Perspective on the CIA's "black ops"

Tom Englehardt and investigative journalist Steve Weissman remind us that the outrageousness of the outing of Valerie Plame - a genuinely traitorous act in any normal sense of the word - shouldn't make us cast some kind of sentimental aura around the CIA undercover operations.  Some of which have been seriously criminal, and some of them have damaged American interests badly.  Their comments are well worth keeping in mind: Outing CIA Agents: Valerie Plame Meets Philip Agee by Steve Weissman (introduction by Tom Engelhardt) TomDispatch.com 10/23/05.

Weissman writes:

As we approach the week when Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury will undoubtedly issue indictments against White House officials, the seldom considered 1982 CIA shield law under which the Plame case was first launched deserves some attention. When Karl Rove, I. Lewis Libby, and possibly others decided to reveal the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame, they clearly wanted to punish her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, for undermining administration claims that Saddam Hussein sought "yellowcake" uranium from Niger to build nuclear weapons. But by publicly ruining Plame's undercover career, they were undoubtedly also sending a very personal message to CIA types and other insiders not to question Mr. Bush's rush to war in Iraq.

As despicable as this White House treachery may have been, those of us who oppose it need to regain some lost perspective. Being bashed by Team Bush does not turn the Central Intelligence Agency into the home team or necessarily make Valerie Plame a modern-day Joan of Arc; nor should her outing stop journalists or anyone else from blowing the cover of her fellow agents when they are found engaging in kidnappings, torture, or attempts to overthrow democratically elected governments.

Weissman is identified in the TomDispatch piece as a friend of Philip Agee, a former CIA agent who exposed the names of a number of CIA agents in the past.  Weissman himself notes that he was one of the journalists who publicized agents' names.  He notes, however, that his work was done using open sources - which had presumably long since been exploited by foreign intelligence services:

The identifications came from the U.S.government's Foreign Service Lists and its yearly Biographic Registers, using a time-consuming method that former State Department officer John Marks described in the November 1974 Washington Monthly. Marks called his method "How to Spot a Spook."

No midnight mail drops from the Soviet KGB. No whispered messages from some Cuban Mata Hari. Just the hard slog of journalistic investigation.

I don't follow this kind of thing closely enough to be authoritative, but it's my understanding that the kind of research he describes here deals only with agents with diplomatic cover", not with those like Valerie Plame who are NOC's, i.e., they have "non-official cover."  The latter are far more vulnerable to retaliation if caught, because they are not protected by any kind of diplomatic immunity.  So far as I've ever heard, it seems unlikely in the extremem that an NOC could be outed using the kind of open-source methods he describes there.

Weissman's article is also worth reading because of his description of the way that intelligence services provided helpful information to a film and book on which he worked, called The Islamic Bomb.  He also touches on the kind of critical approach a journalist has to use in dealing with such information.

His perspective is one worth remembering:

None of this should weaken our opposition to the way Team Bush has treated Ms. Plame. But eternal suspicion of our legal, military, and intelligence professionals is one of the prices we will increasingly have to pay if our government continues to insist on relying on torture.

And what has failed so badly in the current context is not only the lack of responsible conduct by the Executive branch, but a shirking of responsibility by Congress and the courts, as well.