Posted on 10/21/2005 9:44:44 AM PDT by blogblogginaway
The media version of the CIA leak case is that the White House illegally revealed a CIA employee’s identity because her husband, Joseph Wilson, was an administration critic.
But former prosecutor Joseph E. diGenova says the real story is that the CIA “launched a covert operation” against the President when it sent Wilson on the mission to Africa to investigate the Iraq-uranium link. DiGenova, a former Independent Counsel who prosecuted several high-profile cases and has extensive experience on Capitol Hill, including as counsel to several Senate committees, is optimistic that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald will figure it all out.
DiGenova tells this columnist, “It seems to me somewhat strange, in terms of CIA tradecraft, that if you were really attempting to protect the identity of a covert officer, why would you send her husband overseas on a mission, without a confidentiality agreement, and then allow him when he came back to the United States to write an op-ed piece in the New York Times about it.”
That mission, he explained, leads naturally to the questions: Who is this guy? And how did he get this assignment? “That’s not the way you protect the identity of a covert officer,” he said. “If it is, then [CIA director] Porter Goss is doing the right thing in cleaning house” at the agency.
If the CIA is the real villain in the case, then almost everything we have been told about the scandal by the media is wrong. What’s more, it means that the CIA, perhaps the most powerful intelligence agency in the U.S. Government, was deliberately trying to undermine the Bush Administration’s Iraq War policy. The liberals who are anxious for indictments of Bush Administration officials in this case should start paying attention to this aspect of the scandal. They may be opposed to the Iraq War, but since when is the CIA allowed to run covert operations against an elected president of the U.S.?
DiGenova first made his astounding comments about the Wilson affair being a covert operation against the President on the Imus in the Morning Show, carried nationally on radio and MSNBC-TV. I wondered whether these serious charges would be refuted or probed by the media. Imus, a shock jock who has spent several days grieving and joking about the death of his cat, didn’t grasp their significance. But the mainstream press didn’t seem interested, either.
DiGenova told me he believes there has been a “war between the White House and the CIA over intelligence” and that the agency, in the Wilson affair, “was using the sort of tactics it uses in covert actions overseas.” One has to consider the implications of this statement. It means that the CIA was using Wilson for the purpose of undermining the Bush Administration’s Iraq policy.
If this is the case, then one has to conclude that the CIA’s covert operation against the President was successful to a point. It generated an investigation of the White House after officials began trying to set the record straight to the press about the Wilson mission. At this point, it’s still not clear what if anything Fitzgerald has on these officials. If they’re indicted for making inconsistent statements about their discussions with one another or the press, that would seem to be a pathetically weak case. And it would not get to the heart of the issue—the CIA’s war against Bush.
One of those apparently threatened with indictment, as Times reporter Judith Miller’s account of her grand jury testimony revealed, is an agency critic named Lewis Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Miller said that Libby was frustrated and angry about “selective leaking” by the CIA and other agencies to “distance themselves from what he recalled as their unequivocal prewar intelligence assessments.” Miller said Libby believed the “selective leaks” from the CIA were an attempt to “shift blame to the White House” and were part of a “perverted war” over the war in Iraq.
Wilson was clearly part of that war. He came back from Niger in Africa and wrote the New York Times column insisting there was no Iraqi deal to purchase uranium for a nuclear weapons program. In fact, however, Wlson had misrepresented his own findings, and the Senate Intelligence Committee found there was additional evidence of Iraqi attempts to buy uranium.
DiGenova raises serious questions about the CIA role not only in the Wilson mission but in the referral to the Justice Department that culminated in the appointment of a special prosecutor. At this point in the media feeding frenzy over the story, the issue of how the investigation started has almost been completely lost. The answer is that it came from the CIA. Acting independently and with great secrecy, the CIA contacted the Justice Department with “concern” about articles in the press that included the “disclosure” of “the identity of an employee operating under cover.” The CIA informed the Justice Department that the disclosure was “a possible violation of criminal law.” This started the chain of events that is the subject of speculative news articles almost every day.
