When your are reading David Corn’s What Valerie Plame Really Did at the CIA, please keep the following in mind.
Lindsay Moran, in her book Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy, explains how a Case Officer recruits a foreign agent that will give us state secrets. Explaining her recruitment training at The Farm:
…I began to dread my meetings with [her target] Barry. I felt distraught and guilty every time I wrote back to headquarters: “Subject is motivated by desire to help his ailing daughter. If recruited, we can effectively control Subject by leveraging medical aid for his girl.”
…As Barry revealed more about his relationship with his brother-in-law, who, as per the scenario, “tells me everything,” and also about his frustration at not being able to cure his beloved daughter (“if only we had the money”), I was supposed to reciprocate by subtly suggesting ways in which the United States Government could help. I should also be moving our meeting to clandestine venues. The whole development process was supposed to culminate with Barry agreeing to provide me state secrets in exchange for money.
That would require me to lure Barry back to my room on the base, the only suitably secure venue in which I could recruit him. The whole process of recruitment was not unlike a courtship: I was the suitor, and Barry the coy and reluctant object of my affections.
In case you didn’t know, recruiting agents is a nasty business that involves manipulation, the exploitation of human frailty, the violation of trust, and blackmail. But that is not the lesson to be learned here. The lesson is that recruiting agents takes a lot of time. And I want you to think about that fact when you consider what the Bush administration tasked Valerie Plame Wilson to do.
Come the spring of 2001, she was in the CPD’s [Counterproliferation Division] 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.
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. 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.
“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.”
As a reminder, William Safire launched a virtual holy war on the CIA in the fall of 2001, complaining that they were intentionally downplaying intelligence coming in from Chalabi’s crew. He was undoubtedly doing this at the behest of and in coordination with Dick Cheney’s office. And Dick Cheney’s office was very impatient to get the kind of intelligence they wanted about Iraq’s WMD.
In the spring of 2002 Dick Cheney made one of his periodic trips to CIA headquarters. Officers and analysts were summoned to brief him on Iraq. Paramilitary specialists updated the Vice President on an extensive covert action program in motion that was designed to pave the way to a US invasion. Cheney questioned analysts about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. How could they be used against US troops? Which Iraqi units had chemical and biological weapons? He was not seeking information on whether Saddam posed a threat because he possessed such weapons. His queries, according to a CIA officer at the briefing, were pegged to the assumptions that Iraq had these weapons and would be invaded–as if a decision had been made.
Valerie Wilson “was placed in charge of its operations group” for the Joint Task Force on Iraq. In other words, she was coordinating the recruitment of agents and assessing the veracity and utility of walk-ins. The walk-ins were mostly Chalabi or Allawi plants. In other words, Dick Cheney’s operation was planting bogus agents and having them stovepipe intelligence into the system. He was not pleased when that intelligence was debunked and disbelieved by Valerie Plame Wilson’s outfit.
As Wilson tried to recruit agents to go to Iraq and make inquiries, she was under a lot of pressure and didn’t have a lot of time. The task was difficult enough. Identify a relative of an Iraqi weapons scientist or military officer that is living abroad. Identify their human weakness. Exploit that weakness, get them to compromise themselves, and convince them it will be better for them to accept money than for them to be exposed as betraying Iraq. Then get them into Iraq, a totalitarian state with a reputation for the most brutal torture, and get them to pose awkward questions to their relatives.
These things take time. And Wilson’s group was not given a whole lot of time to get the job done.
Insofar as they had any success at all, all their intelligence pointed to the fact that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction. That was a problem because as early as April of 2002 the United States had resolved to pursue regime change based on the threat of WMD and Saddam’s non-compliance on disarming and accepting unfettered inspections.
Coming up empty, Wilson was also subjected to the barrage of misinformation that Chalabi/Cheney were pumping into the system. She personally went and checked out the aluminum tubes, only to see her intelligence ignored and the tubes listed as likely for a non-existent nuclear program. Her husband personally went to Niger only to see his intelligence ignored in the famous 16 words.
It’s not hard to see why the Wilson’s were upset by the botched invasion of Iraq. And it is not hard to figure out why Dick Cheney turned on them the moment Wilson went public.
It doesn’t matter what Richard Armitage did. We’ve all seen Cheney’s marked up copy of Wilson’s editorial. We know he went after them.
