It seemed like an innocent reminiscence at the time. Sen. Kent Conrad , D-N.D., at a March 1 hearing of the Senate Budget Committee, was addressing Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz about the defense budget. Perhaps because the Middle East is so important to that budget, Conrad began to recall his high school days in the mid-1960s at Wheelus Air Force Base in Libya. In the course of that recollection, the senator said: “Five blocks away lived a relative of mine who happened to be the CIA station chief, Harden Smith.”
It was a throwaway line, but in fact, it was classified because CIA station chiefs are covert operatives. After the hearing, the Budget Committee got a call from the Pentagon requesting that the panel delete the line from its official transcript, which it did. On the committee’s Web site, most hearings are available on Real Video, but clicking on the link to watch the March 1 hearing brings up “file not found.”
Conrad was not the only one who was asked to delete the information. Congressional Quarterly, which posts transcripts of hearings on CQ.com, likewise was asked to remove this one. The request to CQ, like that to the Budget Committee, came not from the CIA but from the Pentagon’s Office of Legislative Affairs. It did not come until a month after the hearing, without explanation of the putative security risk. CQ declined.
There’s nothing wrong with the government asking news organizations to delete information that it deems to be classified, as long as there’s no explicit or implied threat of retaliation against the news outlet, said Steven Aftergood, an expert on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. But in this case, he said, there does not appear to be a security imperative that justifies a deletion.
“This individual is retired,” Aftergood said of Smith. “The fact that in the past he may have served undercover is no longer national security information.”
CIA spokesman Thomas Crispell would not say whether Conrad had let slip classified information. In fact, the agency does not confirm or deny any personnel information, even about overt employees, he said. Even the death of a covert agent does not make the person’s identity unclassified, he added, and only a decision to “roll back” the person’s cover prior to his or her retirement or resignation makes it unclassified.
The Name Game
It seems to be getting harder these days to keep being a secret agent secret. Ever since pundit Robert Novak “outed” CIA operative Valerie Plame two years ago in a column about her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, official Washington has become obsessed with the propriety of putting a target on the backs of cloak-and-dagger types. A special prosecutor has been investigating how Novak and other reporters got Plame’s name, which Novak said came from sources in the White House.
Two other senators have started playing the name game as well.
Last week, Richard G. Lugar , R-Ind., and John Kerry , D-Mass., uttered the name of a CIA covert officer, Fulton Armstrong, at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the nomination of John R. Bolton to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
Lugar, chairman of the committee, announced at the start of the hearing that the committee staff had interviewed Armstrong. Kerry later questioned Bolton, who referred to the operative only as “Mr. Smith.”
“Did Otto Reich share his belief that Fulton Armstrong should be removed from his position? The answer is yes. Did John Bolton share that view? Mr. Flights said yes,” Kerry said.
Even then, Bolton did not take the bait. “As I said, I had lost confidence in Mr. Smith, and I conveyed that. I thought that was the honest thing to do.” Lugar spokesman Andy Fisher said Armstrong once held a non-covert position. “The CIA has never said that his name cannot be used,” Fisher said.
