Once again, the Bush administration gives the lie to those that think he has security in his pocket or his portfolio in general. This time, his new director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, published a letter provided by the Israelis. You can read more about it
here.
Israeli intelligence sources said officials who had worked on "Operation Tiramisu" inside Iraq took emergency steps to protect their sources, but it was not clear how successful they had been in averting the damage to their intelligence network.
--more below--
This is the second time that comes to mind that the administration has publicized ongoing operations with other countries for their political benefit. The other time occurred during the election cycle when the administration released information about a hard drive it had captured and the identity of the person it'd captured it from. That destroyed the value of an agent turned by other country's intelligence services. The administration likes to take credit for capturing large percentages of 'terrorists' and Al Queda members (without detailing the figures used to derive the percentage) when in fact, many other countries figure in this work.
The Plame leak is well diaried elsewhere on this site and others, although I wonder if we'll ever know the contents of the CIA damage assessment or know the identities of any agents that the administration got compromised or captured because of their desire to exact revenge on a truth-teller. But it is important to note and remember that, although Mr. Bush will use secrecy to protect him and his family by reclassifying ever deeper levels of government documents, he will not hesitate to leak the secrets of ongoing operations in search of a poll percentage or two.