As has been said many times, the intelligence world is a wilderness of mirrors. In writing about it from the outside, I know that I know that I do not know what I do not know.

If that is not clear, all I mean to say is that when it comes to this terrain, one has to be on guard and critical. One typical example of the problem faced by outsiders is presented by Shadow Warriors, a book by Kenneth R. Timmerman about CIA efforts to sabotage the Bush administration. A longtime student of U.S. intelligence, Timmerman writes flatly here that “to this day, the CIA has no spies in Iran.” He attributes this information to “numerous agency insiders and other sources.”

How are we to evaluate this assertion? If the CIA did have spies in Iran, it would be logical to assume that it would want to keep that  fact very close to the vest. One way to do this would be to have “numerous agency insiders and other sources” go around telling journalists like Kenneth Timmerman that the agency has no spies in Iran with the hope that he will repeat it in a book.

Throughout, and on all subjects, Timmerman writes with an air of certainty, which makes me distrust him. Nonetheless, my best guess, knowing a bit about CIA difficulties in recruiting human sources, is that his claim about the agency’s non-coverage of Iran is accurate.

Even if one reads Shadow Warriors with a skeptical eye, while also taking note of Timmerman’s heavy breathing–the book is replete with polemical phrases that cloud the mirror with unnecessary vapor–it undeniably offers many fascinating details.

One such detail is Timmerman’s assertion that the authorities have a suspect  behind the leak leading to the December 16, 2005 story in the New York Times compromising the National Security Agency’s terrorist surveillance program. “As I can reveal here for the first time,” writes Timmerman, a “senior member of the Senate intelligence committee is under investigation by the FBI in connection with the leak.”

Is Timmerman right? I have no idea. But the Times first got hold of the leaked information shortly before the November 2004 elections and sat on it for a year. An important leak right before a presidential election could have had an obvious political motivation. Here are the Senators who served on the committee in the 2004-2005 time period:

Evan Bayh
Christopher S. Bond
Saxby Chambliss
Jon Corzine
Thomas Daschle ex officio
Mike DeWine
Richard Durbin
John Edwards
Dianne Feinstein
Bill Frist, ex officio
Chuck Hagel
Orrin G. Hatch
Carl Levin
Trent Lott
Barbara A. Mikulski
Pat Roberts
Harry Reid ex officio
John D. Rockefeller IV
Olympia J. Snowe
John Warner
Ron Wyden

Readers are invited to help me connect the dots.  Write to [email protected] and put “Connecting the Dots” in the subject field.