The CIA Disinformation Campaign

American Spectator ^ | 11-08-05 | Jed Babbin - Commentary & Analysis

[smoothsailing]

   

The CIA Disinformation Campaign

By Jed Babbin

Published 11/8/2005 12:09:28 AM

The CIA's disinformation campaign against President Bush -- headlined in the Wilson/Plame affair -- is more jujitsu than karate. Instead of applying your own force to defeat your opponent, you turn his energy and momentum against him and bring him down. The CIA, as much or more than the State Department, didn't support President Bush's decision to invade Iraq. And to discredit that decision, it appears the CIA first chose an unspeakably unqualified political activist for a sham intelligence mission, structured it so that the results would be utterly public, and then -- when the activist resumed his publicity-hound activity -- demanded and achieved a high-profile criminal investigation into White House activities that resulted, so far, in the indictment of the Vice President's chief of staff.

It's time for the Justice Department -- or, better yet, for the Senate Intelligence Committee -- to investigate the Wilson/Plame sham. Not only was the Wilson mission to Niger a sham, but the CIA's demand for an investigation of Robert Novak's outing of Valerie Plame may itself have been a criminal act.

Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely (USA, ret.) is one of Fox's senior military analysts. Gen. Vallely confirmed to me that nearly a year before Robert Novak's July 2003 column revealed Valerie Plame as a CIA employee, former Clinton Ambassador Joe Wilson told Vallely and his wife, Muffin, that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA. This revelation, published last week on John Batchelor's ABC talk show (and repeated Monday night on John's show), blew more holes into Joe Wilson's tattered credibility and raises important questions about the CIA's actions. (Fox's Judge Andrew Napolitano had said on the air that a FNC colleague had told him of Plame's CIA employment; Vallely didn't recall being Napolitano's source.)

Wilson's reactions to Vallely's assertion bespeak panic and meltdown. After Vallely's assertion on the Batchelor show (subsequently republished on World Net Daily), Wilson's lawyer both called and e-mailed Vallely threatening legal action if he didn't withdraw the assertion. The e-mail, which Vallely sent me, included Wilson's e-mail to his lawyer. Wilson, in a message to his lawyer dated November 5 at 5:11 p.m., said, "This is slanderous. I never appeared on tv before at least July 2002 and only saw him maybe twice in the green room at Fox. Vallely is a retired general and this is a bald faced lie. Can we sue? This is not he said/he said, since I never laid eyes on him till several months after he alleges I spoke to him about my wife. Joe." But the threat of legal action against Vallely isn't serious. Neither Wilson nor Plame want to testify in open court under oath.

There are just too many anomalies in the Wilson mission to Niger to believe that anyone who wasn't planning to bash the president could possibly have chosen Wilson for the task. He had no expertise in WMD, hadn't been in Niger since the 1980s, and had no intelligence training. One of the most revealing aspects of Wilson's mission, relevant to showing it was part of a disinformation campaign, was that he wasn't required to sign a CIA secrecy agreement before taking on the mission. In plainest terms, that meant his CIA bosses wanted him to go public on his return. And he did. The other point that proves Wilson's mission was anything but serious is that, in Wilson's own words, he told everyone he met that he was an agent of the U.S. government.

In his July 6, 2003 NYT op-ed, Wilson said, "The mission I undertook was discreet but by no means secret. While the CIA paid my expenses (my time was offered pro bono), I made it abundantly clear to everyone I met that I was acting on behalf of the United States government." You tell everyone you're speaking to that you're in the government's employ so they can feed you whatever line of baloney they want the U.S. government to hear? Wilson's "mission," in short, was a pathetic joke and not an intelligence mission by any definition. The CIA knew this. Who in the CIA authorized, paid for and managed this mission? Why did they do it? There's no plausible explanation other than the intent to embarrass and discredit the Bush administration.

A source who spoke on the condition of anonymity said Valerie Plame -- who suggested her husband for the Niger mission -- was too low on the CIA totem pole to have approved and paid for the mission. The source also told me that Judith ("Jami") Miscik, then the CIA"s deputy director for intelligence, was the person who signed off on the Wilson mission. Plame's WINPAC directorate was under Miscik in the chain of command. Miscik was fired by new CIA director Porter Goss late last year during Goss's housecleaning in which Deputy Director John E. McLauglin resigned and Deputy Director of Operations James Pavitt retired.

