A senior House Intelligence Committee member on Friday asked the nation’s top intelligence officer to investigate whether CIA officers used an unauthorized back channel to provide classified information to European officials investigating the agency’s interrogation of al Qaeda leaders in Europe.
Michigan Rep. Peter Hoekstra, the committee’s ranking Republican, said in a letter that if the reports are true, the officers broke the law and should be prosecuted.
“It is not an option to go to an agent of a foreign power about the classified activities of the United States, and if anyone did, they should be punished to the maximum extent of the law,” Hoekstra said in his letter to Michael McConnell, the director of national intelligence.
A spokeswoman for McConnell declined to comment.
Hoekstra says the reported back-channel contacts by CIA officers is another example of rogue elements within the agency trying to sabotage President Bush. The congressman has accused the CIA of exposing secret intelligence programs and making unsubstantiated charges against the administration.
Appearing on Fox News Channel’s “Fox and Friends,” Hoekstra said a new report by the European Union refers to information supplied by numerous unnamed CIA officials.
“[The European Union is] looking into these supposedly secret prisons and those types of things,” the congressman said. “And cited throughout that whole document are sources in the CIA — high-level sources in the CIA and other high-level sources in the intelligence community.”
He called their cooperation with the EU “a cancer in the intelligence community that is just wrecking our capabilities. And the question you have to ask is, what good is a spy organization that can’t even keep its own secrets?”
The CIA interrogation centers were disclosed by The Washington Post in a Pulitzer Prize-winning article. The CIA did a leak investigation and forced the retirement of an analyst who denied being a source for the story.
Hoekstra also wrote to McConnell that, “As a nation we will find ourselves in a most precarious situation if senior members of the intelligence community, those entrusted with the nation’s most sensitive information, come to believe themselves above laws governing classified information or rules governing their conduct.”
