The Importance of the Plame Affair

By George Friedman

There are three rules concerning
political scandal in the United States. First, every administration has
scandals. Second, the party in opposition will always claim that there has
never been an administration as corrupt as the one currently occupying the
White House. Three, two is almost never true. It is going to be tough
for any government to live up to the Grant or Harding administrations for
financial corruption, or the Nixon and Lincoln administrations for political
corruption -- for instance, was Lincoln's secretary of war really preparing a
coup d'etat before the president's assassination? And sex scandals -- Clinton
is not the gold standard. Harding was having sex with his mistress in the
Oval Office -- and no discussion was possible over whether it was actually
sex. Andrew Jackson's wife was unfairly accused of being a prostitute.
Grover Cleveland had an illegitimate child. Let's not start on John F.
Kennedy.

Political scandal is the national sport -- the only
unchanging spectator activity where a fine time is had by all, save the
turkey who got caught this time. That is the fourth rule: Americans love a
good scandal, and politicians usually manage to give them one. Thus, the Tom
DeLay story is the epitome of national delight. Whether DeLay broke the law
or the Texas prosecutor who claims he did is a Democratic hack out to make a
name for himself matters little. A good time will be had by all, and in a few
years no one will remember it. Does anyone remember Bert Lance or Richard
Secord?

As we discussed in previous weeks, scandals become
geopolitically significant when they affect the ability
of the president to conduct foreign policy. That has not yet happened to
George W. Bush, but it might happen. There is, however, one maturing scandal
that interests us in its own right: the Valerie Plame affair, in which Karl Rove, the
most important adviser to the president, and I. Lewis Libby, the chief of
staff to the vice president, apparently identified Plame as a CIA agent --
or at least did not vigorously deny that she was one when they were
contacted by reporters. Given that this happened during a time of war, in
which U.S. intelligence services are at the center of the
war -- and are not as effective as the United States might wish -- the
Plame affair needs to be examined and understood in its own right. Moreover,
as an intelligence company, we have a particular interest in how intelligence
matters are handled.

The CIA is divided between the Directorate of
Intelligence, which houses the analysts, and the Directorate of Operations,
which houses the spies and the paramilitary forces. The spies are, in
general, divided into two groups. There are those with official cover and
those with non-official cover. Official cover means that the agent is
working at the U.S. embassy in some country, acting as a cultural,
agricultural or some other type of attaché, and is protected by diplomatic
immunity. They carry out a variety of espionage functions, limited by the
fact that most foreign intelligence services know who the CIA agents at the
embassy are and, frankly, assume that everyone at the embassy is an agent.
They are therefore followed, their home phones are tapped, and their maids
deliver scraps of paper to the host government. This obviously limits the
utility of these agents. Being seen with one of them automatically blows the
cover of any potential recruits.

Then there are those with
non-official cover, the NOCs. These agents are the backbone of the American
espionage system. A NOC does not have diplomatic cover. If captured, he has
no protection. Indeed, as the saying goes, if something goes wrong, the CIA
will deny it has ever heard of him. A NOC is under constant pressure when he
is needed by the government and is on his own when things go wrong. That is
understood going in by all NOCs.

NOCs come into the program in
different ways. Typically, they are recruited at an early age and shaped for
the role they are going to play. Some may be tracked to follow China, and
trained to be bankers based in Hong Kong. Others might work for an American
engineering firm doing work in the Andes. Sometimes companies work with the
CIA, knowingly permitting an agent to become an employee. In other
circumstances, agents apply for and get jobs in foreign companies and work
their way up the ladder, switching jobs as they go, moving closer and closer
to a position of knowing the people who know what there is to know. Sometimes
they receive financing to open a business in some foreign country, where over
the course of their lives, they come to know and be trusted by more and more
people. Ideally, the connection of these people to the U.S. intelligence
apparatus is invisible. Or, if they can't be invisible due to something in
their past and they still have to be used as NOCs, they develop an
explanation for what they are doing that is so plausible that the idea that
they are working for the CIA is dismissed or regarded as completely unlikely
because it is so obvious. The complexity of the game is endless.

