CIA leak continues to haunt White House

America/Conor O'Clery: After the Watergate scandal and the intelligence abuses it revealed, the Central Intelligence Agency …

America/Conor O'Clery: After the Watergate scandal and the intelligence abuses it revealed, the Central Intelligence Agency was perceived, in the words of Senator Frank Church, as a "rogue elephant on the rampage."

In 1975, an embittered former CIA agent, Philip Agee, published a hostile memoir called Inside the Company: CIA Diary which identified approximately 250 agents.

He unmasked CIA members in London where they were photographed emerging from their homes. All over Europe the media rushed to identify CIA station chiefs. A group of supporters began publishing CounterSpy which revealed more names.

On assignment in Washington at the time, I called at the bulletin's heavily-fortified office (metal doors and peepholes) and they told me who was the likely CIA agent in the US embassy in Dublin. We did not publish the name, as it might have endangered the agent - in December 1975 Richard Welch, the CIA station chief in Athens, had been assassinated after being uncovered.

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The then CIA director George H W Bush furiously pushed for legislation to outlaw any future revelation of CIA identities without authorisation. It became law in 1982, with a $50,000 fine and 10 years in prison for violations. CounterSpy ceased publication. Agee is currently living in Cuba.

The Agee affair is the ominous backdrop to the squall that blew up suddenly in Washington this week over the leak of an undercover CIA official's identity. The leak actually took place on July 14th in the syndicated column of conservative commentator Robert Novak.

He revealed that Valerie Palme, the wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson is a CIA operative engaged in weapons of mass destruction. Wilson is the US official sent by the CIA to Niger in 2002 to check out a British intelligence claim, originating in Italy, that Iraq had tried to buy uranium for nuclear weapons. Wilson had, correctly, found the claim to be bogus.

However, President Bush later included it in his January State of the Union address. After Iraq was occupied, Wilson went public in an op-ed article in the New York Times challenging the justification for war. It was headed "What I Did Not Find in Africa".

Mr Bush was embarrassed into admitting he should not have used the uranium claim. Shortly afterwards Novak's column appeared. It quoted two senior administration officials alleging that Valerie Palme "suggested sending Wilson to investigate the Italian report". The implication was that Wilson was untrustworthy and only got the assignment because of his wife's influence.

This was a classic Washington smear. But the leaker made four mistakes. First, Wilson has impeccable patriotic credentials. He heroically secured the safety of Americans in Baghdad during the 1991 Gulf war. The first President Bush described him as a truly inspiring diplomat'.

Second: Wilson is a supporter of Democrats, but had given money to the Bush-Cheney bandwagon in 2000, before the dirty tricks campaign against Bush's Republican opponent John McCain in the South Carolina primary. Third: It is an unwritten rule that spouses are off limits in political in-fighting - Wilson claims a journalist told him that Bush's political adviser Karl Rove said his wife was 'fair game'. Mistake No 4 was the most serious of all - 'outing' a CIA operative. To quote the first President Bush again, those who do it are "the most insidious of traitors". Astonishingly, the Novak column at first produced almost no reaction, until Saturday last when MSNBC revealed that the leak was being investigated by the Justice Department.

On Sunday the Washington Post claimed it had been told by a senior administration official that two White House officials had contacted six journalists to peddle the story. This pointed to the Oval Office and there was suddenly a sense that there was blood in the water.

A poll yesterday showed that 70 per cent of Americans wanted an independent counsel to investigate the matter, rather than Attorney General John Ashcroft. It is unlikely anyone will be prosecuted by Justice. The CIA said it refers disclosures of classified information to the Justice Department once a week on average. In 20 years there has not been a single prosecution.

JOSEPH Wilson (54) every inch the suave diplomat, has become a regular on television since the 'outing' of his wife, who has been shown only from behind to preserve some anonymity - though all Washington now claims to know the glamourous couple.

Wilson told Maureen Down of the New York Times that Valerie Plame is the real-life Jennifer Garner, an actress who plays a CIA agent on television. The former ambassador accused Karl Rove of being behind the leak, then retreated after a White House denial.

Wilson is himself under assault from friends of the Bush White House. In the Wall Street Journal he was described as "an open opponent of the US war on terror" and the Washington Times called him a "Democratic partisan" and a "lover of the limelight". Right-wing talk shows portray him as a leftie anti-war agitator. Most people aren't buying it however. At the end of the week it was not Joseph Wilson's credibility that was at stake, but the administration's.

The leaking of the CIA agent's name has highlighted the role of the adviser whom Bush calls "the boy genius". As the scandal blew up, Bush found himself standing and waving from the steps of an aircraft, only to find all the news cameras pointing at Karl Rove standing nearby.

Rove is a Texas political consultant who is credited with engineering Bush's election, often using ruthless tactics. Journalists on the campaign trail in 2000 became convinced that it was Rove who prompted the rumours about mental instability that helped destroy Senator John McCain during the primary campaign, according to a book called Boy Genius.

The campaign got nasty in South Carolina, where it was whispered McCain was gay, had had affairs, and that he had fathered an illegitimate black child (he has an adopted daughter from Bangladesh).

Bush stayed aloof from the rough and tumble, but he was caught on television talking to a state senator who said he hadn't hit McCain's soft spots hard enough, to which Bush replied, "I agree, I'm not going to do it on TV."