Valerie Plame’s pal Larry Johnson posts a letter from “a group of distinguished intelligence and military officers, diplomats, and law enforcement professionals” to the Senate Judiciary Committee “strongly urging that (they) not send Mukasey’s nomination to the full Senate before he makes clear his view on waterboarding.”

If anyone ever cared to investigate who was involved in leaking national security information to the New York Times and Washington Post, I’d suggest waterboarding some of the people on this list of signatories.

Brent Cavan
Intelligence Analyst, Directorate of Intelligence, CIA

Ray Close
Directorate of Operations, CIA for 26 years—22 of them overseas; former Chief of Station, Saudi Arabia

Ed Costello
Counter-espionage, FBI

Michael Dennehy
Supervisory Special Agent for 32 years, FBI; U.S. Marine Corps for three years

Rosemary Dew
Supervisory Special Agent, Counterterrorism, FBI

Philip Giraldi
Operations officer and counter-terrorist specialist, Directorate of Operations, CIA

Michael Grimaldi
Intelligence Analyst, Directorate of Intelligence, CIA; Federal law enforcement officer

Mel Goodman
Division Chief, Directorate of Intelligence, CIA; Professor, National Defense University; Senior Fellow, Center for International Policy

Larry Johnson
Intelligence analysis and operations officer, CIA; Deputy Director, Office of Counter Terrorism, Department of State

Richard Kovar
Executive Assistant to the Deputy Director for Intelligence, CIA: Editor, Studies In Intelligence

Charlotte Lang
Supervisory Special Agent, FBI

W. Patrick Lang
U.S. Army Colonel, Special Forces, Vietnam; Professor, U.S. Military Academy, West Point; Defense Intelligence Officer for Middle East, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA); founding director, Defense HUMINT Service

Lynne Larkin
Operations Officer, Directorate of Operations, CIA; counterintelligence; coordination among intelligence and crime prevention agencies; CIA policy coordination staff ensuring adherence to law in operations

Steve Lee
Intelligence Analyst for terrorism, Directorate of Intelligence, CIA

Jon S. Lipsky
Supervisory Special Agent, FBI

David MacMichael
Senior Estimates Officer, National Intelligence Council, CIA; History professor; Veteran, U.S. Marines (Korea)

Tom Maertens
Foreign Service Officer and Intelligence Analyst, Department of State; Deputy Coordinator for Counter-terrorism, Department of State; National Security Council (NSC) Director for Non-Proliferation

James Marcinkowski
Operations Officer, Directorate of Operations, CIA by way of U.S. Navy

Mary McCarthy
National Intelligence Officer for Warning; Senior Director for Intelligence Programs, National Security Council

Ray McGovern
Intelligence Analyst, Directorate of Intelligence, CIA; morning briefer, The President’s Daily Brief; chair of National Intelligence Estimates; Co-founder, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)

Sam Provance
U.S. Army Intelligence Analyst, Germany and Iraq (Abu Ghraib); Whistleblower

Coleen Rowley
Special Agent and attorney, FBI; Whistleblower on the negligence that facilitated the attacks of 9/11.

Joseph Wilson
Foreign Service Officer, U.S. Ambassador and Director of Africa, National Security Council.

Valerie Plame Wilson
Operations Officer, Directorate of Operations

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.

It looked suspicious to me this morning when I read Rick Moran‘s explanation of just who is representing Mary O. McCarthy. The mere presence of that particular counsel suggested strong ties to the strategic and financial wellsprings of the democratic left.

We had already seen Larry Johnson, Rand Beers, and Larry Wilkerson rush to McCarthy’s defense. And now here comes no less than Ray McGovern himself, chief spokesman of VIPs, the public face of the Anti-Bush Intel Operation, defending her on PBS.

video

The ever-expanding roster of Pouting Spooks appearing out of the woodwork to defend La McCarthy’s God-given Constitutional right to register personal dissent from White House policies by dispensing National Security secrets to the Press would appear further to hint darkly about the lady’s personal and professional associations and ties.

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Hat tip to AJStrata

Hot Air has assembled a very handy primer of background information.

If she’s innocent, it seems a curious coincidence that she’s got such a high-powered democrat party defense attorney defending her.

H/T to Michelle Malkin.

Washington Post reports that Mrs. McCarthy’s not guilty, and you can’t prosecute her successfully either, if she is.

A lawyer representing fired CIA officer Mary O. McCarthy said yesterday that his client did not leak any classified information and did not disclose to Washington Post reporter Dana Priest the existence of secret CIA-run prisons in Eastern Europe for suspected terrorists.

The statement by Ty Cobb, a lawyer in the Washington office of Hogan & Hartson who said he was speaking for McCarthy, came on the same day that a senior intelligence official said the agency is not asserting that McCarthy was a key source of Priest’s award-winning articles last year disclosing the agency’s secret prisons.