These
are the true covert operatives of the intelligence world. Embassy personnel
might recruit a foreign agent through bribes or blackmail. But at some
point, they must sit across from the recruit and show their cards: "I'm from
the CIA and…." At that point, they are in the hands of the recruit. A NOC may
never once need to do this. He may take decades building up trusting
relationships with intelligence sources in which the source never once
suspects that he is speaking to the CIA, and the NOC never once gives a hint
as to who he actually is.

It is an extraordinary life. On the one
hand, NOCs may live well. The Number Two at a Latin American bank cannot be
effective living on a U.S. government salary. NOCs get to live the role and
frequently, as they climb higher in the target society, they live the good
life. On the other hand, their real lives are a mystery to everyone.
Frequently, their parents don't know what they really do, nor do their own
children -- for their safety and the safety of the mission. The NOC may
marry someone who cannot know who they really are. Sometimes they themselves
forget who they are: It is an occupational disease and a form of madness.
Being the best friend of a man whom you despise, and doing it for 20 years,
is not easy. Some NOCs are recruited in mid-life and in mid-career. They
spend less time in the madness, but they are less prepared for it as well.
NOCs enter and leave the program in different ways -- sometimes under their
real names, sometimes under completely fabricated ones. They share one
thing: They live a lie on behalf of their country.

The NOCs are the
backbone of American intelligence and the ones who operate the best sources
-- sources who don't know they are sources. When the CIA says that it needs
five to 10 years to rebuild its network, what it is really saying is that it
needs five to 10 years to recruit, deploy and begin to exploit its NOCs. The
problem is not recruiting them -- the life sounds cool for many recent
college graduates. The crisis of the NOC occurs when he approaches the most
valuable years of service, in his late 30s or so. What sounded neat at 22
rapidly becomes a mind-shattering nightmare when their two lives collide at
40.

There is an explicit and implicit contract between the United
States and its NOCs. It has many parts, but there is one fundamental part: A
NOC will never reveal that he is or was a NOC without special permission.
When he does reveal it, he never gives specifics. The government also makes
a guarantee -- it will never reveal the identity of a NOC under any
circumstances and, in fact, will do everything to protect it. If you have
lied to your closest friends for 30 years about who you are and why you talk
to them, no government bureaucrat has the right to reveal your identity for
you. Imagine if you had never told your children -- and never planned to
tell your children -- that you worked for the CIA, and they suddenly read in
the New York Times that you were someone other than they thought you
were.

There is more to this. When it is revealed that you were a NOC,
foreign intelligence services begin combing back over your life, examining
every relationship you had. Anyone you came into contact with becomes
suspect. Sometimes, in some countries, becoming suspect can cost you your
life. Revealing the identity of a NOC can be a matter of life and death --
frequently, of people no one has ever heard of or will ever hear of
again.

In short, a NOC owes things to his country, and his country
owes things to the NOC. We have no idea what Valerie Plame told her family
or friends about her work. It may be that she herself broke the rules,
revealing that she once worked as a NOC. We can't know that, because we
don't know whether she received authorization from the CIA to say things
after her own identity was blown by others. She might have been
irresponsible, or she might have engaged in damage control. We just don't
know.

What we do know is this. In the course of events, reporters
contacted two senior officials in the White House -- Rove and Libby. Under
the least-damaging scenario we have heard, the reporters already knew that
Plame had worked as a NOC. Rove and Libby, at this point, were obligated to
say, at the very least, that they could neither confirm nor deny the report.
In fact, their duty would have been quite a bit more: Their job was to lie
like crazy to mislead the reporters. Rove and Libby had top security
clearances and were senior White House officials. It was their sworn duty,
undertaken when they accepted their security clearance, to build a
"bodyguard of lies" -- in Churchill's phrase -- around the truth concerning
U.S. intelligence capabilities.

Some would argue that if the
reporters already knew her identity, the cat was out of the bag and Rove and
Libby did nothing wrong. Others would argue that if Plame or her husband had
publicly stated that she was a NOC, Rove and Libby were freed from their
obligation. But the fact is that legally and ethically, nothing relieves
them of the obligation to say nothing and attempt to deflect the inquiry.
This is not about Valerie Plame, her husband or Time Magazine. The
obligation exists for the uncounted number of NOCs still out in the field.


