The Petraeus Passport Puzzle

[Geee]

American Spectator:

Hillary Clinton's State Department bureaucrats are interfering with current CIA operations by denying passports to agents, according to intelligence community sources.

Though this has happened in the past, these denials were until recently a rare occurrence. There has been a surge in the State Department's denial of "country clearances" in recent months. Because the State Department has legal control over the issuance of all U.S. passports -- including those diplomatic and other special passports often used by active CIA operatives -- its refusal to issue passports in recent months has denied the CIA the ability to mount planned operations in several nations. My sources did not reveal which countries are involved but -- given the turmoil in Egypt and Pakistan, and the U.S.'s tenuous relationship with both countries -- they would likely be among those nations for which the passports are being denied.

The State Department's decreasing cooperation with the CIA may have begun as early as January 2011 when CIA contractor Raymond Davis got into a shootout with Pakistanis on a street in Lahore, killing two men who Davis said were attempting to rob him. Davis was arrested for murder and his diplomatic passport was deemed ineffective by the Pakistanis, who held him in prison until the U.S. government paid "blood money" to the relatives of the dead.

These events come at a time when rumblings about the effectiveness of new CIA Director, Gen. David Petraeus, are also being heard. If the passport denial is as great a problem as my sources indicated, why would Petraeus not be fighting the State Department's usurpation of his job?

The denial of passports to CIA agents would most affect those who are going abroad to gather intelligence under an official cover of other U.S. government employment. Covert operations, logically, would not be affected as the agents involved would not be traveling on U.S. government passports, though "case officers" who run the covert agents might be.

The need for the intelligence those agents would gather is too obvious to explain at length here. In short, the instability in nations such as Pakistan, Egypt, Yemen, Somalia, and others enjoying the Islamist fruits of the "Arab spring" has reduced America's ability to influence events in those nations to a dangerous degree. More -- and more accurate -- intelligence is essential to maintaining what little influence we have.

The urgent need for intelligence from inside those nations raises three large questions: is Hillary Clinton behind these actions? Is the president not interested in what advantages we could gain from having it? What is DCI Petraeus doing about the problem?