I have said from the start that I didn't think there was a violation of the Law. They will fire those involved for stupidity, but that is it. I still can't figure out the motives of the WH Leaker. Must have been an unhappy CIA type on assignment to the WH.
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Was She Covert? Apparently Not.
The Valerie Plame kerfuffle seems to be fuffling out. Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times offers "a few pertinent facts" about her career:
First, the C.I.A. suspected that Aldrich Ames had given Mrs. Wilson's name (along with those of other spies) to the Russians before his espionage arrest in 1994. So her undercover security was undermined at that time, and she was brought back to Washington for safety reasons.
Second, as Mrs. Wilson rose in the agency, she was already in transition away from undercover work to management, and to liaison roles with other intelligence agencies. So this year, even before she was outed, she was moving away from "noc"--which means non-official cover, like pretending to be a business executive. After passing as an energy analyst for Brewster-Jennings & Associates, a C.I.A. front company, she was switching to a new cover as a State Department official, affording her diplomatic protection without having "C.I.A." stamped on her forehead.
Third, Mrs. Wilson's intelligence connections became known a bit in Washington as she rose in the C.I.A. and moved to State Department cover, but her job remained a closely held secret. Even her classmates in the C.I.A.'s career training program mostly knew her only as Valerie P. That way, if one spook defected, the damage would be limited.
Now, let's go back to the beginning of this kerfuffle. The Nation's David Corn claimed on July 16 that the identification of Plame as a CIA "operative" in Bob Novak's column two days earlier was a "potential violation" of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, under which, in Corn's words, "it is a crime for anyone who has access to classified information to disclose intentionally information identifying a covert agent."
Under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, an employee of an intelligence service is a "covert agent" only if he has worked overseas within the past five years. Thus if Kristof is right, there is no violation here. Where did Corn get the idea that Plame was a covert agent? From her husband, Joseph Wilson, it would appear:
Without acknowledging whether she is a deep-cover CIA employee, Wilson says, "Naming her this way would have compromised every operation, every relationship, every network with which she had been associated in her entire career. This is the stuff of Kim Philby and Aldrich Ames."
This Joe Wilson is a clever one, isn't he? He didn't actually say his wife was a covert agent, so he can't quite be accused of lying. But if Kristof's account of Plame's career is accurate, Wilson misled Corn (as well as others who followed his lead, including Kristof's colleague Paul Krugman) by making a hypothetical statement based on a premise he knew to be false, which gave journalists hostile to the Bush administration all they needed to make an accusation of criminal wrongdoing.
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