The CIA, through one of its spokesmen, declined to comment on whether it was Miscik or someone else because of pending legal proceedings. And, in context with other information, it appears that Miscik would not likely have been the one. Logically the person who approved the Wilson mission would have had to be some senior person in the Operations Directorate, possibly the now-retired Pavitt.

Regardless of who started the mission, the CIA responded to the Novak column by sending a classified criminal referral -- the allegation of criminal conduct requesting a formal investigation -- to the Justice Department. When it did so, it had to have known that Plame's status was not covert (as defined in the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982) and probably knew " it is an intelligence organization, after all " that Wilson had blabbed his wife's identity around town. Why, then, was the criminal referral made? Who approved it? Such actions had to be approved at least by the CIA general counsel and probably by CIA Director Tenet or at least his deputy, McLauglin. Why did they do that knowing what they must have known?

The December 30, 2003 letter from Deputy Attorney General Paul Comey appointing Patrick Fitzgerald special prosecutor, says, in part: "I hereby delegate to you all the authority of the Attorney General with respect to the Department's investigation into the alleged unauthorized disclosure of a CIA employee's identity" What was the allegation? If it were made falsely -- say with the knowledge that Plame's identity wasn't covert or had become public -- the person who made the referral may have committed a serious crime.

The whole Wilson/Plame affair stinks to high heaven. And the smell is coming from Langley. Porter Goss should receive credit for working hard to fix the CIA. The Wilson affair isn't his problem, it's ours. Right now, the CIA's disinformation campaign has cost Scooter Libby his future, threatens other White House staffers and -- most importantly -- burdens the credibility of the president in time of war. It affects our standing in the world, our relationship with our allies, and our strength in the eyes of our enemies. In short, this damned thing needs to be unraveled, publicly, and right bloody now.

The American people need this matter investigated forthwith, and not -- God help us -- by yet another special counsel. The Senate Intelligence Committee should, immediately, investigate and cause the following questions to be answered publicly as soon as possible:

1) What precisely does the CIA criminal referral that started the Fitzgerald investigation say? It should be declassified and published;

2) Who approved the criminal referral and why?

3) Was Pavitt the person who approved the Wilson mission? Who else approved the mission and how it was to be performed?

4) Why did they choose Wilson instead of someone qualified?

5) Why wasn't Wilson required to sign a confidentiality agreement?

6) Were his various op-eds vetted at CIA?

7) Who else, beside Vallely and his wife, knew Plame was a CIA employee, when did they know it and from whom?

8) Who was Bob Novak's source? Was it Wilson? Pavitt? Someone else at CIA?

There are hundreds of other questions that should be answered publicly. Let's get ol' Joe in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee, under oath and with the television cameras on. Let's see if he does as well as George Galloway did in front of Norm Coleman's Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. I have no doubt he'll fail to rise to even that standard.

TAS contributing editor Jed Babbin is the author of Inside the Asylum: Why the UN and Old Europe Are Worse Than You Think (Regnery, 2004).  

[smoothsailing]

Please sign my copy of your future bestseller:

To Freeper Smoothsailing

We Got The Bums!

.....Zon

;)

[smoothsailing]

I agree completely. This grows every day, there's no putting this toothpaste back in the tube!

[Richard Axtell]

We need to put together a petition to have this investigated. Disinformation is a common comodity these days it seems. Connect the dots, from the Sandy Berger document theft, the suppression of Able Danger intelligence, State Dept. suppression of info about Saddam's WMD caravan to Syria, and via Wilson's French connections, the Oil-for-Food Scandal also. Throw in the Rockefeller memo, and we have one hell of a lot more evidence of criminal wrong doing and comspiracy to commit treason than the phony CIA referral, and that spawned the two year Fitzgerald investigation. Time for a major housecleaning, and the Democrats will not like it one bit. Tough.

[Manic_Episode]

Bookmark

[driftless]

Liberals keep hitching their stars to losers, scoundrels, and easily proven liars like Wilson. Bill Burkitt and Cindy Sheehan are fading and so will Wilson. But he just may be the biggest lying scoundrel of them all. His lies are so outrageous I can't believe even the libs peddling them can keep from laughing every time he appears on one of their programs...which is frequently.

I guess liberals believe that if they throw enough mud, some of it will stick. They are probably right, because they can always count on the collusion of Big Media to keep the lies and the scams going before they are demolished by the light of truth. But they never give up. After the thoroughly discredited Wilson is gone, there will be another. The supply of liberal scoundrels is endless.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

While the CIA paid [Wilson's] expenses ([Wilson's] time was offered pro bono),...

