25Oct03-Edward Alden-Naming of agent 'was aimed at discrediting CIA'
By Edward Alden in Washington
Published: October 25 2003 5:00 | Last Updated: October 25 2003 5:00
The Bush administration's exposure of a clandestine Central Intelligence Agency operative was part of a campaign aimed at discrediting US intelligence agencies for not supporting White House claims that Saddam Hussein was reconstituting Iraq's nuclear weapons programme, former agency officials said yesterday.
In a rare hearing called by Senate Democratic leaders, the officials said the White House engaged in pressure and intimidation aimed at generating intelligence evidence to support the decision to make war on Iraq.
Senior administration officials in July revealed the name of Valerie Plame, a former clandestine CIA officer and the wife of Joseph Wilson, who was sent by the CIA in 2002 to assess claims that Iraq was trying to buy enriched uranium from Niger.
Mr Wilson had angered the White House by concluding that there was no evidence to support the claim, and then going public with that information after the war.
The Justice Department has launched a criminal investigation to determine the source of the leak, which in effect ended Ms Plame's career as a CIA operative and may have endangered agency sources who came in contact with her.
Vince Cannistraro, former CIA operations chief, charged yesterday: "She was outed as a vindictive act because the agency was not providing support for policy statements that Saddam Hussein was reviving his nuclear programme."
The leak was a way to "demonstrate an underlying contempt for the intelligence community, the CIA in particular".
He said that in the run-up to the Iraq war, the White House had exerted unprecedented pressure on the CIA and other intelligence agencies to find evidence that Iraq had links to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda and that Baghdad was trying to build a nuclear bomb.
While the intelligence agencies believe their mission is to provide accurate analysis to the president to aid policy decisions, in the case of Iraq "we had policies that were already adopted and they were looking for those selective pieces of intelligence that would support the policy", Mr Cannistraro said.
In written testimony, he said that Vice-President Dick Cheney and his top aide Lewis Libby went to CIA headquarters to press mid-level analysts to provide support for the claim. Mr Cheney, he said, "insisted that desk analysts were not looking hard enough for the evidence". Mr Cannistraro said his information came from current agency analysts.
Other agency officials, who said they had been colleagues of Ms Plame when she was trained as a CIA agent, said the leak could do severe damage to the morale of the intelligence agencies. "The US government has never before released the name of a clandestine officer," said Jim Marcinkowski, a former CIA case officer. "My classmates and I have been betrayed."
Senate Democrats are pressing for an independent investigation of the intelligence leading up to the war, and are calling for a special counsel to investigate the leak.
The Republican-controlled Senate intelligence committee is preparing a highly critical report of the pre-war intelligence, the Washington Post reported yesterday, which will conclude that the CIA overstated any evidence about Iraq's weapons programmes and ties to terrorism.
But the report will not look at the issue of whether the White House put pressure on the CIA to reach such conclusions.
The administration has refused to appoint an independent special counsel on the leak investigation, and Federal Bureau of Investigation officials said this week that John Ashcroft, attorney-general and close political ally of President George W. Bush, was involved in the investigation.
Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst who said he voted for Mr Bush and contributed to his campaign, said the White House needed to authorise a more independent investigation. "Unless they come up with a guilty party, it will leave the impression that the administration is playing politics."
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