Former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, who ran herd on Woodward & Bernstein during the Watergate salad days, opines in a Vanity Fair interview going on sale today that he thinks the likely source who leaked Valerie Plame's CIA identity was none other than Colin Powell's top deputy, Richard Armitage. If true, and Bradlee is as sharp a guesser for this stuff as anyone alive, it proves anew that in 43's first term his own State Department did a better job of waging internecine warfare against the White House staff than they did implementing his foreign policy.
There is more: The Chicago Tribune (free subscription; minimal info to register) has run an article blowing Valerie Plame's "cover" status out of the water, citing intelligence sources who explain that because Plame was stationed at the US embassy in Athens her status would have been known to friend and foe alike; the information about Plame's embassy status was obtained by the Tribune online! A source identified by the paper as a "senior U.S. intelligence official" told the paper that ..."it would be a fair assumption that a true-blue NOC is not someone who has a headquarters job at any point or an embassy job at any point." The article quotes one CIA agent with 20 years experience as saying that "the key is the [embassy] address. That is completely unacceptable for an NOC. She wasn't an NOC, period." Another agent is quoted as follows:
"[Genuine NOCs] never use an official address. If she had [a diplomatic] address, her
whole cover's completely phony. I used to run NOCs. I was in an
embassy. I'd go out and meet them, clandestine meetings. I'd pay them
cash to run assets or take trips. I'd give them a big bundle of cash.
But they could never use an embassy address, ever."
The Washington Post has a story today in which Bradlee hedges his VF story. NRO's Byron York details today a likely war between the CIA and career officials at Justice that went on for two months, until CIA Director George Tenet's letter to Justice was leaked in late September 2003 to the Washington Post, setting off the media firestorm that led to Patrick Fitzgerald being appointed special counsel in December. The plot thickens. Still it looks more and more like no cover blown, no crime. Yet Fitzgerald sits tight as his case looks more insane with each passing disclosure.
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