| Witnesses Say Wilson Talked About CIA Wife |
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November 9, 2005 |
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BEGIN TRANSCRIPT |
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RUSH: Grab cut eight, because that goes with this story. Our buddies at NewsMax are back again. "Fitzgerald Ignored Witnesses Who Contradicted Wilson – Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's Leakgate investigation is coming unraveled, as witness after witness steps forward to challenge a key premise of his controversial probe. Was the identity of Joseph Wilson's wife Valerie Plame really a deep dark secret before she was 'outed' by columnist Robert Novak in July 2003? The number of witnesses now saying 'No' has climbed to four - and none of them have apparently been interviewed by Fitzgerald's investigators. On Wednesday, Wayne Simmons, a 27-year veteran at the CIA, told Fox News Radio: 'As most people now know, (Plame) was traipsed all over Washington many years ago by Joe Wilson and introduced at embassies and other parties as 'my CIA wife.' Last week, Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely told WABC Radio's John Batchelor that during a 2002 conversation with Wilson while the two waited to appear on a TV show, Wilson casually mentioned that his wife worked at 'the Agency.' In Oct. 2003, NBC's diplomatic correspondent, Andrea Mitchell, told CNBC that Plame's occupation 'was widely known among those of us who cover the intelligence community and who were actively engaged in trying to track down who among the foreign service community was the envoy to Niger.' Mitchell added: 'So a number of us began to pick up on that.' And in Sept. 2003, NationalReviewOnline's Cliff May wrote that when Plame's CIA connection was mentioned in Novak's column - 'That wasn't news to me.'
"'I had been told that (Plame was CIA) - but not by anyone working in the White House. Rather, I learned it from someone who formerly worked in the government and he mentioned it in an offhand manner, leading me to infer it was something that insiders were well aware of.' The day his report appeared, May told the Fox News Channel's John Gibson: 'I knew this, and a lot of other people knew it.' In fact, rumors now swirl around Washington that Plame used to take her friends to lunch at the CIA's cafeteria. So what has Mr.Fitzgerald - who was hailed as a 'prosecutor's prosecutor' only weeks ago - done with the avalanche of testimony that contradicts his stated claim that Plame's job 'was not widely known'? Apparently nothing. In the six days since he's gone public, Gen. Vallely says prosecutors have yet to contact him." He was on Hannity & Colmes last night, and Colmes said to him, "Did Ambassador Joe Wilson expose his wife himself? That's exactly what our next guest says. Joining us now in an exclusive interview that you're not going to see anyplace else, Fox News military analyst and retired Major General Paul Vallely, who says that Wilson told him that Valerie Plame was a CIA agent in 2002. General, where did this happen?" |
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 VALLELY: Joe Wilson and I met in Washington in the greenroom of the bureau there for Fox. Met several times in 2002, and as we talked about our families, he did not say that she was an agent, only that she was employed by the agency, and as we since learned, she is in fact and has been an analyst in Washington for a number of years. So that basically is how we met and how we discussed that.
RUSH: So Joe Wilson is telling people. Cliff May didn't reveal his source, but he said, "I knew who she was. I knew she was CIA when I saw it in Novak's column." Andrea Mitchell said she knew who it was, and Wayne Simmons, the new guy on the scene here, 27-year veteran at the CIA said to Fox News, "As most people now know, Plame was traipsed all over Washington many years ago by her husband and introduced at embassies and other parties as, quote, unquote, 'my CIA wife.'" I thought this was really strange. Remember the week of special counsel Fitzgerald's press conference, which was a Friday, on I guess it was the Monday or Tuesday of that week, he was sending investigators, FBI, into the Wilson neighborhood asking neighbors, "Did you know that Valerie Wilson down the street there is CIA?" "Oh, no, we knew nothing about it," and I remember thinking this is an odd time to be doing all this. After two years of the investigation, when this was the focus of it, original focus was, who outed this brave, courageous, covert agent whose life has been destroyed, and to be going around the neighborhood asking this at that point two years after the investigation began was somewhat curious. Then, you learn that Wilson wasn't called to testify. None of these other people have been asked to testify before the grand jury. Now, clearly what's going to happen here is that Scooter Libby's defense team (ha-ha-ha) I'm sure they've got this dossier already loaded and you've got witnesses here that are going to be called and this is going to go right to the whole notion of whether she was covert or not, the whole notion of how she could have been outed when she already was. So it's going to be fireworks time. It's going to be fascinating to watch this.
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Read the Articles... |
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Headline: Patrick Fitzgerald Ignored Witnesses Who Contradicted Wilson
Date: Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2005
Source: NewsMax
Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's Leakgate investigation is coming unraveled, as witness after witness steps forward to challenge a key premise of his controversial probe.
Was the identity of Joseph Wilson's wife Valerie Plame really a deep dark secret before she was "outed" by columnist Robert Novak in July 2003?
The number of witnesses now saying "No" has climbed to four - and none of them have apparently been interviewed by Fitzgerald's investigators.
