Did Plame's Outing Disrupt CIA Efforts Against Pakistani Nuclear Proliferation? A court filing in the Libby case indicates that a former Agency counterrorism officer in Pakistan revealed Plame's undercover role to I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. This outing may have crippled work that was being done by the CIA to track and contain the spread of nuclear technologies by Pakistanis. See,
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/031906Z.shtml; also see, the 39-page filing,
http://talkleft.com/libbydiscov317.pdf Mr. Libby has been indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice related to a coordinated White House operation that revealed Ms. Plame's identity to reporters. The 39-page filing submitted by defense lawyers indicates that Robert Grenier, a recently-retired former head of CIA counter-terrorism, may have been the source for some details of Libby's knowledge about Plame, an undercover CIA counterproliferation expert. Appointed head of counterrorism in 2004, Grenier was Chief of Station is Islamabad, and had been working in Pakistan for many years. According to a February Washington Post report printed at the time of Grenier's departure from the Agency in February, Grenier had been recalled from Pakistan to headquarters and been tasked to head the Iraq Issues Group in anticipation of the U.S. invasion. According to The Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/07/AR2006020700016.htmlRobert Grenier, who spent most of his career undercover overseas, took charge of the Counterterrorism Center about a year ago after a series of senior jobs at the center of the Bush administration's national security agenda.
When al Qaeda struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, Grenier was station chief in Islamabad, Pakistan. Among the agency's most experienced officers in southwest Asia, Grenier helped plan the covert campaign that preceded the U.S. military ouster of al Qaeda and its Taliban allies from Afghanistan.
By the summer of 2002, with President Bush heading toward war in Iraq, then-Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet recalled Grenier to headquarters and promoted him to chief of a newly created Iraq Issues Group. His staff ballooned as the administration planned and launched the invasion in March 2003.It is unknown whether Grenier became acquainted with Plame during his stint at CIA headquarters, or whether they had previously worked on matters in South Asia.
Either way, this filing sheds new light on how the CIA's nuclear counterproliferation activities were connected to counter-terrorism operations, and Plame's role within them.
If Grenier's knowledge of Plame's role was gained during the run-up to the Iraq invasion, it would indicate that Plame and Grenier were both working on questions related to Iraq's suspected WMD program. On the other hand, if Grenier had been working with Plame earlier, this would have much broader implications for Plame's role within the Agency and might suggest possible additional motives for the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) to ruin her career.
Last week, Rawstory carried coverage from a pair of Asian news outlets alleging terrorist activities in Pakistan had been deleted from the 9/11 Commission report at the behest of lobbyists working for Pakistan.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/3/14/133330/930. If these reports are accurate, it points to the possibility that Plame and Grenier may have shared some insider's knowledge of what the CIA knew about A.Q. Khan's nuclear proliferation network, and the international funding network that sustained it. The 9/11 Commission report redacted 27 pages of material reportedly related to Saudi funding for terrorism. The reports from Asia now say that the similar material related to Pakistan were also omitted from the final draft of the Report issued in 2004.
How would CIA people working on Pakistan/UBL issues know about Plame? This raises an interesting question. Why would Grenier, who had been working in Pakistan for years in the Clandestine Service, the unnamed former head of CIA Counter-Terrorism Center (CTC), know who Valerie Plame was? This would seem to lend additional credance to speculation that Plame, an NOC counter-proliferation expert, was working on the A.Q. Khan account when she was outed. This makes complete sense for the following reason.
At the time the 9/11 hijackers entered the US, the former Sudan Chief of Station, Cofer Black, was in charge of CTC. Black relates a story about a run-in he had with UBL in Khartoum just before both men left that country for other places that makes it seem more than possible that Black was UBL's case officer in Sudan. Since 1995, CTC and a separate bin Laden unit had focused on al-Qaeda. Last summer, the FBI IG report on 9/11 revealed that Black had been part of chain of command at CTC that ordered the FBI liason to withhold a cable to John O'Neil's FBI National Security Office in NY when CTC observed the Flt. 77 hijackers enter the US on 01/15/00 following their attendance at a Kuala Lumpur planning summit. The CIA had monitored them there planning the 9/11 and USS Cole attacks with Mohamed Atta's roommate and a dozen other al-Qaeda operatives. The reason that order was given to withhold notification to the FBI was because the surveillance of the 9/11 hijackers was just part of a much larger compartmentalized CIA operation that involved illegal warrantless wiretapping inside the US.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0310/S00257.htm What do the 9/11 hijackers have to do with Pakistan's nuclear program? They were both parts of the same funding network that extended from big banks in Riyadh to Chicago to the Northern Virginia suburbs to accounts managed by the President's brother at Riggs Bank in Washington, DC. There was such a degree of overlap that it made sense to place all related matters under commonly-directed working groups at the Agency. That was the function that CTC was supposed to play. Grenier, who had long worked on counter-terrorism in Pakistan, would thus have had some contact with Plame, who worked on nuclear proliferation operations running through the same country supported by the same funders in Saudi Arabia and the U.S. This was among the most politically sensitive operation the CIA was working on, given the role that some prominent Americans had in allowing Pakistan to develop its nuclear arsenal and the two-way exchange of large amounts of money, much of which ended up in GOP and al-Qaeda coffers. See,
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/1/3/10145/56290Interesting, how all of these scandals are leading back to the same circles. By the summer of 2001, something truly bizarre was going on within the Agency. The near-obsession that Tenet had with bin Laden, and the smoke seen coming from his hair during the months before the attack, can be explained by his overview of these issues. I suspect that once these counter-terrorism guys start talking about the Plame outing, and the counter-proliferation people can speak to Saudi and Pakistani financial networks, the American public is going to learn a lot more than they've been told in the mass media about 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq.
2006. Mark G. Levey
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