The New York Times reports that Barack Obama’s leftwing position during the campaign are now running into conflicts with reality as decisions on CIA appointments and policy need to be made.

Obama can’t appoint the best choice for CIA Director for fear of offending the leftwing base.

Last week, John O. Brennan, a C.I.A. veteran who was widely seen as Mr. Obama’s likeliest choice to head the intelligence agency, withdrew his name from consideration after liberal critics attacked his alleged role in the agency’s detention and interrogation program. Mr. Brennan protested that he had been a “strong opponent” within the agency of harsh interrogation tactics, yet Mr. Obama evidently decided that nominating Mr. Brennan was not worth a battle with some of his most ardent supporters on the left.

Mr. Obama’s search for someone else and his future relationship with the agency are complicated by the tension between his apparent desire to make a clean break with Bush administration policies he has condemned and concern about alienating an agency with a central role in the campaign against Al Qaeda.

Mark M. Lowenthal, an intelligence veteran who left a senior post at the C.I.A. in 2005, said Mr. Obama’s decision to exclude Mr. Brennan from contention for the top job had sent a message that “if you worked in the C.I.A. during the war on terror, you are now tainted,” and had created anxiety in the ranks of the agency’s clandestine service. …

The flap over Mr. Brennan, who served as a chief of staff to George J. Tenet when he ran the C.I.A., was the biggest glitch so far in what has been an otherwise smooth transition for Mr. Obama. Some C.I.A. veterans suggest that the president-elect may have difficulty finding a candidate who can be embraced by both veteran officials at the agency and the left flank of the Democratic Party.

Now that the decision-making power, and the responsibility, are theirs, democrats have to square the circle of contradiction between liberal pieties and effectively preventing terrorist attacks. Will “human and non-coercive” methods really get the villain to tell where the ticking time bomb is located, or will Jack Bauer just have to shoot him in the knee?

On Wednesday, a dozen retired generals and admirals are to meet with senior Obama advisers to urge him to stand firm against any deviation from the military’s noncoercive interrogation rules.

But even some senior Democratic lawmakers who are vehement critics of the Bush administration’s interrogation policies seemed reluctant in recent interviews to commit the new administration to following the Army Field Manual in all cases.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who will take over as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee in January, led the fight this year to force the C.I.A. to follow military interrogation rules. Her bill was passed by Congress but vetoed by President Bush.

But in an interview on Tuesday, Mrs. Feinstein indicated that extreme cases might call for flexibility. “I think that you have to use the noncoercive standard to the greatest extent possible,” she said, raising the possibility that an imminent terrorist threat might require special measures.

Afterward, however, Mrs. Feinstein issued a statement saying: “The law must reflect a single clear standard across the government, and right now, the best choice appears to be the Army Field Manual. I recognize that there are other views, and I am willing to work with the new administration to consider them.”

Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, another top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said he would consult with the C.I.A. and approve interrogation techniques that went beyond the Army Field Manual as long as they were “legal, humane and noncoercive.” But Mr. Wyden declined to say whether C.I.A. techniques ought to be made public.

C.I.A. officials have long argued that publishing a list of interrogation techniques only allows Al Qaeda to train its operatives to resist them. But they say the secrecy has led to exaggeration and myth about the agency’s detention program.

Greg Miller, at the LA Times, reports that a multi-hundred million dollar CIA program to create shell companies in agreeable European locations designed to supply non-official cover in the War on Terror has been concluded to have been ill-conceived, and all but two of the companies have been closed down. The leaked story indicates that the ultimate decision, which sounds sensible enough, was arrived at via the Agency’s customary processes of cat fighting and back biting.

But critics called the arrangement convoluted, and argued that whatever energy the agency was devoting to the creation of covers should be focused on platforms that could get U.S. spies close to their most important targets.

“How does a businessman contact a terrorist?” said a former CIA official involved in the decision to shut down the companies. “If you’re out there selling widgets, why are you walking around a mosque in Hamburg?”

Rather than random businesses, these officials said, the agency should be creating student aid organizations that work with Muslim students, or financial firms that associate with Arab investors.

Besides broad concerns about the approach, officials said there were other problems with the companies. Some questioned where they were located. One, for example, was set up in Portugal even though its principal targets were in North Africa.

The issue became so divisive that the agency’s then-director, Porter J. Goss, tapped the official then in charge of the CIA’s European division, Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, to lead an in-house review of the NOC strategy.

