Now THIS Is a Scoop

by emptywheel

David Corn has posted the scoop that should have been the first teaser from his and Isikoff's Hubris--a post detailing Valerie Plame's role in the CIA. It turns out Plame managed the group tasked with studying Iraq's WMDs, the Joint Iraq Task Force.

Though 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.

[snip]

In 1997 she returned to CIA headquarters and joined the Counterproliferation Division. (About this time, she moved in with Joseph Wilson; they later married.) She was eventually given a choice: North Korea or Iraq. She selected the latter. Come the spring of 2001, she was in the CPD's modest Iraq branch. But that summer--before 9/11--word came down from the brass: We're ramping up on Iraq. Her unit was expanded and renamed the Joint Task Force on Iraq. Within months of 9/11, the JTFI grew to fifty or so employees. Valerie Wilson was placed in charge of its operations group.

Valerie Plame, Corn says, was in charge of the group that tried to develop assets who could tell them about Saddam's WMD program.

Will Corn Satisfy the Wingnuts?

Hopefully, this post will receive the same attention that Isikoff and Corn's non-scoop about Armitage received. It challenges one of the fundamental claims trotted about by wingnuts trying to exonerate Libby for his actions--the suggestion that Plame wasn't really still working as a spy.

Unfortunately, I fear Corn hasn't given the frothy wingnuts the detail they'll demand. He provides just a few details, for example, of the harm Plame's outing caused.

In doing so, they harmed her career and put at risk operations she had worked on and foreign agents and sources she had handled.

Similarly, Corn doesn't provide the wingnuts the details they'll want to determine whether Plame qualified for protection under the IIPA (presuming, as they always have, that the "runaway prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald" would pursue a case for two and a half years that didn't fit the statute). He reveals Plame returned to the US in 1997, but continued to travel overseas.

In 1997 she returned to CIA headquarters and joined the Counterproliferation Division. (About this time, she moved in with Joseph Wilson; they later married.)

[snip]

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.)

And finally, I imagine the wingnuts will cling to their claim that Plame didn't deserve IIPA protection based on a technicality, though Corn describes the transition she was undergoing to be that from NOC status to official cover.

When the Novak column ran, Valerie Wilson was in the process of changing her clandestine status from NOC to official cover, as she prepared for a new job in personnel management. Her aim, she told colleagues, was to put in time as an administrator--to rise up a notch or two--and then return to secret operations.

It'll be interesting to see whether the wingnuts--the same people crowing last week that the lefty blogs didn't get excited over news we had had for almost six months, show this piece of news much attention. It'll be interesting to see whether the wingnuts treat this with the same credibility as they did the claim that Armitage was the "primary" source for Novak.

The Really Interesting Details

But I'm interested by the details that put Valerie Plame at the center of so many issues central to the run-up to the war. The SSCI reports our interception of the aluminum tubes, for example (we know this to be Jordan from other reporting).

Although China,                      SENTENCE DELETED                     , a shipment of about 2,000 tubes had already been sent DELETED. In DELETED June, 2001, the tubes arrived DELETED authorities, DELETED, seized DELETED. A DELETED intelligence assessment disseminated on July 2, 2001 said DELETED personnel had inspected the tubes DELETED and said, "The tubes are constructed from high strength aluminum (7075-T6) and are manufactured to the tight tolerances necessary for gas centrifuges. The dimensions of the tubes match those of a publicly available gas centrifuge design from the 1950s, known as the Zippe centrifuge."¹² The assessment concluded that "the specifications for the tubes far exceed any known conventional weapons application, including rocket motor casings for 81 -mm multiple rocket launchers."

But it doesn't mention Plame's involvement. Not that it should, but given how insistent the Republicans have been that Plame wasn't involved in overseas work, you'd think they might mention it.

Similarly, Plame appears to have been in charge of a program described at length in James Risen's State of War.

While other top CIA officials, including CIA Director George Tenet and Deputy Director for Operations James Pavitt, dithered and failed to mount any serious operations to get more spies into Iraq to find out what was going on, [Charlie] Allen, an old hand who had little time for Tenet and the circle of yes-men and yes-women on Tenet's senior staff, began a renegade effort to search for new sources of information.

He pushed for several new collection programs, including one that called for approaching members of families of Iraqi scientists who were believed to be involved in secret weapons programs. At the time, the CIA had no direct access to key Iraqi scientists, and so using family members as intermediaries to find out what the scientists were doing seemed like the next best thing.

