Why has the CIA decided to go nuclear on the Wilsongate story?
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Why has the agency gone to Defcon 1?
These guys almost literally detonated a bomb beneath the Justice Department -- then followed up with a coordinated campaign of press leaks apparently designed to flush the White House perps (and their journalistic contacts) out into the open.
The top echelons of the CIA have, by their leaks over the weekend, left themselves with no place to retreat if the current White House staff survives. Possibly they have concluded that they finally have the lever to evict key members of the White House staff--give our weak and underbriefed Sultan a new set of hopefully more competent and rational viziers. Possibly they have concluded that their chances of changing anything are small, but that in the final analysis they are not bureaucratic hacks but patriotic Americans, and that this current White House bunch has crossed the final line.
I cannot tell which: whether this is the opening shot in a campaign to replace the incompetent hardliners and political hacks ... or whether it is the hopeless final Charge of the Intelligence Chiefs.
Speculation is probably futile, unless you're one of the 20 or 30 people actually inside the decisionmaking loops out at Langley or in the White House right now. Certainly, as I noted some months back, administrations that mess with the agency usually do so at their own peril. But the urgency with which Tenet and Co. have pushed this scandal back up from the depths of the sea is still eyecatching.
Whatever role the CIA played in bringing down the Nixon White House, or in pulling the plug on the Iran Contra operation, was very much in the background -- a few secrets whispered here, a draft presidential finding there. The agency may have left fingerprints, but the fingers themselves were not visible until well after the fact.
Not this time. These guys almost literally detonated a bomb beneath the Justice Department -- then followed up with a coordinated campaign of press leaks apparently designed to flush the White House perps (and their journalistic contacts) out into the open. We'll see over the next few days how well that game plan works, but the fact that the CIA has been so obvious about executing it really gives me pause.
So why has the agency gone to Defcon 1?
I started out thinking this was just another round in the mother of all bureaucratic turf wars -- with Tenet striking preemptively to keep the White House and its congressional allies from tagging him with responsibility for the missing WMD debacle. And maybe that's it. Maybe this really is about nothing more complicated than one man's fight to keep his job.
But the more I watch the story unfold, the more I think something deeper and darker is at stake. It seems the top career elite at the CIA, plus Tenet, has pulled out all the stops to try to bust up the Rove machine. That suggests they're worried about something much bigger than just bureaucratic turf or the WMD blame game.
In fact, if this were a Third World country, I'd say we're witnessing the early stages of a coup d'etat -- or of a desperate effort to prevent one. But of course, those kind of things never happen in America.
It's still creepy, though. In a democracy, intelligence agencies generally aren't supposed to undermine elected governments. But of course, elected governments also aren't supposed to go around outing intelligence agents for fun and profit.
So should we make an exception in this case, and cheer for the spooks? Under the circumstances, it's hard not to. But it also suggests an argument for the creation of a Special Counsel that conservatives might want to think about. Because if this investigation remains with the Justice Department, and the spooks decide the fix is already in, how will they react? What else might they spill, and who might they spill it to?
Even thinking about these things puts us a long step towards Alice's looking glass world. But so have the events of the past few days. If the CIA and the White House really are going to duke it out here, it would probably be good for both sides -- and for the country -- if we at least had a neutral referee.
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