The Strange Journey of Larry Johnson

By David Weigel, The American Prospect. Posted July 1, 2008.

On May 13, 2006, Larry C. Johnson -- former CIA intelligence officer, counterterrorism pundit, classmate of Valerie Plame -- put up a breaking post claiming that Karl Rove was under federal indictment for perjury and lying to investigators looking into the leaking of Plame's identity.

"Rove Indicted," Johnson blogged. "Frog march the bastard. As Freddie Mercury sang, 'another one bites the dust.'"

The post linked to the investigative site TruthOut and an anonymously sourced story that, it turned out, wasn't true. Still, on May 21, Johnson approvingly linked to TruthOut's explanation for the blunder. "They are sticking to their guns and justifiably so," he wrote. "Time will tell." In response, National Review's Byron York asked how an intelligence consultant who'd downplayed the threat of terrorism less than two months before Sept. 11 became a player in the Plame scandal and an icon on the left. But Johnson had been attacked by the right ever since he became an advocate for Plame; the criticism rolled right off.

But, by May and early June of this year, Johnson had become much more hated on the left than he ever was on the right. He was instrumental in spreading the rumor that Republican operatives possessed a tape of Barack Obama's wife Michelle railing against "whitey." The affair has turned some of Johnson's old friends and allies into raging, red-eyed enemies. "Smears of this type are unforgivable," wrote blogger Booman, who said that his friendship with Johnson had ended over the matter. "You're a sad and pathetic piece of shit," wrote Brad Reed of Sadly, No! Daily Kos, the left-wing blogopolis where Johnson's diaries once drew upward of 400 comments, became a carnival of Johnson-bashing. "You," wrote Kos regular Bob Johnson (no relation), "and the denizens of your cesspool of hate have promoted and stoked every fringe-lunatic, right-wing smear of Obama."

In the space of six months, a man who had been one of the most high-profile, credible recruits of the liberal blogosphere became as loathed as the White House apparatchiks he used to attack.

Johnson's following at places like Daily Kos was always something of a fluke. He followed four years as a CIA analyst with four years at the State Department's Office of Counterterrorism. Johnson left intelligence work in 1993, going on to build a dual career as a business consultant and a pundit on intelligence issues. He argued throughout the 1990s, on shows like "The NewsHour" and "Larry King Live," that domestic law enforcement was dropping the ball on terrorist threats while the threat of international terror was decreasing. In this age before blogs, Johnson's commentary, whether printed in the New York Times or submitted in congressional hearings, was dry, analytic and laced with facts.

Of course, part of the reason Johnson was able to build such a public profile was that his analysis was colored by his flinty, swashbuckling personality. In 2001 Peter Lance, an Emmy-winning investigative journalist, was writing the screenplay for a movie called "Terror.net" for Showtime, a project for which Johnson was retained as a consultant. The Sept. 11 attacks occurred in the midst of pre-production, and as part of his rewrite, Lance followed a tip that Abdul Hakim Murad, a plotter of the 1993 World Trade Center attack, had revealed some of the planning for the next attacks while under interrogation in the Philippines. Johnson told Lance not to follow the tip: "He went ballistic," Lance remembers. When Lance's tip turned out to be right, Johnson worked to discredit it and keep it out of the movie. "Larry, to me, is one of the great empty suits," Lance says now. "He is emblematic of what goes wrong in the agency, emblematic of the attitude that let 9/11 happen."

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David Weigel is an associate editor of Reason.

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