Corn describes Plame as managing this effort.

There was great pressure on the JTFI to deliver. Its primary target was Iraqi scientists. JTFI officers, under Wilson's supervision, tracked down relatives, students and associates of Iraqi scientists--in America and abroad--looking for potential sources. They encouraged Iraqi émigrés to visit Iraq and put questions to relatives of interest to the CIA.

And finally, perhaps most ominous given the subsequent players in the story, Plame's unit also debriefed the walk-in sources presenting themselves around the world.

The JTFI was also handling walk-ins around the world. Increasingly, Iraqi defectors were showing up at Western embassies claiming they had information on Saddam's WMDs. JTFI officers traveled throughout the world to debrief them. Often it would take a JTFI officer only a few minutes to conclude someone was pulling a con. Yet every lead had to be checked.

[snip]

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.)

Now, I have always been hesitant to assume that Judy Miller, the INC's favorite mouthpiece, had direct information leading to Plame's identity. Most of Judy's sources were higher-level partisan stalwarts, people like Libby and John Bolton.

Except for the defectors. Judy was often the defectors' second stop in the US, just after they had been discredited by the CIA. Judy publicized their claims even after the CIA had labeled them fabricators. So it is not unreasonable to wonder whether one of those defectors, particularly one with a strong INC affiliation, might have passed some details to Judy. And at the very least, this connection might explain Judy's fierce anger at the Wilsons. Because Plame did her job (presumably) well, Judy had to work extra hard at building these defectors' credibility. And in fact, Judy became doubly necessary--since they couldn't get the defectors past the CIA's lie detectors, Judy had to introduce their claims into the debate.

While I doubt the wingnuts will believe a word Corn says, these revelations add a whole new importance to the outing of Valerie Plame. As many have speculated in the past, Plame's outing punished not just Wilson, but also a key CIA figure who had proven, before the war, that there were no WMDs.

Comments

[John Forde]

Oh EW,

THIS IS JUICY!

[mainsailset]

It's one thing to analyze the bits and pieces we've been privy to, to read the monumental narratives you have toiled over. But somehow, to read this, to know the absolute damage that has cost so many lives, so terribly much, is beyond horrific. Pat Fitzgerald, a prosecutor that has overreached? No, a prosecutor faced with the herculean job of piecing together into a triable case, the actions of a leadership without morals, without an ounce of patriotism.

[emptywheel]

Questions I'd like to see asked:

• Bob Novak, do you still think you didn't do anything wrong by exposing Plame's identity?
• Bill Kristol, you still think Libby should be pardoned?
• The wingnutosphere, you still believe this is a partisan issue?

[Jim E.]

At his blog, David Corn plainly writes: "She was an undercover officer in charge of running critical covert operations."

I wish the Nation piece had that line in it. The Nation piece is detailed and pretty obvious, but since it never explicitly answers the question posed in it ("Was she truly undercover?") the way Corn's blog post does, Wilson haters can proceed to scratch their heads and wonder what it all means.

Our departed friend Nasty Sue, for example, seems pleased because she thinks the article shows that Plame had the pull to dispatch her hubbie on the trip.

[Jeff]

A couple of quick comments. The Joint Task Force appears to be described on p. 262 of the SSCI report. It says the task force was established by DCI within CPD in September 2001. And the information from the sources it recruited resulted in the production and dissemination of over 400 intelligence reports, an increase from only 90 reports in 2000.

There is something unclear about the recruitment and use of the scientists and their relatives. Risen makes it sound like a defiant operation organized by Charlie Allen at odds with DO, hence with CPD. Here's p. 106, and worth asking which sources it is that say this:

CIA officials ignored the evidence and refused to even disseminate the reports from the family members to senior policy makers in the Bush administration. Sources say that the CIA's Directorate of Operations, which was supposed to be in charge of all of the agency's clandestine intelligence operations, was jealous of Allen's incursions into its operational turf and shut down his program and denigrated its results. President Bush never heard about the visits or the interviews.

