Bob Novak had something of a scoop this week about a huge behind-the-scenes conflict.
A few hours after George W. Bush dismissed a pessimistic CIA report on Iraq as ”just guessing,” the analyst who identified himself as its author told a private dinner last week of secret, unheeded warnings years ago about going to war in Iraq. This exchange leads to the unavoidable conclusion that the president of the United States and the Central Intelligence Agency are at war with each other.
Paul R. Pillar, the CIA’s national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, sat down Tuesday night in a large West Coast city with a select group of private citizens. He was not talking off the cuff. Relying on a multi-paged, single-spaced memorandum, Pillar said he and his colleagues concluded early in the Bush administration that military intervention in Iraq would intensify anti-American hostility throughout Islam.
Interesting stuff. Bush dismissed the National Intelligence Estimate’s warnings, saying the CIA was “just guessing.” The CIA is returning rhetorical fire, defending the report and identifying Bush’s inability to recognize serious threats. When the president and the CIA are engaged in a hostile conflict, there’s a problem in an already-dysfunctional administration.
The Post article I mentioned earlier touched on this with some disturbing details about the animosity between the two.
“I’m not surprised if people in the administration were put on the defensive,” said one CIA official, who like many others interviewed would speak only anonymously, either because they don’t have official authorization to speak or because they worry about ramifications of criticizing top administration officials. “We weren’t trying to make them look bad, we’re just trying to give them information. Of course, we’re telling them something they don’t want to hear.”
Yeah, the White House isn’t big on information they don’t like.
And while it’s not related to the White House-CIA tension, an interesting tangent was Novak’s inability to follow instructions about confidentiality. Novak explained:
Pillar’s Tuesday night presentation was conducted under what used to be called the Lindley Rule (devised by Newsweek’s Ernest K. Lindley): The identity of the speaker, to whom he spoke, and the fact that he spoke at all are secret, but the substance of what he said can be reported. This dinner, however, knocks the Lindley Rule on its head. The substance was less significant than the forbidden background details.
The Lindley Rule highlights a distinction between “off the record,” “on background,” and “not for attribution.” Unfortunately, Novak, because he felt like it, ignored this distinction altogether.
In other words, Novak received a briefing from a high-level CIA officer. Before the briefing, those in attendance were told explicitly that the identity of the speaker was confidential. Novak didn’t think he should keep the agreement, so he didn’t. Novak wrote up an item with the primary speaker’s name prominently featured in his column’s third sentence.
Considering the Plame Game scandal, you’d think he’d understand how this works by now.