Bob Novak: Consider Him for All Your Pawn Needs
Well, the Salon blog servers are back up, but a lot has happened in the interim:
A Las Vegas tiger finally realized that "Hey, humans don't have claws OR fangs, and we clearly have the edge in muscle: why are we taking orders from them?" Roy has our sincere wishes for a quick recovery.
Coca Cola has come out with an orange juice that fights cholesterol, so now you can order a Big Mac and a Coke, and let them duke it out in your stomach.
Ann Coulter got $20,000 to tell University of North Carolina students that, among other things, "Liberals don't think of themselves as Americans. They aren't betraying America because they don't think of America as their own country." (We think this deserves further investigation, and so, in our in-depth weekend report on Official State Religions, we will cover this breaking news too.)
And, of course, Bob Novak, in an effort to prove that he is NOT just a tool of the Republican Party, reported in his latest column (The Wilsons for Gore) basically the same thing that he had said on TV, to whit:
On the same day in 1999 that retired diplomat Joseph Wilson was returned $1,000 of $2,000 he contributed to Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore a month earlier because it exceeded the federal limit, his CIA-employee wife gave $1,000 to Gore using a fictitious identification for herself.
In making her April 22, 1999, contribution, Valerie E. Wilson identified herself as an "analyst" with "Brewster-Jennings & Associates." No such firm is listed anywhere, but the late Brewster Jennings was president of Socony-Vacuum oil company a half-century ago. Any CIA employee working under "non-official cover" always is listed with a real firm, but never an imaginary one.
Here's part of the Wash Post story on Novak's latest revelation:
The leak of a CIA operative's name has also exposed the identity of a CIA front company, potentially expanding the damage caused by the original disclosure, Bush administration officials said yesterday.
The company's identity, Brewster-Jennings & Associates, became public because it appeared in Federal Election Commission records on a form filled out in 1999 by Valerie Plame, the case officer at the center of the controversy, when she contributed $1,000 to Al Gore's presidential primary campaign.
After the name of the company was broadcast yesterday, administration officials confirmed that it was a CIA front. They said the obscure and possibly defunct firm was listed as Plame's employer on her W-2 tax forms in 1999 when she was working undercover for the CIA.
[snip]
The name of the CIA front company was broadcast yesterday by Novak, the syndicated journalist who originally identified Plame. Novak, highlighting Wilson's ties to Democrats, said on CNN that Wilson's "wife, the CIA employee, gave $1,000 to Gore and she listed herself as an employee of Brewster-Jennings & Associates."
"There is no such firm, I'm convinced," he continued. "CIA people are not supposed to list themselves with fictitious firms if they're under a deep cover -- they're supposed to be real firms, or so I'm told. Sort of adds to the little mystery."
In fact, it appears the firm did exist, at least on paper. The Dun & Bradstreet database of company names lists a firm that is called both Brewster Jennings & Associates and Jennings Brewster & Associates.
So, apparently Brewster-Jennings & Associates WAS Plame's CIA-assigned Non-Official Cover. It may be a real company that listed her on its rolls as a favor to the CIA, but more likely is a company that exists only on paper, set up just to provide cover to CIA officers working without a net (if any of them are caught or captured as a result of this disclosure, Bob Novak will deny all knowledge of their activities, making everything okay).
So, Plame did just what she was SUPPOSED to have done by listing it when she donated money to Gore. And Bob blew ANOTHER CIA cover -- this time for the greater good of pointing out that Joseph Wilson was . . . gasp . . . somebody who donated money to AL GORE!
And now we're back to leaks and motives. The truth is, anybody could have found out who Plame donated money to, and consequently, also have found out the name of her cover employer, once her name was out there. This is not a new leak, just part of the fallout from the original leak.
But surely the great Robert Novak didn't go through campaign donation records himself, in order to find this tidbit. No, it seems likely that eager Republican party operatives, frantically looking for "dirt" to throw at Wilson, found this item, thought that it showed that Wilson and Plame had violated campaign donation laws, and eagerly offered it to Novak to prove that there was no White House Leak of a CIA undercover officer's name and affiliation because . . .well, don't ask why this makes the leak go away, just believe that it does. And Novak used their info because now that he's known to be a pawn and has no reputation worth saving, he decied that he might as well be the best darned pawn that the RNC ever had!
But who is telling Novak that "CIA people are not supposed to be list themselves with fictitious firms" and "any CIA employee working under 'non-official cover' is always listed with a real firm, never with an imaginary one"? Surely no REAL CIA employee would ever say that, because they'd know it wasn't the case. Unless they were trying to set up Novak, in a stunning double-cross operation, right out of Robert Ludlums's latest posthumous thriller, The Estroy-day Ovak-Nay Operation!
But I don't think that actually happened. It is possible that Novak's "CIA snitch" Huggybear, the non-CIA employee who gave him that great scoop about Plame just being an analyst, came through for him again with this latest inaccuracy. But wouldn't Bob be a little distrustful of Huggybear at this point, and vet his info with somebody else?
So, the only thing that makes sense to me is that this info about how the cover of CIA NOCs work came from the GOP too, from somebody who had once talked to somebody who claimed to have worked for the CIA. And this little knowledge became a dangerous thing, both for the CIA (and its efforts to provide intelligence on weapons proliferation) and for Novak (who is once again revealed as an idiot and a pawn of the GOP).
The moral of this story is clear: Novak is a tool, and whoever is feeding him this information DOESN'T CARE about the country (since he or she isn't giving any thought as to what these revelations could do to National Security), and is only trying to score petty partisan points by blackening the name of Joseph Wilson for having dared to question his master. Any administration that claims to be moral must demand that this be stopped immediately. Unless they want to add this to the newsletter as an example of "What President Bush and Republicans are doing to make America stronger, safer, and better."
5:07:01 PM 
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