Mowatt-Larssen sided with critics of the approach and began pulling the plug on the companies before he left the agency to take a senior intelligence post at the Department of Energy, officials said. Mowatt-Larssen declined to comment.

The agency is in the midst of rolling out a series of new platforms that are more narrowly targeted, officials said. The External Operations and Cover Division has been placed under Eric Pound, a veteran foreign officer who was CIA station chief in Athens during the 2004 Olympics.

But the agency is still struggling to overcome obstacles, including resistance from many of the agency’s station chiefs overseas, most of whom rose through the ranks under traditional cover assignments and regard the NOC program with suspicion and distrust.

In one recent case, officials said, the CIA’s station chief in Saudi Arabia vetoed a plan to send a NOC officer who had spent years developing credentials in the nuclear field to an energy conference in Riyadh.

The NOC “had been invited to the conference, had seen a list of invitees and saw a target he had been trying to get to,” said a former CIA official familiar with the matter. “The boss said, ‘No, that’s why we have case officers here.’

Reuters:

Philip Agee, a former CIA agent who exposed its undercover operations in Latin America in a 1975 book, died in Havana, the Cuban Communist Party newspaper Granma said on Wednesday.

Agee, 72, died on Monday night, the newspaper said, calling him a “loyal friend of Cuba and staunch defender of the peoples’ struggle for a better world.”

His widow, German ballet dancer Giselle Roberge, told friends he had been in hospital since December 15 and did not survive surgery for perforated ulcers.

Agee worked for the CIA for 12 years in Washington, Ecuador, Uruguay and Mexico. He resigned in 1968 in disagreement with U.S. support for military dictatorships in Latin America and became one of the first to blow the whistle on the CIA’s activities around the world.

His expose “Inside the Company: CIA Diary” revealed the names of dozens of agents working undercover in Latin America and elsewhere in the world. …

The U.S. government called Agee a traitor and said some of the agents he exposed were murdered, an allegation he rejected.

Agee’s disclosure of the identities of CIA agents, which led to several assassinations, resulted in the passage of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982.

He was 72 and died of perforated ulcers. So much for Cuban health care.

Former CIA officer Joseph Weissberg, in an editorial exemplifying perfectly the can-do attitude characteristic of the Agency’s liberal intelligentsia, explains just how futile the recruiting of foreign agents really is.

According to statements by Tyler Drumheller, the former chief of the CIA’s European operations, the CIA entered into a clandestine relationship with Iraq’s then-foreign minister, Naji Sabri, in mid-2002. Drumheller has claimed that Sabri provided the CIA with documentary evidence that Iraq did not have an active program to pursue weapons of mass destruction.

But Sabri’s information had no influence whatsoever on U.S. policy. Nor did it alter the CIA’s own assessment of Iraqi weapons capabilities. This is because Sabri, like virtually every other CIA asset, could not possibly have been trusted. So any intelligence he provided was useless.

Intelligence from almost all CIA assets is unreliable for the simple reason that so many of them are double agents, meaning that the CIA recruited them but that they are being controlled by their own countries’ intelligence services. When I worked at CIA headquarters in the early 1990s, I once suggested to a friend who worked in counterintelligence that up to a third of all CIA agents could be doubles. He said the number was probably much higher.

Concrete proof is always scarce in these matters, but from the late 1970s to the late 1980s, most and very likely all Cuban agents on the CIA payroll were doubles. So were a majority of East German agents during the Cold War.

If Sabri was being controlled by Iraqi intelligence as a double, the most likely goal of such an operation would have been to convince the U.S. government that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction. This means that Sabri’s “intelligence” would have been the same whether he was a double or not — Iraq had no WMD. So the only way to figure out if it was real intelligence or disinformation would have been to determine with absolute certainty whether Sabri was a double.

The CIA has methods to try to detect double agents, but they’re far from foolproof. Polygraph exams are probably considered the most useful and are frequently administered to agents. But it’s unlikely that on the eve of war an Iraqi foreign minister would be able to sneak away for a polygraph exam without risking detection. Even if he did take and pass such an exam, the question of the polygraph’s reliability would loom large. And even the biggest supporters of polygraphs would be reluctant to make a case for or against war on the basis of polygraph results.