In clear violation of the Posse Comitas Act.

[ovrtaxt]

I've been ignoring this whole Plame/Wilson thing up to now, simply because it's so silly and unbelievable. Now I think I'm up to speed after reading this. Good article here.

[astounded]

Purge the CIA...with extreme prejudice.

[Lexington Green]

November 22, 1963

[Bob from De]

I keep wondering what Fitzgerald meant when he said that he had recently learned something that gave him "pause".
He made this statement during his press conference, and shortly after meeting with Rove's attorney.
Perhaps Porter Goss and the Justice Dept. are on the job!
One can only HOPE.....

[Steve_Seattle]

Apart from the minor error that Wilson hadn't been in Niger since the 1980s (he apparently made a brief visit in 1999 - also at the CIA's behest), the article points out something I've been saying for weeks, i.e., Wilson's so-called investigation was a sham, a half-assed effort by an amateur who never should have been selected for such a politically sensitive mission. Now, Wilson's trip could have been a set-up to embarrass Bush from the outset - as the article implies - or it could have started out simply as an effort to respond to Cheney's request "on the cheap," and morphed into an anti-Bush plot as the failure to find WMDs in Iraq became a hot political issue. Either way, the CIA was playing politics with national security, and was working at cross-purposes with our elected officials. In that sense, it could be another Iran-Contra affair.

[ravingnutter]

Jami Miscik is Deputy Director for Intelligence at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Not anymore...from a previous post of mine...

Here's some more info for you to ponder...how many top CIA employees resigned suddenly for "personal reasons"?

1) George Tenet for "Personal Reasons"

2) James Pavitt (Plame's boss)within 4 days of Tenet for "Personal Reasons"

3) John McLaughlin, who served as acting director following the resignation of George Tenet also for "Personal Reasons"

4) Jami Miscik,CIA Deputy Diretor for Intelligence for what she called a "natural evolution", although rumor has it that she was asked to leave.

There are many others who resigned as a result of confrontations with Goss and his aide, Patrick Murray who were "cleaning out" the CIA of Dem political operatives and they quit supposedly due to those conflicts, specifically citing Murray as the reason. Now here is where it gets interesting:

...on Nov. 5, Murray raised the issue of leaks with the associate deputy director of counterintelligence. Referring to previous media leaks regarding personnel, he said that if anything in the newly appointed executive director’s personnel file made it into the media, the counterintelligence official “would be held responsible,” according to one agency official and two former colleagues with knowledge of the conversation.

Source

Also according to that article, it must be noted that the associate deputy director of counterintelligence's name was being withheld because she is undercover.

An article I found while doing research on the multitude of CIA resignations a few days ago, which at the time I dismissed as moonbat rantings...BUT:

Why did DCI George Tenet suddenly resign on June 3rd, only to be followed a day later by James Pavitt, the CIA's Deputy Director of Operations (DDO)?

The real reasons, contrary to the saturation spin being put out by major news outlets, have nothing to do with Tenet's role as taking the fall for alleged 9/11 and Iraqi intelligence “failures” before the upcoming presidential election.

Both resignations, perhaps soon to be followed by resignations from Colin Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage, are about the imminent and extremely messy demise of George W. Bush and his Neocon administration in a coup d'etat being executed by the Central Intelligence Agency. The coup, in the planning for at least two years, has apparently become an urgent priority as a number of deepening crises threaten a global meltdown. Shortly after the “surprise” Tenet-Pavitt resignations, current and former senior members of the U.S. intelligence community and the Justice Department told journalist Wayne Madsen, a former Naval intelligence officer, that they were directly connected to the criminal investigation of a 2003 White House leak that openly exposed Valerie Plame as an undercover CIA officer.

Seymour Hersh dropped a major bombshell that went virtually unnoticed, 54 paragraphs deep into an October 27, 2003 story for the New Yorker titled “The Stovepipe.”

“Who produced the fake Niger papers? There is nothing approaching a consensus on this question within the intelligence community. There has been published speculation about the intelligence services of several different countries. One theory, favored by some journalists in Rome, is that [the Italian intelligence service] Sismi produced the false documents and passed them to Panorama for publication.

“Another explanation was provided by a former senior C.I.A. officer. He had begun talking to me about the Niger papers in March, when I first wrote about the forgery, and said, 'Somebody deliberately let something false get in there.'

