The Next Hurrah: Updated: How Can They Protect Us?

March 12, 2006

Updated: How Can They Protect Us?

By Meteor Blades

Just when you think no new revelation about the incompetence of this Administration could possibly flabbergast you more than the last one you heard about, they clobber you again.

The latest is a story in today's Chicago Tribune :

Internet blows CIA cover

It's easy to track America's covert operatives. All you need to know is how to navigate the Internet.
WASHINGTON -- She is 52 years old, married, grew up in the Kansas City suburbs and now lives in Virginia, in a new three-bedroom house.

Anyone who can qualify for a subscription to one of the online services that compile public information also can learn that she is a CIA employee who, over the past decade, has been assigned to several American embassies in Europe.

The CIA asked the Tribune not to publish her name because she is a covert operative, and the newspaper agreed. But unbeknown to the CIA, her affiliation and those of hundreds of men and women like her have somehow become a matter of public record, thanks to the Internet.

When the Tribune searched a commercial online data service, the result was a virtual directory of more than 2,600 CIA employees, 50 internal agency telephone numbers and the locations of some two dozen secret CIA facilities around the United States.

Only recently has the CIA recognized that in the Internet age its traditional system of providing cover for clandestine employees working overseas is fraught with holes, a discovery that is said to have "horrified" CIA Director Porter Goss.
Well, it's understandable. Because the Internet has only been around for six or seven months. On such short notice, how could they possibly know their covers might be penetrated?

At a minimum, the CIA's seeming inability to keep its own secrets invites questions about whether the Bush administration is doing enough to shield its covert CIA operations from public scrutiny, even as the Justice Department focuses resources on a two-year investigation into whether someone in the administration broke the law by disclosing to reporters the identity of clandestine CIA operative Valerie Plame.

I can see Robert Novak and Scooter Libby smiling from ear to ear now, reprising the hoary argument rightwingers have been using since 2003 that Plame wasn't really a covert agent, so she couldn't be exposed. "See," they will now argue, "Plame couldn't be covert because NONE of the CIA's agents are covert. They're all on the Internet."

Not all of the 2,653 employees whose names were produced by the Tribune search are supposed to be working under cover. More than 160 are intelligence analysts, an occupation that is not considered a covert position, and senior CIA executives such as Tenet are included on the list. ...

But an undisclosed number of those on the list--the CIA would not say how many--are covert employees, and some are known to hold jobs that could make them terrorist targets.

We all know our nuclear plants and chemical plants and ports still aren't well-protected from a terrorist attack. But you would think that Bushco would have at least made an attempt to protect its own agents.

Or does Dick Cheney really hate the CIA that much.

Update

If I had read the sidebars in the Chicago Tribune series before posting, I would have known that my half-snarky, half-serious speculation about Novak and Libby may well have been the key POINT of the whole series, as suggested by more astute folks than I at firedoglake and especially Larry Johnson at No Quarter.

Despite what we learned about Judy Miller, I still give people with Pulitzers, in this case the series' reporter John Crewdson, who has a small amount of CIA coverage under his belt, too much credit. Mea culpa

The sidebar: Plame's identity, if truly a secret, was thinly veiled

March 12, 2006 at 04:27 in Contributor--Meteor Blades, Foreign Policy, Misc, Terrorism | Permalink

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The Next Hurrah

March 12, 2006

Updated: How Can They Protect Us?

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