By Patricia L. Sharpe
You remember Valerie Plame. She’s the undercover C.I.A. operative with an unblemished record whose identity was revealed by the Bush administration. Why? To punish her husband. That’s Joe Wilson, the career ambassador who, as they say, told truth to power. His investigations revealed that Iraq under Saddam Hussain was not getting yellow cake uranium from Africa. This conclusion undercut the Bush administration’s chief initial argument for invading Iraq. So Wilson had to be shut up, and the classic way to emasculate a man is to rape his wife. Which is what the Bush administration did to Valerie Plame. Metaphorically, of course. But still, very nasty stuff.
In short: the administration revealed the identity of a C.I.A. agent to further its own purposes, with no regard, obviously, for the effect of such a betrayal on morale or recruitment.
Fast forward to the recently disclosed Tinner affair in Switzerland. It seems that the Swiss government destroyed “a huge trove of computer files and other material documenting the business dealings of a family of Swiss engineers suspected of helping smuggle nuclear technology to Libya and Iran.” The infamous “Pakistani bomb-pioneer-turned-nuclear black Marketeer” Abdul Qadeer Khan figures in this story, too.
There’s much more to learn here, no doubt, and I hope it dribbles out, but what I want to focus on is this: the Bush administration wanted those files destroyed to “hide evidence of a clandestine relationship” between the Tinners and the C.I.A., fearing that an open trial would not just “reveal the Tinners relationship with the United States—and perhaps raise questions about American dealings with atomic smugglers—but would also imperil efforts to recruit new spies....”
But! But! But! It was ok to reveal Valerie Plame’s identity. It was ok to smear Joe Wilson, too, which hardly improved State Department recruitment or morale among career diplomats.
In short, the Bush administration will protect intelligence operatives when it serves partisan purpose, but U.S. spies will be thrown to the wolves by their own government when truth gets in the way of policy preferences. I have no doubt that anyone who is smart enough to have been recruited, or has potential for recruitment to the C.I.A., has also managed to put these two stories together and drawn the same conclusions. If you work for the C.I.A. during this administration, you better watch your back in Washington even as you risk your life abroad.
These inconsistencies and contradictions lead me to ask a very important question: what is the real reason for the destruction of those Tinner files? Who else is being protected? The argument for destruction leans heavily on preventing weapons’ designs from getting into the wrong hands. But the destroyed* material wasn’t limited to physicists’ doodles, which may or may not have been helpful to proliferators, the experts not being in total accord here, so that argument too seems a bit specious.
I really hate being cynical. But, over and over again, with the George W. Bush administration, we’ve seen how science and truth have been twisted for partisan purposes and how lower downs have been prosecuted to protect higher ups. In the Plame case, for example, the office of the Vice President was involved, but Cheney escaped prosecution. In the case of the Abu Ghraib torture scandals, the causal chain clearly reaches to the Presidency itself. Similarly, in the Tinner case, I wonder what mis- or malfeasance higher up in the Bush administration is being covered up in the guise of protecting the lower downs?
What is this extremely secretive administration really afraid of?
*It's possible that the U.S. government has copies. In that case, why would the Swiss need to destroy them? Speculations are invited. Also: any ideas as to what the Swiss government might have got from the Bush administration in return for destroying those papers? An agreement not to push for less bank secrecy, for example?