A front page story in today’s Washington Post by Jim VandeHei and Carol Leonnig reports that ace reporter Bob Woodward has just testified in the CIA leak case that
a senior administration official told him about CIA operative Valerie Plame and her position at the agency nearly a month before her identity was disclosed.
As usual, I’m tempted to say, the WaPo itself, at least in this VandeHei-Leonnig story, seems to miss the significance of this. For example, VandeHei and Leonnig refer repeatedly to Ms. Plame as a CIA “operative,” but that varies even from what they themselves report:
In a more than two-hour deposition, Woodward told Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald that the official casually told him in mid-June 2003 that Plame worked as a CIA analyst on weapons of mass destruction, and that he did not believe the information to be classified or sensitive, according to a statement Woodward released yesterday.
More specifically, in that statement, also printed in today’s WaPo, Woodward stated:
Fitzgerald asked for my impression about the context in which Mrs. Wilson was mentioned. I testified that the reference seemed to me to be casual and offhand, and that it did not appear to me to be either classified or sensitive. I testified that according to my understanding an analyst in the CIA is not normally an undercover position.
Could VandeHei and Leonnig, or their editors, possibly not be aware of the difference between an “operative” and an “analyst,” or of the significance of that distinction for Fitzgerald’s investigation? (The Intelligence Identities Protection Act, the possible violation of which was the occasion for appointing a special prosecutor, applies only to consciously and intentionally revealing the name of an operative [or an agent who had been an operative within the previous five years] whose identify the Agency was affirmatively trying to conceal.)
UPDATE
See the exhaustive review of the Woodward revelation by Tom Maguire.
