What Valerie Plame Really Did at the CIA
The Nation, by David CornThough Cheney was already looking toward war, the officers of the agency’s Joint Task Force on Iraq–part of the Counterproliferation Division of the agency’s clandestine Directorate of Operations–were frantically toiling away in the basement, mounting espionage operations to gather information on the WMD programs Iraq might have. The JTFI was trying to find evidence that would back up the White House’s assertion that Iraq was a WMD danger. Its chief of operations was a career undercover officer named Valerie Wilson.
…Valerie Wilson was no analyst or paper-pusher. She was an operations officer working on a top priority of the Bush Administration. Armitage, Rove and Libby had revealed information about a CIA officer who had searched for proof of the President’s case. In doing so, they harmed her career and put at risk operations she had worked on and foreign agents and sources she had handled.
Another issue was whether Valerie Wilson had sent her husband to Niger to check out an intelligence report that Iraq had sought uranium there. Hubris contains new information undermining the charge that she arranged this trip. In an interview with the authors, Douglas Rohn, a State Department officer who wrote a crucial memo related to the trip, acknowledges he may have inadvertently created a misimpression that her involvement was more significant than it had been.
There’s a human dimension to this story that transcends all of the Palace Intrigue, the misinformation from the Administration, the craziness in the Press. It’s about Joseph and Valerie Wilson’s lives.
"We knew nothing about what was going on in Iraq," a CIA official recalled. "We were way behind the eight ball. We had to look under every rock." Wilson, too, occasionally flew overseas to monitor operations. She also went to Jordan to work with Jordanian intelligence officials who had intercepted a shipment of aluminum tubes heading to Iraq that CIA analysts were claiming–wrongly–were for a nuclear weapons program. (The analysts rolled over the government’s top nuclear experts, who had concluded the tubes were not destined for a nuclear program.)
The JTFI found nothing. The few scientists it managed to reach insisted Saddam had no WMD programs. Task force officers sent reports detailing the denials into the CIA bureaucracy. The defectors were duds–fabricators and embellishers. (JTFI officials came to suspect that some had been sent their way by Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, an exile group that desired a US invasion of Iraq.) The results were frustrating for the officers. Were they not doing their job well enough–or did Saddam not have an arsenal of unconventional weapons? Valerie Wilson and other JTFI officers were almost too overwhelmed to consider the possibility that their small number of operations was, in a way, coming up with the correct answer: There was no intelligence to find on Saddam’s WMDs because the weapons did not exist. Still, she and her colleagues kept looking. (She also assisted operations involving Iran and WMDs.)
When the war started in March 2003, JTFI officers were disappointed. "I felt like we ran out of time," one CIA officer recalled. "The war came so suddenly. We didn’t have enough information to challenge the assumption that there were WMDs…. How do you know it’s a dry well? That Saddam was constrained. Given more time, we could have worked through the issue…. From 9/11 to the war–eighteen months–that was not enough time to get a good answer to this important question."
Joseph Wilson and his wife were both involved in trying to help the Administration find out if there were weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein, ruler of Iraq. She was involved with trying to confirm both of the main pieces of evidence – the "aluminum tubes" and the "Niger Yellowcake" story. Joseph Wilson was recruited to check out the latter, as an expert on both Niger and Iraq. They came up empty handed. When Joseph Wilson went public with his part of the story, both he and his wife were attacked by the Administration, en masse, to cover up the truth. He was obviously portrayed by Richard Armitage to Robert Novak as an "asshole." Her career was destroyed. Both of them were working for the Administration, for the Administration.
I suppose that Cheney would say, "Why didn’t he keep his mouth shut?" That’s what Rove was saying when he said to Chris Matthews that Wilson’s wife was "fair game." Well, thank God he didn’t keep his mouth shut. He didn’t keep his mouth shut because he’s a patriot, that’s why. The Administration has portrayed him, a man with a strong and courageous record of government service, as hanging on his wife’s coat-tails, and have maligned her when she couldn’t defend herself because of her code of silence as a C.I.A. Agent. So these two people were thrown to the wolves by a bunch of draft dodgers who were marching off to fight a foolish war – a part of the human experience they had avoided themselves. The result, we’re dying like flies in a hopeless Civil War in Iraq of our own making [2651 Americans and over 40,000 Iraqis killed to date], and the Wilson’s lives have been thrown way, way off track.
It’s enough to make one cry…
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