(Libby
trial testimony)
(Libby
trial testimony)
October 2003 – After his FBI interview,
Grossman goes back to Undersecretary of State Armitage and tells him that the
Plame leak came up.
(Libby
trial testimony)
“And
yet, as some former U.N. inspectors often predicted, the tons of chemical and
biological weapons that the American public was led to expect have thus far
proved illusory. As long as that remains the case, one question will be asked
more and more insistently: How did the American intelligence community get it
so wrong?
Part
of the answer lies in decisions made early in the Bush Administration, before
the events of
A
retired C.I.A. officer described for me some of the questions that would
normally arise in vetting: “Does dramatic information turned up by an overseas
spy square with his access, or does it exceed his plausible reach? How does the
agent behave? Is he on time for meetings?” The vetting process is especially
important when one is dealing with foreign-agent reports—sensitive intelligence
that can trigger profound policy decisions. In theory, no request for action
should be taken directly to higher authorities—a process known as
“stovepiping”—without the information on which it is based having been subjected
to rigorous scrutiny.”
“It is important to remember the above chemistry--the mixing of ignorance, curiosity, pride, and self-importance--when thinking about former ambassador Joseph Wilson and his "outed" CIA wife, Valerie Plame. It helps to explain how the commentary about the Wilson affair became so surreal, leading the press, Democratic congressmen and senators, and "professionals" within the intelligence community to suggest that Plame's outing in a leak to columnist Robert Novak had demoralized the intelligence community, quite possibly put Plame and her known foreign contacts into physical jeopardy, and even chilled recruitment efforts by American operatives worldwide. Foreigners, so the theory went, could no longer have confidence in the operational cover protecting their associations with CIA officials after the exposure of Ambassador Wilson's wife.
These hypotheses and conjectures, as it happens, were
wildly overstated. There are reasons to be disturbed about what has been
revealed in the Wilson-Plame affair, but they are not the reasons we have been
told.
Cover is the Achilles' heel of the Operations
Directorate. If you have a basic understanding of CIA cover, you can figure out
why the over-the-top charges against the Bush administration in the
(“Everything
you know about the CIA's clandestine work is wrong,” Oct. 27)
As
usual when the neocons trot out a defensive line, blame here goes to every
individual and every entity that can safely be attacked—except to those who
participated in planting Valerie Plame’s name in the news media.
The
Operations Directorate, under attack here, does indeed get reorganized. Part of
its non-proliferation mission involves
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