The Wall Street Journal
REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Political Intelligence
The agenda behind the kerfuffle over Joe Wilson's wife.
Wednesday, October 1, 2003
We've been knocking our heads trying to figure out how a minor and
well-known story about an alleged CIA "outing" has suddenly blossomed into a
Beltway scandal-ette. The light bulb went off reading Monday's White House
press briefing.
Right out of the box, Helen Thomas asked if "the President tried to find out
who outed the CIA agent? And has he fired anyone in the White House yet?"
OK, the point of this exercise is to get President Bush to fire someone. But
whom? That answer became clear when the press corps quickly uttered, and
kept uttering for nearly an hour, the name "Karl Rove."
Of course! The reason this is suddenly a story is because Mr. Rove, the
President's political strategist and confidant from Texas, has become the
main target. Joseph Wilson, the CIA consultant at the center of this
mini-tempest, had recently fingered Mr. Rove as the official who leaked to
columnist Robert Novak that Mr. Wilson's wife works for the CIA. Mr. Wilson
has offered no evidence for this, and he's since retreated to say only that
he now believes Mr. Rove had "condoned it." The White House has replied that
the charge is "simply not true." But no matter, the scandal game is afoot.
The media, and the Democrats now slip-streaming behind them, understand that
the what of this mystery matters much less than the who. It's no accident
that Tony Blair's recent and evanescent scandal over WMD evidence concerned
his long-time political aide and intimate, Alastair Campbell. We're also old
enough to recall what happened to Jimmy Carter's Presidency once his old
Georgia friend Bert Lance was run out of town. If they can take down Mr.
Rove, the lead planner for Mr. Bush's re-election campaign, they will have
knocked the props out of his Presidency.
The political goals must be paramount here because the substance of the
story is so flimsy. The law against revealing the names of covert CIA agents
was passed in 1982 as a reaction against leaks by Philip Agee and other
hard-left types whose goal was to undermine CIA operations around the world.
This case is all about a policy dispute over Iraq. The first "outing" here
was the one Mr. Wilson did to himself by writing an op-ed in July for the
New York Times.
An avowed opponent of war with Iraq, Mr. Wilson was somehow hired as a
consultant by the CIA to investigate a claim made by British intelligence
about yellowcake uranium sought in Niger by Iraqi agents. Though we assume
he signed the routine CIA confidentiality agreement, Mr. Wilson blew his own
cover to denounce the war and attack the Bush
Administration for lying. Never mind that the British still stand by their
intelligence, and that the CIA's own October 2002 National Intelligence
Estimate on Iraq, since partly declassified, lent some credence to the
evidence.
This is the context in which Mr. Novak was told that Mr. Wilson had been
hired at the recommendation of his wife, a CIA employee. This is hardly
blowing a state secret but is something the public had a right to know. When
an intelligence operative essentially claims that a U.S. President sent
American soldiers off to die for a lie, certainly that operative's own
motives and history ought to be on the table. In any event, Mrs. Wilson was
not an agent in the field but is ensconced at Langley headquarters. It
remains far from clear that any law was violated.
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The real intelligence scandal is how an open opponent of the U.S. war on
terror such as Mr. Wilson was allowed to become one of that policy's
investigators. That egregious CIA decision echoes what has obviously been a
long-running attempt by anonymous "intelligence sources" quoted in the media
to undermine the Bush policy toward Iraq. Mr. Bush's policies of prevention
and pursuing state sponsors of terror overturned more than 30 years of CIA
anti-terror dogma, and some of the bureaucrats are hoping to defeat him in
2004.
As recently as Monday, the New York Times hung its lead story around a leak
that the Pentagon had somehow not got its money's worth from the $1 million
it had spent mining some of Ahmed Chalabi's intelligence tips. We'd love to
see a declassified bang-for-the-buck analysis of the tens of millions the
CIA has spent paying sources who claimed to have Saddam Hussein in their
sights. If CIA Director George Tenet can't control his bureaucracy, then
President Bush should find a director who can.
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Which brings us back to the politics. The Democratic Presidential candidates
are naturally all over this pseudo-story, calling for a "special counsel"
and Congressional probe. They can suddenly posture as great defenders of the
CIA and covert operations, though some of them spent the decades before 9/11
assailing both. And if they can't get Mr. Bush to give up Mr. Rove, perhaps
they can keep the story going through next November.
At least we can be thankful that Democrats buried the independent counsel
statute during the Clinton years. "Leak" investigations are notoriously
fruitless in any case and typically a waste of Justice Department resources.
It's especially amusing to see the media whose lifeblood is leaks feigning
outrage. We trust that Mr. Bush and Republicans on Capitol Hill understand
that if they throw Mr. Rove over the side, the blood in the water will
really be theirs.
