The Plame Game - Identifying the Players

During the Plame Game I and others have talked the people involved. Yet many people who read of them might not know who they are or more importantly where they come from. So let's start with one of the first and most mentioned 'playas", Washington Post Journalist Walter Pincus. First a this bio:

"Born in Brooklyn, Walter Pincus worked as a copyboy at the New York Times after graduating from Yale University. He was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1955 and served in the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps in Washington from 1955-1957. After his discharge, he worked on the copy desk of The Wall Street Journal's Washington edition. He left in 1959 to become Washington correspondent for three North Carolina newspapers. In 1963, he moved to the Washington Star before joining The Washington Post, where he worked from 1966 to 1969. From 1972 to 1975, he was executive editor of The New Republic. He covered the Watergate Senate hearings, the House impeachment hearings and the Watergate trial, writing articles for the magazine and op-ed pieces for The Washington Post. In 1975, he returned to The Washington Post to write for the national staff of the newspaper.

When he resumed writing for the newspaper, he also was permitted to work as a part time consultant to NBC News and later CBS News, developing, writing or producing television segments for network evening news, magazine shows and hour documentaries.

Pincus has taken two 18-month sabbaticals from journalism. Both were spent directing investigations for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under its then-chairman, Sen. J. William Fulbright. The first was into foreign government lobbying (1962-63) and the second into U.S. military and security commitments abroad and their effect on U.S. foreign policy (1969-70). Both investigations led to legislation. The first in a revision of the Foreign Agents Registration Act; the second in a series of limiting amendments on defense appropriations bills that culminated in the Hatfield-McGovern legislation to end the Vietnam War.

At The Washington Post, Pincus has written about a variety of national news subjects ranging from nuclear weapons and arms control to political campaigns to the American hostages in Iran to investigations of Congress and the Executive Branch. For six years he covered the Iran-contra affair. He covered the intelligence community and its problems arising out of the case of confessed spy Aldrich H. Ames, allegations of Chinese espionage at the nuclear weapons laboratories."

And he won a bunch of awards....pretty stellar.

Ok, let's take a look at all this for a minute. Notice for one, he began as as an editor of The New Republic a liberal progressive magazine in print since 1917. Not earth shattering, but important. Notice that most of Mr. Pincus's work has come during Republican trouble spots such Watergate, Iran Contra, etc. I don't recall anything of import that he wrote from the Clinton Scandal days, in fact he wrote relatively little compared to his colleagues. Except when he wrote this screed ripping into Kenneth Starr.

The reader should note the current glowing press protrayals of Fitzgerald compared to Starr (at least for now).

Some of you might not be as old as me and remember the Vietnam era, but I noted Mr. Pincus's curious connection to Senator J. William Fulbright, a staunch critic of the war, as well at was some of Pincus's work that led to the C-BS story on Westmoreland in the 1980s - a sore spot with me.

Well, where does this all lead. Well history tells us that the MSM/CIA connection was "industry secret" up until the mid 1970s. After the lid was blown the "Church Commission" attempted to fix the problem but as we know it was 'glossed over" at the time and many of the "ties that bind" remain. To quote:

"According to John Kelly of CounterSpy magazine, Post reporter Walter Pincus (CFR) worked for the CIA in 1959 as an Agency trained and funded delegate sent to the International Youth Festival in Vienna to disrupt the festival and spy on fellow Americans. After briefing agents on his activities and taking a pledge of secrecy, he went on attend youth conferences in Ghana and Guinea. Pincus claims that he was offered, but turned down, a permanent CIA position, although he did attend a political meeting in New Delhi at the Agency's request before going on to bigger and better things at the Post. Pincus has written several pieces sympathetic to CIA operations."

So is Walter still "Pinko Pincus"? Well you could compare from most of Pincus's work in the Plame Game and see that it has amazing comparisons to the writings of VIPS Johnson, McGovern and others.

Yet more specifically, Pincus's current connections today are mainly through go betweens, such as Senator Chuck Shumer, through whom he was introduced to Mr. Joe Wilson. You just had to know that someone had to have "helped" Joe get his story out and Chucky and Wilson go way back as do Chucky and Walter and especially his wife Ann.

Next: Nicolas Krisoff.
























Filed under: judith miller valerie plame karl rove Valerie Plame PlameGate john hannah

October 20, 2005

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