Also, what, if any, relationship was there between the JTFI and the thing Robert Grenier was head of, which is called in the Post article on him the Iraq Issues Group? And what's the connection between those two and the Iraq Operations Group, detailed in Risen's book? The reason this is interesting, of course, is because Grenier was one of the early sources for Libby on Plame. And as Tom Maguire pointed out in an effort to make the rather roundabout argument that Armitage was probably the one to tell Novak Plame's name, Grenier could very well know her as "Valerie Plame," her undercover name apparently. It is, of course, true that Grenier could have told Armitage about her using her undercover, and maiden, name, though we have no concrete evidence that such a thing happened. We do, on the other hand, have concrete evidence that Grenier told Libby about Plame in June 2003, so isn't it more likely that Grenier spoke to Libby about Plame as "Plame"? One other note on Grenier: I don't know whether to make anything of this, but Grenier doesn't show up in Fitzgerald's list, in his 8-27-04 affidavit, of government officials who discussed Plame with Libby before Libby's conversation on July 10 2003 with Russert, during which, libby testified (allegedly falsely), he learned as if for the first time of Plame's CIA affiliation. Does that mean that Grenier offered his information to Fitzgerald subsequent to August 27, 2004?

[Tom Maguire]

It'll be interesting to see whether the wingnuts treat this with the same credibility as they did the claim that Armitage was the "primary" source for Novak.

Well, let's see - the Armitage story was both old news and "testimony against interest" in that it did not fit Corn's prefrred story line. Odds that he was embellishing it - pretty low.

The notion that Ms. Plame was covert, traveled abroad, and that national security was harmed by her outing are all news and all fit Corn's preferred story line. Odds that he is embellishing it, overweighting the sources that told him what he wants, and so forth - you make the call!

Other points I know you'll want to see covered:

(a) the Raw Story news that she was working on Iran (and the neocons had to out her because she was impeding their next war.)

(b) the Niger forgeries - she was a major figure in the CIA JTFI yet was as surprised as the rest of us by the forgeries? Suddenly I am sympathetic to all the Wilso-philes who insist he *did too* debunk the forgeries in March 2002. Of course, if he did then it is highly likely that his wife was a key part of the CIA cover-up that has managed to gull us into thinking the forgeries were only discovered in early 2003.

Well, that won't be investigated and I'm sure you have your theory explaining how Cheney and Rove engineered that as well.

[emptywheel]

Jim E

Gosh, that didn't take long. And I wonder why she isn't here searching out Jeff to "tell him she told him so"?

[Jim E.]

Tom,

I dunno about the RawStory piece, but Corn does say she worked on Iran, too.

[emptywheel]

Tom

We know who covered up the forgeries--they were in WINPAC, not JTFI.

That was easy. Next?

(Though I'm glad you came over to check in--it's so much more fun sparring with you than some of your commenters; I hope you do know you're always welcome?)

I'm also intrigued to see how any tensions between Isikoff and Corn play out. I really view their partnership on this as a curious partnership, each gaining the credibility/readership of the other. It'll be interesting to see where they had to compromise to tell this story.

[Jeff]

Tom

First, it's been reported for years that Plame was undercover anyway, just not believed. Second, when you suggest Corn might be overweighting the sources that told Corn what he wants, which of the news claims you mention do you think are consequently likely not true? That she was covert, that she was in charge of operations for the Joint Task Force on Iraq within CPD within DO, that she traveled abroad as described, or that her outing put at risk operations she had worked on and foreign agents and sources she had handled? All of them, some of them, what? I've provided some material for you to start to work with above. But I'd be curious to hear.

Also, it's interesting you parse the two stories with regard to Corn alone; what about his ever-delightful coauthor, who surely must count as among the most White House-friendly authors who has covered this story in the dread MSM, no?

[anxburns]

How is it that Bush inspires this cult-like behavior? He and his administration can do no wrong. Out a CIA operative - no big deal. Fail to catch Osama after five years - hey, don't be so hard on the guy. Completely **ck-up planning and executing a war - it's the media's fault!

What IS it about him? I don't feel that way about any of democratic leaders. I agree with them ideologically, but I can see faults and flaws in every one of them, (especially Bill and Hillary Clinton).

It's scary. Bush could announce complete martial law tomorrow and Maguire's posters would be over here justifying it.

[clbrune]

Tom,
To assume that Corn and Isikoff don't embellish facts they don't "prefer", but do embellish facts they DO "prefer" is telling. But not about them. Does this kind of reasoning color all of your thought processes?

In answer to Raw Story's claim about Plame and Iran, please take a minute to read Corn's piece. He includes a role for Plame in Iranian WMD.

In answer to the Niger forgeries, I remember a characterization attributed to Plame that the Niger uranium deal was some "crazy idea." That is, she (and others) thought the likelihood of a uranium deal was low, even without seeing the forgeries.

