Reply #256: More on the Plame/Iran angle from Mick Smith

[robertpaulsen]

February 14, 2006
Did the Administration damage CIA operations against Iran?

Sometimes a story that seems relatively inconsequential can turn out to have devastating consequences. The most famous instance of this phenomenon was the shooting of Archduke Ferdinand by a young Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip which is commonly held to have been triggered the First World War. The decision by White House aides to try to suppress Joe Wilson’s criticism of President Bush for his hyperbole over Iraqi weapons of mass destruction will hopefully not have such catclysmic consequences. But it does threaten to have a much greater long-term effect than its architects ever imagined.

Most readers of this blog will be aware of how the White House aides attacked Wilson in leaks to selected US reporters by pointing out that his wife worked for the CIA. Wilson was unhappy about the continued administration claims, in particular by President Bush in his 2003 State of the Union address, that Saddam had tried to buy uranium ore from Niger.

Wilson was an ex-ambassador, a former US diplomat with good contacts in Niger. He was sent there by the CIA to investigate the claims and concluded they weren’t true. When he wrote this in the New York Times, the smear campaign began. It was nasty and brutal and appeared to be a knee-jerk reaction by a spin doctor designed, in the jargon of such people, to “deal with the story”. The word between the White House aides and the hacks was that Wilson’s wife was a CIA officer working on Iraqi WMD, that she was the architect of his mission, and that the mission was designed to rubbish the Niger claims rather than investigate them. At some point someone said oh by the way her name is Valerie Plame. That was the big mistake. Plame was an operations officer working on “non-official cover” who might need at any time to go undercover anywhere in the world, Iraq for instance, protected only by her anonymity. Naming a covert CIA officer is illegal under US law. The White House aides were breaking the law and when it appeared in print, all hell broke lose.

more...

http://timesonline.typepad.com/mick_smith/2006/02/did_the_adminis.html#more