African Spying Incidents

Earlier in the week, I read a story that has been circulating some of the conservative courses and popped up on the Drudge Report. How accurate it is, I cannot say, but I thought I would talk about it for debate sake.

Several months ago there was a big todo about an article written by Bob Novak where he disclosed the name of a CIA agent who was the wife of an ex-diplomat named Joe Wilson. Mr. Wilson instantly made the accusation that someone in the White House (Karl Rove was his guess) was the source for the article and it was done as a revenge tactic for Wilson talking about how he had never found any evidence that Iraq was trying to buy yellow cake uranium from Niger. Wilson had been sent by the CIA to Niger to investigate these claims in February 2002, despite his somewhat dubious qualifications for the job (he was serving as ambassador to Gabon at the time). Wilson spent 12 days in Niger, drinking tea with local officials and poking around in an official capacity. He returned and filed a report saying he had not found any evidence that Iraq was trying to buy yellow cake.

After the article that mentioned his wife was published, Wilson accused the White House of revenge tactics and for ignoring his report on the subject. He referred to Bush as a liar for mentioning Iraq's desire to buy yellow cake during his state of the union speech, despite his memo saying the opposite. Wilson became a semi-hero to anti-war types and published a book on the subject.

However, because disclosing the name of a CIA agent in the field is a felony, the Senate Intelligence committee began to do some investigating of its own. The Senate report (which was signed off on by all members) contradicted Wilson's statements on several key points. Wilson claimed that he had been given the yellow cake assignment independently. The committee concluded that it was active campaigning by Wilson's wife which got him the assignment. Wilson said that in his report, no evidence of yellow cake acquirement attempts by Iraq could be found. The committee concluded that there was evidence in Wilson's report and the British and French intelligence communities, from whom the original rumors emerged, still say that their reports were accurate. Wilson also claimed to have known that certain procurement documents were fake. However, he later admitted that he had not read those documents until 8 months after his assignment, causing the Washington Post to get a little miffed with him as they has published his original interview.

In the end, the committee decided that Wilson's claims were not sufficiently valid to warrant charges against any members of the White House. So the matter has been dropped. Unresolved yet is whether Bob Novak will be charged with publishing Wilson's wife's name. However, questions are still floating as to whether Wilson's wife was on actual assignment or working at CIA headquarters in Langley. If its the latter, then Novak did nothing wrong as she was not an agent in the field at that time. That issue is still open for investigation.

Many conservative pundits have claimed that this exposes Wilson as a left wing operative and not the wronged moderate that he claims to be. Certainly his instant and active support for several Democratic politicians after the incident have not helped him in terms of those opinions. But the real question is what to make do with this information. Its not made much of a splash in the mainstream media and many in the public have probably forgotten Mr. Wilson and the incident. At the very least, they probably didn't care to much over whether the yellow cake story was true or not as we've found no deposits of said material in Iraq. So its more the question of public opinion as to whether Mr. Wilson is anything more that a shrieking speed bump on the road of history.