[Sally]

O.K., I'm more confused than ever. Did the Bush/Cheney junta openly go after Ambassador Wilson with the objective of shutting down Mrs. Wilson's work at the CIA which they saw as dangerous to their oh-so-clever Iraq scheme? And as a warning to her colleagues not to contradict what the junta was broadcasting about their case for war?

[clbrune]

The reference to Plame's impression of the initial Niger uranium claims being "crazy" was surprisingly easy to find;

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39834-2004Jul9.html

"The [Senate intelligence committee] report said Plame told committee staffers that she relayed the CIA's request to her husband, saying, "there's this crazy report" about a purported deal for Niger to sell uranium to Iraq."

Without seeing the forgeries, see?

[emptywheel]

Jeff

Here's an interesting (lack of) detail. The Robb-Silberman doesn't appear to mention the JTFI at all, even though the bulk of it is on Iraq intelligence. They also don't mention the report from the Jordanian interception I mentioned above, which is curious.

Sally

I think I'll post on that in the upcoming days. But I imagine a couple of things were going on. I'm sure Cheney perceived Wilson's claims that he had debunked the Niger forgeries to have been assisted by Plame--perhaps he assumed Plame told him a lot of background from her own work. That's one of the reasons it's so important that the SSCI reports that Wilson was informed of the Italian reports in his February 19 meeting. Cheney probably thought he could out Plame and justify it on her leaking him into (but he turned out to be wrong).

I also think they were particularly worried about Wilson because they had started to use the report from his trip to justify the Niger claim. Once he started telling people about it, it became clear the report was incomplete, and that they had used a report to justify this wrongly.

But finally, I would guess it comes down to two birds with one stone. They had Wilson, who had some damaging info, and they assumed he had access to the core of all the damaging info. So they tried to pretend that sending someone of Wilson's profile was unusual, precisley because it pissed Cheney off that Wilson had indirect access to all the intell that proved the war was unjustified.

[Mimikatz]

Anxburns: IIRC, Bush did not inspire such abject devotion until after 9/11. It may be that a bunch of people with conservative or libertarian leanings were unhinged by 9/11 to the degree that they had to believe in an all-powerful father figure that would keep them safe from any further attacks. Bush was made to fit the bill, and any concession that he is really out of his depth as President and/or cares more about staying in power than actually governing (or keeping us safe) would send them back to that place of fear. At least that is the conventional explanation.

Some people have a greater tolerance for ambuguity than others, and Bush's 'bots seem to have less than your average Dem who, I agree, is ever ready to criticize most any Dem leader.

[Jeff]

emptywheel

Though Robb-Silberman is, in general, better with its judgments and handling of the facts than SSCI, it is not nearly as detailed. The SSCI has lots of useful details, just not well handled. The bit on the JTFI is a good example, and quite useful at the moment, as it makes it sound like it was a rather robust organization.

Any idea what the Iraq Issues Group that Grenier was in charge of was? Here's the story on Grenier that mentions it, and I can't find anything else. Was this CIA, as it appears to be, interagency, what? Does it have another, more used name?

I'm still curious about the tension between Corn's account of the operation with Iraqi scientists and Risen's.

Finally, I wonder how detailed some of the information Libby and others learned was with regard to Plame's job. In particular, I wonder whether Cheney learned and told Libby back in June 2003 not just that Plame worked in CPD but more specifically that she was involved in the JTFI or some such - surely if that were the case, Fitzgerald would not have put it in the public documents.

[Sally]

emptywheel, I look forward to your commentary on the "two birds with one stone." In the near future we may have many questions answered if the Democrats gain a majority in at least the House. I do not want to go to my death with my country in the grip of Bush and his terrorists.

[orionATl]

it's good to learn this new detail.

but

as, i read the post and comments, it seems to me something very important is missing, at least in emphasis.

i don't yet understand how chaney/bush could not have known plame was working on iraq WMDs

and i can't figure out why, knowing that, they would have exposed her cia status. why not just have her transfered or otherwise disciplined?

true, jos Wilson's nytimes editorial was a dissident public voice, but by itself it did not do, and could not actually have done, any great harm to the cheney/bush iraq-invasion selling job.

i wonder when we read that the white house believed that " v. plame (wilson) sent her husband to niger" if they were not signaling their concern that she had told her husband a great deal more (about unsubstantiated administration wmd claims)

and that her husband might again publicly call into question one or another "pillar" of the official white house line being deployed to stampede the u.s. into an invasion of iraq.

more revelations about such pre-invasion fabrications as the little tubes of terror, the buried centrifuge parts, the trailers of biological destruction, the continuing secret weapons programs, etc.

might indeed have destroyed the pre-invasion selling job.

if this speculation were substantially true, it would mean that libby, rove, bush, and cheney and gang knew a lot more, and in a different direction, about plame and internal intelligence dissent from what we have been hearing and assuming for the last couple of years. and that their attack on plame was more than just punishment for wilson's outspokeness.

maybe this (plus deference to an election time) is why fitzgerald has grown so quiet.

