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Hayden was brought into the CIA as an intelligence professional when President Bush fired Porter Goss, who had retired from Congress to go to Langley at the president’s request. Goss thought he had a mandate to clean up an agency whose senior officials delivered private anti-Bush briefings during the 2004 campaign. The confusion over Valerie Plame’s status suggests the CIA gave Waxman what he wanted, even if the director of central intelligence seemed confused.
Dusty Foggo asshole. He wasn’t cleaning up anything.
Why the Sun-Times still runs his crap is a mystery. Earlier in the article Novak attempts to make a particular distinction between undercover and covert that is hysterical:
At the Gridiron, I heard Hayden tell me he referred to Plame only as ”undercover.” He apparently said the same thing to Toensing, who testified as a Republican-requested witness at the March 16 hearing. On April 4, she wrote Hayden that in three Gridiron conversations ”in front of different witnesses you denied most emphatically that you had ever told” Waxman ”that Valerie Plame was ‘covert.’ You stated you had told Waxman he could use the term ‘undercover’ but ‘never’ the term ‘covert.’ ”
That contradiction concerned Toensing, a former Senate staffer who helped draft the 1982 Intelligence Identities Act. At the hearing, Waxman menacingly challenged Toensing’s sworn testimony that Plame was not ”covert” under the act. Accordingly, she asked Hayden to inform Waxman ”you never approved of his using the term ‘covert.’ ”
The confusion deepened when I obtained Waxman’s talking points for the hearing. The draft typed after the Hayden-Waxman conversation said, ”Ms. Wilson had a career as an undercover agent of the CIA.” This was crossed out, the hand-printed change saying she ”was a covert employee of the CIA.”
Who had made this questionable but important change? Hayden told me Tuesday that the talking points were edited by a CIA lawyer after conferring with Waxman’s staff. ”I am completely comfortable with that,” the general assured me. He added he now sees no difference between ”covert” and ”undercover” — an astounding statement, considering that the criminal statute refers only to ”covert” employees.
Mark Mansfield, Hayden’s public affairs officer, next e-mailed me: ”At CIA, you are either a covert or an overt employee. Ms. Wilson was a covert employee.” That also ignores the legal requirements of the Intelligence Identities Act.
Could someone who is like an editor sit down and have an intervention with this asshole and explain to him he helped out a CIA agent who worked on weapons of mass destruction? Furthermore, Toensing at the hearing admitted to not having discussed Plame’s status with anyone who would actually know.
The entire canard that Plame wasn’t covert was started by Toensing and her husband on cable channels and yet they had no information to make the claim.