He became more forthcoming in subsequent months, eventually saying that a small group of disgruntled retired C.I.A. clandestine operators had banded together in the late summer of last year and drafted the fraudulent documents themselves.”

Source

[ravingnutter]

I keep wondering what Fitzgerald meant when he said that he had recently learned something that gave him "pause".

Let's hope it was something he learned when he went to Italy...about the Niger Embassy break in where the letterhead and seals were stolen for the forgeries.

[Steve_Seattle]

"I've been ignoring this whole Plame/Wilson thing up to now, simply because it's so silly and unbelievable."

"Silly and unbelievable" are precisely the reasons this has intrigued (and enraged) me from the outset. I'm finally beginning to understand why the Clinton's were so outraged by the Lewinsky affair. In both cases, something that was really very small potatoes to begin with was fueled by political passions until it morphed into something that threatened a presidency. But in the Lewinsky case, Clinton was personally responsible for dragging out the whole thing, and Starr got trapped by Clinton's tar baby. Every little trick that Clinton pulled, every little game he played, only made Starr look bad because he had to respond in kind, and as it dragged on for months, Starr was cast in the public eye as obsessive. But if Clinton had simply fessed up at the beginning and said, "Yeah, we had an affair, I'm very sorry," it would have soon blown over.

[dirtboy]

Why isn't someone investigating all this

Because the CIA has been playing politics for years, and Washington doesn't want that coming out.

[dirtboy]

I'm finally beginning to understand why the Clinton's were so outraged by the Lewinsky affair. In both cases, something that was really very small potatoes to begin with was fueled by political passions until it morphed into something that threatened a presidency.

Monicagate was a proxy for all of Clinton's other, far more serious wrongdoing. But the reason Clinton wasn't attacked for such is that other players in Washington were doing much of the same. Take Chinagate. Dems and Pubbies alike sold out to foreign interests, such as Bob Dole and the Albanian lobby. To go after Clinton for his blatant sell-out to Chicom interests might draw attention to others. But viola, a sex scandal with false statements comes along, and that scandal only implicats Slick! And Slick couldn't unleash his scorched-earth approach for this one, because no other major players were implicated.

[Protect the Bill of Rights]

Off topic, but since we are talking CIA.....

I recently came across several references to The Crowley Files. Before I spend alot of time googling, I wonder if anyone who is aware of these files can say if they have been proven/disproven/jury still out as far as authenticity.

Here is a general background from :
http://cryptome.org/cia-2619.htm

"....Robert Trumbull Crowley died in a Washington DC hospital on October 8, 2000.

He was a senior Central Intelligence Agency officer from 1948 until the mid-1980s.

During his tenure with the CIA, Crowley became Assistant Deputy Director for Operations and the second-in-command of the clandestine Directorate of Operations.

He wrote a book entitled The New KGB: Engine of Soviet Power that was published in 1985 by William Morrow.

In 1996, prior to what Crowley felt might be a fatal major surgery for suspected lung cancer, he gave a number of historical documents from his extensive personal files to an American journalist with whom he had been working.

One of the caveats of this gift was that none of the material could be used or published until after his death.

Among the treasure trove of historical material on the genesis and operations of the influential CIA was an alphabetical listing of CIA sources throughout the world, provided below.

A source is not a paid agent but an individual who can occupy a position of influence, such as an international banker, a member of the print or television media, or a scholar or academic, who might be in a position to influence official decisions or supply necessary support for an official CIA position.

Other material covered a number of clandestine operations of the agency, both national and international, from 1948 through 1978.

For instance, among papers in the Crowley archives there is an explosive signed report concerning the underlying facts of the assassination of President John Kennedy and other material on such controversial issues as Operation Phoenix, the MK-ULTRA program, Operations Condor and Applepie, and even an in-house budget for the 1996-97 fiscal years.

In his final years, a reflective Crowley often expressed his desire to help others understand the many historical events that he was party to, and his many friends and admirers are pleased that his wishes are now being fulfilled....."

[antisocial]

BUMP

[p23185]

They practically answer to nobody as it is. Not like they're running for re-election - their jobs are guarenteed.

And a lot of their work is so black that it is not even known to exist. I heard on the 9:30 news in Phoenix that the CIA and/or intelligence budget has now been leaked and is $44B annually. This has always been a classified fact - but no longer now the WP/NYT/MSM has gotten a hold of it. We are in for some very dangerous times ahead, thanks to the MSM and Rats. I see the Military tribunals are being challenged at the Supreme level - any bets on how that will turn out after Roberts recuses himself!!