[mamayaga]

So it is not unreasonable to wonder whether one of those defectors, particularly one with a strong INC affiliation, might have passed some details to Judy.

Are there any Arabic speakers out there? Do such speakers sometimes confuse the F and the P sounds? Could this be the explanation for Judy's notation about "Valerie Flame"? Didn't Novak also make that mistake? Could it be that he got also some of his info from defectors?

If Chalabi could share intelligence about our code breaking with Iran, surely he and his buddies wouldn't hesitate to talk to journalists about our CIA agents. On the other hand, that would be such a clean (and deniable) way to leak the information, the fact that Libby et al still went on to speak to reporters suggests they didn't do any of the leak via the Chalabi gang.

[ab initio]

Why have the DC Dem establishment not made a bigger deal about this?

I know the "we can't comment about a DoJ investigation". This was a political act and needs a political response.

[katie Jensen]

I still think that getting clear information about her role, if she was in fact undercover, is problematic. They have to hide some aspects of her work, don't they?? I think that we have rarely been given information about spying activity. I mean, do we have anyone coming forward and addressing their spy days outwardly?? With details?? I am suspect about any information about her role. But I am certain of this. If she were not covert, we would know for sure. Since she might be covert, that suggests to me, the fact that the government has not denied her completely, that there is risk to letting us know everything about her role. It's the only thing that makes sense to me.

It also makes it look more plausible that the point man in this could be grossman?

If it was just armitage gossiping about a woman who was not covert, not undercover, and it did not ruin her career, and it did no harm to the country, why would there be an investigation to begin with?? And why would this administration be lying all over itself about it?

It still stinks...and I can't imagine that Fitzgerald had nothing on Rove. It seems impossible. And that armitage wasn't charged with anything??

Things that make you go hmmmmm. (old reference but boy!! hmmmm)

[FredinVermont]

Now that we know just what Plame's job at the CIA was it seems quite plausible the she herself debriefed some of the Washington-based Chalabi gang "informers" who were trying to push stories about WMD in Iraq. If she had, of course, she would not have used her real name or her actual job title, but they would remember her and understand that she was somehow involved in the rejection of their information.

People like that would also very likely know Joe Wilson by sight either by seeing in Iraq or from the many pictures of him published when he made a big splash by standing up to Saddam before the first war. If someone with Chalabi who had spoken to Plame at the CIA later saw her and Wilson together around Washington they would have paid attention, easily learned that they were husband and wife, and felt that was a fact that should be noted and filed away by the Chalabi gang (who mostly are old Iraqi spooks).

So it is at least possible that the way Miller got into this story (and really really didn't want to have to talk about it) was that someone in the Chalabi gang, acting independently, used her to attempt to discredit Wilson in the same way that Libby and Rove did.

[emptywheel]

FredinVermont

That's kind of what I'm thinking. Though it's more complicated. Remember that Woolsey was the defacto lawyer for the INC and on at least one (I think it's two, but I'd have to check my notes) introduced a defector-labeled-fabricator to Judy/DOD. So he was right there in the transition place between the time when they'd be labeled as defectors and funnelled someplace else. And of course, he and Judy were both Benador Associates members (she had to renounce her membership because it made the NYT look bad).

In other words, I'm suggesting that someone--perhaps the former head of the CIA--monitored what the CIA was doing as he was shepherding Chalabi's defectors around.

[Dismayed]

Boom! OrionAT, Your comment makes a lot of sense to me. EW - Perhaps I'm the dumbest guy in the room, but I'm beginning to feel like we are finally getting to the meat of the matter. That final nexus that makes it all make sense is now visible. Chris Mathews ran a story on hardball, and the quote on there is that Fitz is NOW deciding if he's going to press charges on Rove, but won't comment for at least a week. Isn't that interesting? Looking over the last week, feels like the pot is coming to a boil.