The CIA’s version of its contacts with the Justice Department was contained in a 4-paragraph letter to Rep. John Conyers, ranking Democratic Member of the House Judiciary Committee. Conyers and other liberal Democrats had been clamoring for the probe.
DiGenova doubts that the CIA had a case to begin with. He says he would like to see what sworn information was provided to the Justice Department about the status of Wilson’s CIA wife, Valerie Plame, and what “active measures” the CIA was taking to protect her identity. The implication is that her status was not classified or protected and that the agency simply used the stories about her identity to create the scandal that seems to occupy so much attention these days.
But if the purpose was not only to undermine the Iraq War policy but to stop the administration from reforming the agency, it hasn’t completely worked. Indeed, the Washington Post ran a long story by Dafna Linzer on October 19 about the “turmoil” in the agency as personnel either quit or are forced out by CIA Director Goss. Like so many stories about the CIA leak case, this story reflected the views of CIA bureaucrats who despise what Goss is doing and resist supervision or reform of their operations.
Members of the press do not want to be seen as too close to the Bush Administration, but acting as scribblers for the CIA bureaucracy, which failed America on 9/11, is perfectly acceptable.
DiGenova’s comments might be dismissed as just the view of an administration defender. But his comments reflect the facts about the case that emerged when the Senate Intelligence Committee conducted an independent investigation. Wilson, who became an adviser to the Kerry for President campaign, had claimed his CIA wife had no role in recommending him for the trip, but the committee determined that was not true. Why would Wilson misrepresent the truth about her if the purpose were not to conceal the curious nature of the CIA role and its hidden agenda in his controversial mission? And who in the CIA besides his wife was behind it?
In this regard, Miller’s account of her testimony to the grand jury disclosed that Fitzgerald had asked whether Libby had complained about nepotism behind the Wilson trip, a reference to the role played by Plame. This is the line of inquiry that could lead, if Fitzgerald pursues it, to unraveling the CIA “covert operation” behind the Wilson affair. There may be rogue elements at the agency who are conducting their own foreign policy, in contravention of the official foreign policy of the U.S. Government elected by the American people. Like it or not, Bush is the President and he is supposed to run the CIA, not the other way around.
Fitzgerald has the opportunity to break this case wide open. Or else he can take the politically correct approach, which is popular with the press, and go after administration officials.
One irony of the case is that Miller is under strong attack by the left as an administration lackey when she didn’t even write an article at the time noting Libby’s criticisms of the CIA and the Wilson trip. Did her “other sources,” perhaps in the CIA, persuade her to drop the story? We may never know because she claims that she got Fitzgerald to agree not to question her about them. But what she did eventually report, after spending 85 days in jail, amounts to an exoneration of the Bush Administration. Libby, Karl Rove and others obviously believed they could not take on the CIA directly but had to get their story out indirectly through the press. They got burned by Miller and other journalists.
Goss’s CIA house-cleaning, of course, has come too late to save the administration from being victimized in the Wilson/Plame affair. Some officials could get indicted because of faulty or inconsistent memories. It is also obvious that liberal journalists are so excited over possible indictments of Bush officials that they are willing to overlook the agency’s manipulation of public policy and the press. But if the CIA has been out-of-control, subverting the democratic process and undermining the president, the American people have a right to know. If Fitzgerald doesn’t blow the whistle on this, the Congress should hold public hearings and do so.
Vincent Cannistraro too...he is a security advisor for the Vatican in Rome where the Niger Embassy is located that was burglarized. The letterhead and seals for the forgery were taken. He has been VERY outspoken about how much "damage" this case has caused Plame and national security.
