With each passing day, the manufactured "scandal" over the publication of
Valerie Plame's relationship with the CIA establishes new depths of
mainstream-media hypocrisy. A highly capable special prosecutor is probing
the underlying facts, and it is appropriate to withhold legal judgments
until he completes the investigation over which speculation runs so rampant.
But it is not too early to assess the performance of the press. It's been
appalling.

Is that hyperbole? You be the judge. Have you heard that the CIA is actually
the source responsible for exposing Plame's covert status? Not Karl Rove,
not Bob Novak, not the sinister administration cabal du jour of Fourth
Estate fantasy, but the CIA itself? Had you heard that Plame's cover has
actually been blown for a decade - i.e., since about seven years before
Novak ever wrote a syllable about her? Had you heard not only that no crime
was committed in the communication of information between Bush
administration officials and Novak, but that no crime could have been
committed because the governing law gives a person a complete defense if an
agent's status has already been compromised by the government?
No, you say, you hadn't heard any of that. You heard that this was the crime
of the century. A sort of Robert-Hanssen-meets-Watergate in which Rove is
already cooked and we're all just waiting for the other shoe - or shoes - to
drop on the den of corruption we know as the Bush administration. That,
after all, is the inescapable impression from all the media coverage. So who
is saying different?
The organized media, that's who. How come you haven't heard? Because they've
decided not to tell you. Because they say one thing - one dark,
transparently partisan thing - when they're talking to you in their news
coverage, but they say something completely different when they think you're
not listening.
You see, if you really want to know what the media think of the Plame case -
if you want to discover what a comparative trifle they actually believe it
to be - you need to close the paper and turn off the TV. You need, instead,
to have a peek at what they write when they're talking to a court. It's a
mind-bendingly different tale.
SPUN FROM THE START
My colleague Cliff May has already demonstrated the bankruptcy of the
narrative the media relentlessly spouts for Bush-bashing public consumption:
to wit, that Valerie Wilson, nee Plame, was identified as a covert CIA agent
by the columnist Robert Novak, to whom she was compromised by an
administration official. In fact, it appears Plame was first outed to the
general public as a result of a consciously loaded and slyly hypothetical
piece by the journalist David Corn. Corn's source appears to have been none
other than Plame's own husband, former ambassador and current
Democratic-party operative Joseph Wilson - that same pillar of national
security rectitude whose notion of discretion, upon being dispatched by the
CIA for a sensitive mission to Niger, was to write a highly public op-ed
about his trip in the New York Times. This isn't news to the media; they
have simply chosen not to report it.
The hypocrisy, though, only starts there. It turns out that the media
believe Plame was outed long before either Novak or Corn took pen to paper.
And not by an ambiguous confirmation from Rove or a nod-and-a-wink from
Ambassador Hubby. No, the media think Plame was previously compromised by a
disclosure from the intelligence community itself - although it may be
questionable whether there was anything of her covert status left to salvage
at that point, for reasons that will become clear momentarily.
This CIA disclosure, moreover, is said to have been made not to Americans at
large but to Fidel Castro's anti-American regime in Cuba, whose palpable
incentive would have been to "compromise[] every operation, every
relationship, every network with which [Plame] had been associated in her
entire career" - to borrow from the diatribe in which Wilson risibly
compared his wife's straits to the national security catastrophes wrought by
Aldrich Ames and Kim Philby.
THE MEDIA GOES TO COURT ... AND SINGS A DIFFERENT TUNE
Just four months ago, 36 news organizations confederated to file a
friend-of-the-court brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington. At the
time, Bush-bashing was (no doubt reluctantly) confined to an unusual
backseat. The press had no choice - it was time to close ranks around two of
its own, namely, the Times's Judith Miller and Time's Matthew Cooper, who
were threatened with jail for defying grand jury subpoenas from the special
prosecutor.
The media's brief, fairly short and extremely illuminating, is available
here. The Times, which is currently spearheading the campaign against Rove
and the Bush administration, encouraged its submission. It was joined by a
"who's who" of the current Plame stokers, including ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, AP,
Newsweek, Reuters America, the Washington Post, the Tribune Company (which
publishes the Los Angeles Times and the Baltimore Sun, among other papers),
and the White House Correspondents (the organization which represents the
White House press corps in its dealings with the executive branch).
The thrust of the brief was that reporters should not be held in contempt or
forced to reveal their sources in the Plame investigation. Why? Because, the
media organizations confidently asserted, no crime had been committed. Now,
that is stunning enough given the baleful shroud the press has consciously
cast over this story. Even more remarkable, though, were the key details
these self-styled guardians of the public's right to know stressed as being
of the utmost importance for the court to grasp - details those same
guardians have assiduously suppressed from the coverage actually presented
to the public.
Though you would not know it from watching the news, you learn from reading
the news agencies' brief that the 1982 law prohibiting disclosure of
undercover agents' identities explicitly sets forth a complete defense to
this crime. It is contained in Section 422 (of Title 50, U.S. Code), and it
provides that an accused leaker is in the clear if, sometime before the
leak, "the United States ha[s] publicly acknowledged or revealed" the covert
agent's "intelligence relationship to the United States[.]"

As it happens, the media organizations informed the court that long before
the Novak revelation (which, as noted above, did not disclose Plame's
classified relationship with the CIA), Plame's cover was blown not once but
twice. The media based this contention on reporting by the indefatigable
Bill Gertz - an old-school, "let's find out what really happened" kind of
journalist. Gertz's relevant article, published a year ago in the Washington
Times, can be found here.
