Follow-up at http://corner.nationalreview.com/05_07_10_corner-archive.asp#069692 :
BURIED LEDE [Cliff May]
Rather deep in the Washington Times story today by Stephen Dinan and Joseph Curl is this revelation:
A former CIA covert agent who supervised Mrs. Plame early in her career yesterday took issue with her identification as an "undercover agent," saying that she worked for more than five years at the agency's headquarters in Langley and that most of her neighbors and friends knew that she was a CIA employee.
"She made no bones about the fact that she was an agency employee and her husband was a diplomat," Fred Rustmann, a covert agent from 1966 to 1990, told The Washington Times.
"Her neighbors knew this, her friends knew this, his friends knew this.”
If her neighbors knew she worked for the CIA, if her friends new she worked for the CIA, no crime was committed by anyone passing such information along to a reporter--as long as they didn’t know and tell that she had once been undercover, and as long as the source of their knowledge was not classified documents.
It bears repetition: Knowing Plame worked at the CIA does not mean knowing she had ever been a covert agent.
Bob Novak did not know she had been undercover--until The Nation’s David Corn suggested that, based on information that clearly came from Joe Wilson himself. And Corn was the first to raise the suggestion that Plame was a secret agent--one who had been exposed by the Bush administration to punish Wilson. (My piece on this is elsewhere on NRO today.)
Also, while I hate say I told you so, I did write on NRO back on Sept. 29, 2003:
It’s the top story in the Washington Post this morning as well as in many other media outlets. Who leaked the fact that the wife of Joseph C. Wilson IV worked for the CIA?
What also might be worth asking: "Who didn't know?"
Now, is this a question or a telling statement?
Another follow-up by Cliff May: http://corner.nationalreview.com/05_07_10_corner-archive.asp#069737
RE DAVID CORN
My friend David Corn is hopping mad and he’s calling me names and questioning my motives. I understand that. I feel his anger.
But he hasn’t actually challenged any of the facts or analysis in my piece.
Except one: He is arguing that providing the name of a CIA employee – or operative -- is the same as exposing the identity of a CIA covert agent.
Now that may play out in the boondocks among people who have never known anyone who worked at the CIA and who assume that everyone at CIA has a secret identity and works for a CIA front.
But anyone with any knowledge or experience knows that is it doesn’t work like that.
The facts are these: (1) Bob Novak did not say that Valerie Plame was a secret agent; (2) David Corn did; (3) we don’t know who Bob’s sources were; (4) we know David’s source was Joe Wilson.
The rest is commentary.
later read
It may not be obvious outside the Beltway (and the DC columnists are certainly not helping in this regard) but if you live in the DC suburbs of Northern Virginia or Maryland, it's very common knowledge who in the neighborhood works for DoD, the Secret Service, DEA, foreign consulates, the FBI, NSA.... and the CIA.
You may not know exactly what they do - and they are extremely unlikely to tell you - but the fact of employment by this or that agency is generally not a big deal.
A showboating blowhard like Joe Wilson is exactly the sort of egocentric nitwit who'd tout his wife's employment to everyone he ever met, including cabbies, waiters, doormen, trash collectors, and of course reporters.
It's predictable that the DUmmies and their reporter/columnist allies would use this general naivete about "DC as a company town" as a propaganda lever. Wilson and his fans are counting on the naivete of the American public.