Mary McCarthy's Tough Choice

As a 27-year-veteran of the CIA, I have one overwhelming reaction to the news that senior intelligence analyst Mary McCarthy has been fired for leaking information to the press on CIA's network of secret prisons abroad: She must have seen no alternative to stop the abuses.

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."

Like Sam, Mary McCarthy was an independent thinker, which she proved during her tenure as senior director for intelligence programs at the White House from 1998 to 2001. There she achieved some notoriety for the personal letter she sent President Bill Clinton, criticizing the flimsiness of the "intelligence" that led to the cruise missile strike on the Sudanese pharmaceutical plant that some suggested might be producing chemical warfare agent. She was correct, but then-CIA Director George Tenet vouched for the "evidence;" testosterone won the day; and they blew the place up.

Those paying attention to the issue of torture by the CIA and the Army will recall the tortured memorandum of January 25, 2002, authored by David Addington (then counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney and now Cheney's chief of staff) and signed by then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales. That memo argued that "Geneva 's strict limitations on questioning enemy prisoners" were "obsolete" in the new war-on-terror paradigm. Still, Addington/Gonzales felt compelled to remind the president that U.S.criminal code--specifically the War Crimes Act (18 U.S.C. 2441), with its draconian penalties (including death)--could come into play.

That statute pins the "war crime" label on any grave breach of Geneva, like "outrages against personal dignity," regardless of whether the detainee qualifies as a prisoner of war. Addington and Gonzales warned the president of the danger that he could be prosecuted under that law by a future independent counsel, but reassured him that there is a "reasonable basis in law that Section 2441 does not apply, which would provide a solid defense to any future prosecution." That was good enough for President George W. Bush, who on Feb. 7, 2002, signed a memorandum saying that detainees should be treated humanely, "as appropriate and consistent with military necessity." And that is the loophole through which Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld drove a Mack truck.