Intelligence Brief, a newsletter published by former CIA officers Vince Cannistraro and Philip Giraldi
Philip Giraldi is a former military intelligence and CIA
counter-terrorism official
Vince Cannistraro, former CIA operations chief, charged yesterday: "She was outed as a vindictive act because the agency was not providing support for policy statements that Saddam Hussein was reviving his nuclear programme."
The leak was a way to "demonstrate an underlying contempt for the intelligence community, the CIA in particular".
In written testimony, he said that Vice-President Dick Cheney and his top aide Lewis Libby went to CIA headquarters to press mid-level analysts to provide support for the claim. Mr Cheney, he said, "insisted that desk analysts were not looking hard enough for the evidence". Mr Cannistraro said his information came from current agency analysts...
Other agency officials, who said they had been colleagues of Ms Plame when she was trained as a CIA agent, said the leak could do severe damage to the morale of the intelligence agencies. "The US government has never before released the name of a clandestine officer," said Jim Marcinkowski, a former CIA case officer. "My classmates and I have been betrayed."
Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst said the White House needed to authorise a more independent investigation. "Unless they come up with a guilty party, it will leave the impression that the administration is playing politics."
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Larry C. Johnson left the CIA in 1989 and, thus, had no "need to know" Plame's status in 2003. Novak's CIA source was a CIA employee in 2003. If Plame were truly undercover in 2003, there's a good chance Novak's source would not even know Plame worked for the CIA. However, Novak's CIA source not only knew Plame worked at the CIA, the source readily confirmed that she worked at the CIA.
Rustmann noted Plame's status during the 1990s. He had since retired and no longer had the "need to know" Plame's status in 2003. Rustmann also noted that Plame's "ability to remain under cover was jeopardized by her marriage in 1998 to the higher-profile American diplomat."
This all suggests that Plame's superiors moved her to a desk job at Langley shortly after her marriage to Wilson. If someone drives to work at Langley day after day for several years, she's not doing a good job of hiding her identity.
Speaking of good jobs, Plame worked in the area of WMD proliferation during the very same years the CIA claimed Iraq had WMD. One has to wonder how much she contributed to getting things wrong.
Did he just out himself?
Joe has told the world he learned of her identity on the third date during a heavy makeout session. Crass alert, but I will restate this in everyday terms.
Joe Wilson is married. Separated, but still a married man. He meets younger, tighter blonde. They go out. On the third date he is getting ready to have sex with her and she tells this married man she has none for such a short time him she is a spy.
I would think that is a no-no in the agency.
Rustmann also noted that Plame's "ability to remain under cover was jeopardized by her marriage in 1998 to the higher-profile American diplomat."
Joe has a big mouth. I am wondering if she was brought back because her higher-profile American diplomat husband could not keep his mouth shut.
Equally suspicious is the Hersch article, where Cannistraro and another unnamed agent state the exact route the documents took and Cannistraro actually admits that he called the CIA about the documents before they were proven to be false. This begs the question...just how did Cannistraro know about the documents before they were vetted? Sounds a whole lot like Wilson's slip-up about seeing the documents.
Relevent excerpt:
Two former C.I.A. officials provided slightly different accounts of what happened next. “The Embassy was alerted that the papers were coming,” the first former official told me, “and it passed them directly to Washington without even vetting them inside the Embassy.” Once the documents were in Washington, they were forwarded by the C.I.A. to the Pentagon, he said. “Everybody knew at every step of the way that they were false—until they got to the Pentagon, where they were believed.”Remember...he is Ex-CIA, how could he be privy to these documents before they were vetted? This would have been classified info, and he no longer had a "need to know". It has also been said that the "stranger" Novak met on the street was Larry Johnson. With paperjam's info backing up my TotalFinaElf connection, it all makes sense.The documents were just what Administration hawks had been waiting for. The second former official, Vincent Cannistraro, who served as chief of counter-terrorism operations and analysis, told me that copies of the Burba documents were given to the American Embassy, which passed them on to the C.I.A.’s chief of station in Rome, who forwarded them to Washington. Months later, he said, he telephoned a contact at C.I.A. headquarters and was told that “the jury was still out on this”—that is, on the authenticity of the documents.