Wilson ran his company out of the offices of an investment company called Rock Creek Corporation. Rock Creek was controlled by Mohammed Alamoudi, whom Wilson had met in 1997 at a reception organized for the World Bank by Westar Group. Alamoudi was a member of the Saudi-Ethiopian Alamoudi dynasty, which was heavily invested in the segments of the African economy Wilson was seeking to penetrate. The Alamoudi-affiliated company Delta Services--a Swiss subsidiary of the Saudi company Delta Oil--handled Iraqi oil export contracts in 2000 and 2001 and was revealed in 2003 as a recipient of Iraqi Oil-for-Food vouchers channeled through Abu Abbas, a Palestinian terrorist with Iraqi connections. Delta Services also cooperated with Afghanistan’s Taliban regime in a project to build an oil pipeline from Afghanistan to Pakistan, prior to this project’s suspension in 1998. In 1999, Alamoudi was accused by USA Today reporter Jack Kelley of heading a bank which was being investigated for financing Al Qaeda. USA Today printed retractions of several details in Kelley’s article in 2004, after another member of the Alamoudi family--Abdurahman Alamoudi, a prominent American Muslim lobbyist--was indicted on terror-related charges involving a Libyan-backed conspiracy to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Abdullah. Abdurahman was ultimately convicted in October 2004 and sentenced to 23 years in prison.
Holy Moly - this is an angle i've not heard before.
He doesn't list wife #2 in that. Curious.
Pinz
HEY, FITZIE --OVER HERE!!
Wow, good catch!! He omits 2nd wife Jacqueline (whose last name no one can find) entirely from his bio in Who's Who while including his 1st and 3rd wives!! He's treating Jacqueline with a lot more discretion and privacy than he treated 3rd wifey Valerie who is supposedly NOC with the CIA! He was married to Jacqueline for 11-12 years from what we've seen elsewhere and now he's writing her out of his bio, even after discussing her (with too much candor) in the Vanity Fair article??? (he referred to separate bedrooms and playing a lot of golf, and I have to say I don't think anyone with any class discusses their lack of sex with an ex in a national magazine!!).
OK, so maybe this is nothing, or maybe the reason he cannot give Jacqueline's last name is because (as I have suspected) she is not merely a "French diplomat" as former "cultural counselor" etc. but French intel under cover..... think about it, in no other part of his life does Joe Wilson show much judgment or discretion or restraint, yet somehow he has managed to leave his 2nd wife of 12 years out of the recital of 1st and 3rd wives. I think that is FISHY....
Cheney and his chief of staff, Lewis Libby, visited the C.I.A. several times at Langley and told the staff to make more of an effort to find evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and to uncover Iraqi attempts to acquire nuclear capabilities. One of the people who objected most fervently to what he saw as "intimidation," according to one former C.I.A. case officer, was Alan Foley, then the head of the Weapons Intelligence, Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center. He was Valerie Plame's boss. (Foley could not be reached for comment.)
This post reminds me of Kerry's big deal about how so many foreign heads of state supported him during his run against Bush. It seemed like a silly statement at the time, but in retrospect, it's not hard to fathom that he was getting his shadow government up and running early in 2004, so that they could move quickly to get the common policies rolling immediately after the election.
Pinz
It was called "Watergate" and was run by the agency a generation ago. And it worked.
Yes, this could be G. Gordon Liddy's retirement swansong: 'Gemstone II'...or, maybe, 'Demstone'...
However, the Watergate Hotel break-in was foiled only because the Scotch tape failed to hold the escape door latch open long enough, leading to the Presidential (expletive deleted) coverup.
In this postmodern case, if Liddy has devised a plan to break into a Betty Crocker yellow cake factory on President Bush's behalf, the fact that Helen Thomas' Polident may fail & lead to the plot's demise will NOT necessarily cause W to order a burglary of Valerie Plame's psychiatrist's office...
Does Able Danger come to anyone else's mind in this context?
Pinz
I don't think anyone will ever confuse Joe Wilson with someone with any class. lol
I've thought Ms Jacqueline was an agent from the first mention. Too mysterious, yet obvious at the same time. (Could be my liberal use of FR tin foil, too.)
Was their marriage a 'cover?' Is he a French spy? Is Valerie on 'loan' to France for this mission?
Interesting that she mentions, in writing no less, that Joe has French connections when she recommends him for the trip to Niger.
