The CIA has been playing `CYA' for three years, since one of its employees (we'll call her `99') sent her 'free-agent' husband (read: an unemployed Maxwell Smart) on an intelligence gathering mission to Niger, without having him sign a confidentiality agreement.
Customarily when something like this happened--before a 'loose cannon' started shooting off his mouth--the director, here, Tenet, would call the journalist (Novak) and ask that he not report an employee's identity, but that was not done here. And Novak probably assumed everyone knew who she was anyway . . . at the time the `scoop' was probably that the CIA had devolved into a `Mom & Pop' operation.
Further the CIA has been MIA since Stansfield Turner effectively `cut its nuts', stopping real `human intelligence' efforts, beginning with Jimmah, and this debacle is just a result. (9-11 was another)
Some in the Agency now are hoping to `pin' on the executive branch their own inability/failure to follow their own policies & procedures (they have been hostile to this administration for 5 years) but they filed the request for investigation, and this is due to their failure to get smart until it was too late. The genie's out of the bottle now. Our illustrious intelligence community.
All President Bush and his people did was say to other insiders, "Hey, wait a second--this "expert" is the hubby of the spook that sent him on this `fishing expedition' and they're both Democrat partisans!"
Before this is concluded I can see a few CIA employees taking early retirement.
"Before this is concluded I can see a few CIA employees taking early retirement."
So what's the punishment for lying about something that's integral to American foreign policy? Wilson's doing his speaking tour, Kerry's in the Senate, and some CIA people are going to take early retirement? And Libby's life and career have been ruined.