McCarthy was fired because the CIA concluded that she had undisclosed contacts with journalists, including Priest, in violation of a security agreement. That does not mean she revealed the existence of the prisons to Priest, Cobb said.

Cobb said that McCarthy, who worked in the CIA inspector general’s office, “did not have access to the information she is accused of leaking,” namely the classified information about any secret detention centers in Europe. Having unreported media contacts is not unheard of at the CIA but is a violation of the agency’s rules…

..Though McCarthy acknowledged having contact with reporters, a senior intelligence official confirmed yesterday that she is not believed to have played a central role in The Post’s reporting on the secret prisons. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing personnel matters…

..Where Cobb’s account and the CIA’s account differed yesterday is on whether McCarthy discussed any classified information with journalists. Intelligence sources said that the inspector general’s office was generally aware of a secret prison program but that McCarthy did not have access to specifics, such as prison locations…

..Thomas S. Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, a nongovernmental research institute at George Washington University, said he does not think the Post article includes the kind of operational details that a prosecutor would need to build a case.

“It’s the fact of the thing that they’re trying to keep secret, not to protect sources and methods, but to hide something controversial,” he said. “That seems like a hard prosecution to me.”

Kate Martin, executive director of the Center for National Security Studies, said that “even if the espionage statutes were read to apply to leaks of information, we would say the First Amendment prohibits criminalizing leaks of information which reveal wrongful or illegal activities by the government.”

And the New York Times unlimbers its Ouija Board and channels a warning from a Pouting Spook.

A criminal trial would be devastating for Langley,” said one former C.I.A. officer, referring to the agency’s Virginia headquarters. He spoke about a possible prosecution on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the case.

Well, they’ve double-dared Porter Goss and the Administration to try to do anything about the Press leaks and the Anti-Bush Intel Operation. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens next.

Robin has compiled a link collection, which may be helpful for those trying to connect the dots.

MacRanger, I think, calls it right. The exposure of Mary O. McCarthy is just the beginning. The MSM is wasting all the ink it’s spilling this morning trying to establish a whistleblower defense. Ms. McCarthy is probably not going to jail. She has most likely already made a deal. It’s her associates in the Pouting Spooks Conspiracy who will be going up the river, with her testifyng against them.

..Mary’s discovery definitely came as a part of a tip, most likely on the promise of immunity, which I find most intriguing and amusing. Imagine a mole on the inside who is now spilling the beans on those leakers – such as Mary – who have been leaking stories over the last three years. Its going to be fun to watch the rats devour one another to save their own hides.

As we all know – or should know – since before and especially during the 2004 election cycle leaks were coming out at a fast and furious pace. It was if the State Department and the CIA had suddenly become a 24 hour news service, leaking information specifically designed to undermine the Bush administration, the war effort, and ulitmately was intended to defeat the President’s reelection effort.

We now know that McCarthy was a hire of Sandy Burglar, a Clintonista, and a heavy contributor to failed Presidential candidate John Kerry. In addition she worked out of the IG’s office of the CIA who would have directly worked on the referral to the JD of the Valerie Plame Game. As the Agency is a small sorority, I immediately wonder just how close she was and is to Valerie Plame.

As I noted from the beginning of the Plame Game, the story was never about Joe Wilson’s boondoggle to Niger per-se, but about an elaborate coup by a group of rogue ops to undermine the President of the United States in war time. This is much more than just the leak of CIA prisons – a story which in itself is false, but about the oldest type of war waged and which the CIA is expert at. That being toppling Governments by misinformation propaganda designed to sow discord among the people. Thus the Plame Game was and continues to be a ruse – a paper tiger- a fact that Fitzgerald and his bungling prosecution continually reminds us of.

Mary McCarthy’s ties to the Clinton Administration and Kerry campaign (and via Beers implicitly to the Pouting Spooks VIPS organization) were identified by Rick Ballard of YARGB (writing at Just One Minute):

National Security Advisor Samuel R. Berger announced today the appointment of Mary O’Neil McCarthy as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Intelligence Programs. Mrs. McCarthy succeeds Rand Beers.

Hat tip to AJStrata.

The New York Times reports:

Public records show that Ms. McCarthy contributed $2,000 in 2004 to the presidential campaign of John Kerry, the Democratic nominee.

UPDATE

Tom Maguire finds the Times’s report just a bit short of complete:

However, per public records at Open Secrets, we can easily find the $2,000 donation to Kerry, a $5,000 donation by Mary O. McCarthy to the Ohio DNC, a $2,000 donation by a Michael J McCarthy from the same address (Husband, brother, bro-in-law, dad? I’ll guess hubby), and a $500 donation to Barbara Mikulski, all in 2004.

