Can we stop considering this an open question now?
An unclassified summary of outed CIA officer Valerie Plame’s employment history at the spy agency, disclosed for the first time today in a court filing by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, indicates that Plame was “covert” when her name became public in July 2003. […]
While assigned to CPD, Ms. Wilson engaged in temporary duty (TDY) travel overseas on official business. She traveled at least seven times to more than ten countries. When traveling overseas, Ms. Wilson always traveled under a cover identity — sometimes in true name and sometimes in alias — but always using cover — whether official or non-official cover (NOC) — with no ostensible relationship to the CIA.
At the time of the initial unauthorized disclosure in the media of Ms. Wilson’s employment relationship with the CIA on 14 July 2003, Ms. Wilson was a covert employee for whom the CIA was taking affirmative measures to conceal her intelligence relationship to the United States.
Glenn has an extensive list of prominent conservative voice, all of whom insisted, repeatedly, that Plame really wasn’t covert. Kevin added, “So that settles that. I hope the wingosphere can finally stop bleating about how she wasn’t ‘really’ covert and there was no harm in what Libby et. al. did.”
And yet, they can’t. Here’s a far-right blog that says the media is “covering” for Plame. Another says Plame was only “sort of” covert. Another argues that the CIA wasn’t “working hard at all to keep her connection with the Agency secret at all.”
Some folks just don’t know when to give up.
I guess I can’t blame them. Top officials in the Bush administration outed an undercover CIA agent during a war. They did so intentionally, for political reasons, and then lied about it. In the panoply of crimes an administration can commit, this one’s right up there among the most serious.
If a presidential administration I supported did something like this, I might struggle to believe it, too. But reality is a stubborn thing.
Of course, given that Plame was covert, why no prosecution under IIPA? Kevin explains the competing scenarios and what the latest news tells us.
I figured it was because Plame had been working inside the U.S. for six years at the time of the leak, and one of the technical elements of “covert” under the IIPA Act is that the agent has “within the last five years served outside the United States.”
But obviously she had been working under cover outside the U.S. quite extensively during the previous five years, which means that Plame almost certainly qualified as “covert” under the specific definitions outlined in IIPA. Nonetheless, for some reason Fitzgerald decided not to bring outing charges against anyone. This suggests that Mark Kleiman has been right all along: Fitzgerald’s decision had nothing to do with technical aspects of IIPA, but rather with its scienter requirements. That is, the leakers had to know that leaking Plame’s name could be damaging, and Fitzgerald didn’t think he had the evidence to make that case. That might have been especially true since the leaks seem to have been authorized at very high levels, something the leakers could have used in their defense at trial.
Anyway, it’s still a bit of a mystery. But we’re a tiny step closer to understanding it.
Well, some of us are.