Americans stay safe because of NOCs. They are the first line of
defense. If the system works, they will be friends with Saudi citizens who
are financing al Qaeda. The NOC system was said to have been badly handled
under the Clinton administration -- this is the lack of humint that has been
discussed since the 9-11 attacks. The United States paid for that. And that
is what makes the Rove-Libby leak so stunning. The obligation they had was
not only to Plame, but to every other NOC leading a double life who is in
potentially grave danger.

Imagine, if you will, working in Damascus
as a NOC and reading that the president's chief adviser had confirmed the
identity of a NOC. As you push into middle age, wondering what happened to
your life, the sudden realization that your own government threatens your
safety might convince you to resign and go home. That would cost the United
States an agent it had spent decades developing. You don't just pop a new
agent in his place. That NOC's resignation could leave the United States
blind at a critical moment in a key place. Should it turn out that Rove and
Libby not only failed to protect Plame's identity but deliberately leaked
it, it would be a blow to the heart of U.S. intelligence. If just one
critical NOC pulled out and the United States went blind in one location,
the damage could be substantial. At the very least, it is a risk the United
States should not have to incur.

The New York Times and Time Magazine
have defended not only the decision to publish Plame's name, but also have
defended hiding the identity of those who told them her name. Their
justification is the First Amendment. We will grant that they had the right
to publish statements concerning Plame's role in U.S. intelligence; we
cannot grant that they had an obligation to publish it. There is a huge gap
between the right to publish and a requirement to publish. The concept of
the public's right to know is a shield that can be used by the press to hide
irresponsibility. An article on the NOC program conceivably might have been
in the public interest, but it is hard to imagine how identifying a
particular person as part of that program can be deemed as essential to an
informed public.

But even if we regard the press as unethical by our
standards, their actions were not illegal. On the other hand, if Rove and
Libby even mentioned the name of Valerie Plame in the context of being a CIA
employee -- NOC or not -- on an unsecured line to a person without a security
clearance or need to know, while the nation was waging war, that is the end
of the story. It really doesn't matter why or whether there was a plan or
anything. The minimal story -- that they talked about Plame with a reporter
-- is the end of the matter.

We can think of only one possible
justification for this action: That it was done on the order of the
president. The president has the authority to suspend or change security
regulations if required by the national interest. The Plame affair would be
cleared up if it turns out Rove and Libby were ordered to act as they did by
the president. Perhaps the president is prevented by circumstances from
coming forward and lifting the burden from Rove and Libby. If that is the
case, it could cost him his right-hand man. But absent that explanation, it
is difficult to justify the actions that were taken.

Ultimately, the
Plame affair points to a fundamental problem in intelligence. As those who
have been in the field have told us, the biggest fear is that someone back
in the home office will bring the operation down. Sometimes it will be a
matter of state: sacrificing a knight for advantage on the chessboard.
Sometimes it is a parochial political battle back home. Sometimes it is
carelessness, stupidity or cruelty. This is when people die and lives are
destroyed. But the real damage, if it happens often enough or no one seems
to care, will be to the intelligence system. If the agent determines that
his well-being is not a centerpiece of government policy, he won't remain an
agent long.

On a personal note, let me say this: one of the
criticisms conservatives have of liberals is that they do not understand
that we live in a dangerous world and, therefore, that they underestimate
the effort needed to ensure national security. Liberals have questioned the
utility and morality of espionage. Conservatives have been champions of
national security and of the United States' overt and covert capabilities.
Conservatives have condemned the atrophy of American intelligence
capabilities. Whether the special prosecutor indicts or exonerates Rove and
Libby legally doesn't matter. Valerie Plame was a soldier in service to the
United States, unprotected by uniform or diplomatic immunity. I have no idea
whether she served well or poorly, or violated regulations later. But she did
serve. And thus, she and all the other NOCs were owed far more -- especially
by a conservative administration -- than they got.

Even if that debt
wasn't owed to Plame, it remains in place for all the other spooks standing
guard in dangerous places.

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