Senior CIA Officers: Outing of Valerie Plame by Bush White House ‘Unconscionable,’ ‘Shameful Event’

Yesterday’s New York Times ran a story by Douglas Jehl, Ex-C.I.A. Aides Ask for Leak Inquiry by Congress, about the Justice Department investigation of the White House leak of the identity of undercover CIA operative, Valerie Plame.

Karl Rove–portrait of a leaker

A group of well-respected retired CIA operatives (who no longer have to worry about damaging their careers by butting heads with the President) called on Congress to ensure that the White House staffer (who almost everyone but John Ashcroft knows was Karl Rove or one of his minions) who revealed Plame’s identity will pay a price for his actions. Jehl describes the signers of the letter to House Speaker Hastert:

The 10 former intelligence officers who signed the letter include respected intelligence analysts and retired case officers, including at least two, John McCavitt and William Wagner, who were C.I.A. station chiefs overseas. The former analysts include Larry C. Johnson, a former analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department’s intelligence branch, and Ray Close and Ray McGovern, former C.I.A. analysts in the agency’s Near East division.

“The disclosure of Ms. Plame’s name was an unprecedented and shameful event in American history and, in our professional judgment, has damaged U.S. national security, specifically the effectiveness of U.S. intelligence-gathering using human sources,” the group wrote in the two-page letter.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Johnson, who described himself as a registered Republican who voted for President Bush, said he and other former intelligence officers had been discussing the idea of a letter for months and decided to go forward with it because of a lack of evidence of progress in the Justice Department investigation.

“For this administration to run on a security platform and allow people in the administration to compromise the security of intelligence assets, I think is unconscionable,” Mr. Johnson said.

The former officers called on Congress to act “for the good of the country” and said it was time to “send an unambiguous message that the intelligence officers tasked with collecting or analyzing intelligence must never be turned into political punching bags.”

The call for action from the CIA officers comes as Democratic House members of the Intelligence Committee, worried that the Justice Department investigation will fail to hold anyone to account, introduced a resolution calling for an independent inquiry.

A group of former intelligence officers is pressing Congressional leaders to open an immediate inquiry into the disclosure last summer of the name of an undercover C.I.A. officer, Valerie Plame.

Their request, outlined in a letter on Tuesday to Speaker J. Dennis Hastert and others, reflects discontent and unrest within the intelligence services about the affair, along with concern that a four-month-old Justice Department investigation into the matter may never identify who was behind the disclosure.

What is really “news” about this extraordinary event is that CIA operatives, normally loyal to the core to their Commander in Chief, are willing to take George Bush to task and to tell him they expect the guilty party to be held accountable:

It is unusual for former intelligence officers to petition Congress on a matter like this. The unmasking of Ms. Plame is viewed within spy circles as an unforgivable breach of secrecy that must be exhaustively investigated and prosecuted, current and former intelligence officials say. Anger over the matter is especially acute because of the suspicion, under investigation by the Justice Department, that the disclosure may have been made by someone in the White House to punish Ms. Plames’s husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, for opposing administration policy on Iraq.

Tonight, CNN’s Paula Zahn interviewed Viveca Novak (no relation I presume to Robert Novak, the infamous pundit who outed Valerie Plame) announced that Patrick Fitzgerald, John Ashcroft’s designee to run the leak investigation is ready to convene a grand jury to consider indictments.

Patrick Fitzgerald, Justice Department lawyer
heading Valerie Plame leak investigation

Novak is Time Magazine ‘s Washington correspondent and co-writer of Grand Jury Hears Plame Case:

Novak: Well, we learned this week that a grand jury in Washington, D.C., has begun hearing witnesses, begun subpoenaing and hearing witnesses in the case.

They appear to be starting with people who weren’t directly, allegedly, on one end or the other of the phone calls in which Valerie Plame’s identity was revealed. But they will sooner or later be hearing from people who were more directly involved and will soon decide whether to call journalists.

The prosecutors have a pretty good idea of this case and what they do and don’t have, and that they probably think that they know who the perpetrators are. The big question is, do they have enough to make a criminal case out of it?

ZAHN: And what is your sense from the amount of investigation you’ve done?

NOVAK: Well, it’s awfully hard to tell, because, under the statute, they have to — the person who leaked the information has to have known that Valerie Plame was undercover at the CIA.

And, you know, it’s not clear from what we know whether that’s the case or not. There’s also a possibility they could make a false statements case. If you lie to the FBI, if you lie to the federal agent, you can be criminally prosecuted. So there might be something there. On the other hand, it may come down to, you know, they know who did it, but there was no criminality there.

I’m gratified to hear that Fitzgerald is pursuing the investigation seriously. I think many of us doubted (and still doubt) that the truth would ever be known in this case because the highest levels of power do not want it known.

My wife practiced law towards the beginning of her professional career with Patrick Fitzgerald and she told me when he was appointed that if people think he was going to be a pushover for the White House they would be sorely mistaken. She thinks Fitzgerald is a tough, unrelenting and courageous man who will follow the evidence wherever it leads him and not shrink from taking on the highest levels of official power if that’s what he feels is called for by the evidence.

Let us hope she is right.