CIA.

This is a story about how the internet works. Late at night a few days ago I did a a somewhat nasty item about Valerie Plame Wilson's reported $2.5 million advance for a book telling what she'd done in the CIA. Within a few hours, I got a very thoughtful response from Steve—

paying off informants is not always an easy task. Finding people who are willing to talk to you and give you good information is a job in itself. Besides since her job is classified, we really don't know precisely what she did. So let's give her the benefit of the doubt.

followed by a much tougher comment from Anonymous:

Mr. Weiss, you have no idea what you are talking about. You are clueless

And that was it. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that Anonymous was Joe Wilson, Plame's husband, who I mentioned in the post, and that he was alerted to my item by a search service that alerts people who monitor their appearances on the 'net. It's just a guess. But that was the feeling I got from the formal and angry, masculine note.

Two lessons. One, the best part of the internet is highly-specialized conversations, gatherings of experts, or to use Howard Rheingold's expression, Smart mobs. Focused education. I learned more about how the CIA works.

Two, I wish I hadn't been so nasty. We thought the internet was the wild west, full of flaming and irrationality, because it's a "virtual reality" where people go in masks. Well, we had it wrong. It's actually very sophisticated socially, and people who flame get sorted out rather quickly. It's not a virtual reality, it's reality. Put another way, it's only as artificial socially as a dinner party, and maybe less artificial than a dinner party, because people are being more honest. And there's a ton more exchange of views than there is in a newspaper. If you're going to be a jerk, you'll suffer for it on the internet.

Which is to say, I promptly ordered Joe Wilson's book The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity: A Diplomat's Memoir. Looking forward to reading it, Joe.

Valerie (Plame) (Wilson)—who can be sure which name to parenthesize?—is said to be getting $2.5 million for a memoir of her life as a CIA analyst, demonstrating that the leaking of her name is the best thing that ever happened to her career.

Much as I hope this case will take down the vicious Cheney and Rove, and Judith and Scooter, and all the other war cabal-ers, the core infraction has never seemed like a big deal. I wonder how many people knew that (Plame)(Wilson) was CIA. I wonder what she was actually doing, besides commuting to a desk job from her beautiful home in Washington, and reading the Financial Times. Under cover, of course. In what sense was her work compromised? Yes, they were scurrilously trying to undermine Joe Wilson, but how did this leak smear Wilson? He's been dining off it ever since. (Though yes, he was a noble force on the Niger lies.)

I've had brushes with CIA analysts over the years and the sad truth is they're a lot like journalists. They read stuff. They send one another emails. (If you're Ken Pollack on the Iran account, you don't even go to Iran). I know they train to handle guns, but how often do they actually do so? I once visited an embassy compound in the Third World where a friend in State explained to me that the CIA guys just paid off informants to get information about the bad guys. I wonder whether (Plame)(Wilson) even got that far. According to the Vanity Fair profile that launched her blonde meteor, she graduated from Penn State—in the glamour days CIA people did a little better than that—and apparently spent her time in various European capitals, such as dangerous Brussels, working on, among other things, her wifeability. She landed an Ambassador. Good for her. But $2.5 million? There better be a lot of sex.

My Life in CIA: A Chronicle of 1973, by Harry Mathews.  read more »