But what if the CIA, for whatever reason, was convinced that Sabri was not a double agent? The agency still would have had to factor in the overwhelming likelihood that, like most CIA agents, he was working first and foremost in his own interest. (The collection of defectors and exiles who misled us so badly in Iraq practically gave new meaning to “working in your own interest” — their goal was to have the United States invade their country.) In Sabri’s case, his overriding concern probably would have been securing CIA protection in the event of a U.S. invasion. This could have led him to tell the entire truth about everything he knew. But it could just as easily have led him to tell us what he thought we wanted to hear.

Let’s assume, despite all these obstacles, that the CIA somehow determined that Sabri was being truthful. Being truthful still wouldn’t mean that Sabri knew the truth. Would the Iraqi foreign minister know whether Iraq had WMD? In Saddam Hussein’s secretive police state, the answer could easily be no.

Intelligence professionals have to sort through these kinds of problems all the time. But it’s rarely, if ever, possible to come to a definitive conclusion.

So the CIA, on the eve of war, may have had something close to the dream recruit — a member of Hussein’s inner circle — and he was providing intelligence on the most salient question of the war — did Iraq possess WMD? — and he was right. But what good did the intelligence do? None.

I’m convinced. I’ve been persuaded for a long time that the current Agency, infested with pacifists and liberals, afflicted with Hamlet-like doubts, and encrusted with decades of Congressional restriction should simply be abolished. A brand-new high morale, and really secret, organization operating out of a handful of anonymous houses and obscure office buildings should replace it.

Christopher Hitchens says it’s time to abolish the CIA, because someone destroyed videotapes which could be used by the Agency’s adversaries to attack it.

He has the right idea, but he has the wrong reasons. The chap who destroyed those tapes did exactly the right thing.

Ex-Spook Charles McCarry identifies why the CIA needs to be abolished far more accurately in in his 1992 espionage thriller Second Sight.

—————————————————————
A description of the Agency’s earlier days:

The Outfit had no headquarters. Its employees, whose numbers cost, and true identities were kept secret from everyone except the O.G. (“the Old Gentleman,” the head of the Outfit), were scattered around Washington in gimcrack temporary government buildings left over the First World War, or in offices with the names of fictitious organizations painted on the doors, or in private houses in discreet residential neighborhoods. This milieu, in which daring undertakings were planned and spacious ideas were discussed in mean little rooms by ardently ambitious men who were mostly very young, preserved a wartime atmosphere long after WWII was over. This was exactly what the O.G. wanted.

“Nooks and crannies, visibility zero — that’s the ticket,” he said. “The day we move into a big beautiful building with landscaped grounds and start hanging portraits of our founders is the day we begin to die.”

The sentence that Patchen murmured to the O.G. over their inedible dinner at the Club was this: “If (Patchen were captured and fully debriefed by the enemy), we could start all over again.”

But, more recently:

There was no need for him to explain his idea. The O.G. grasped its perfection and simplicity as soon as the words were spoken. If Patchen’s memory were emptied by the enemy like
those of the others who had been kidnapped, the Outfit could not continue to exist. There could be no going back to what had existed before; something new would have to be created to take the Outfit’s place — something that would recapture the energy, the patriotism, the audacity, the sheer fun of the Outfit in its youth.

Both Patchen and the O.G. had believed for a long time that a way must be found for American espionage to start over again. The Cold War was over. Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism (always, as the O.G. liked to say, “a lie wrapped in a sham surrounded by a delusion”) had collapsed under the weight of its own pathology. The old secret alliances against the Russian Communists, built up over half a century by the O.G. and Patchen and their operatives, had outlived their usefulness. A new world was in the making. A new intelligence service was required to study it, to discover America’s real enemies and to help her real friends.

The Outfit in its present form could not do the job. Its methods were outdated, its purposes irrelevant. Its best people, the brilliant, intrepid eccentrics recruited by the O.G. were gone, having grown old in the service or having been driven out of it by wave after wave of exposés in the press, investigations in Congress, reforms by the Executive Branch, and mutilating internal reorganizations imposed from above. The combined effect of all these assaults had been to render it almost incapable of operating as a secret intelligence service. Its agents in the field could no longer behave as spies must behave — with duplicity, ruthlessness, cold logic, and unquestioning devotion to their cause (that is to say, like idealists) — without fearing that they might be called home, frog-marched through the media, and indicted on felony charges.

