First, the caveats. The top
CIA employee fired last week for allegedly sharing classified
information with the Washington Post and other news
organizations, has not officially been charged with any crime. Nor
has she been referred to the Justice Department for prosecution.
But the public firing of former Inspector General executive Mary O.
McCarthy on April 20 - just ten days before she was scheduled to
retire after two decades in government - was virtually unprecedented
in the history of the Agency, and shows the tremendous fissures that
have opened up within our intelligence community.
We're only at the beginning of learning about the extraordinary
internal probe that singled out McCarthy for having "unauthorized
contacts" with reporters. But even the little we know so far is
stunning.
Furious at the leaks that exposed sensitive intelligence programs -
including the existence of- "secret prisons" the Agency has used
periodically to hold high priority suspected terrorists - CIA
Director Porter Goss kicked off the internal investigation by
personally submitting to a polygraph.
He then called on other top Agency officials to do the same. Those
who went "on the box" included McCarthy's boss, CIA Inspector Geeral
John. L. Helgerson. All the while, Porter Goss led the probe
himself.
Internal probes led personally by a CIA director are virtually
unheard of. As far as I've been able to ascertain from Agency
veterans, there hasn't been a single one in the past fifteen
years.
But late last year, top intelligence executives began to seriously
review a 2001 Robert Redford/Brad Pitt thriller, Spy Game, in
which a wily covert operator (Redford) is grilled by the CIA Director
and top Agency lawyers about an operation gone sour, on the very day
he is scheduled to retire.
The interrogation goes on and off the record, as lawyers dig up new
information, and Robert Redford conducts his own covert operation
right under their noses. In the Hollywood version, the CIA
director¬Ýis the villain (naturally) and the rogue agent
is the hero.
To the enemies of the Bush administration in Congress and elsewhere,
the same holds true today.
Senator John Kerry told George Stephanopoulos on ABC this Week
last Sunday that he was "glad she told the truth." He then went on to
compare the courageous truth-telling of Mary McCarthy to the "lies"
of former deputy National Security Advisor Scooter Libby, charged
with perjury in the Valerie Plame case.
"Here's my fundamental view of this," Kerry said. "You have somebody
being fired from the CIA for allegedly telling the truth, and you
have no one fired from the White House for revealing a CIA agent in
order to support a lie. That underscores what's really wrong in
Washington, D.C."
Kerry was repeating almost word for word an earlier comment by former
Agency analyst Larry Johnson, who found the firing of McCarthy
"smells a little fishy." Noting that "she may have been fired for
ensuring that the truth about an abuse was told to the American
people," Johnson went on to comment: "there is something potentially
honorable in that action, particularly when you consider that George
Bush authorized Scooter Libby to leak misleading information for the
purpose of deceiving the American people about the grounds for going
to war in Iraq."
Johnson has made a career in recent years in becoming a source for
the media in slamming Bush. But the media convenently forgets that
key among his credentials is a famous op-ed he wrote just days before
the September 11, 2001 attacks, claiming that the threat from
terrorism had become virtually non-existent, thanks to Clinton
administration policies.
McCarthy's lawyer, Ty Cobb, claims his client did not leak classified
information, although the CIA concluded from a polygraph that she had
undisclosed contacts with journalists, including Washington
Post reporter Dana Priest who just received a Pulitzer for her
role in exposing the CIA "secret prisons."
Ray
McGovern, a former CIA
analyst who co-founded the anti-Bush Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity, blames House Permanent Select Intelligence
committee chairman Pete Hoekstra for compelling Mary McCarthy to
"chose between a silence she would regret and being punished for
speaking out." She went to the Post, McGovern said, because
she had "no where else to turn."
Former clandestine officers say that the leaks surrounding the
extraordinary renditions have caused "tremendous damage" to the
Agency and have "physically endangered" officers currently serving
overseas.
A great ideological divide separates these officers, who believe that
a "secret service" ought to remain secret, and others in the Agency
who believe they have a "duty" to expose what they believe are
unlawful or unethical actions by the Agency.
One thing is certain: the firing of Mary McCarthy is far from the end
of this drama, which began with the forced departures in the weeks
after Goss arrived at CIA of top managers and covert operators who
had profound political disagreements with the new Director and with
the Bush administration.
For the ideological divide currently paralyzing our intelligence
community runs deep and is not limited to CIA or State Department
analysts. It involves top officials, who believe they have a moral
"duty" to prevent the President of the United States from executing
policies with which they disagree.
I call this sabotage.
Some in Congress are attempting to encourage the leakers and to
intimidate those who keep secrets, by threatening legal action
against intelligence officers who fail to inform Congress of
clandestine operations.
Maryland Democrat Chris Van Hollen pursued this approach in a Feb.
15, 2006, House national security committee hearing on NSA
whistleblowers.
In his questioning of Russell Tice, who was dismissed from the NSA
last year, Van Hollen noted sternly that people "will be very alarmed
at the kind of abuses that went on in those agencies."
Tice had sought whistleblower protection in order to testify on
highly classified Special Access Programs, or SAPs, he claimed were
improperly carried out by both the NSA and the DIA. Some of these
programs, which involved NSA eavesdropping on international
communications, have been called "warrantless wiretapping" by the
press.
But Van Hollen was not interested in information. He wanted to send a
chill down the spine of those in the intelligence community he
considered to be his "enemies."
He warned Tice that "a court of law may determine that an individual
NSA employee could be held criminally liable for violating the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act," which establishes guidelines
for obtaining a court order to carry out surveillance against
potential terrorist targets in the United States.
This is how far we have come in Year- Five of the War on Terror.
Members of the United States Senate and the U.S. House of
Representatives do not seem to agree with the president of the United
States that our nation is at war, and that war requires a vigorous
intelligence establishment, willing to take risks to protect the
nation. Instead, they are seeking to bend the law and enhance their
own powers, to intimidate intelligence officers out of doing their
jobs.
This, too, is sabotage.
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