CIA Outing Snaps Back

White House officials have always leaked information to boost their own standing or damage rivals. Confidential and even classified information is by no means immune. Before the Iraq war, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was livid about leaks of military plans, saying more than once that leakers “ought to be in jail.� But even by Washington standards, there is something particularly odious about an alleged White House leak seemingly designed to destroy the career of an undercover CIA officer married to former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. The leak occurred in July but is just now becoming the subject of a Justice Department investigation.

No one should count on catching the leaker, at least in a legally airtight manner.

Wilson emerged this summer as a potent critic of the administration’s case for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, stating that he visited the African nation of Niger last year on behalf of the CIA and found assertions that Saddam Hussein tried to purchase “yellowcake� uranium ore to be bogus.

A Bush aide -- unnamed -- told the Washington Post on Saturday that two White House officials -- unnamed -- cold-called six Washington journalists in July to disclose that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was an analyst on weapons of mass destruction for the clandestine service of the CIA. Among them, only syndicated columnist Robert Novak ran with the story, stating that two senior administration officials said Plame recommended sending her husband to Niger. Novak on Monday, however, told CNN that he got the news during an interview.

The most memorable outing of CIA officials was in the mid-1970s by disaffected agent Philip Agee, who published names of purported CIA operatives. In 1982, Congress enacted the Intelligence Identities Protection Act so that any future rogue agent would know he or she faced up to 10 years in jail. But the White House itself targeting CIA employees is something no one imagined. Plame’s career is shredded. She can no longer work in secret, and her contacts may well be endangered as foreign intelligence services track down anyone who met with her.

The CIA is right to ask the Justice Department to investigate. Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.), a presidential candidate, has called for an “independent, nonpartisan counsel.� Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft could appoint a special counsel, but that wouldn’t make uncovering the leak any more likely. Reporters aren’t going to reveal secret sources, and leakers usually get away with it.

David Kelly, the British government scientist who was skeptical about evidence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, committed suicide after being mysteriously outed as a BBC source and later maligned by government officials. The Bush administration’s alleged assault on Wilson’s wife smacks in the same way of government retribution. If true, White House officials may have thought they were getting back at Wilson, but the thing they will have damaged most in the long run is their own credibility.