanation for all this casual chit-chat?  Any theories at all?  Here is a wild thought - Ms. Plame's CIA affiliation was just not that big a deal! 

I know Mr. Schmitt will want to train his reporter's eye on that possibility, so here are a few leads.  First, Mr. Schmitt gives us this from Richard Armitage, who leaked the Plame news to Bob Woodward and Bob Novak:

Armitage, an old hand at dealing with sensitive intelligence matters, later told a friend that gabbing about Plame was "the dumbest thing he'd ever done in his life."

But Armitage said other things, such as this:

"I had never seen a covered agent's name in any memo in, I think, 28 years of government," he says.

Ms. Plame presented herself casually at an inter-agency meeting, the INR fellow in attendance wrote up her presence casually, and it was presented casually in the memo Armitage read, after which he disclosed it casually.  How about that.

As another example, CIA press spokesperson Bill Harlow mentioned Ms. Plame to Catherine Martin, his counterpart in Cheney's office, apparently in June 2003.  Yet when Bob Novak asked about her in July, Harlow actually talked about her, then checked her status (yes, that sounds backwards to me, too).  From the WaPo:

Harlow said that after Novak's call, he checked Plame's status and confirmed that she was an undercover operative. He said he called Novak back to repeat that the story Novak had related to him was wrong and that Plame's name should not be used. But he did not tell Novak directly that she was undercover because that was classified.

So Harlow had let a month go by without ever checking Ms. Plame's status, then talked about her with Novak, then decided to confirm her status.  And even after Novak had the information, Harlow did not arrange for DCI George Tenet to call Novak or his editors to kill the story.  Just by contrast, the NY Times editors were asked by the "senior administration officials"  to sit on their NSA warrantless surveillance story.  Dare we suggest that Harlow did not seem to be taking the Plame news particularly seriously?

One last example - Joe Wilson himself was apprised on July 8 that Bob Novak was aware that his wife was at the CIA.  With his wife's clandestine career and the lives of CIA assets all over the world hanging by the most slender of threads, did Wilson respond by alerting his wife and the CIA press office?  Not exactly - He called Eason Jordan, Novak's boss at CNN, then played telephone tag with Novak until the 10th (this is in Wilson's book).  Following that, he alerted his wife.  Does that make sense to anyone?  Unless, of course, Wilson was not all that fussed about a possible Novak story naming his wife.

Well.  The CIA did file a criminal referral, so perhaps the leak was serious after all.  Or perhaps the CIA was simply playing "Gotcha" games with their White House overlords.  We can refer Mr. Schmitt to Walter Pincus of the Wapo, who saw political opportunism rather than substance to the Plame case:

Pincus believes that the Bush administration acted obnoxiously when it leaked Valerie Plame’s identity, but he has never been convinced by the argument that the leaks violated the law. “I don’t think it was a crime,” he says. “I think it got turned into a crime by the press, by Joe” — Wilson — “by the Democrats. The New York Times kept running editorials saying that it’s got to be investigated — never thinking that it was going to turn around and bite them.”

Last gasp - a few weeks back we reprised the thoughts of Dana Priest about the harm done by the Plame leak.  Here we go again:

Dana Priest: I don't actually think the Plame leak compromised national security, from what I've been able to learn about her position.

That might be because, as Nick Kristof reported, Ms. Plame's clandestine career had been wound down after she was (potentially) outed by Aldrich Ames in the early 90's, and because she was in transition to an inter-agency liasion function.

I know Mr. Schmitt will want to examine the notion that people discussed Ms. Plame casually because there was no reason to pretend that her CIA affiliation was a great secret.  His current story embraces the opposite idea.

Comments

[azaghal]

Tom, thanks for the link to Fineman's interesting article (October, 2003. While one might argue with some of his assertions, the following passage is certainly eyebrow raising:

It was a fascinating moment if you know the history. The way I hear the story, Bush Two, when he was elected, had his doubts about Tenet, but was told he was a “good guy” by the ultimate arbiter of “good guys” in the Bush Family, Bush One. Tenet had curried favor with the family years earlier when he was still an intelligence bureaucrat on the Hill, serving as chief of staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Though he was working in a Democrat-controlled environment, Tenet helped out—or at least did not stand in the way—when Bush One wanted to appoint his friend, Robert Gates, to head the CIA. Word was that Tenet was a “team player”—a standup guy, not a relentless Democratic partisan by any means. An expert at the inside game from his years as a staffer on the Hill, Tenet knew how to fit into Bush Two’s world. He did so with ease from the start.

