Leak suspect no pushover

WASHINGTON — In 1998, when President Bill Clinton ordered military strikes against a suspected chemical-weapons factory in Sudan, Mary McCarthy, a senior intelligence officer assigned to the White House, warned the president the plan relied on inconclusive intelligence, two former government officials said.

McCarthy's reservations did not stop the attack, carried out in retaliation for al-Qaida's bombing of two U.S. embassies in East Africa. But they illustrated her willingness to challenge intelligence data and methods endorsed by her bosses at the CIA.

On Thursday, the CIA fired McCarthy, 61, accusing her of leaking information to reporters about overseas prisons operated by the agency in the years since the Sept. 11 attacks. She has not been charged with any crime.

Some colleagues who worked with her at the White House and other offices during her intelligence career said they cannot imagine McCarthy as a leaker of classified information.

As a senior National Security Council aide for intelligence from 1996 to 2001, she was responsible for guarding some of the nation's most sensitive secrets.

"We're talking about a person with great integrity who played by the book and, as far as I know, never deviated from the rules," said Steven Simon, a National Security Council aide in the Clinton administration who worked with McCarthy.

Others said it was possible McCarthy — who began attending law school at night several years ago, made a contribution to Sen. John Kerry's presidential campaign in 2004 and had announced her intention to retire from the CIA — had grown increasingly disenchanted with the methods adopted by the Bush administration for handling al-Qaida prisoners and thought she had no alternative except to go to the media.

If McCarthy was the leaker, said Richard Kerr, a former CIA deputy director, "I have no idea what her motive was, but there is a lot of dissension within the agency, and it seems to be a rather unhappy place."

She was known as a low-key professional during her time at the White House who paid special attention to preventing leaks of classified information and covert operations, several current and former government officials said.

Some former intelligence officials who worked with McCarthy saw her as a persistent obstacle to aggressive anti-terrorism efforts.

"She was always of the view that she would rather not get her hands dirty with covert action," said Michael Scheuer, a former CIA official. In the case of the Al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan, her concerns may have been well-founded. Sudanese officials and the plant's owner denied any connection to al-Qaida.

Eventually, Clinton administration officials conceded the hardest evidence used to justify striking the plant was one soil sample that seemed to indicate the presence of a chemical used in making VX gas.

McCarthy, who earned a doctorate in history from the University of Minnesota, joined the CIA in 1984 as an intelligence analyst for Africa.

By 1991, she was deputy to one of the agency's most senior analysts, Charles Allen, whose job was to anticipate major national-security threats. McCarthy took over the job from Allen in 1994 and moved to the Clinton White House two years later.

There, she "worked on some of the most sensitive programs," a former White House aide said, and was responsible for notifying Congress when covert action was being undertaken.

When President Bush took office in 2001, McCarthy's career seemed to stall and she left several months into his first term.

She took an extended sabbatical at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington research organization. In 2003, she testified publicly before the 9/11 commission about ways to reorganize the intelligence agencies to prevent another major terrorist attack.

Several associates of McCarthy, who is married and has one child, said she returned to the CIA in 2004, taking a job in the Inspector General's Office. That year, public records show, she contributed $2,000 to Kerry's campaign.

After a November article in The Washington Post reported the CIA was sending terrorism suspects to clandestine detention centers in several countries, including some in Eastern Europe, Porter Goss, the agency's director, ordered polygraphs for intelligence officers who knew about certain "compartmented" programs, including the secret detention centers for terrorism suspects.

Polygraphs are given routinely to agency employees at least every five years, but special ones can be ordered when a security breach is suspected.

Government officials said that after McCarthy's polygraph showed the possibility of deception, the examiner confronted her and she disclosed having had conversations with reporters.

But some former CIA employees who know McCarthy remain unconvinced.

"It looks to me like Mary is being used as a sacrificial lamb," said Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer who once worked for McCarthy.