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October 10, 2003
Plame, Novak and the Holy Grail
Josh Marshall has a couple notes up about the Plame scandal. One discusses the latest conservative attempt at finding what Josh calls the Holy Grail - an "innocent" explanation for the Plame leak. He quotes a "Nick. Y" who wrote
When was Wilson's wife last on a clandestine operation? As a 40 year old mother of 2 year old twins I would imagine it has been a long time ago. Don't you?He then has a second piece where he takes Bob Novak up on his suggestion that someone should search the Nexis database to show just how many times he's used the word "operative" and how that demonstrates that he might have used it in describing Plame without his having meant to imply that she was undercover. (Josh finds only 6 examples of Novak using it in reference to the CIA, and in each case, he uses it to refer to someone who's undercover). One of the stories he described this way:
Did the CIA change her status? Is she now just an analyst as she has been working at in the CIA Langley Office?Is there a pay scale difference among analysts and operatives? Could it be that she retained that title even though there was no intention of ever using her again in a clandestine operation? After all she is the wife of a former Ambassador and now has two small children.
The lady may have been an operative at one time but my bet is that she was still with the CIA and would have continued her career as an analyst until her retirement and that's why her role at the CIA was well known in Washington Circles.
The CIA needs to answer some questions about this woman.
Enough said.
On December 3rd 2001 Novak reported on the surprise and even outrage among CIA veterans that Mike Spann’s identity had been revealed even in death. Spann was the agent killed at the uprising at Mazar-i-Sharif Thus Novak: “Exposure of CIA operative Johnny (Mike) Spann's identity as the first American killed in Afghanistan is viewed by surprised intelligence insiders as an effort by Director George Tenet to boost the embattled CIA's prestige.”Oddly, these two pieces kind of found an intersection in my head. It seems to me that if people in the CIA expect that someone's identity as a CIA operative would survive even their death (presumably because of the need to protect the operative's contacts, networks, agents and projects), that there would also be a similar expectation that their identity as an operative would survive marriage and motherhood, and for the same reasons. So, even if Plame's duties have changed or if she's working more at the "home office" now that she used to, it doesn't make revealing the fact that she used to be undercover any less egregious.
Posted by thorswitch at October 10, 2003 06:30 AM
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