Pile-on
by Michael Burns
[ politics | opinion - april 04 ]
Casualties from the 2003 Iraq war have come in all varieties, some tragically strange: accidental electrocution and drowning, as well as grenade attacks and suicide bombers. Last summer showed that strange bureaucratic casualties also occur. For the first time in American history, a covert CIA agent's identity was disclosed not by an axe-grinding former operative, but by her employer, the US government. But the case of Valerie Plame is more than a historical footnote or an instance of extraordinary vindictiveness; it is a microcosm of the battle between the White House and the CIA for control of intelligence which was an open secret in the run-up to the war. Though legal consequences may emerge, the consequences for a Washington/Langley relationship may be deeper, with both parties now all too aware of the price of unenthusiastic co-operation.
The drive to war
The building of the case for war in Iraq was multi-layered, diverse and aggressive. If there is a political equivalent of a schoolyard pile-on, this was it. In the President's January 2003 State of the Union address, the litany of possibly weaponised agents (including thousands of litres or hundreds of tons of anthrax, botulinum toxin, sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent) was only part of what an Iraq free of inspectors might try to produce. At the United Nations, Colin Powell traced the footsteps of al Qa'ida liaisons and the possible alliances implied by contact between them and Iraqis. Buttressing these and countless other public appearances in which Administration officials repeated their case for war were the think tanks, journals and magazines which spared no detail of Saddam Hussein's crimes and evil intentions. The list of dozens of allegations from the Douglas Feith memo used in the Weekly Standard "exposé" (still, apparently, in the Vice President's magazine rack even though the allegations have been debunked) was an apt illustration of the lengths they went to in order to argue that possibilities and proximity were actually imminent dangers and alliance.
But not everyone was joining the pile-on. CIA National Security Estimates indicated that while Iraq might have had ambitions to be aggressive, in reality it was weak and had a crumbling infrastructure. As a result (as ably reported by Jason Vest, Robert Dreyfuss and Seymour Hersh), the Pentagon set up an intelligence office, the Office of Special Plans, to produce alternative intelligence summaries, briefings and talking points derived from raw sources, unvetted by the CIA and "stovepiped" to the President, the Vice President and their advisors. That OSP information came from dubious or simply unbelievable sources such as the Iraqi National Congress, which was drooling over the possibility of regime change, was not particularly relevant. You don't need to ask someone why they're piling on to appreciate their participation.
The CIA did not welcome the establishment of a parallel structure more suited to the Executive's needs, but it could not ignore it, nor the White House staff's unorthodox trips to the CIA. Former CIA officer Vice Cannistraro said: "[I]n my twenty-seven years in intelligence [this is] the first time I have ever heard of a Vice President of the United States going out to the CIA and [..] sitting down and debating with junior level analysts... And they're not going to say, 'Well, Mr Vice President, you're full of it.' They say, 'Well, we haven't found anything.' [With the Vice President replying,] 'Well, you're not looking hard enough.'" When you combine the OSP with such personal visits to Langley, something had to give. What gave was the ability of the CIA to stand by its initial assessments of the threat posed by Hussein. It moved to worst-case scenarios, and conspicuously removed the previously included qualifiers and caveats in intelligence estimates. The OSP search for an answer they already had forced the hand of a CIA searching for an answer yet to be discovered. In this battle for intelligence, the CIA attempted to carve out a space of credibility under the onslaught of White House-directed information, reports and allegations which favoured quantity over quality, and doomsday visions over evidentiary facts.
From Niger to Plame
A seemingly settled inquiry into a possible Iraq/Niger uranium purchase was resuscitated. The claim was that in the 90s, Iraq had tried to obtain a highly enriched nuclear component nicknamed "yellowcake" from Niger. Previous reports by Ambassador Owens-Kirkpatrick and others had concluded that it would have been impossible to empty, even partially, the country's mines (which were being watched by the IAEA and were almost impenetrable) without being noticed. However, in February 2002, the CIA decided to have the claim re-investigated. There is still a question mark over who initiated the request. Joseph Wilson, the francophone former ambassador to Gabon and the last American diplomat to have contact with Saddam Hussein before Gulf War I, was asked to be the Agency's special envoy.
Ten days of interviews, paperwork reviews and reassessment of the international community's safeguards of the country's mineral deposits proved, according to Wilson's account, that the previous conclusions remained valid: there was no attempted purchase.
But despite Wilson's four-pronged oral and written reports, the claim was not dead: it resurfaced prominently four times.
On 24 September, 2002, "the United Kingdom issue[d] a report on Iraq's WMD program, stating that 'there is intelligence that Iraq has sought the supply of significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Iraq has no active civil nuclear power programme or nuclear power plants, and therefore has no legitimate reason to acquire uranium.' [In] early October 2002, a classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), a portion of which was later made public July 18, 2003, state[d], 'A foreign government service reported that as of early 2001, Niger planned to send several tons of uranium to Iraq, adding that 'Niger and Iraq reportedly were still working out arrangements for this deal, which could be for up to 500 tons of yellowcake.' [On] December 19, 2002, a State Department fact sheet charge[d] Iraq with omitting its 'efforts to procure uranium from Niger' from its December 7 declaration to UN weapons inspectors. UN Security Council Resolution 1441, adopted November 8, 2002, required Iraq to submit a declaration 'of all aspects of its [weapons of mass destruction] programmes.'" Finally, on January 29, 2003, a version of the claim, in its now infamous 16-word form, found its way into the President Bush's State of Union address.