Pinz
Hmmnnnn...
Now this is food for fodder. Very well put. All of these things have been known, but the culture at the CIA, and them being out to get GW is new to me. Do you have any other information? Guess I better get Baer's book.
I believe so- check Eva's notes, and #82:
They are all on the Alamoudi payroll.
And Alamoudi worked for Clinton. Doesn't that make a pretty picutre.
82 posted on 07/15/2005 2:31:35 AM EDT by pbrown
Remember too, Joe is Victoria Toensing's husband,
the woman who WROTE the supposedly broken law.
What we may see come about is the death of the democrat party if the roots of this can be traced back to any of
them.
"...since when is the CIA allowed to run covert operations against an elected president of the U.S.?... "
When he is a Republican.
Yup .. is he still at the CIA? Boy .. Porter Goss has a gargantuan mission .. God bless him with endurance and fortitude.
Alan Foley to head national security programs at Argonne
ARGONNE, Ill. (March 16, 2004) — Alan A. Foley has been named associate laboratory director for national security at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory.
Foley most recently was director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's Center for Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation and Arms Control. He was associated with the CIA for 26 years, and has held positions including serving as chief of the Arms Control Intelligence Staff and as senior member of the U.S.-Soviet Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (SALT) from 1987 to 1990.
snip
In his new role at Argonne, Foley will head the laboratory's $40 million research effort in national security programs. Argonne researchers are providing scientific and technical support to assist the Department of Energy, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defense and other public agencies in accomplishing their mission to reduce threats to national security.
The nation’s first national laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory conducts basic and applied scientific research across a wide spectrum of disciplines, ranging from high-energy physics to climatology and biotechnology. Since 1990, Argonne has worked with more than 600 companies and numerous federal agencies and other organizations to help advance America's scientific leadership and prepare the nation for the future. Argonne is operated by the University of Chicago for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science.
If the CIA was as smart and ingenious as the Left always claims they are, how come they haven't taken out Bin Laden or Castro.
A day or two days before January 28
Robert G. Joseph, director for nonproliferation at the National Security Council (NSC), telephones senior CIA official Alan Foley and argues that the Africa-uranium claim should be included in Bush's upcoming State of the Union address. When Foley warns that the allegation has little evidence to support it, Mr. Joseph instead requests that the speech include a remark saying that the British had learned that Iraq was seeking uranium in Africa, leaving out the bit about Niger and the exact quantity of uranium that was allegedly sought. [The Washington Post, 7/17/03; New York Times, 7/17/03; New York Times, 7/17/03; The Washington Post, 7/27/03; Time Magazine, 7/21/03 Sources: Alan Foley, Two unnamed senior administration officials interviewed by Time] Joseph claims he does not recall the discussion and White House communications director Dan Bartlett calls Foley's version of events a “conspiracy theory.” [The Washington Post, 7/27/03]
October 2, 2003 | Ray McGovern
The consummate diplomat, Ambassador Wilson chooses his words carefully. He was fed up, though, with the specious reasons adduced to justify the unprovoked U.S.-U.K. attack on Iraq — the same reasons that prompted three courageous colleagues to leave their careers in the foreign service in protest.
With the Times article, Wilson threw down the gauntlet. At the same time, he permitted himself the comment to Washington Post reporters that the Iraq-Niger hoax "begs the question as to what else they are lying about."
So far the intimidation has worked. But a test case is waiting in the wings.
Alan Foley, the CIA official in charge of analysis on weapons of mass destruction, has announced his retirement. His name hit the news recently when it was learned that Foley tried, unsuccessfully, to prevent the bogus report on Iraq-Niger from finding its way into the president's state-of-the-union speech. Foley's credibility was immediately attacked by the White House — which may come to regret having done so.
I have worked with Alan Foley. He is cut of the same cloth as Ambassador Wilson. I am betting that the White House's latest preemptive strike will not deter Foley and other intelligence officials able to put conscience and integrity before career from following Wilson's example. Things are likely to get even more interesting.
