The Most Insidious of Traitors
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Tuesday 30 September 2003
"Even though I'm a tranquil guy now at this stage of my life, I have nothing but
contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the name of our
sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious of traitors."
-- George Herbert Walker Bush, 1999
Karl Rove, senior political advisor to George W. Bush, is a very powerful man. That is not to say he
has never been in trouble. Rove was fired from the 1992 Bush Sr. campaign for trashing Robert
Mosbacher, Jr., who was the chief fundraiser for the campaign and an avowed Bush loyalist. Rove
accomplished this trashing of Mosbacher by planting a negative story with columnist Bob Novak. The
campaign figured out that Karl had done the dirty deed, and he was given his walking papers.
Demonstrably, Rove is back in the saddle again. The January 2003 edition of Esquire magazine
carried an article by Ron Suskind which quoted comments from John DiIulio, a domestic policy advisor
to the White House who had just retired from his post. On October 24, DiIulio had sent a letter to
Suskind describing what he had seen while working for the Bush administration. The meat of the letter
described an administration far, far more interested in raw political triangulation and ruthless spin than
in actual policy and government functionality. Some excerpts from DiIulio's letter:
"Some are inclined to blame the high political-to-policy ratios of this administration on
Karl Rove...some staff members, senior and junior, are awed and cowed by Karl's real or
perceived powers. They self-censor lots for fear of upsetting him, and, in turn, few of the
president's top people routinely tell the president what they really think if they think that
Karl will be brought up short in the bargain. Karl is enormously powerful, maybe the
single most powerful person in the modern, post-Hoover era ever to occupy a political
advisor post near the Oval Office."
Even a casual political observer would have trouble missing the fact that this is one of the sharpest
political outfits ever to reside in the Oval Office. Bush's team is a unified wall, cemented to their
message-of-the-day, and they have done very well for themselves because of this. All of this can be
laid at the feet of Karl Rove, the senior political advisor to George W. Bush. According to DiIulio, the
preeminence of political considerations within this administration is so complete that any and all policy
considerations or contemplation of actual issues are not so much in the back seat as they are in the
trunk below the spare tire and the jack. This, again, can be laid at the feet of Mr. Rove.
All of Washington and the country has been buzzing for the last few days over a report that the CIA
has asked the Justice Department to investigate the White House regarding a matter of important
national security. The wife of a former ambassador named Joseph Wilson, it has been alleged, was
'outed' as an active CIA agent to columnist Robert Novak by this White House in an act of political
revenge.
Joseph Wilson was the man dispatched to Niger in February of 2002 by the CIA, after Vice
President Dick Cheney asked CIA to figure out whether there was any substance to the charge that
Iraq was attempting to procure uranium "yellow cake" from that nation for the purpose of starting a
nuclear weapons program. Ambassador Wilson went, investigated, and returned eight days later to
state flatly that the evidence was garbage. He has claimed since that his analysis was one of three
intelligence reports debunking the Niger story. Ambassador Wilson told this to Cheney's office, the
CIA, the State Department, and the National Security Council. Despite the fact that Wilson made it
clear that these allegations were untrue - it was revealed that the 'evidence' to support the Niger
uranium charge was a pile of crudely forged documents - George W. Bush used the Niger uranium
evidence dramatically in his 2003 State of the Union address.
In July, Ambassador Wilson went very public, criticizing the White House for using evidence to
support war that they knew was patently false. One week later, Robert Novak reported that Wilson's
wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA operative. As it turns out, two senior White House officials cold-called
six different journalists and informed them of Valerie Plame's status as a CIA agent, according to an
anonymous administration official quoted by the Washington Post. None of the journalists ran the
story. That same administration official was quoted about these revelations as saying, "Clearly, it was
meant purely and simply for revenge." Joseph Wilson likewise charges that this act was done as an
act of revenge for his vocal criticism of George W. Bush and the administration's actions leading up to
the Iraq war. Specifically, he views Karl Rove as being possibly involved in, or at least condoning, the
cutting down of his wife.
The facts of this story are singularly grotesque. Taken at the top layer, you have a White House
that appears perfectly willing to go after the family members of its critics. Valerie Plame's career is
destroyed, period. The act itself displays a level of viciousness that is dangerous to the functioning of
this, or any, democracy.
Peel the second layer and you discover the rank illegality of it all. Section 421 of the Intelligence
Identities Protection Act of 1982 reads as follows:
"Whoever, having or having had authorized access to classified information that identifies
a covert agent, intentionally discloses any information identifying such covert agent to
any individual not authorized to receive classified information, knowing that the
information disclosed so identifies such covert agent and that the United States is taking
affirmative measures to conceal such covert agent's intelligence relationship to the
United States, shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than ten years, or
both."