THE MEDIA TELLS THE COURT: PLAME'S COVER WAS BLOWN IN THE MID-1990s
As the media alleged to the judges (in Footnote 7, page 8, of their brief),
Plame's identity as an undercover CIA officer was first disclosed to Russia
in the mid-1990s by a spy in Moscow. Of course, the press and its attorneys
were smart enough not to argue that such a disclosure would trigger the
defense prescribed in Section 422 because it was evidently made by a
foreign-intelligence operative, not by a U.S. agency as the statute
literally requires.
But neither did they mention the incident idly. For if, as he has famously
suggested, President Bush has peered into the soul of Vladimir Putin, what
he has no doubt seen is the thriving spirit of the KGB, of which the Russian
president was a hardcore agent. The Kremlin still spies on the United
States. It remains in the business of compromising U.S. intelligence
operations.
Thus, the media's purpose in highlighting this incident is blatant: If Plame
was outed to the former Soviet Union a decade ago, there can have been
little, if anything, left of actual intelligence value in her "every
operation, every relationship, every network" by the time anyone spoke with
Novak (or, of course, Corn).
THE CIA OUTS PLAME TO FIDEL CASTRO
Of greater moment to the criminal investigation is the second disclosure
urged by the media organizations on the court. They don't place a precise
date on this one, but inform the judges that it was "more recent" than the
Russian outing but "prior to Novak's publication."
And it is priceless. The press informs the judges that the CIA itself
"inadvertently" compromised Plame by not taking appropriate measures to
safeguard classified documents that the Agency routed to the Swiss embassy
in Havana. In the Washington Times article - you remember, the one the press
hypes when it reports to the federal court but not when it reports to
consumers of its news coverage - Gertz elaborates that "[t]he documents were
supposed to be sealed from the Cuban government, but [unidentified U.S.]
intelligence officials said the Cubans read the classified material and
learned the secrets contained in them."
Thus, the same media now stampeding on Rove has told a federal court that,
to the contrary, they believe the CIA itself blew Plame's cover before Rove
or anyone else in the Bush administration ever spoke to Novak about her. Of
course, they don't contend the CIA did it on purpose or with malice. But
neither did Rove - who, unlike the CIA, appears neither to have known about
nor disclosed Plame's classified status. Yet, although the Times and its
cohort have a bull's eye on Rove's back, they are breathtakingly silent
about an apparent CIA embarrassment - one that seems to be just the type of
juicy story they routinely covet.
A COMPLETE DEFENSE?
The defense in Section 422 requires that the revelation by the United States
have been done "publicly." At least one U.S. official who spoke to Gertz
speculated that because the Havana snafu was not "publicized" - i.e.,
because the classified information about Plame was mistakenly communicated
to Cuba rather than broadcast to the general public - it would not available
as a defense to whomever spoke with Novak. But that seems clearly wrong.
First, the theory under which the media have gleefully pursued Rove, among
other Bush officials, holds that if a disclosure offense was committed here
it was complete at the moment the leak was made to Novak. Whether Novak then
proceeded to report the leak to the general public is beside the point - the
violation supposedly lies in identifying Plame to Novak. (Indeed, it has
frequently been observed that Judy Miller of the Times is in contempt for
protecting one or more sources even though she never wrote an article about
Plame.)
Perhaps more significantly, the whole point of discouraging public
disclosure of covert agents is to prevent America's enemies from degrading
our national security. It is not, after all, the public we are worried
about. Rather, it is the likes of Fidel Castro and his regime who pose a
threat to Valerie Plame and her network of U.S. intelligence relationships.
The government must still be said to have "publicized" the classified
relationship - i.e., to have blown the cover of an intelligence agent - if
it leaves out the middleman by communicating directly with an enemy
government rather than indirectly through a media outlet.
LINGERING QUESTIONS
All this raises several readily apparent questions. We know that at the time
of the Novak and Corn articles, Plame was not serving as an intelligence
agent outside the United States. Instead, she had for years been working,
for all to see, at CIA headquarters in Langley. Did her assignment to
headquarters have anything to do with her effectiveness as a covert agent
having already been nullified by disclosure to the Russians and the Cubans -
and to whomever else the Russians and Cubans could be expected to tell if
they thought it harmful to American interests or advantageous to their own?
If Plame's cover was blown, as Gertz reports, how much did Plame know about
that? It's likely that she would have been fully apprised - after all, as we
have been told repeatedly in recent weeks, the personal security of a covert
agent and her family can be a major concern when secrecy is pierced.
Assuming she knew, did her husband, Wilson, also know? At the time he was
ludicrously comparing the Novak article to the Ames and Philby debacles, did
he actually have reason to believe his wife had been compromised years
earlier?
And could the possibility that Plame's cover has long been blown explain why
the CIA was unconcerned about assigning a one-time covert agent to a job
that had her walking in and out of CIA headquarters every day? Could it
explain why the Wilsons were sufficiently indiscrete to pose in Vanity Fair,
and, indeed, to permit Joseph Wilson to pen a highly public op-ed regarding
a sensitive mission to which his wife - the covert agent - energetically
advocated his assignment? Did they fail to take commonsense precautions
because they knew there really was nothing left to protect?
We'd probably know the answers to these and other questions by now if the
media had given a tenth of the effort spent manufacturing a scandal to
reporting professionally on the underlying facts. And if they deigned to
share with their readers and viewers all the news that's fit to print ... in
a brief to a federal court.
- Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, is a senior fellow at the
Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.