Breaking the rules

Sometimes breaking the rules is the right thing to do. Especially if the rules are working to cover up and facilitate extreme criminal behavior.

Ray McGovern on Mary McCarthy, the CIA official fired for allegedly linking information on the Agency's secret gulag system:

It appears that McCarthy was one of the sources upon which Washington Post reporter Dana Priest relied for the prison scoop that won her a Pulitzer. The Post quoted an unnamed "former senior intelligence official" yesterday saying he thought a majority of CIA officers would probably agree with the firing of McCarthy. "A small number might support her, but the ethic of the business is not to leak," said the former official, adding that one should stay within official grievance channels.

That’s what my colleague, CIA analyst Sam Adams, did 40 years ago - and came to rue the day. Through painstaking research, Adams discovered that Gen. William Westmoreland’s staff in Saigon had been ordered to keep Communist force figures artificially low - about half the actual strength - in order to project a picture of progress. When the countrywide offensive at Tet in early 1968 gave the lie to Westmoreland’s figures and vindicated Adams, Sam tried manfully to hold the culprits accountable by going to the CIA’s and the Pentagon’s inspectors general. He got the proverbial run-around, and some 30,000 additional U.S. troops and a million more Vietnamese fell before the war was over six years later. Adams was never able to shake his nagging remorse at the thought that he might have helped prevent further carnage, had he gone out of "official channels" and briefed his findings to the then-free mainstream press. He died at 55 when his heart gave out.

The tragedy of Sam Adams is well known, even to those, like Mary McCarthy, who joined the CIA many years after Sam left. From his present perch, I relish the thought that he is pleased that Mary may have learned a valuable lesson from the frustration he encountered by "staying within official grievance channels."

And, yes, there are ways to distinguish between "leaking" to stop criminal torture and illegal practices, as McCarthy apparently did, and "leaking" to impose political payback on a CIA agent's husband as in the Valerie Plame, regardless of how many people might be hurt or killed, and regardless of how useful Plame's network was in providing accurate information about Iran's nuclear program.

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