Declassify the CIA Referral of Libby Case

Human Events, Feb 19, 2007 by Babbin, Jed

Among the greatest responsibilities our public officials bear is the use and care of our nation's secrets. When anyone breaks that trust-be it a CIA employee or a U.S. senator-he commits a crime. And therein lies the tale of two referrals.

A federal agency that believes a crime has been committed within its jurisdiction can't bring the case to court itself. That's the job of the Department of Justice. So when, for example, the CIA believes top-secret information has been divulged illegally, it sends a document called a "criminal referral" to Justice and asks that the incident be investigated and, if appropriate, prosecuted.

In mid-December 2004, the CIA sent a criminal referral to Justice regarding the disclosure of a top-secret satellite program by Democratic Senators Jay Rockefeller (W.Va.), Dick Durbin (Ill.) and Ron Wyden (Ore.). Rockefeller and Wyden had obtained the information as part of their job as members of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The senators, the CIA asked, should be investigated and possibly prosecuted. As I wrote for the American Spectator Dec. 16, 2004, the three had spoken publicly about what is reportedly a "black" reconnaissance satellite.

"Black" programs, which are so secret even their existence is not publicly acknowledged, are the things on which national strategies are based and billions of dollars are spent. Merely to admit that such weapons or reconnaissance systems exist enables adversaries to change their behavior to deny us the advantage these strategic systems provide. Now, more than two years after the CIA's referral on the RockefellerWyden-Durbin disclosure, the Justice Department is still not acting on it, and the CIA is, apparently, not upset about it. Contrast this with the CIA's action in the case of Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

The President's 2003 State of the Union Address contained a statement that Saddam Hussein's regime had sought uranium from the African nation of Niger. Joe Wilson, having "investigated" the Niger uranium matter for the CIA, disputed this and launched a media campaign to discredit the President's statement. A firestorm erupted when Bob Novak's July 14, 2003, column divulged that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was, "an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction." Plame turned out to be a person whose identity was not protected by the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which means that she wasn't a "covert" agent and disclosure of her identity wasn't a crime.

When the political firestorm began to spread, the CIA sent a criminal referral to the Justice Department asking that the disclosure of Plame's identity be investigated and prosecuted. According to my sources, this referral was rejected not once but twice, and only after then-CIA Director George Tenet personally called the attorney general was the investigation begun. At that point. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft and his deputy. James Comey, recused themselves. Comey, on Dec. 30, 2003, appointed Patrick Fitzgerald "special counsel" to investigate the matter "independent of any supervision or control of any officer of the [Justice] Department." Why was Tenet so insistent when he must have known Plame wasn't a covert agent? And why did Ashcroft allow Comey to appoint Fitzgerald on terms that made Fitzgerald-for this case-the equal of the attorney general?

Unanswered Questions

The only way we will ever know is if the criminal referral from ClA, in all its iterations, is declassified and disclosed.

We know now that Scooter Libby wasn't Novak's original source. Then Deputy secretary of State Richard Armitage was. We also know that Armitage told his boss mat he was probably the source. Neither shared that information with the White House or, for years, with Karl Rove or Libby. Let us, for the moment, pass on that ultimate act of political disloyalty to the President. What is important here is how and why the CIA apparently manipulated both the intelligence community and the criminal justice system. Joe Wilson was unqualified, by training and experience, for the Niger "mission," which has been so widely and mistakenly used to undercut the rationale for the Iraq invasion.

Questions I have raised before still need to be answered:

* How did Joe Wilson, contrary to decades of CIA policy, get sent to Niger without a security agreement requiring him to remain silent about what he did and what he found?

* Why did the CIA never require a written report from Wilson?

* Who within the CIA chose Wilson for the mission? It wasn't his wife, who lacked the authority to do more than recommend him for it.

* Most importantly, why did the Justice Department reject the CIA referral and then bend to Tenet's demands?

The CIA referral to Justice was an official government communication that sought specific action. Under the law (Title 18 U.S. Code, sec. 1001), if some or all of the statements made in that referral were made with knowledge of their falsity, the person who made the referral and those who argued in favor of it may themselves have committed a crime. Were there false statements in the CIA's referral?