When yours truly was doing his duty during the Cold War in a classified position, among the things emphasized in the non-technical part of the training was the absolute necessity of remaining silent about the mission, the people doing the mission, and anything at all in any way connected to the mission. The reasons for this were simple. Just as we pieced together seemingly disconnected bits of information into usable wholes, so were our adversaries doing the same. A question about what one did or who one knew could be innocent, or could be the normal data collection that most intelligence operations is made of. A name here, a location there, measure some antennae on a building, observe the comings and goings of people, and before you know it, you've figured out exactly what some intelligence entity is up to and you can now work to thwart their mission.
So when it came to light two years ago in Bob Novak's column that two White House officials had exposed Valerie Plame as a CIA operative, I naturally assumed that this would be one screwup that would not be countenanced by a White House which was staking its entire being on a war on terror. After all, exposing someone in intelligence operations, even someone who is not on a covert mission, is a very serious act, and had I or one of my colleagues back in the early 1970s done such a thing, we would have been stripped of our clearances, banished from any access, and likely court martialed for violating clear security rules. There would have been no question, no hesitation, and no spinning. You compromise security, it's over for you. Period.
So here we have the commander in chief of all US forces, a man who is at the top of the pyramid for our security, and his right-hand man, his deputy chief of staff, Karl Rove, tells not one, or two, but at least three reporters that Joe Wilson's wife is in the CIA. However, innocent he may have been of Valerie Plame's darker assignments undercover, and however ignorant he may have been of how useful such information might be to skilled intelligence services, he broke the trust of his position.
Something else that is not discussed by our kneepad press is what might have happened to all those foreign operatives who were connected to Valerie Plame when she was indeed working overseas to investigate WMD. What has become of them? Once her name was out, those known to have socialized with her or been involved in the cover business under which she operated were in deep jeopardy. Fraternizing with an attractive blonde woman in business circles surely gets you attention in the Middle East, and if that blonde woman suddenly becomes known as a CIA agent who did extensive work on WMD in your country, well, you might find your testicles wired up to a telephone generator at some point while your relationship is explored.
That's why Karl Rove is dangerous and even treasonous. I expect him to follow the same code I swore to back in my day, and I also expect him to suffer the same fate I would have had I acted as he did.
Karl Rove is a traitor at worst, or at minimum a political partisan to whom power means more than the security of the American people. He needs to be taken down. And if George W. Bush has known this all along, then he too must go, and I expect to see articles of impeachment drawn up within days.
Of course, with a Republican Congress, that won't happen, which shows you just how corrupt and dangerous that party has become to our entire nation.
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