This state of affairs was a triumph for the Outfit’s foes, foreign and domestic. Some of the Outfit’s own former officials had gone so far as to testify before Congress or talk to the press about “legalizing” the Outfit’s activities. This was an absurd notion on the face of it — the very purpose of a secret intelligence service is to carry out illegal actions with the unacknowledged blessing of its government — but it was eagerly taken up by good-hearted, patriotic people as well as by others,… who instinctively loved their country’s enemies better than they loved their country. Little by little, the Outfit had been robbed of its reputation and its élan, and of all but a few of the tools it needed to carry out its mission.

Jill Dekker

Daily Mail:

An EU expert on biological warfare has told how she fears ending up ‘dead in the woods’ like scientist Dr David Kelly after an alleged campaign of intimidation by members of MI6 and the CIA.

Jill Dekker, a bio-defence expert based in Brussels, has reported a string of sinister incidents – including the parking of a hearse outside her house – after making a speech critical of British and American policy in the Middle East.

Her claims are included in a new book by Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker which argues that Dr Kelly was murdered to silence his criticism of the grounds for going to war in Iraq. …

She was placed under the protection of the Belgian government after reporting a series of sinister incidents earlier this year. …

Dr Dekker says the ‘intimidation’ against her started in March, as she was flying to Florida to give a speech on Syria’s weapons programme to an intelligence summit. She says she was subjected to a ‘heavy-handed’ interrogation by a man she suspects of being a British intelligence operative.

She believes the speech made her powerful enemies because she argued that billions of dollars spent by the US government to develop a smallpox vaccine has been wasted because scientists – including British experts – have used a different viral strain to the one she believes is being developed in Damascus.

If this is true, it means governments would have no way of protecting the public against the use of the virus by terrorists or rogue states.

She also believes that Iraq did have a biological weapons capacity which was all shipped to Syria before the outbreak of war.

She argues this was known, but was concealed from the public because the real purpose of the war was not to target weapons of mass destruction but to topple Saddam Hussein and gain a strategic foothold in the region.

When she returned to her home in Belgium after the speech she said she was subjected to an overt campaign of surveillance and harassment, including being continuously followed on foot and having cars parked outside her house with the headlights on.

On one occasion, she says she found a hearse parked outside her house with the drivers ‘staring straight ahead.’ When she approached, it sped off and she pursued it, taking photographs as evidence. …

Last night, Mr Baker said he believed Dr Dekker could have made enemies by exposing a fallacy at the heart of military action against Iraq.

“If the war was really about WMD, then to be consistent we should also invade Syria,” he said.

“Otherwise, it suggests that it was more about giving Saddam a bloody nose.”

All this sounds a great deal like the usual leftwing Hollywood meme of the innocent person of integrity targeted by the sinister representatives of corrupt government trying to cover something up, but her contention that Saddam’s WMD were shipped to Syria is probably perfectly true, and I certainly agree that the Bush Administration’s failure to invade Syria as well in pursuit of those WMD is very puzzling.

This post falls into the “making a note of it… just for the record” category.

On Thursday last, the New York Times reported that CIA Director Michael Hayden has initiated an unusual investigation into the activities of the CIA’s Inspector General’s Office.

According to the Times, all this stems from criticism by that office of the CIA’s performance pre-9/11, and from “aggressive investigations” of “detention and interrogation programs and other matters.”

But, as MacRanger points out, it was Inspector General John L. Helgerson who personally recruited the same Mary O. McCarthy who was fired in April of 2006 for leaking information on covert counter-terrorism operations to Washington Post reporter Dana Priest.

AJStrata thinks the Times is spinning, and agrees that this story is really about CIA internal efforts finally to do something about the partisan leaks of highly classified national security information to the press by adversaries of the Administration within the agency.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we aren’t beginning to see some reciprocity, in the form of the Agency actually doing something about the most outrageous leaks, in return for the Bush Administration’s surrender, its abandonment of efforts to reform the Agency, and the reinstatement of Stephen R. Kappes and Michael Sulick.

No longer pouting, but smiling with content, Bush administration adversaries in the CIA put their feet up and reminisce contemptuously about Porter Goss and his associates, referred to as “Goslings,” who tried to change the agency’s culture and were defeated.

“From day one, Goss and his people seemed to be punching above their weight,” reports Jeff Stein.

Michael J. Sulick in 2005

The question about who’s really in charge in Washington has been settled. The amateurs who came to town after the election of the year 2000 and started interfering with the professionals and experts making up the real government have been put in their place or made to resign, and it’s back to business as usual in the interval of waiting for the next democrat party administration to arrive.

