Common Sense Political Thought

What I haven’t seen is any discussion of a very simple fact: Mrs. Wilson got in her car, and drove to the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, in full public view, every day, for several years.

The CIA’s headquarters building isn’t exactly a secret; there is at least one exit off a major highway in the Washington metropolitan area which tells everyone driving past that that is the exit for the CIA headquarters! It is a public road.

While it’s unlikely that the foreign intelligence services of Monte Carlo or Azerbaijan covered this particular aspect, it is pretty difficult to believe that the intelligence services of Russia and China and France and Israel and the United Kingdom and Iran and Japan and a whole bunch of other countries didn’t occasionally plant people somewhere along that highway, and every other public entrance, and take pictures of every car, and every license plate, entering the facility. License plates are easily researched; all of those intelligence services knew exactly who was actually employed there, by looking at the frequency with which people drove there and parked their cars.

Mrs. Wilson’s cover was that she worked for a consulting firm, based in Boston. The media checked that out as soon as her status became truly public (as opposed to party circuit public) knowledge, and the Boston company for which she worked was an obvious front, little more than a post office box. If Mossad had checked out her license plate (and we all know that they did, because Mossad is not sloppy), and then checked to see where she was employed, they’d have quickly tracked her back to that bogus company, discovered that the company was bogus, and therefore known that every other person stationed abroad who claimed to be a consultant for that company was, in fact, a “non-official cover” or NOC agent. For a secret intelligence agency, trying to keep a NOC’s identity covert, that was pretty sloppy work.