Leaks and Lies

Eric Rasmusen and James Taranto have picked up a possibility that I alluded in an earlier post: that Mary O. McCarthy’s “secret prison” disclosure wasn’t a leak but a lie.

There are multiple reasons for suspicion. European Union investigators – hardly likely to be prejudiced in favor of the United States – have uncovered nothing. Less, in fact, for the principal “evidence” of the prisons’ existence comes from dubious characters who say they were incarcerated there. That is the same sort of corroboration that appeared for the “October Surprise” fabrication, and both sets of witnesses seem equally credible; at least, the EU authorities haven’t given them any credence.

Then, too, Mrs. McCarthy worked in the CIA Inspector-General’s office, not in an operational role. Her knowledge of the “secret” derived from second hand information at best, from her own imagination at worst.

There are also internal loose ends. The existence of the prisons was supposedly known to only a handful of top officials, but how could any substantial facilities for imprisonment and interrogation be run without rank-and-file operatives who would necessarily know the details? Do Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld personally jet to Poland to quiz al-Qa’eda capi? And the suppositious captives were ferried by CIA-run airlines, whose existence was publicized nearly a year ago by the New York Times. Even before then, they don’t seem to have been a very closely guarded secret. The anti-American propaganda group Human Rights Watch was apparently monitoring them well before then; after the Post published its story, HRW cited details of a November 2003 flight by a “CIA plane” from Afghanistan to Poland to Romania to Morocco to Guantanamo as “proof” of Polish and Romanian involvement. Using such a compromised transport system for a super-secret project would be extraordinarily careless.

It is still possible that the story is true, or not entirely false. There may be rational explanations for the discrepancies, and reality doesn’t have to be probable. But let’s toy with the idea of its falsity (which would make consistent Mrs. McCarthy’s confession that she gave it to the Washington Post and her denial that she ever disclosed classified information) and see how it plays out.

What was the motive for the invention? As a domestic embarrassment to the Bush Administration, it was patently minor league. True, some Angry Leftists believe that al-Qa’eda members ought to receive the full panoply of Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendment protections, but that’s hardly a widespread opinion. The story in fact had little impact in the U.S. when it appeared.

It was in Europe that it was Big News, for plenty of EU bien-pensants believe fervently in due process for Islamofascists (a contrast to their view of the rights to be accorded to, say, accused businessmen). A very plausible motive for concocting a tale of Polish-Romanian cooperation with the CIA would be to punish those governments for their past aid to the American cause and to discourage them from helping in the future. If that was the originator’s intent, it implies an active desire to aid the enemy by weakening the anti-Islamofascist coalition. We all know what we would call someone who tried to break up the Allies in the middle of World War II. The same term seems apt here.

While the scenario that I’ve just sketched has its speculative elements, another instance of a false leak aimed at helping our enemies is hard to doubt. Bill Hawkins takes note of one of the less-discussed “revelations” in James Risen’s treasonfest:

In State of War, Risen reveals that Clinton also had an overly ambitious plot, which eventually backfired, involving assisting an enemy with WMDs. Operation Merlin had the CIA using a Russian atomic scientist, who had defected to the United States, to sell or give nuclear bomb blueprints to Iranian diplomats at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. The catch was that the plans for the TBA 480 “firing set” contained design errors that would send Iran’s scientists down the wrong path and delay their development of weapons. The TBA 480 is a Russian device for creating the implosion that sets off the nuclear chain-reaction in a bomb. The Russian scientist, whose defection does not now seem as genuine as was supposed, spotted the flaws and offered to help Iran fix the problems. But even if he had not tipped off the Iranians, other Russian and Chinese experts are known to be helping Tehran, so the design flaws would likely have been spotted at some point.

Risen writes (page 195) that the Clinton-approved plan ended up handing Tehran “one of the greatest engineering secrets in the world, providing the solution to one of a handful of problems that separated nuclear powers such as the United States and Russia from rogue countries such as Iran that were desperate to join the nuclear club but had so far fallen short.”

Little as I wish to deny Mr. Clinton the blame for anything, this “Operation Merlin” is clearly a fiction. One needn’t be an intelligence expert to discern the folly of giving key information about nuclear weapons to an enemy state and the futility of trying to render the data harmless by throwing in a few mistakes. Bill Clinton is not stupid, and he wouldn’t in any case have devised such a scheme on his own. It would have had to pass muster with a lot of men who, whatever their faults, are too skilled for such a sophomore blunder.

No, somebody fed Risen this silly lie, and he swallowed it. Here the liar’s motive is transparent: to obscure the role of non-Iranian scientists in the mullarchy’s nuclear program by insinuating that America unwittingly supplied the crucial technological know-how.

A corollary is that Risen’s source sympathizes with the rogue scientists who have been assisting nuclear proliferation. It would be fascinating to know who he is. A chilling hypothesis is that an American official at a high enough level to be able to claim acquaintance with top secret operations is actively running interference for the men who are arming our most dangerous enemies.

Comments

[Travel Guy]

While I'm not sure a CIA-run Airline is the best idea, I don't necessarily want to be sitting next to these folks on a discount Southwest Airlines flight from DFW to DC.