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Sloppy Intelligence Trade Craftby
Jim Grichar (aka Exx-Gman)
The recent flap in Washington over public disclosure of the name of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s wife, reportedly a CIA employee who worked under non-official cover (known as a "NOC"), has caused loads of recriminations, including a search for the "leakers" and possible prosecution for violating a federal law that prohibits such disclosures. Thus far, the press and Washington pundits have ignored the most important question of all, namely how did any senior administration officials get the name of his wife? Wilson the "envoy" Wilson, who visited the Niger on an official mission of trying to discover whether or not Saddam Hussein had purchased high-grade uranium from that country, subsequently went public in a New York Times Op-Ed piece with his findings, namely that Niger did not sell such uranium to Iraq and that, therefore, Iraq was unlikely to have been able to manufacture nuclear weapons. President Bush had mentioned the strong likelihood that Iraq had, or would soon have, nuclear weapons in making his pitch for the U.S. to attack Iraq. The disclosure by Wilson was a major embarrassment to the Bush Administration, suggesting that it had lied to the American public in order to get support for the preemptive war. After Wilson’s article, veteran reporter and columnist Robert Novak began to dig into the issue. In talking to a source within the Bush Administration, Novak found out that Wilson, who served on the Clinton Administration’s National Security Council and who contributed to Democratic presidential candidates, had been promoted for this mission by none other than his wife, who was an employee with the CIA. Novak published an article last July in which he named Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, as being an "operative" with the CIA who had experience in the area of weapons of mass destruction. Novak has since stated that his source did not tell him that Plame was under cover let alone the fact that she was a NOC, which is supposed to be the deepest cover possible. The stink about disclosure of her true identity got larger as a press report from the Washington Post indicated that several high administration sources tried to get other reporters to divulge her name as a way of getting back at Wilson for his embarrassment and exposure of the Bush Administration. Some have suggested that George Bush’s political guru, Karl Rove, tried to plant the story. With this big stink, a formal investigation, required under the law, was started. And as of the close of business on Tuesday, October 7, all files, email records, and other information pertinent to the investigation are to be turned over to the FBI. The Real $64,000 Question There are a number of serious implications regarding the use of spies who are not under diplomatic cover. (For those interested in a little more background on the question of cover at the CIA, check out a short article by Ed Finn that appeared on Slate last week.) Suffice it to say that anyone under non-official cover, if caught in an act of espionage by a foreign government, is totally on their own, with little or no chance of getting help from the U.S. government. The U.S. government will not even acknowledge that a NOC is working for it. That is one reason why keeping one’s identity secret is most important for a NOC. A second reason is that once a NOC has been "burned," that is, either caught in the act of espionage or revealed as being a spy, he or she is finished in that end of the intelligence business. And in the last few days, Wilson himself has publicly expressed fear for his wife’s safety, as terrorists may now target her, although that is always a risk, even for those under diplomatic cover. Finally, every foreign country to which Valerie Plame traveled will now conduct an investigation regarding whom she met, with all her contacts placed under suspicion of being clandestine agents for the U.S. It is possible that some of these people, if the offense was considered serious, might be executed for treason by their countries. While all of the above are serious and are reasons for conducting the so-called investigation of the leaks, the Washington media, being who they are, have totally missed out on asking the real $64,000 question of this flap, namely, how on earth did the name of a CIA NOC, supposedly under the deepest possible cover, get known to anyone high in the Administration other than CIA Director George Tenet? Excepting Joseph Wilson, no one outside the CIA should have known that his wife was a NOC, and darned few CIA people should have even known her real name or even have ever set eyes on her. If she was practicing what is known as good intelligence trade craft (using proper procedures to protect her true identity), she would never set foot in CIA headquarters. She would have been careful with whom she was associated, particularly regarding a spouse who had public visibility. From published reports, Wilson – a former U.S. Ambassador and former official at the National Security Council – listed Valerie Plame as his wife in publicly available documents. If Wilson had been thinking, he would have listed her as Valerie Wilson or just not given out the name of his wife. To maintain her cover, she would have worked extremely long hours, actually working at a real job and undertaking her clandestine assignments at appropriate times under that cover. Like other CIA spies, she would have had to collect information from her sources and prepared and filed – in a much more circumspect and clandestine manner – reports containing information desired by her bosses and the senior officials in the U.S. national security apparatus. Even if senior administration officials got a look at the raw reports she prepared, they would not have known her name. If they were given her name by anyone from the CIA, then that person or persons ought to be fired. And that includes the CIA Director, if he was the one to reveal her name to a senior administration official, but the chances of Bush firing Tenet over this are close to zero. Would Wilson or Plame herself have revealed her true identity? I doubt it, but I do not know their life style. He or she might have done or said something which inadvertently gave away her identity at some Washington social function or other venue where administration officials or members of the press might have been present. Washington being Washington, gossip spreads faster than a wildfire, so rumors or news of her true identity could have spread quickly, particularly among those with some links to national security matters. In either case, the fact that her name was disclosed reflects sloppy intelligence trade craft, either by other CIA employees or by Wilson and Plame herself. As I have stated in earlier articles about the intelligence apparatus of the U.S. government, it needs to be slimmed down drastically, focused on legitimate threats to the U.S. homeland, and staffed with fewer, but more intelligent and resourceful, professionals who would practice proper intelligence trade craft. October 8, 2003 Copyright © 2003 LewRockwell.com
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