Ken Timmerman reports:

The Central Intelligence Agency announced on Friday that it was calling back from retirement a controversial former operations officer to head the National Clandestine Service, three years after he left the Agency to protest reforms being put in place by then-CIA Director Porter Goss.

Michael J. Sulick was associate deputy director for operations at the time he resigned in November 2004 along with his boss, Stephen R. Kappes.

The Wall Street Journal called their bitter fight with Porter Goss and his aides over Agency reform “an insurgency,” although both Kappes and Sulick were praised by Rep. Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, who became a fierce critic of Goss and his reforms.

Sulick’s return was praised by John McLaughlin, who as acting CIA director in July 2004 was involved in his earlier appointment, prior to the clash with Goss.

“Mike Sulick’s return is a big plus for the agency,” McLaughlin told NewsMax. “He is open to new ideas, but espionage in the classic sense has been around since biblical times and — while novelty is always welcome — there’s a lot to be said for the proven experience that Mike Sulick brings to the table. “

The National Clandestine Service, formerly known as the Directorate of Operations, is the Agency’s elite corps of spies.

When Goss took over the Agency in September 2004, he sought to revitalize the clandestine service and weed out “dead wood” operators who were the product of an “old boys network” that failed to recruit spies in difficult overseas environments.

But he ran into fierce opposition from Kappes, Sulick and other products of the CIA “old guard,” who objected to Goss’s efforts to reform the operations directorate and bring it under his control.

As I will reveal in my upcoming book, “Shadow Warriors: Traitors, Saboteurs, and the Party of Surrender,” Kappes had been implicated in a serious security breach at a CIA station overseas, but was never disciplined by the Agency.

Furthermore, both he and Sulick were engaged in activities to lobby members of Congress in their own districts that violated U.S. law. When Goss tried to discipline them, the two men resigned in protest.

Sulick’s message sends a “terrible message” to CIA officers who are trying to do their job and stay out of politics, and suggests that the CIA bench is so thin they have no other candidates for the critical job as head of the Clandestine Service, former agency officers said.

Goss was trying to change the “culture” of the DO, where Clandestine officers were promoted for the number of foreign sources they recruited, not the quality of their information.

Sulick and Kappes earned a reputation as political infighters, who fiercely opposed the policies of the Bush administration in the war on terror and the war in Iraq.

“Sulick’s appointment is an unbelievable slap at the president,” a congressional source told NewsMax over the weekend.

Michael J. Sulick bio.

Newsweek‘s hunt for Bin Laden article has some interesting accounts attributing his success at escaping justice to excesses of official caution (Hey! the press might criticize them) and bureaucratic paralysis.

As recalled by Gary Berntsen, the CIA officer in charge of the covert team working with the Northern Alliance, code-named Jawbreaker, the military refused his pleas for 800 Army Rangers to cut off bin Laden’s escape. Maj. Gen. Dell Dailey, the Special Ops commander sent out by Central Command, told Berntsen he was doing an “excellent job,” but that putting in ground troops might offend America’s Afghan allies. “I don’t give a damn about offending our allies!” Berntsen yelled, according to his 2005 book, “Jawbreaker.” “I only care about eliminating Al Qaeda and delivering bin Laden’s head in a box!” (Dailey, now the State Department’s counterterror chief, told NEWSWEEK that he did not want to discuss the incident, except to say that Berntsen’s story is “unsubstantiated.”)

Berntsen went to Crumpton, his boss at the CIA, who described to NEWSWEEK his frantic efforts to appeal to higher authority. Crumpton called CENTCOM’s commander, Gen. Tommy Franks. It would take “weeks” to mobilize a force, Franks responded, and the harsh, snowy terrain was too difficult and the odds of getting bin Laden not worth the risk. Frustrated, Crumpton went to the White House and rolled out maps of the Pakistani-Afghan border on a small conference table. President Bush wanted to know if the Pakistanis could sweep up Al Qaeda on the other side. “No, sir,” Crumpton responded. (Vice President Dick Cheney did not say a word, Crumpton recalled.) The meeting was inconclusive. Franks, who declined to comment, has written in his memoirs that he decided, along with Rumsfeld, that to send troops into the mountains would risk repeating the mistake of the Soviets, who were trapped and routed by jihadist guerrilla fighters in the 1980…