The third layer is where the darkness truly lurks, and where the deadly importance of this situation
lies. Valerie Plame was not simply an analyst or a data cruncher. She was an operative running a
network dedicated to tracking any person or nation that might try to give weapons of mass destruction
to terrorists. That sentence deserves to be written twice. She was an operative running a network
dedicated to tracking any person or nation that might try to give weapons of mass destruction to
terrorists.
The Bush administration pushed very hard the idea that America is in danger from WMDs being
placed into the hands of terrorists. This was one of the central arguments behind the war in Iraq. Yet in
order to protect Bush's political standing, a couple of "administration officials" blew Valerie Plame, and
by proxy her network, completely out of the water in an attempt to shut her husband up. In short, in
order to protect Bush from the ramifications of using fake evidence to support his war, this White
House destroyed an intelligence network that was protecting us from the threat posed by chemical,
biological, and nuclear weapons.
We are less safe now that Valerie Plame is no longer performing this vital task, and the members of
her network are in mortal danger of being revealed and destroyed. Beyond that, we are facing a level of
hypocrisy that shatters any and all previously known boundaries. This administration ginned up a war
in Iraq based upon manufactured evidence and wildly overstated threats, all of which was painted over
with rhetoric about defending the country from terrorists and weapons of mass destruction. The fate of
Valerie Plame, and her network, shows without doubt that the moral standing of this administration is
as empty as Saddam Hussein's WMD cache.
In Ambassador Wilson's words, "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."
The current spin from administration defenders within and without the mainstream media is that
Valerie Plame was only an analyst, and not an operative. This, somehow, is supposed to lessen the
blow of an administration willing to attack the families of its critics. Yet the characterization of Plame
as an analyst is factually incorrect. For one, Robert Novak himself indicated that she was an operative
in the original report that birthed this scandal. "Wilson never worked for the CIA," wrote Novak, "but his
wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction."
Ray McGovern, who was for 27-years a senior analyst for the CIA, further confirms the status of
Plame within the CIA. "I know Joseph Wilson well enough to know," said McGovern in a telephone
conversation we had today, "that his wife was in fact a deep cover operative running a network of
informants on what is supposedly this administration's first-priority issue: Weapons of mass
destruction."
McGovern further elaborated on the damage done when such an agent has their cover blown. "This
causes a great deal of damage," said McGovern. "These kinds of networks take ten years to develop.
The reason why they operate under deep cover is that the only people who have access to the kind of
data we need cannot be associated in any way with the American intelligence community. Our
operatives live a lie to maintain these networks, and do so out of patriotism. When they get blown, the
operatives themselves are in physical danger. The people they recruit are also in physical danger,
because foreign intelligence services can make the connections and find them. Operatives like Valerie
Plame are real patriots."
Mr. Rove has done this kind of thing before, specifically using Robert Novak in that one notable
attempt to cut down Mosbacher. Rove is a disciple of the undisputed heavyweight champion of political
assassins, Lee Atwater, and has often reached into a deep bag of dirty tricks to accomplish his
political ends. He knows no ideology beyond power, and has no bones about using it to wreak havoc
on anyone who gets in his crosshairs. The Esquire article about DiIulio finds him recounting a singular
Rove moment, as he overheard a conversation happening in another room: "Inside, Rove was talking to
an aide about some political stratagem in some state that had gone awry and a political operative who
had displeased him. I paid it no mind and reviewed a jotted list of questions I hoped to ask. But after a
moment, it was like ignoring a tornado flinging parked cars. 'We will fuck him. Do you hear me? We
will fuck him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever fucked him!'"
Guess who was doing the cursing and threatening.
One last bit of inside baseball. When the Niger scandal erupted, the Bush administration went out
of its way to blame the CIA for the mess, despite the fact that the CIA, along with the entire
intelligence community, had been cut out of the loop by Don Rumsfeld's Office of Special Plans. The
OSP, and its pet Iraqi Ahmad Chalabi, became the source for all of the information regarding Iraq's
weapons capabilities, and a number of intelligence insiders have publicly blamed that group for the
preponderance of highly erroneous data about Iraq. For the Bush administration to completely usurp
the CIA by depending solely on data manufactured by the Office of Special Plans, and then to turn
around and blame CIA when the OSPs data did not turn out to be true, is as insane as it is laughable.
Yet this is what they have done. The CIA's calling for this investigation is nothing more or less than the
Agency defending itself, proving out the oft-repeated warning that one scapegoats the CIA at their
mortal peril.
Also, the fact that this data came to the Washington post from a White House official means that
another Deep Throat may have just been born.
The White House has denied the allegation, and promises a full investigation. A great many people
find it laughable to believe this White House is capable of investigating itself, and are demanding an
independent investigation. A quick look at the White House telephone logs will reveal who called
whom, and when. It may well be the case that Rove was not involved; there are several administration
officials - Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Rice, Card - along with a constellation of administration
associates and media mouthpieces, who had a vested interest in shutting Ambassador Wilson's
mouth. The White House phone logs will be revelatory. If this administration fails to hand those logs
over, they will stand in taint of high treason.
J'accuse.
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