Last week I mentioned that the Bush administration was turning its political guns on Joseph Wilson, the former ambassador who discovered that the Niger/uranium claim was bogus after being sent to Africa last year by the CIA.
Specifically, administration officials were focusing their criticism on Wilson by suggesting that his wife, whom they identified as a CIA agent, was responsible for pushing Wilson’s role in the Niger investigation. Robert Novak, a conservative newspaper columnist, first reported this claim after having heard it from two unnamed “two senior administration officials.”
David Corn at The Nation speculated that the White House should not be going around “outing” CIA agents, especially those “agency operatives” who investigate weapons of mass destruction, as Novak reported was the case.
“That would seem to mean that the Bush administration has screwed one of its own top-secret operatives in order to punish Wilson or to send a message to others who might challenge it,” Corn wrote. He added that it appeared that “a pair of top Bush officials told a reporter the name of a CIA operative who apparently has worked under what’s known as ‘nonofficial cover’ and who has had the dicey and difficult mission of tracking parties trying to buy or sell weapons of mass destruction or WMD material. If Wilson’s wife is such a person — and the CIA is unlikely to have many employees like her — her career has been destroyed by the Bush administration.”
Corn’s analysis was quickly rejected by conservative critics who said the administration would never do such a thing and that Wilson’s wife was probably not a “secret” CIA agent so there was no risk in telling her identity to a newspaper columnist.
Well, it turns out the administration did just that. By telling Novak about her status at the intelligence agency, the administration blew a CIA agent’s cover.
As Newsday reported yesterday, “The identity of an undercover CIA officer whose husband started the Iraq uranium intelligence controversy has been publicly revealed by a conservative Washington columnist citing ‘two senior administration officials.’ Intelligence officials confirmed to Newsday yesterday that Valerie Plame, wife of retired Ambassador Joseph Wilson, works at the agency on weapons of mass destruction issues in an undercover capacity — at least she was undercover until last week when she was named by columnist Robert Novak.”
Why would Novak report secret information about a CIA agent in his column? Because the administration officials who leaked him the story never told him it was a secret.
“I figured if they gave it to me, they’d give it to others,” Novak later said. “I’m a reporter. Somebody gives me information and it’s accurate. I generally use it.”
I’m certainly no fan of Novak’s work, but this wasn’t his mistake. The blame lies solely on those administration officials who leaked the information.
There’s two points to consider, as far as I’m concerned.
First, it seems obvious that the Bush administration exposed the identity of a covert agent to spite Wilson and send a message to others who might follow his example. As Wilson told Newsday, “It’s a shot across the bow to these people, that if you talk we’ll take your family and drag them through the mud as well.”
Second, and perhaps more importantly, what these administration officials did was illegal. They put the career of a CIA official in jeopardy, and according to the Newsday article, endangered the lives of her contacts in foreign countries.
Federal law is clearly intended to prevent this from happening. As Corn wrote in The Nation, “Under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, it is a crime for anyone who has access to classified information to disclose intentionally information identifying a covert agent. The punishment for such an offense is a fine of up to $50,000 and/or up to ten years in prison.”
Again, Novak isn’t the one who broke the law. It’s not as if he stumbled upon the identity of a secret CIA agent and published the information in his column. He got the information from the Bush administration.
The White House can’t pass the buck on this one; there’s no way to blame “British intelligence” for what they did.
Those officials who leaked the information appear to have broken the law and put a lot of people at risk in the process. At the same time, they have blown the cover of an experienced official who was helping with the search for biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons. With her career in jeopardy, the administration may have carelessly made each of less safe.
Will there be a formal investigation? Congressional hearings to determine which two administration officials leaked this information? Media outrage? Paul Krugman mentioned it, and I’m glad, but that’s not enough.
And lastly, I get tired of saying this — and I suspect you get tired of reading it — but can you imagine what Republicans would do if Clinton officials revealed classified information to a liberal columnist and secretly released the identity of a secret CIA official out of spite? Heads would roll.