White House Blows Cover of CIA Spy – by Mistake

You want to call it “throwing oneself into the fray”? Well, let’s call it that. But, in reality, after a blatant bureaucratic and administrative blunder on the part of the most powerful and active body in the world, the only one who has been thrown into the fray is the CIA Chief of Station in Kabul. Now everyone knows his identity. He has been made into a living target, and as a result, has been forced to flee the country to avoid assassination. Are the Taliban to blame? No; not in the slightest. All of this is the result of an error on the part of White House staff, who released his identity during Obama’s recent surprise flash visit to Afghanistan. His full name was inserted in a press release by mistake, and sent out in a mailing list containing the addresses of some 6,000 American journalists. For a name that was intended to be kept top secret, this is no laughing matter. Now the White House has found itself in the middle of an embarrassing storm of controversy and debate.

Washington Post Reporter Makes a Scoop

The blunder was revealed by Scott Wilson, a reporter at the Washington Post. When he received his usual report from the White House press office on the president’s activity, he was in for a shock. On reading the list of names of the 15 high-ranking American officials who had met with Obama at Bagram air base, he noticed that next to one of the names, the title “CIA Chief of Station, Kabul” was listed. Wilson could not believe his eyes: A breach the size of a house in the security system, made by the very people that were meant to ensure its integrity.

Wilson immediately called the sender and alerted him to the blunder. But then he did what journalists do best: He spread the news. The Langley agent was caught in friendly fire. When the journalist asked his correspondent at the press office for further details, the response came that it wasn’t their fault; the list had been provided by the military.

The Bagram air base is essentially the stronghold of U.S. armed forces in Afghanistan; it is more than likely that the list of officials who met with Obama was compiled by military personnel. Was the White House not able to grasp that a mistake had been made? Of course, but it wasn’t them who made it. So how does the story end? The CIA official has probably already returned to the U.S., unable to remain in Kabul, where he risked elimination at any moment.

Prior Events

It is a very rare event indeed that the American administration should reveal the name of one of its CIA agents. In 2003, sources from the Bush administration used the revelation that Valerie Plame was a Langley agent to get at her husband, an ex-ambassador who was himself a fierce critic of the decision to invade Iraq. But that was a case of political vendetta with legal repercussions. This case, on the other hand, was a mistake.

It is a mistake which concerns a member of the National Clandestine Service, the section of the CIA which handles the most dangerous covert operations: targeted assassinations, drone attacks, the elimination of al-Qaida and Taliban leaders. This agent was required to flee Afghanistan in the space of just a few hours, not because he had been discovered by the enemy but because he found himself under friendly fire, from the staff of his own commander-in-chief.