On Wednesday, Wayne Simmons, a 27-year veteran at the CIA, told Fox News Radio: "As most people now know, [Plame] was traipsed all over Washington many years ago by Joe Wilson and introduced at embassies and other parties as 'my CIA wife.'"
Last week, Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely told WABC Radio's John Batchelor that during a 2002 conversation with Wilson while the two waited to appear on a TV show, Wilson casually mentioned that his wife worked at "the Agency."
In Oct. 2003, NBC's diplomatic correspondent, Andrea Mitchell, told CNBC that Plame's occupation "was widely known among those of us who cover the intelligence community and who were actively engaged in trying to track down who among the foreign service community was the envoy to Niger."
Mitchell added: "So a number of us began to pick up on that."
And in Sept. 2003, NationalReviewOnline's Cliff May wrote that when Plame's CIA connection was mentioned in Novak's column - "That wasn't news to me."
"I had been told that [Plame was CIA] - but not by anyone working in the White House. Rather, I learned it from someone who formerly worked in the government and he mentioned it in an offhand manner, leading me to infer it was something that insiders were well aware of."
The day his report appeared, May told the Fox News Channel's John Gibson: "I knew this, and a lot of other people knew it."
In fact, rumors now swirl around Washington that Plame used to take her friends to lunch at the CIA's cafeteria.
So what has Mr.Fitzgerald - who was hailed as a "prosecutor's prosecutor" only weeks ago - done with the avalanche of testimony that contradicts his stated claim that Plame's job "was not widely known"?
Apparently nothing.
In the six days since he's gone public, Gen. Vallely says prosecutors have yet to contact him.
Ms. Mitchell has been mum since her "widely known" comment resurfaced last week, offering no indication whether Fitzgerald has bothered to check her story out.
If Mr. May has been interrogated, he's also keeping it to himself.
And Mr. Simmons has made no mention of any contact with Fitzgerald's team.
On the other hand, the prosecutor's prosecutor made a big show of interviewing two of the Wilsons neighbors just four days before he announced his indictment of Lewis Libby - in a bid to establish whether Ms. Plame's occupation was indeed secret.
It was, as far as her neighbors were concerned. But the revelation that Fitzgerald had waited till the last minute to confirm such a key aspect of his case raised more than a few eyebrows.
Now, with four witnesses on the record saying they knew what the Wilsons' neighbors didn't - and two of those witnesses coming forward even before the Leakgate investigation began - it's beginning to look like Mr. Fitzgerald deliberately ignored critical testimony that would have compelled him to close up shop well before he ever got to Mr. Libby.
Headline: The Plame kerfuffle illustrates the CIA's sloppiness
By: Reuel Marc Gerecht
Date: November 9, 2005
Source: The Wall Street Journal
"And they [CIA employees] have to expect that when they do their jobs, that information about whether or not they are affiliated with the CIA will be protected. . . . And they run a risk when they work for the CIA that something bad could happen to them, but they have to make sure that they don't run the risk that something bad is going to happen to them from something done by their own fellow government employees."
So spoke Patrick Fitzgerald, special prosecutor in the Valerie Plame investigation, about the need to preserve the cover of CIA case officers. His sincere concern for the woman's lost camouflage can also be heard among commentators on both left and right, even among those who recognize that Ms. Plame's publicity-loving husband, Joseph "Yellowcake" Wilson, often doesn't have a firm grip on the truth. In particular, left-leaning liberals, not well known for their defense of the CIA, have charged forward to equate the maintenance of cover for Langley's operatives (who are, let us be frank, probably overwhelmingly antiwar and anti-Bush) with the country's national security. In their eyes, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, former chief of staff for the vice president, is thus guilty, at a minimum, of a politically motivated disregard for a clandestine public servant on the front lines of freedom.
Needless to say, Langley, which started this whole affair with its referral of Ms. Plame's "outing" to the Justice Department, couldn't agree more about the critical role of its secret operatives in the nation's defense. (If it weren't for the CIA's use of rendition and secret prison facilities, a return of 1950s-era liberal love for the clandestine service might be in the works.)
Truth be told, however, the agency doesn't care much at all about cover. Inside the CIA, serious case officers have often looked with horror and mirth upon the pathetic operational camouflage that is usually given to both "inside" officers (operatives who carry official, usually diplomatic, cover) and nonofficial-cover officers (the "NOC" cadre), who most often masquerade as businessmen. Yet Langley tenaciously guards the cover myth--that camouflage for case officers is of paramount importance to its operations and the health of its operatives.
Know the truth about cover--that it is the Achilles' heel of the clandestine service--and you will begin to appreciate how deeply dysfunctional the operations directorate has been for years. Only a profoundly unserious Counter-Proliferation Division would have sent Mr. Wilson on an eight-day walkabout in Niger to uncover the truth about uranium sales to Saddam Hussein and then allowed him to give an oral report.
• Fact: The vast majority of CIA officers overseas operate with little to no cover and have done so since the foundation of the post-World War II clandestine service in 1947. Most case officers posted abroad carry official cover, which usually means they serve as fake diplomats. The use of official cover allowed the agency to grow rapidly in the 1940s, when panic about Soviet expansionism was real and America's experience with espionage and global secret services was small. Developing an agency weighted in favor of nonofficial-cover officers would have been vastly more difficult, time-consuming, and not necessarily useful for a CIA aimed overwhelmingly at massive covert-action programs that did not require officers to be particularly stealthy in their daily routines.
