What would happen if you were outed as CIA?
Let's play counterfactual for a paragraph and say that you do in fact work for America's premier intelligence service. What does your job now look like to suspicious outsiders? Could you continue doing what you do? Or would you lose your job? Which of your friends or acquaintances would lose their jobs - or their lives? With whom do you regularly correspond? Can you remember people you met five or ten years ago - who now have to deal with the fact that they shared with you a business meeting, a dinner, a drink, a taxi? Every single person you have ever met in your adult life is now being looked at askance.
I think about my life: my ability to travel over, my international friends and colleagues compromised, all the meetings and training sessions wasted. I think about people I have known who were accused out of spite of working for the CIA and the burden that false witness has laid upon them and their close colleagues. A false accusation of working for the CIA puts people's lives at risk for as long as the story has legs. What happens to all those people when the story is true?
How many lives would be destroyed - literally - if you were outed?
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Juan Cole has a good roundup of the scandal with some moral outrage for good measure.
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UPDATE: Changed a few words for emphasis.
Posted by Martial"What happens to all those people when the story is true?"
Depends on where they live. If they're in a totalitarian or authoritarian state, say Syria or China, it doesn't matter whether the story is true or not--they're totally f*cked, and will be lucky to live through the experience. And things are likely to be only slightly better in more enlightened states.
I'm beginning to think we're starting off the 21st century with the biggest scandal ever to hit the White House--let's hope it doesn't turn out to be one more illustration of Sir John Harrington's epigram:
""Treason doth never prosper, what's the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason!"
Posted by: Dave Trowbridge on October 2, 2003 12:29 PMOn Paula Zahn's show last night, Jim Marcinkowski, a former undercover CIA case officer, said:
" As an operations officer on scene in a country, the effects of this are that anyone who knows you or did know you now will look at your mosaic. They will look at the people you've come in contact with. They will suspect those people, be they official contacts or innocent contacts. They will suspect those persons of being intelligence agents. They could be subject to interrogation, imprisonment and even death, depending on the regime that you may be operating under. "
Posted by: Martial on October 8, 2003 02:23 PM