Did the Administration damage CIA operations against Iran?

Sometimes a story that seems relatively inconsequential can turn out to have devastating consequences. The most famous instance of this phenomenon was the shooting of Archduke Ferdinand by a young Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip which is commonly held to have been triggered the First World War. The decision by White House aides to try to suppress Joe Wilson’s criticism of President Bush for his hyperbole over Iraqi weapons of mass destruction will hopefully not have such catclysmic consequences. But it does threaten to have a much greater long-term effect than its architects ever imagined.

Most readers of this blog will be aware of how the White House aides attacked Wilson in leaks to selected US reporters by pointing out that his wife worked for the CIA. Wilson was unhappy about the continued administration claims, in particular by President Bush in his 2003 State of the Union address, that Saddam had tried to buy uranium ore from Niger.

Wilson was an ex-ambassador, a former US diplomat with good contacts in Niger. He was sent there by the CIA to investigate the claims and concluded they weren’t true. When he wrote this in the New York Times, the smear campaign began. It was nasty and brutal and appeared to be a knee-jerk reaction by a spin doctor designed, in the jargon of such people, to “deal with the story”.  The word between the White House aides and the hacks was that Wilson’s wife was a CIA officer working on Iraqi WMD, that she was the architect of his mission, and that the mission was designed to rubbish the Niger claims rather than investigate them. At some point someone said oh by the way her name is Valerie Plame. That was the big mistake. Plame was an operations officer working on “non-official cover” who might need at any time to go undercover anywhere in the world, Iraq for instance, protected only by her anonymity. Naming a covert CIA officer is illegal under US law. The White House aides were breaking the law and when it appeared in print, all hell broke lose.

As with so much that happened in the run-up to the Iraq War, the truth of the actual Niger claims is far more complicated than either side of the argument would have you believe. But that Plame’s name ended up in the papers as the result of an illegal act by someone in the administration is not in doubt. So let’s just concentrate on Plamegate as it has become known.

Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the Special Prosecutor looking into the case, has already indicted I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, for perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements. As with Watergate, it is the cover-up rather than the initial offence that is trapping officials. Fitzgerald is also said to be looking at Bush’s Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove. The Sunday Times revealed last November that Stephen Hadley, now National Security Adviser, was the source who told veteran Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward about Plame. Since Hadley was also close to Dick Cheney, his alleged involvement inevitably leads to fingers being pointed at the vice-president.

A lot of very good journalists have had to make some very worrying admissions in this case so I hope you won’t mind if I make my own. If anyone out there thought the Sunday Times broke the Hadley story. Well we didn’t really. OK. I know. We never claimed we did and even if we had my admission isn’t anywhere near the same as say Woodward forgetting to tell his bosses that he might have had one of those dodgy conversations with the spin doctors. But it is at least in the cause of right and truth.

We were the first mainstream newspaper to confirm the story. But it was actually broken by a US internet newspaper known as Raw Story, an extraordinarily good website which combines links to the best of other media around the world with its own scoops. Raw Story has persistently led the way on Plamegate, breaking story after story that the US mainstream media have subsequently been forced to follow up. Now Larisa Alexandrovna, the Raw Story reporter who has taken the lead on most of these stories, has come up with what appears to be an extremely interesting new line.

Plame was also gathering intelligence on the Iranian nuclear programme. This is not really a surprise since we know she worked in the CIA department dealing with the proliferation of WMD. But Alexandrovna then goes on to cite US intelligence officials as saying that Plame was part of an operation tracking distribution and acquisition of weapons of mass destruction technology to and from Iran. They told her that:

“Plame's outing was more serious than has previously been reported and carries grave implications for US national security and its ability to monitor Iran's burgeoning nuclear programme… her outing resulted in ‘severe’ damage to her team and significantly hampered the CIA's ability to monitor nuclear proliferation.”

Now we know Cheney was famous for bullying intelligence analysts into giving him the answers he wanted and we know that he and others believed Iraq was only the beginning and that Iran was next in the firing line. If this Raw Story exclusive is as accurate as its predecessors, Plamegate will have been the trigger to something far more damaging than even some of the administration’s most vociferous critics believed.

Comments

[jules]

Good story, and back story. Unfortunately, if it is true, it means that we cannot rely on any information about Iran coming from the CIA sources in the near future.

The awfult thing about that is that the NSA becomes (by default) our primary source of covert intelligence information.

Now I'm really scared.

[Linda Jack]

So what's the answer? As journalists you throw a spotlight into the dark corners, but the dark corners seem to be prolificating - and what can the rest of us do? Scary - yes - but it reminds me of the story of the frog - you put it in boiling water and it jumps out, you put it in cold water and heat it up and it doesn't - little by little we are being dragged to the abyss and we won't realise it til we get there.

[Mr. Natural]

Thank you. Hopefully sunlight will disinfect this horribly sick situation.