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FURTHER UPDATE

Spook86 draws upon an insider’s understanding to put McCarthy’s rank & career in perspective:

Ms. McCarthy had been an agency employee for 22 years at the time of her dismissal. She had strong ties to the Clinton Administration; disgraced former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger (of “Secrets Down My Pants” fame) engineered her appointment as Special Assistant to the President for Intelligence Programs in 1998. Before that, she held a similar post at the National Intelligence Council (NIC), and previously served as National Intelligence Officer (NIO) for Warning (1994-1996), and the Deputy NIO for Warning (1991-1994).

You’ll note that many media accounts describe the leaker as an “analyst,” suggesting that she was, at best, a mid-level staffer. That was hardly the case; few analysts make the jump from a regional desk at Langley to the White House. A “National Intelligence Officer” is the equivalent of a four-star general in the military, or a cardinal in the Catholic Church. There are only a handful of NIOs in the intelligence community; they are in charge of intelligence community efforts in a particular area. As a senior officer for Warning, Ms. McCarthy was tasked, essentially, with preventing future Pearl Harbors. Observers will note that McCarthy’s tenure in that role coincided with early strikes by Islamofacists against the United States, including the first World Trade Center bombing, and the Khobar Towers attack. It could be argued that Ms. McCarthy’s performance in the warning directorate was mediocre, at best–but it clearly didn’t affect her rise in a Democratic Administration.

Equally interesting is her meteoric rise within the intelligence community. According to her bio, she joined the CIA as an analyst in 1984. Within seven years, she had rise to a Deputy NIO position, and reached full NIO status by 1994. To reach that level, she literally catapulted over dozens of more senior officers–and I’m guessing that her political connections didn’t hurt. By comparison, I know a current NIO, with a resume and academic credentials more impressive than Ms. McCarthy’s, who reached the position after more than 20 years of extraordinarily distinguished service. McCarthy’s rapid advancement speaks volumes about how the Clinton Administration did business, and sheds new light on the intelligence failures that set the stage for 9-11. We can only wonder how many other political hacks climbed the intel food chain under Clinton–and remain in place to this day…

.. I also detect the whiff of sour grapes in her motivation for leaking information to the Post. At the time she talked with reporter Dana Priest, Ms. McCarthy was apparently working in the CIA Inspector General’s Office. The agency, citing the Privacy Act, hasn’t divulged her pay grade or title at the time of her firing, but it seems certain that she was not at the NIO level. After the rarefied air of the Clinton White House, McCarthy had been banished to a relative backwater at Langley, and she was likely upset by the apparent demotion.

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And look who admits knowing her, but “doesn’t consider her a friend,” Pouting Spook, VIPs member, and Plame Pal Larry Johnson himself:

Let me state at the outset that the officer in question, Mary McCarthy, is an old acquaintance. I hasten to add that I do not consider her a friend. She was my immediate boss in 1988-89 and was instrumental in my decision to leave the CIA and take a job at the State Department’s Office of Counter Terrorism. Mary, in my experience, was a terrible manager. I left the CIA in 1989 despite having received two exceptional performance awards during my last eight months on the job because I could not stand working under her.

But Johnson is ready to perform some pretty demanding intellectual acrobatics to defend her:

I am struck by the irony that Mary McCarthy may have been fired for blowing the whistle and ensuring that the truth about an abuse was told to the American people. 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. While I’m neither a fan nor friend of Mary’s, she may have done a service for her country.

Mary McCarthy

A variety of news sources are reporting that Mary McCarthy, a veteran CIA officer employed by the agency’s Inspector General’s Office has been identified as having illegallly given classified information to Washington Post reporter Dana Priest.

McCarthy, previously an employee of the NSA and currently nearing retirement, failed a polygraph test. She then admitted to more than a dozen unauthorized meetings with Priest, at which she supplied a variety of classified information, not all the content of which has so far been identified. It is clear, however, that it was McCarthy who provided the classified information leading to the Washington Post’s published reports of secret prisons in Eastern Europe, for which Priest received a 2006 Pulitzer Prize.

The case is now under review by the Justice Department, and an indictment is expected.

NBC — AP

CSIS bio (both photo & bio have been removed):

Prior to joining CSIS in August 2001, Mary O. McCarthy was a senior policy adviser to the CIA’s deputy director for science and technology. Until July 2001, she served as special assistant to the president and senior director for intelligence programs on the National Security Council (NSC) Staff, under both Presidents Clinton and Bush. From 1991 until her appointment to the NSC, McCarthy served on the National Intelligence Council. She began her government service as an analyst, then manager, in CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence, holding positions in both African and Latin American analysis. From 1979 to 1984 she was employed by BERI, S.A., conducting financial, operational, and political risk assessments for multinational companies and banks. Previously she had taught at the University of Minnesota and was director of the Social Science Data Archive at Yale University. McCarthy has a B.A. and M.A. in history from Michigan State University, an M.A. in library science from the University of Minnesota, and a Ph.D. in history from the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Social Change and the Growth of British Power in the Gold Coast (University Press of America, 1983).