http://www.alternet.org/story/16936/If the Justice Department or anyone else wants to find out who blew the cover of CIA operative Valerie Plame, the spouse of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson who has been causing so much trouble for the Bush administration, they might ask Clifford May, president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), a neo-conservative outfit closely linked to pro-Likud hawks in the administration.
Aside from Wilson himself, May is the only person who has publicly claimed knowledge of Plame's employment at the CIA even before Robert Novak, the columnist who broke the story. Novak apparently acted at the behest of two "senior White House officials" who, according to a highly placed but unnamed source at the Washington Post, informed six reporters around the capital that Plame worked for the agency.
So I think it may be something of an open secret," May told Gibson.
May's assertions raise some troubling questions. Exactly who were the "insiders" for whom this was "something of an open secret?" Why and how did they pass on this information so readily to May? And is the FBI asking May who his sources were?
A 10-year veteran of the New York Times and the Rocky Mountain News, May became director of communications at the Republican National Committee in 1997, a post that he retained until 2001 when he joined BSMG Worldwide, one of the world's largest and most politically connected public and media relations firms. Two days after 9/11, he and his associates founded the FDD, whose board of directors include Steve Forbes, former HHS Secretary Jack Kemp*, and former UN Amb. Jeane Kirkpatrick, who, since resigning in 1985, has made the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) her principal home.
The FDD also has two boards of advisers; the first consists of "distinguished advisers" of which there are two -- former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former CIA director James Woolsey -- both of whom are members of Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board (DPB). The second, presumably less distinguished board of advisers constitutes a bipartisan who's who of pro-Israel hawks leading with the former chairman of the DPB, Richard Perle.
PLUS:
Woolsey said on CNN that "leakers rarely get caught"
http://www.poliblogger.com/index.php?p=1690WOOLSEY: ..."And it’s relatively routine thing. These leaks get investigated all the time. Occasionally somebody gets caught, but it’s pretty rare. It’s a lot rarer than any directors of Central Intelligence would wish."
*Kemp is a close friend of Kenneth Blackwell
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