Today, operational camouflage is usually shredded within weeks of a case officer's arrival at his station, since the manner, method and paperwork of operatives is just too different from real foreign-service officers. (Even if the CIA really wanted to fix this inadequate verisimilitude--and it does not--it probably couldn't reconcile the differing demands and bureaucracies of the two institutions.) Minimally competent foreign security services know a great deal of what occurs inside U.S. embassies and consulates since these institutions are completely dependent upon local employees--the State Department calls them "foreign-service nationals"--who, through patriotism or coercion, often report on the activities of their employers.
The situation is better with nonofficial-cover officers who live overseas, most often in rather civilized places where hunting for American NOCs hasn't been a major pursuit of the local security services and where the "outing" of an NOC wouldn't likely lead to the officer's physical harm or long-term imprisonment. As a general rule, the more dangerous the country, the less likely that NOCs, who don't benefit from diplomatic immunity, will be stationed or visit there. (Imagining CIA nonofficial operatives penetrating Islamic radical groups even after 9/11 isn't possible.) And the agency often gives nonofficial case officers atrociously bad cover that makes no sense, especially given today's targeting priorities. A temporary "NOC of convenience," which is what Ms. Plame might have at times been while serving at headquarters in the Counter-Proliferation Division, is a much less secure cover, workable on very short-term assignments overseas, but paper-thin when confronted by knowledgeable folks in the cover profession. Given the low standards the agency often uses with its HQ-based nonofficial cover, Ms. Plame probably could still, if she dyed and shortened her hair, fly overseas and do whatever she might have been doing before she recommended her husband for his Africa sojourn.
• Fact: The CIA knows that most of its officers overseas are "blown" to the local security and intelligence services, and not infrequently to the more astute members of the native press in countries where a real press exists, and to knowledgeable members of the foreign diplomatic community who have firsthand contact with the country's foreign and defense ministries (where real diplomats always spend more quality time and have greater access than do spooks). But our clandestine service chooses not to dwell on the obvious. Compromised officers continue to run agents, and to try to develop foreigners for recruitments, knowing full well that the host security services know who they are. Now, this may not be an enormous counterintelligence problem if case officers are working "compatible" targets, that is, working on foreigners whom the host country's security and intelligence services don't really care about (for example, the French internal security service probably would not express its displeasure at regular meetings of a Nigerian official with a known CIA officer in the cafés of Paris). However, it is more of an issue when the local security and intelligence service might object, and since the end of the Cold War, foreign security and intelligence services have become noticeably less generous in viewing CIA activity on their soil as being harmless or complementary to their own actions.
• Fact: Probably the vast majority of all sensitive assets--foreign agents whom the agency considers highly valuable and who might be in some trouble if exposed--have been handled by compromised officers. The agency attempts to compensate for the blown state of its officers by having case officers use "surveillance detection runs" (SDRs). In the Soviet Union, where the agency and the State Department actually tried hard to hide CIA identities, but where CIA officers inevitably became known, American operatives deployed long and challenging SDRs. In most other countries, where the internal security has been less daunting, case officers have often been much more lax in scrupulously designing runs, sometimes with very adverse consequences. "Inside" officers--those who serve inside official U.S. facilities--have too often damned their agents to jail or death because they did not, or could not, insulate themselves sufficiently from the prying eyes of a hostile service. But the CIA quite happily has lived with this state of affairs since any attempt to get serious about cover would destroy the clandestine service as we have known it for 58 years.
If we were to use the standards suggested by Mr. Fitzgerald--"It's a lot more serious than baseball. . . . The damage wasn't to one person. It wasn't just Valerie Wilson. It was done to all of us"--we would fire the operations management, which in practice has become a barely clandestine version of the State Department. The revealing of Valerie Plame's true employer has in all probability hurt no one overseas. You can rest assured that if her (most recent) outing had actually hurt an agent from her past, we would've heard about it through a CIA leak.
Langley's systemic sloppiness--the flimsiness of cover is but the tip of the iceberg of incompetence--has repeatedly destroyed agent networks and provoked "flaps" with some of our closest allies. A serious CIA would never have allowed Mr. Wilson to go on such an odd, short "fact finding" mission. It never would have allowed Ms. Plame potentially to expose herself by recommending such an overt mission for her mate, not known for his subtlety and discretion. With a CIA where cover really mattered, Mr. Libby would not now be indicted. But that's not what we have in the real world. We have an American left that hates George W. Bush and his vice president so much that they have become willing dupes in a surreal operational stage-play. You have to give credit to Langley: Overseas it may be incompetent; but in Washington, it can still con many into giving it the respect and consideration it doesn't deserve.
Mr. Gerecht, a former CIA case officer, is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is a contributor to "The Future of American Intelligence," edited by Peter Berkowitz and just out from Hoover Institution Press.
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