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Mattdono,

Pretend you're the CIA. Suddenly, out of the blue, a newspaper columnist announces that the wife of a former US Ambassador is in fact a CIA operative.

There are two basic reactions that you, as the CIA, can have to this 'revelation'.

The first possible reaction is that you don't particularly care, because you know that this woman has nothing at all to do with the CIA. She doesn't work for you, and never has. Which means that no field agents can possibly be blown by the columnist's allegations, since by definition, no field agents can be traced back to the ambassador's wife.

You can even announce publically that she is not a CIA operative, and not care if no one believes you, simply because you know you're telling the truth.

So realistically, your decision is to do absolutely nothing. You don't call for an investigation of the 'leak', because you know there hasn't been a leak. Which means that asking the Department of Justice to investigate is not only a waste of time, but has the potential of making your agency look stupid, since the first question any competent investigator is going to ask will: was she or was she not a CIA operative?

When you respond "No", the second question is going to be "Then what exactly are we investigating? A reporting screw up?". The third will be "And why the hell are you wasting our time?"

Now, the second possible reaction is one of pure fury, since the ambassador's wife is indeed a CIA operative whose cover has been blown for no real reason. Under those circumstances, your own agents would be calling for your head on a platter if there *wasn't* an investigation into who exactly within the government leaked top secret, confidential information.

WOOLSEY: No. I think that's normally what they'd do in an investigation. CIA refers crimes report over about once a week to the Department of Justice whenever there's a leak or any other potential violation of law that they come across.

If Valerie Plame isn't a CIA operative, then there's no potential crime here at all . None. If the leak isn't true to begin with, it's not really much of a leak, is it?

In this case, there simply isn't any room for any potential violations of the law, from the CIA's point of view. Valerie Plame was either an agent, or she wasn't. If she wasn't, then there's no crime. And if she was, then an investigation needed to be called.

First of all, go read Bob Novak's column here. He provides a detailed account of exactly how this came up, the context of the conversations (including contact with the CIA prior to the release of his column that has caused this whole fuss), and his reasons for reporting the name.

Second, I think that I have covered this issue with you already, but I will do so one more time. If you want to keeping believe what you believe, then that is your issue. You are focused, solely, on the referral of the investigation, which actually means little, and you are missing the bigger picture.

Mrs. Wilson (Plame) does work for the CIA.
Mr. Novak's column in July was about why Mr. Wilson was sent to Niger.
Mrs. Wilson was involved in the process that sent Mr. Wilson to Niger to investigate the Uranium claims.
Her involvement is the reason why she was mentioned in the story at all. In fact, her involvement was the only reason that sending Mr. Wilson to Niger made any sense, because he was anti-war and anti-Bush.

Interestingly, perhaps ironically, point #3 also shows that no one in the White House could have been involved in the decision to send Mr. Wilson to Niger, because he was and is, indeed, devotely anti-Bush. If the White House was in control of the original decision to send anyone, it wouldn't have been him. This points to an interesting thought that I will get to in a minute.
During Mr. Novak's fact gathering phase, prior to the release of his column, the CIA did not make it clear that Mrs. Wilson was a covert operative/agent/spy/whatever.

Novak states, "He [his CIA contact] never suggested to me that Wilson's wife or anybody else would be endangered. If he had, I would not have used her name" (Source)

The CIA could have, without revealing any specific details, nipped this in the bud by explaining to Mr. Novak that her position at the agency is a sensitive and/or a covert position. Period. He would have still ran his column, but would have excluded her name.

Of course, anyone could have deduced who Mr. Wilson's wife was by looking on his own web site biography (Middle East Institute) or, as Novak points out, in Mr. Wilson's "Who's Who in America" biography. As has been recounted here on FR (I don't know, about 1,000 times now?), written by both Mr. May and Mr. Novak, and is starting to make its way into the mainstream media, he name was plainly published.

The fact is, this women's identity was going to be known at some point.

Actually, one could (rightly) argue that Mr. Wilson's op-ed in the NY Times was the first domino in the revelation to her identity. His very public claims were going to warrant a reaction from someone.

The demoCREEPs would have you believe that the publication of the name came directly from the very tip-top of Bush White House, specifically Karl Rove. This is, simply, not the case.

The fact is, a reporter (Mr. Novak) dug into the story about why in the hell this guy was sent to begin with (Novak: "I was curious why a high-ranking official in President Bill Clinton's National Security Council (NSC) was given this assignment"). He found out why.

He talked to the administration. "He [the administration official] said Wilson had been sent by the CIA's counterproliferation section at the suggestion of one of its employees, his wife." It wasn't anyone at the tip-top of the White House; rather, "It was an offhand revelation from this official, who is no partisan gunslinger."

He talked to CIA. The CIA official said that would prefer the name not be used, but didn't request that it not be published. Mr. Novak, again, would have withheld the name if asked. By Mr. Wilson's own choice, his wife's name was already public. So, whether Mr. Novak was told Mrs. Wilson's name by an administration official, the CIA official, or a research assistant the Chicago Sun-Times, it is besides the point.

So what's really going on here?

It's simple. Politics. Pure and unadulterated politics.

The people at the CIA who decided to send Mr. Wilson have an agenda. Whatever their agenda is, it isn't to help the Bush administration. They sent Mr. Wilson to Niger knowing that he wouldn't be the most motivated guy to find Iraqi connections to uranium, because he --publicly-- didn't support the war in Iraq. Before he was sent, this was a known fact. When he got there, he sat on his butt for 8 days, drinking mint tea, and dismissing a potential claim that Iraq had contact with someone in Niger about uranium only because it wasn't "significant quantities". (So there was evidence, just not enough of it in Mr. Wilson's mind. Yeah, ok. )

His involvement with EPIC, "a far-Left group that opposed not only the U.S. military intervention in Iraq but also the sanctions and the no-fly zones that protected Iraqi Kurds and Shias from being slaughtered by Saddam" (Source), was well-known. His involvement with the far-left moveon.org is more evidence of his opposition to President Bush and his policies.

The bottom line is this: this is about the referral, it is about making the Bush administration weaker and getting themselves back in power. Unfortunately, the demoCREEPs actions, as usual, is making our country weaker too, which they don't seem to have a problem with.

Do you?