Whenever (Special Forces Operations Sergeant Adam Rice) and his men moved within five kilometers of the safe house, he says, they had to file a request form known as a 5-W, spelling out the who, what, when, where and why of the mission. Permission from headquarters took hours, and if shooting might be involved, it was often denied. To go beyond five kilometers required a CONOP (for “concept of operations”) that was much more elaborate and required approval from two layers in the field, and finally the Joint Special Operations Task Force at Baghram air base near Kabul. To get into a fire fight, the permission of a three-star general was necessary. “That process could take days,” Rice recalled to NEWSWEEK. He often typed forms while sitting on a 55-gallon drum his men had cut in half to make a toilet seat. “We’d be typing in 130-degree heat while we’re crapping away with bacillary dysentery and sometimes the brass at Kandahar or Baghram would kick back and tell you the spelling was incorrect, that you weren’t using the tab to delimit the form correctly.”

But Rice made his request anyway. Days passed with no word. The window closed; the target—whether Mullah Omar or not—moved on. Rice blames risk aversion in career officers, whose promotions require spotless (“zero defect”) records—no mistakes, no bad luck, no “flaps.” The cautious mind-set changed for a time after 9/11, but quickly settled back in. High-tech communication serves to clog, rather than speed the process. With worldwide satellite communications, high-level commanders back at the base or in Washington can second-guess even minor decisions.

Read the whole thing.

The MSM is reporting that Valerie Plame’s status as a covert CIA agent has been confirmed (and the left blogosphere is howling in triumph), but all that has really happened is that Patrick Fitzgerald reiterated in his sentencing brief the same leap of logic he has been using all along to justify his meritless prosecution.

The relevant law is the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, which makes it a crime intentionally to reveal the identity of a US covert Intelligence agent.

US CODE TITLE 50 > CHAPTER 15 > SUBCHAPTER IV > § 426 defines the term “covert agent:”

4) The term “covert agent” means—
(A) a present or retired officer or employee of an intelligence agency or a present or retired member of the Armed Forces assigned to duty with an intelligence agency—
(i) whose identity as such an officer, employee, or member is classified information, and
(ii) who is serving outside the United States or has within the last five years served outside the United States.

Fitzgerald’s summary says:

While assigned to CPD [Counterproliferation Division], Ms. Wilson engaged in Temporary Duty (TDY) travel overseas on official business. She traveled at least seven times to more than ten countries. When traveling overseas, Ms. Wilson always traveled under a cover identity–sometimes in true name and sometimes in alias–but always using cover–whether official or non-official cover (NOC)–with no ostensible relationship to the CIA.

Fitzgerald is attempting to conflate a business trip abroad with “serving outside the United States,” and conventional casual procedure with “affirmative measures to conceal her intelligence relationship to the United States.”

Victoria Toensing, who as Deputy Assistant Attorney General at the time helped draft the 1982 Act, has testified before Congress that Valerie Plame was not covert under the definition of the Act.

Pouting Spook Larry Johnson inadvertently reveals the pretext being employed by Fitzgerald:

Valerie Plame was undercover until the day she was identified in Robert Novak’s column. I entered on duty with Valerie in September of 1985. Every single member of our class–which was comprised of Case Officers, Analysts, Scientists, and Admin folks–were undercover.

Everybody employed by the CIA above the rank of janitor is supposed to make modest pro forma efforts to avoid disclosing the identity of his employer and the nature of his employment. That does not make every CIA-employed “Analyst, Scientist, or Administrator” a “covert agent” under the definition of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. Nor should routine non-disclosure or pro forma use of cover, on the level of James Bond’s supposed employment at “Universal Export,” be considered to rise to the level of the “affirmative measures” meantioned in the Act.

Patrick Fitzgerald is employing a crucial leap of interpretation to get to where he wants to go, and he wants to go there for partisan political advantage, not for reasons having anything to do with National Security or Justice.

ABC News:

The CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert “black” operation to destabilize the Iranian government, current and former officials in the intelligence community tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com.

The sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the subject, say President Bush has signed a “nonlethal presidential finding” that puts into motion a CIA plan that reportedly includes a coordinated campaign of propaganda, disinformation and manipulation of Iran’s currency and international financial transactions.

How can the publication of this kind of story in time of war not be vigorously prosecuted by the Department of Justice?

You don’t find the MSM reporting on the organized activities of retired and actively serving Intelligence officers, including ABC’s informants on this matter, to mount a covert “black” operation to destabilize the Bush Administration though, do you?