I’ve long admired the work Marcy Wheeler does, but she is not writing Gospel and she has a conspiratorial bent that is usually informed but not the same thing as the truth. When it comes to the case of Undiebomb 2.0, as she likes to call it, she is suggesting very strongly that the subpoenas of the Associated Press are a cover for something larger. She’s also convincing a lot of people that she’s right. But I don’t think she is.
For starters, I think it is a fundamental error of analysis to focus on the publication of the Associated Press article. And that leads to further mistakes, like blaming John Brennan for doing the damage the leaker actually caused and thinking the administration had signed off on making the information public because they planned to announce it the next day.
The focus should be on the moment the Associated Press confronted the administration with the information that they had acquired about the foiled bomb plot. That happened on May 2nd, 2012.
The news service was prepared to publish its scoop on May 2, 2012. But in discussions with government officials, the CIA stressed to AP that publishing anything about the operation to obtain the bomb and thwart the plot would create grave national security dangers and compromise a “sensitive intelligence operation.”
Michael J. Morell, the CIA’s deputy director, gave AP reporters some additional background information to persuade them to hold off, [former White House national security spokesman Tommy] Vietor said. The agency needed several days more to protect what it had in the works.
The same informant who acquired the undiebomb and gave it to the CIA also helped the CIA track down and kill Fahd al-Quso on May 6th. On May 7th, the CIA informed the Associated Press that their pressing national security concerns had been resolved and began negotiating with the AP over the timing of their publication.
In the interim period between finding out that someone had leaked the operation to the AP and beginning negotiations with the AP over publication, the American Intelligence Community had the unhappy responsibility of informing the British and Saudi Intelligence Communities that the cover of their informant was about to be blown. This was especially troublesome for the UK because they have laws against assassination, which meant the plan to eliminate Fahd al-Quso could come back to bite them if it went ahead (and it did go ahead).
I admit that there is something funny with the story about how the informant delivered a bomb to the CIA without blowing his own cover, but that’s what we’re being told.
…U.S. national security officials familiar with the matter said the real damage was done by the original leak to the AP because it revealed that the FBI had possession of the bomb. It also ended any chance of using the informant in the future. “They were going to keep him in there,” said the official.
Because I cannot quite envision how this worked, I just have to set it aside as an oddity. What we do know is that the informant and his family had to be hustled out of Yemen.
U.S. officials acknowledge that, after they were contacted by the AP and told it was going to publish the story, they alerted British intelligence, which scrambled to extract the informant and his family from Yemen.
So, before the AP ever published anything, the leak had caused a rift with Britain and Saudi Arabia, caused an emergency rescue mission of an in-place informant, complicated the mission to eliminate Fahd al-Quso, and caused alarm because they knew that the AP was going to report that the FBI had possession of the bomb.
If anyone wants to look at that and say that the White House wanted this information to come out so that they could take credit for it, they’re high on crack. But, unfortunately, that’s what digby is arguing:
I’m going to take a wild leap and guess that the AP sweep was a CYA operation to placate the British who were upset that the AP even had the original story of the glorious thwarted bomb plot — a story that the administration clearly wasn’t all that upset about except for the timing. (According to the AP, the administration had planned to make the announcement themselves a day later.) After all, if the agreement to hold the story broke down over the alleged request that the government not comment for one hour as government officials alleged, it’s fairly obvious their concerns were less about national security and more about spin. It was only after Brennan spilled the beans about their real secret that this thing came apart.
See how wrong that looks? Let’s start with the fact that the administration was planning to make an announcement the next day. Does digby truly not understand that the announcement was planned as a reaction to the article? If the article had not existed, there never would have been any announcement.
The White House and CIA declined to comment for this article. But former White House national security spokesman Tommy Vietor, recalling the discussion in the administration last year, said officials were simply realistic in their response to AP’s story. They knew that if it were published, the White House would have to address it with an official, detailed statement.
“There was not some press conference planned to take credit for this,” Vietor said in an interview. “There was certainly an understanding [that] we’d have to mitigate and triage this and offer context for other reporters.”
Marcy Wheeler responds to this quote from Mr. Vietor this way:
Jeebus Pete! If your idea of “mitigating and triaging” AP’s fairly complimentary story is to make it far, far worse by hinting about the infiltrator, you’re doing it wrong!
First of all, the the AP‘s article was not complimentary at all. It accused the administration of lying to the public about whether any threats existed around the anniversary of bin-Laden’s death (which was the probable motivation for the leak). It was that seeming contradiction that caused the White House to go into damage control. As for Ms. Wheeler’s assertion that Tommy Vietor made things worse, she is inferring that Mr. Vietor was coordinating with John Brennan in the damage control, which gets us to the next point. Ms. Wheeler has been going on and on about how the real harm from the leak was caused by John Brennan when he did a teleconference with former counterterrorism officials just after the publication of the AP article in which he revealed that there had never been any danger to the public because we had “inside control” of the plot. As a result of that briefing, Richard Clarke went on television and said that we had an informant.
But I think you can see from what I’ve written above that all the damage from the leak was already done at that point. The Brits were angry and legally compromised, the Saudis were pissed, a very sensitive operation to take out Fahd al-Quso had been complicated (and possibly sped up), the informant had been rescued and lost as an asset, and the article had been published revealing that the FBI had possession of the bomb. John Brennan had caused none of that.
In other words, it’s the wrong way of looking at it to think that the publication of the article was the main problem. All that added was the bit about the FBI having the bomb. The rest of the damage was done by the leak to the AP and the knowledge that publication could not be delayed indefinitely.
I’d also point out that, as far as I know, the alleged bomb maker, Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, is still on the loose. And this bomb had no metal pieces and could only be detected by body-scanners. I have no way of proving it, but it’s possible that Mr. al-Asisi would not still be out there concerning our national security team if this leak had not occurred.
In conclusion, I think it is plenty evident that this leak caused considerable damage on its own, and we do not need to posit some massive conspiracy at the Department of Justice to sweep up a bunch of ancillary leakers on other subjects. The DOJ went after the source of the leak because it’s possible that the person responsible is still in a position of responsibility and might make similar errors in judgment in the future.
Whether the scope of the DOJ’s surveillance was appropriate or not, I think people are minimizing the impact of the leak and maximizing their imaginations.
