Dirty Tricks?

In a recent column, Glenn Reynolds (the Instapundit) said:

What was the CIA thinking sending Joseph Wilson on a secret mission to look into nuclear weapons matters without swearing him to secrecy? It's almost as if the Agency -- whose director, George Tenet, had told President Bush that the case for WMD was a "slam dunk" -- actually wanted the mission to produce a hostile Op-Ed in the New York Times. Either that or they're just idiots, but either way it seems that some people at the CIA should be losing their jobs.

It is hard to believe that Wilson was not sworn to secrecy, or at least that he had to send any public statements to the CIA for approval. Not only was Wilson sent to Niger by the CIA, his wife works for them. Plus, as a former ambassador, he should know something about keeping secrets.

It is assumed that he felt so strongly about Bush's "falsehoods" that he had to go public but we now know that the report he turned in did not match his op-ed column.

The left has been totally accepting of Wilson and the CIA recently. This is because the CIA in general and Wilson in specific have been undercutting Bush. Still, it wasn't that long ago that the left thought that the CIA was worse than the KGB. There are still people who believe that the CIA is behind most of the world's drug trade. According to some theories, Crack was introduced into the US just to kill off minorities. The left has gone from blaming the world's ills on the CIA to supporting them unquestioningly.

So no one is looking critically at the CIA. The right is used to trusting them (at least somewhat) and the left has gotten over its hatred of them.

Still, the CIA's operations used to be know as dirty tricks.

Now, what if Wilson did pass his op-ed column past his wife's superiors? At the time, Wilson was maintaining that he had been sent by the Vice-President's office. That would inevitably lead to the following conversation:

Reporter: Is it true that you send Ambassador Wilson to Niger?
Vice-President Cheney: No, he was sent by the CIA.
Reporter: Why did they send him?
VP Cheney: His wife recommended him.
Reporter: What does she have to do with it?
VP Cheney: She works for the CIA.

You can substitute Karl Rove or Scooter Libby's names. It makes no difference. The important thing is that Wilson's column was bound to raise questions that would lead to the White House leaking Plame's identity. If the CIA approved the column ahead of time they should have seen this coming. They may even have been counting on it.

That would be a dirty trick.