Former CIA supervisor Glenn L. Carle has accused senior Bush administration officials of trolling secret CIA files for negative information about one of its public critics, University of Michigan Professor Juan Cole, according to the June 16 New York Times.
The paper reported that David B. Low, the National Intelligence Officer (NIO) for Transnational Threats at the National Intelligence Council, asked Carle in 2005: “What do you think we might know about him, or could find out that could discredit him?” After being rebuffed for making an inappropriate request, Low continued: “But what might we know about him?” Carle said Low asked: “Does he drink? What are his views? Is he married?”
Carle rebuffed the request again, stressing that it was illegal. But the next day, Carle explained that "on his way to a meeting in the C.I.A.’s front office, a secretary asked if he would drop off a folder to be delivered by courier to the White House. Mr. Carle said he opened it and stopped cold. Inside, he recalled, was a memo from Mr. Low about Juan Cole that included a paragraph with 'inappropriate, derogatory remarks' about his lifestyle."
Juan Cole — the target of the CIA's political dirt, called the spying "outrageous." Wired.com's Spencer Ackerman summarized that "[B]ewilderingly, all Cole did was say mean things about the Bush team on the internet. He wasn’t a militant, he wasn’t even an activist. He blogged. To devote precious intelligence resources, especially from counterterrorism officials, to silencing him is laughably solipsistic."
