Leaking With a Vengeance

The Administration leaked in an incredible act of hubris - valuing revenge and warning to other critics over preventing terrorists from getting their hands on nuclear materials.

"Her career as an undercover operative is over," says former CIA officer Jim Marcinkowski, now a prosecutor in Royal Oak, Mich. He was a classmate of Plame's during the year rookie spies spend at the Farm, the Camp Peary, Va., school where CIA recruits learn how to read code and sneak through checkpoints and memorize secret documents. At the Farm, Plame stood out, he recalls, for being the best shot with an AK-47 in the entire class. "She will no longer be safe traveling overseas," he says. "I liken that to the knee-capping of an athlete."

The ultimate irony is that the Administration may now be depending on journalists' rectitude. In the prelude to and particularly in the aftermath of the war, Bush's aides at times questioned the patriotism of the press; that some of those officials may now be depending on the silence of the media in the face of a national-security investigation made some Bush allies uncomfortable. Though she says she believes the White House denials, longtime Bush adviser Karen Hughes tells TIME, "I don't believe it's right to hide behind journalists."

The double-barreled leak had two targets. One was to tag Wilson as a tired, second-rate diplomat who couldn't get a job without his wife's help. The leakers also wanted to drop the hint that the CIA had purposefully chosen someone it believed would come back with a skeptical finding.

EL - it's a cover story but TIME doesn't go far enough. The main conclusion that has to be drawn is that this administration would prefer playing hardball politics even if it meant risking a nuclear fireball in American. The worse thing is that Bush has done nothing for weeks about this and when finally it became a big story he is treating this as a political game of what's the spin.

The great thing about this story for Democrats is that it illustrates the administration's hubris, meanness, and politicizing as nothing else does. Bush could have exposed the leakers, fired them and this issue would have dropped weeks ago. Instead the White House response was Karl Rove trying to get other journalists on his story that it showed Wilson as getting the job through nepotism.

These little mean vicious children don't have a clue.