******
October 20, 2005
Cheney's Chickens Come Home to Roost by Ray McGovern
Indictments are expected to come down shortly as special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald completes the investigation originally precipitated by the outing of a CIA officer under deep cover. In 21-plus months of digging and interviewing, Fitzgerald and his able staff have been able to negotiate the intelligence/policy/politics labyrinth with considerable sophistication. In the process, they seem to have learned considerably more than they had bargained for. The investigation has long since morphed into size extra large, which is the only size commensurate with the wrongdoing uncovered – not least, the fabrication and peddling of intelligence to justify a war of aggression.
The coming months are likely to see senior Bush administration officials frog-marched out of the White House to be booked, unless the president moves swiftly to fire Fitzgerald – a distinct possibility. With so many forces at play, it is easy to lose perspective and context while plowing through the tons of information in this case. What follows is a retrospective and prospective, laced with some new facts and analysis aimed at helping us to focus on the forest once we have given due attention to the trees.
ANY QUESTIONS WHERE ALL THE CRAP IS COMING FROM NOW?!?!!?!?!?!!!
Ray McGovern’s 27-year career as a CIA analyst spanned administrations from John F. Kennedy to George H. W. Bush. Ray is now co-director of the Servant Leadership School, which provides training and other support for those seeking ways to be in relationship with the marginalized poor. The School is one of ten Jubilee Ministries, not-for-profit organizations inspired by the ecumenical Church of the Saviour and established in an inner-city neighborhood in Washington, DC.
The department Ray heads at the School deals with the biblical injunction to “speak truth to power,” and this, together with his experience in intelligence analysis, accounts for his various writings and media appearances over the past year. His focus dovetails nicely with the passage carved into the marble entrance to CIA Headquarters: “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free”—the ethic mandating that CIA analysts were to “tell it like it is” without fear or favor.
In January 2003, when it became clear that that ethic was in serious jeopardy, a handful of intelligence community alumni/ae, including Ray, created Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. VIPS now includes over 35 former professionals from CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Army Intelligence, the FBI, and the National Security Agency. VIPS’ first effort (of ten thus far) was a same-day critique of Secretary of State Colin Powell’s address to the UN on February 5.
In addition to co-authoring some of VIPS’ issuances, Ray has published some 20 op-eds over the past year on intelligence-related issues. These have appeared in newspapers and journals around the country like The Birmingham News, The Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor, The Miami Herald, Die Sueddeutsche Zeitung, The International Herald Tribune, and Der Berliner Tagespiegel, for example.
Over the past several months, he and his VIPS colleagues have made numerous TV, radio and lecture appearances in the US and Europe. They also have appeared in several recent video documentaries—notably, “Uncovered: the Whole Truth About the Iraq War” (Robert Greenwald) and “Break the Silence: Truth and Lies in the War on Terror” (John Pilger).
Ray’s duties at CIA included chairing National Intelligence Estimates and preparing the President’ Daily Brief (PDB). These, the most authoritative genres of intelligence reporting, have been the focus of press reporting on “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq and on what the president was told before 9/11. During the mid-eighties, Ray was one of the senior analysts conducting early morning briefings of the PDB one-on-one with the Vice President, the Secretaries of State and Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs.
Ray received his B.A., summa cum laude, from Fordham College and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Designated a Distinguished Military Graduate, he was commissioned upon graduation and served as an infantry/intelligence officer in the US Army from 1962-64. Ray holds an M.A. in Russian Studies from Fordham University and a certificate in Theological Studies from Georgetown University. He is also a graduate of the Harvard Business School’s Advanced Management Program.
At his retirement ceremony, Ray received the Intelligence Commendation Medal and a letter from then-president George H. W. Bush wishing him well in his transition to non-profit work in inner-city Washington. Ray served on the board of Bread for the City from 1989-94, the latter two years as president, before becoming co-director of the Servant Leadership School.
A native New Yorker, he has been married to Rita Kennedy for 42 years; they have five children and six grandchildren
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