Did the Libby Trial Testimony Reveal a CIA "Courage Gap"?
By Andrew Cochran
You would think that senior CIA agents who run operations are all rough, tough, unbreakable, imaginative men of steel - see Brad Pitts' and Robert Redford's characters in the movie Spy Games or Redford's character in Three Days of the Condor - but you wouldn't know that from yesterday's testimony in the trial of Lewis "Scooter" Libby. See today's "New York Daily News" with the following: "Robert Grenier, the former top CIA official overseeing Iraq operations, testified that he was so unnerved about being pulled out of a summer 2003 meeting by Cheney's chief of staff Lewis (Scooter) Libby, he identified the spy as Valerie Plame... Libby ordered Grenier out of a meeting with CIA Director George Tenet - an unprecedented demand - to get answers. Grenier was so flustered that the vice president's office was calling, he blurted out to Libby that Wilson's wife was CIA."
Read that slowly and think about it. The man who ran the entire CIA operation in Iraq crumbled like a saltine when a politician's lackey asked him for information. His excuse? Grenier told the court (edit) that he figured that Libby "probably had every security clearance known to man." Oh really? In 15+ years of federal and Congressional service, I never assumed any such status, and certainly nobody who is running a CIA operation overseas should ever so assume. What he should have done was to stand nose-to-nose with "Scooter" and fire back, "Mr. Libby, what is your security clearance, on whose authority are you asking for that information, and do you have written proof of both?" Instead, he turned over important information with no idea how it was to be exploited.
No wonder CIA operations in Iraq were such a mess; if this guy can't stand up to a short-term political employee in a Washington meeting, how could we trust him to pull off something really important in the field? The Congressional intelligence committees should investigate this behind closed doors to determine if this "courage gap" at senior levels of the CIA is a widespread disease and whether CIA leadership has reminded career agents of their responsibility to protect sensitive information (classified or not) from unauthorized disclosure.