Under cover at the CIA

If we're to believe that Valerie Plame was in fact a covert CIA operative as of July, 2003 then I guess we have to believe that CIA op's go deep-undercover...at Langley. As analysts.

Valerie Toensing, co-author of 1982's IIRPA, doesn't buy that, and neither would I:

There has been some dispute, moreover, about just how secret a secret agent Ms. Wilson was.

"She had a desk job in Langley," said Ms. Toensing, who also signed the supporting brief in the appeals court, referring to the C.I.A.'s headquarters. "When you want someone in deep cover, they don't go back and forth to Langley."

Doesn't pass the sniff test. More conventional reading way back in '03 from Nicholas Kristof:

"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."


John Podhoretz's column today clearly delinieates exactly how and why many a conservative refuses to get apoplectic over the Rove-Plame connection:

There's no mistaking the purpose of this conversation between Cooper and Rove. It wasn't intended to discredit, defame or injure Wilson's wife. It was intended to throw cold water on the import, seriousness and supposedly high level of Wilson's findings.

Rove was suggesting to Cooper that that folks lower down in the CIA than its own director commandeered the process so that the husband of one of their own could get the gig. And the husband in question then went and misrepresented his findings to various journalists (The Washington Post's Walter Pincus and The New York Times's Nicholas Kristof) and then in his own now-famous Times op-ed.

This Rove-Cooper conversation discredits Wilson, not Plame. In fact, nothing we know so far was done either with the purpose of exposing or even the knowledge that these remarks would be exposing an undercover CIA operative.

But Plame's undercover status at the time was and is a little questionable in any case. How undercover could she have been when her name was published at the time as part of Joseph Wilson's own biography online?

So if the offense wasn't against Plame, what of the offense against Wilson? There was no offense. As many of Joe Wilson's own hottest defenders would no doubt argue in relation to President Bush, exposing a liar is not only not a crime, it's a public service.

And Wilson lied. Repeatedly.

You don't say!? Indeed. The SIC report made it clear, with documentation, that Plame had in fact pushed Wilson for the job, something he denied on his own. Furthermore, they point out that Wilson's report had far less impact on CIA analysis of Iraq's efforts at obtaining uranium than it seemingly had in Wilson's own mind.

With that in mind, Podhoretz concludes that: Thus, Rove was telling Cooper the truth. According to one of Cooper's e-mails, "not only the genesis of the trip is flawed an[d] suspect but so is the report. He [Rove] implied strongly there's still plenty to implicate Iraqi interest in acquiring uranium fro[m] Niger . . ."

J-Pod concludes by painting quite a different picture of Wilson than what Wilson's adoring fans work at: Karl Rove didn't "out" Valerie Plame as a CIA agent to intimidate Joe Wilson. He was dismissing Joe Wilson as a low-level has-been hack to whom nobody should pay attention. He was right then, and if he said it today, he'd still be right.

And if Valerie Plame wants to live a quiet spy life, she should stop having her picture taken by society photographers and stop getting stories written about her on the front page of the Times.

This is hardly a one-stop-shopping collection of links and story-lines, but I wanted to post something that was working hard at being somewhat comprehensive. Why?

I can't stand the screaming of the usual suspects over this. Rove, and very possibly nobody, broke the law. Minus that, all they're left with is the hand-wringing over a CIA operative's 'outing'. With, of course, all the attendant bile directed at Karl Rove for being Karl Rove.

Some get indignant over the perceived political handling of the Wilson-Plame affair. That, seems to me, is a fair criticism. That of course posits that Rove was attempting to push-back at Wilson by discrediting him via his wife.

Lest we forget though, politics is nasty sometimes. I mean, if it were not, what exactly would Rove have had to push-back at anyway!?