\jeff{krimmel}

My Feelings About The CIA Leak

You have probably heard something about the ongoing investigation regarding the publishing of a CIA operative’s name in a nationally syndicated column a couple of years ago. The original story itself is fairly straightforward; the legal morass that has resulted is certainly not.

In February 2002, Joseph Wilson was sent by the CIA to Niger to investigate President Bush’s claims, made in his State of the Union address, that Suddam Hussein was trying to buy uranium from undisclosed Nigerian sources. After some research in the area, Mr. Wilson concluded such claims were false and wrote an editorial for The New York Times on July 6, 2003, explaining his conclusions.

Five days later, on July 11, Robert Novak wrote an article criticizing Mr. Wilson’s investigation and in the process revealed the fact that Valerie Plame, Mr. Wilson’s wife, was a CIA operative and was responsible for making the push for the CIA to send Mr. Wilson to Niger in the first place.

The ramifications are immediately obvious. Someone told Mr. Novak that Ms. Plame was a CIA operative. If not illegal (and this point is debatable), such a disclosure is, at the least, extremely dangerous for both Ms. Plame and the broader national security. The CIA relies quite heavily on the anonymity of its operatives, and having this anonymity destroyed publicly is uniquely dangerous.

The investigation that has been taking place the past couple of years has revolved around who leaked this information to Mr. Novak; Matt Cooper, who wrote an article published in the July 21, 2003, issue of TIME magazine; and Judith Miller, who discovered Ms. Plame’s name while researching for an article that she would never write for The New York Times.

It is still not clear how Mr. Novak or Ms. Miller received their information. It is believed Mr. Novak has made some arrangement with the special prosecutor in this case, Patrick Fitzgerald, and Ms. Miller was recently sent to jail for refusing to provide information to the grand jury.

Regarding Mr. Cooper, it turns out that in the past couple of days, Robert Luskin, the attorney for Karl Rove, the senior advisor and chief political strategist for President Bush, revealed to the public that Mr. Rove was the one who told Mr. Cooper about Ms. Plame. Mr. Luskin claims that Mr. Rove only passed the information along in the form of telling Mr. Cooper about Mr. Wilson’s wife, not identifying her by name as Valerie Plame (or Valerie Wilson). A second defense is that Mr. Rove did not know Ms. Plame was an undercover agent, only that she was a CIA analyst at some level working on weapons of mass destruction.

I am not sure if Mr. Luskin thinks the distinction between leaking information about “Joe Wilson’s wife” versus “Valerie Plame” or “Valerie Wilson” is significant, but to me, who cares? If Mr. Rove did not think Ms. Plame was an undercover agent, then he may be absolved of any legal wrongdoing, but the political consequences should be severe. The issue is still that a senior White House official has leaked the name of a US citizen working on sensitive national security issues to the press. And for what? The going theory is that the White House was miffed about Mr. Wilson’s report discrediting President Bush’s claims about Suddam Hussein and wanted to fire back on several fronts, one of which was a personal ousting of Mr. Wilson’s wife.

I find it to be a very scary thing when the president’s top advisors begin to compromise national security in the hopes of scoring political points against the opposition. The same goes true for any such leak on any level within any political party. Politics is politics, and that game will inevitably be played ad nauseam in Washington, but the line needs to be drawn that this nation’s security is not to be compromised to effect such schoolyard retaliation.