WARNING: Everything in this post is speculation!
I'm a little slow. Along with everybody else in the community I've been following the PlameGate stories eagerly. But I haven't really gotten it until now. Other people may have reached these conclusions already (I'm seeing some of the same stuff from Josh Marshall), but it's taken me a while to get here.
The thing that I never understood about the whole scandal was why. From the first day I heard about it, it made no sense to me that Valerie Wilson was outed to discredit her husband in retribution for his editorial.
It just didn't fit. The m.o. of this administration has been character assassination, and there seemed to be far better and more legal ways of tarring Joe Wilson. The guy had been a public servant for decades, surely they could have drug up somebody from his past to label him as partisan and a hack. Swift-boating I would have understood. This I did not.
If anything, identifying his wife as a CIA operative seemed to give his story more weight in my mind.
Then there was the odd thing with the use of his wife's maiden name in the article. Novak's <italic>Who's Who</italic> explanation of this just felt false from the get-go. That's the kind of thing that felt like a very specific choice to me. Why?
My theory on all this is that Plame was outed not as retaliation towards Wilson, but as retaliation towards the CIA community. This was a warning shot, an outing of an agent that would have relatively little collateral damage. "Don't fuck with us," they were saying.
It would explain the choice to name her as Valerie Plame. As others have pointed out, that was the name she went by at the CIA, and it would have been the equivalent of the mob leaving a picture of your child in your mailbox. "We know where you live," they were saying.
It sounds like Patrick Fitzgerald is heading down this path as well. From the Washington Post today:
As the investigation into the leak of a CIA agent's name hurtles to an apparent conclusion, special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has zeroed in on the role of Vice President Cheney's office, according to lawyers familiar with the case and government officials. The prosecutor has assembled evidence that suggests Cheney's long-standing tensions with the CIA contributed to the unmasking of operative Valerie Plame.
So why did the Veep's office feel the need to snap the CIA into line? There must have been something immediately pressing to take an action of this magnitude.
One theory is that this was part of a competition for Bush's attention. Bush would have been a CIA man coming in, with close family connections in the organization. Tenet seems to have had the ear of the President up to this point. And after the outing, the relationship between Tenet and the Veep went downhill rapidly, with Tenet publicly refuting some of Cheney's more outlandish claims about Iraq.
Tenet resigned just under a year later, but as NBC noted:
A senior aide to Tenet told NBC News that Tenet, who made his final decision to leave over the holiday weekend and informed his senior staff Tuesday, had wanted to resign last summer or fall but that with the intelligence investigations coming up, Bush persuaded him to stay.
That would have been shortly after the Plame outing. So one theory is that this was aimed at making Tenet look bad. There had been a report in his own organization, from one of his own analysts that disproved the Niger claims that had been the strongest basis of the WMD claims. Tenet famously told Bush there was a "slam-dunk" case for WMD in Iraq. Now there was evidence he should have had at the ready and didn't. And it made Tenet look uncapable of protecting his own agents, making his position untenable.
But there's another theory as well. Shortly after Novak's column appeared, Seymour Hersh published an articlein the New Yorker that made a lot of sense to me. In his account, the Vice-President's office and the Defense Department had basically shut out the intelligence analysis community, instead creating a system where raw, un-vetted intelligence data was "stove-piped" directly to the Veep (and probably WHIG) through the offices of John Bolton at the State Department (perhaps through a Fleitz connection?) and Douglas Feith at Defense.
From Hersh's article:
A few months after George Bush took office, Greg Thielmann, an expert on disarmament with the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, or INR, was assigned to be the daily intelligence liaison to John Bolton, the Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control, who is a prominent conservative. Thielmann understood that his posting had been mandated by Secretary of State Colin Powell, who thought that every important State Department bureau should be assigned a daily intelligence officer. "Bolton was the guy with whom I had to do business," Thielmann said. "We were going to provide him with all the information he was entitled to see. That's what being a professional intelligence officer is all about."
But, Thielmann told me, "Bolton seemed to be troubled because INR was not telling him what he wanted to hear." Thielmann soon found himself shut out of Bolton's early-morning staff meetings. "I was intercepted at the door of his office and told, `The Under-Secretary doesn't need you to attend this meeting anymore.' " When Thielmann protested that he was there to provide intelligence input, the aide said, "The Under-Secretary wants to keep this in the family."
Eventually, Thielmann said, Bolton demanded that he and his staff have direct electronic access to sensitive intelligence, such as foreign-agent reports and electronic intercepts. In previous Administrations, such data had been made available to under-secretaries only after it was analyzed, usually in the specially secured offices of INR. The whole point of the intelligence system in place, according to Thielmann, was "to prevent raw intelligence from getting to people who would be misled." Bolton, however, wanted his aides to receive and assign intelligence analyses and assessments using the raw data. In essence, the under-secretary would be running his own intelligence operation, without any guidance or support. "He surrounded himself with a hand-chosen group of loyalists, and found a way to get C.I.A. information directly," Thielmann said.
Needless to say, this pissed off people at the CIA. And now we come upon another unanswered question in this whole drama. Where did those forged Niger documents come from? Clearly they were a plant from someone, but who? Hersh speculates on this as well, relating his conversations with a "former, senior CIA 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.
"The agency guys were so pissed at Cheney," the former officer said. "They said, `O.K, we're going to put the bite on these guys.' " My source said that he was first told of the fabrication late last year, at one of the many holiday gatherings in the Washington area of past and present C.I.A. officials. "Everyone was bragging about it--`Here's what we did. It was cool, cool, cool.' " These retirees, he said, had superb contacts among current officers in the agency and were informed in detail of the sismi intelligence.
"They thought that, with this crowd, it was the only way to go--to nail these guys who were not practicing good tradecraft and vetting intelligence," my source said. "They thought it'd be bought at lower levels--a big bluff." The thinking, he said, was that the documents would be endorsed by Iraq hawks at the top of the Bush Administration, who would be unable to resist flaunting them at a press conference or an interagency government meeting. They would then look foolish when intelligence officials pointed out that they were obvious fakes. But the tactic backfired, he said, when the papers won widespread acceptance within the Administration. "It got out of control."
If this were indeed the case, then this would have been a huge embarassment for the Veep's office. They were made to look like fools in front of the President and the nation. Certainly that's the sort of thing that might warrant a little inter-agency retaliation.
Hersh's article seemed to disappear out of the collective conscious after a bit, for reasons unknown to me. Did I miss an important piece that disproved this?
One thing that emerges from this is that the President might actually not have known much about this. Like Nixon in Watergate, this was something instituted by his underlings that has threatened his administration. Has he, like Nixon, been involved in the cover-up? Or am I completely wrong and Bush was central to the whole drama?
Can't wait for those Fitzgerald announcements to clear some of this up.