Subject: Secrets of a Spy Scandal...

From: [email-masked] (Marian)
Date: 14 Oct 2003 21:49:36 GMT

I love spy thrillahs, and this one is for real...He is critical of all parties
in this mess.        Marian

http://www.iht.com/articles/113364.htm 

Secrets of a spy scandal ~ Nicholas D. Kristof of the NYT ~ 10/13/03 

Like any good spy story, the Valerie Plame Wilson affair is far more complex
than it seems on the surface. I know Mrs. Wilson, but I knew nothing about her
CIA career and hadn't realized she's "a hell of a shot with an AK-47," as a
classmate at the CIA training "farm," Jim Marcinkowski, recalls.

I'll be more careful around her, for she also turns out to be skilled in 
throwing hand grenades and to have run covert operations in some of the 
world's messier spots. She was not a source for this column.

Her operations remain secret, but there are several crucial facts that 
can be made public without putting anyone at risk - and together, they 
leave everybody looking bad. The CIA is conducting a damage assessment, 
which will determine what networks and operations it will have to close 
down. But my sense is that Democrats exaggerate the damage to Wilson's 
career and to her personal security, while Republicans vastly play down 
the enormity of the security breach and the danger to the assets she 
worked with.

And now a few pertinent facts:

First, the CIA suspected that Aldrich Ames had given Wilson's name to 
the Russians before his arrest for espionage in 1994. So her undercover 
security was undermined at that time and she was brought back to 
Washington for safety reasons.

Second, as 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 CIA front company, she was switching to 
a new cover as a State Department official, affording her diplomatic 
protection without having "CIA" stamped on her forehead.

Third, Wilson's intelligence connections became known a bit in 
Washington as she rose in the CIA and moved to State Department cover, 
but her job remained a closely held secret. Even her classmates in the 
CIA's career training program mostly knew her only as Valerie P. That 
way, if one spook defected, the damage would be limited.

All in all, I think the Democrats are engaging in hyperbole when they 
describe the White House as having put Wilson's life in danger and 
destroyed her career; her days skulking in the back alleys of cities 
like Beirut and Algiers were already mostly over.

If Democrats have politicized the scandal and exaggerated it, 
Republicans have inexcusably tried to whitewash it. The leak risked the 
security of all operatives ever seen with Wilson. Unwitting sources will 
now realize that they were supplying the CIA with information, and even 
real agents may fear exposure and vanish.

CIA veterans are seething, and rightly so, at the betrayal by their own 
government. Larry Johnson, who entered the agency at the same time as 
Wilson, is a Republican who voted for President George W. Bush - and 
he's so enraged that he compares the administration leaker to the spies 
Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen.

"Here's a woman who put her life on the line," Johnson said. "But unlike 
a Navy Seal or a Marine, she didn't have a gun to fight back. All she 
had to protect her was her cover."

We in journalism are also wrong, I think, to extend professional 
courtesy to Robert Novak, by looking beyond him to the leaker. True, he 
says he didn't think anyone would be endangered. Working abroad in ugly 
corners of the world, American journalists often learn the identities of 
American CIA officers, but we never publish their names.

I find Novak's decision to do so just as inexcusable as the decision of 
administration officials to leak it.

This scandal leaves everybody stinking.
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