Only after documents ostensibly authorising the sale of yellowcake to Iraq were made public and immediately identified as second-rate forgeries did the story begin to focus on the context of the claim, its validity and how it could have got into a president's crucial plea to convince the world a war was necessary.
Then Wilson broke his silence in a New York Times editorial. He stated that he was the envoy who had been sent to Niger in early 2002 and that misrepresentation of what he and others had found amounted to a "twisting" of evidence designed to "exaggerate the Iraqi threat." Eight days later conservative columnist Robert Novak fired back, questioning whether Wilson as a proper choice for the mission in the first place and adding, "Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction."
Consequences run deep
The immediate consequence was that a deep-cover agent specialising in WMD intelligence in the Middle East had her career ended. The deeper consequences stem from the Newsday and Washington Post follow-up that Plame's name was leaked by someone in the White House. The leak was a microcosm of the battle for control of US intelligence, and revealed tensions too severe to be concealed any longer.
The 1982 law that was broken was specifically designed to stop ex-CIA agents like Phillip Agee from disclosing agent's names. It appears that the law's strict conditions may be satisfied, paving the way for prosecution: the disclosure of the agent's identity must be intentional; the accused person must know that the person being identified is a covert agent; and the accused must know that "the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such covert agent's intelligence relationship to the United States." So specific are these conditions that no successful prosecution has been mounted in the 22 years of the law's existence. Yet a grand jury convened in late 2003 concluded that there was enough evidence for a criminal investigation. The latest news on it is that Karl Rove and other high-level White House staffers have been questioned under oath about the leak, its source, what they knew and when they knew it. Additionally, Justice has subpoenaed the phone records for the days in July before the Novak column ran of both Air Force One and the White House Iraq Group, an internal task force created to strengthen the case for war.
Few of the near-weekly formally filed leaks the Justice Department has been pursuing, especially those involving journalistic confidentiality, have yielded a semblance of prosecution; but the questions of national security that arise and the lack of legal precedent are potentially significant. We don't yet know enough about the direction of Justice's work to predict the likely outcome in court.
But beyond the legal consequences which have attracted so much attention is the impact on the Agency's ability to do its job. Three ex-CIA officers (who started their testimony on the Plame case in front of the Democratic Senate Committee in October 2003 by declaring their GOP membership and 2000 election Bush votes) summarised some of those broader consequences for intelligence gathering which trump partisan allegiance to whomever happens to be sitting in the Oval Office. On the leak, Jim Marcinkowski noted, "there is a host of incalculable damage that flows from the exposure itself: damage to our ability to assuage the security concerns and personal safety of our current and potential agents overseas, damage to our reputation to maintain confidentiality with foreign friendly governments who share intelligence with the United States, damage to our image and attracting our own talented people to come work for the CIA, damage to the credibility of this country's efforts to safeguard the well-being of its own citizens."
But the consequences don't end there. The leak signified that when necessary, Executive sabotage and manipulation of the agency is not out of the question. The leak was a statement that the battle between the White House and the CIA over Iraqi intelligence is not benign. Team B was the group of "outside experts" brought in by the Department of Defense in 1975 to second-guess the Agency and pressure the CIA into rewriting its Soviet missile estimates. The formation of its 21st century cousin, the Office of Special Plans, confirms that if the CIA does not provide what the White House wants, ways will be found to go around it, and there will be pressure to comply. Plame's fate shows that if CIA is not compliant or if it dares to question the legitimacy of the circumvention - as Joe Wilson's outspokenness did - extreme measures will be taken. That the law was treated as such an irrelevance (White House aides allegedly pitched the illegal leak to six journalists before one, Novak, bit) shouldn't be surprising; but it should underscore how high the stakes are in the battle over intelligence in this and future wars. The game Team B and the Office of Special Plans play so well is still being played, but with new rules. Whether these will be further exposed depends on how closely Congress and investigative journalists continue to look at the run-up to war. The first mention of the OSP in Congress in mid-March, in a question directed to George Tenet, met an evasive answer. One wonders if it will be the last.
Last February, Donald Rumsfeld said: "Leaks put people's lives at risk. And I think that the people in any branch of government have an obligation to manage their mouths in a way that does not put people's lives at risk. Folks that leak and put people's lives at risk ought to be in jail."
The idealist would apply a simple moral standard and give face value to those comments, hoping that pursuing justice in the unprecedented breach of American national security in the case of Valerie Plame's outing would outweigh any DoD/CIA rivalry. The cynic would say that the territory being staked out and the lines being drawn not only tolerate such indiscretions, but require them.