Bush presumably trusted Tenet and the CIA to get the goods on Saddam and his WMD. Cheney’s staff evidently did too. But why did Tenet send Wilson to Africa? Maybe he just thought he was sending the most qualified guy. But the neo-cons and their allies came to see it as a conspiracy to ignore the truth—especially after Wilson, last July, went public with the essence of his findings, which was that the yellowcake rumors were false.

The moment that piece hit the op-ed page of the New York Times, it was all-out war between the pro- and anti-war factions, and between the CIA and its critics. I am told by what I regard as a very reliable source inside the White House that aides there did, in fact, try to peddle the identity of Joe Wilson’s wife to several reporters. But the motive wasn’t revenge or intimidation so much as a desire to explain why, in their view, Wilson wasn’t a neutral investigator, but, a member of the CIA’s leave-Saddam-in-place team.

And on Tenet’s part, it was time for payback—whatever his past relationship with the Bush’s had been. First, he and his agency had been humiliated, caught by the White House trying to distance themselves from the president’s speech. Then the CIA was forced to admit that it had signed off on the speech. Now one of its own investigations was coming under attack, as was one of its own undercover staffers.

Are we to believe that it was a routine matter for the CIA to forward to the Department of Justice a complaint about the leak of Valerie Plame’s name and job? Are we to think that Tenet didn’t know that the complaint was being forwarded? Or that Tenet couldn’t have shortstopped it if he wanted to?

So, back in 2003 there was already a coherent, credible and responsible explanation for the interest of WH and OVP personnel in Joe Wilson and, eventually, who sent him to Niger. And that's what's coming out at the trial--like, Fitz couldn't have figured that out from the testimony these people had already given, he just had to have in front of a federal judge?

Let's see, now. We know that elements at DOJ, prominent among them Comey (who talked Ashcroft into recusing and then appointed Fitz), who were at serious policy and personal loggerheads with the Administration--and with the OVP and Libby in particular, who was the point man on important legal issues concerning the war on terror.

We know that DOS, including Powell and Armitage, were also at serious policy and personal loggerheads with the Administration and their despised "pissants" (Armitage's favorite epithet). And Libby again was prominently involved.

And then there was Tenet and the CIA. Certainly the Wilson mission to Niger seriously irked DOS, but it looks like at some point--probably shortly after the referral to DOJ--key people at DOJ, DOS and CIA found that they had a common interest in thwarting Administration policy and that Plamegate could be the vehicle for just that type of initiative. Hmmm, could it be that when Powell, Armitage and Taft came over to DOJ to discuss Armitage's leak this realization dawned on those who were part of the conversation? Or some scenario so similar to this that it makes no real difference?

[Extraneus]

Nice post, azaghal. One can only hope it's the policy and personal loggerheads' kids that get blown up before anyone else's. Assuming anyone's will, of course, which is obviously a pretty far-fetched assumption.

[Liinda]

I'm glad you read Schmidt the way I do. His coverage of the Libby trial is surely strange. He is straight about reporting the courtroom happenings as they occur, but his underlying assumption that Plame is covert skews his coverage. It's almost like he isn't reading his own reports.

[TCO]

I've always thought that it was treated as a no big deal thing...and was no big deal. This means the conspiracy to "burn an agent" meme of the liberals is reduced. However, it actually makes it more likely that Libby did leak (because he also was not thinking of the security aspect). When this thing became a tar baby wrt the "agent burning" he lied. And whether the tar baby was the public bruahaha or the actual legal issue of the outing, is no matter. Both are motive to lie. (And only the real running dogs here think that the legal aspect was irrelevant, was settled for Libby given that there had been a formal referal to DOJ and given that if leaks to one reporter are wrong, they are likely wrong to another.)