More on the subject… from one of the key players involved…
[quote]‘Covert’ Confusion at the CIA
By Robert D. Novak
Thursday, April 12, 2007; A27
Seated at the Washington Gridiron Club dinner on March 31, I was interrupted by a man crouching at my feet and dressed Air Force formal with the four stars of a full general. It was CIA Director Michael Hayden, and he complained to me profanely that he was misrepresented in my March 22 column on the Valerie Plame Wilson case. Denying that he favors Democrats, Hayden indicated that he had not authorized Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman to say Mrs. Wilson had been a “covert” CIA employee, as Waxman claimed, but only that she was “undercover.” Keeping busy at a Gridiron evening supposedly devoted to frivolity, Hayden made similar points to Rep. Peter Hoekstra, the House intelligence committee’s ranking Republican; Republican lawyer Victoria Toensing, an expert in national security law; and White House counsel Fred Fielding. Yet, 10 days later, the CIA and its director asserted to me that the wife of Bush critic Joseph Wilson indeed had been “covert.” The designation could strengthen erroneous claims that she came under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.
Nobody will ever be prosecuted under the act for revealing that Mrs. Wilson worked for the CIA. But Hayden has raised Republican suspicions that he is angling to become intelligence czar – director of national intelligence – under a Democratic president. While Hayden proclaims himself free of politics, his handling of the Plame case is puzzling. Waxman, as chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, sought to breathe political life into the affair with a March 16 hearing featuring Mrs. Wilson. Waxman made news by declaring that Hayden “told me personally . . . that if I said she was a covert agent, it wouldn’t be an incorrect statement.” I reported that this revelation stunned Hoekstra, who as intelligence committee chairman spent years unsuccessfully seeking word on Mrs. Wilson’s status from the CIA.
At the Gridiron, Hayden told me he referred to Mrs. Wilson only as “undercover.” He apparently said the same thing to Toensing, who testified as a Republican-requested witness at the March 16 hearing. On April 4, she wrote Hayden that in three Gridiron conversations “in front of different witnesses you denied most emphatically, that you had ever told” Waxman "that Valerie Plame was ‘covert.’ You stated you had told Waxman he could use the term ‘undercover’ but ‘never’ the term ‘covert.’ " That contradiction concerned Toensing, a former Senate staffer who helped draft the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act.
At the hearing, Waxman menacingly challenged Toensing’s sworn testimony that Mrs. Wilson was not “covert” under the act. Accordingly, she asked Hayden to inform Waxman that "you never approved of his using the term ‘covert.’ " The confusion deepened when I obtained Waxman’s talking points for the hearing. The draft typed after the Hayden-Waxman conversation said, “Ms. Wilson had a career as an undercover agent of the CIA.” This was crossed out, the handwritten change saying she “was a covert employee of the CIA.”
Who had made this questionable but important change? Hayden told me Tuesday that the talking points were edited by a CIA lawyer after conferring with Waxman’s staff. “I am completely comfortable with that,” the general assured me. He added that he now sees no difference between “covert” and “undercover” – an astounding statement considering that the criminal statute refers only to “covert” employees. Mark Mansfield, Hayden’s public affairs officer, e-mailed me next: “At CIA, you are either a covert or an overt employee. Ms. Wilson was a covert employee.” That also ignores the legal requirements of the intelligence identities law. The CIA gave me a lot more than either Toensing or Hoekstra received.
Toensing’s letter to Hayden has gone unanswered. On March 21, Hoekstra again asked the CIA to define Mrs. Wilson’s status. A written reply April 5 from Christopher J. Walker, the agency’s director of congressional affairs, said only that "it is taking longer than expected" to reply because of “the considerable legal complexity required for this tasking.” Hayden was brought into the CIA as an intelligence professional when President Bush fired Porter Goss, who had retired from Congress to go to Langley at the president’s request. Goss thought he had a mandate to clean up an agency whose senior officials delivered private anti-Bush briefings during the 2004 campaign. The confusion over Valerie Plame’s status suggests the CIA gave Waxman what he wanted, even if the director of central intelligence seemed confused.
© 2007 Creators Syndicate Inc.[/quote]
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