Updated below
The White House outed the CIA Station Chief in Kabul, Gregory Vogel:
The CIA’s top officer in Kabul was exposed Saturday by the White House when his name was inadvertently included on a list provided to news organizations of senior U.S. officials participating in President Obama’s surprise visit with U.S. troops.
The White House recognized the mistake and quickly issued a revised list that did not include the individual, who had been identified on the initial release as the “Chief of Station” in Kabul, a designation used by the CIA for its highest-ranking spy in a country.
The name and the position of the person was widely distributed.
[T]he pool report was filed by Washington Post White House bureau chief Scott Wilson. Wilson said he had copied the list from the e-mail provided by White House press officials. He sent his pool report to the press officials, who then distributed it to a list of more than 6,000 recipients.
Wilson said that after the report was distributed, he noticed the unusual reference to the station chief and asked White House press officials in Afghanistan whether they had intended to include that name.
Initially, the press office raised no objection, apparently because military officials had provided the list to distribute to news organizations. But senior White House officials realized the mistake and scrambled to issue an updated list without the CIA officer’s name. The mistake, however, already was being noted on Twitter, although without the station chief’s name.
Despite the name being distributed on a list to 6,000 news people a Google news search for Gregory Vogel brings up no results for the name.
This shows the enormous power the CIA holds over news entities.
Those who published the name were immediately informed to pull and redact their news pieces. This is, for example, a screenshot from an earlier web search for Gregory Vogel:
The search result from a recent Wall Street Journal blog entry clearly says "His name is Gregory Vogel." That piece though was soon scrubbed from the WSJ website and in its current version has no station chief named in it.
This whole story is weird in several aspect:
1. The station chief name is widely known in Kabul and elsewhere and has been public for four years. Why is there still a need to hide it? Why are the media going along with the government in this?
2. The CIA station chief was installed by the U.S. military under then General McChrystal and Petreaus, a very unusual procedure. The generals wanted him because he was a former special operations soldier and cooperated with their death squadrons killing missions. The results were predictable:
The problem with this shift, the officials say, is that both the military and the CIA are focusing on short-term, tactical intelligence, and ignoring the long view.
That the military was allowed to select a CIA station chief also led to problems with the State Department:
The CIA’s prominent role in Afghanistan is fraught, the spy agency having clashed at times with the official diplomatic mission. That has complicated the civilian component of the U.S. military surge.
In particular, the station chief’s role has led to tensions with the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry. Officials said the ambassador objected last fall to the return to Kabul of the station chief, who had held the same post earlier in the war. Mr. Eikenberry declined to comment, as did the State Department.
It is no wonder that the State Department protested. Under Gregory Vogel the CIA hired over 3,000 locals as "Counterterrorist Pursuit Teams". These local thugs under CIA control are responsible for a lot of bad mood against the United States in Afghanistan and have led to many diplomatic problems.
3. That the name of the stations chief was put on the to-be-published list by the White House is unlikely to have been a "mistake". Someone wanted to out the guy to get rid of him. For what reason is hard to know but many parties could have their own interests in such a change. Gregory Vogel will now have to leave the country and that may lead to policy changes where the local CIA gangs may get folded into the Afghan army and come under a more regular line of command. The CIA could then go be back to thinking strategically about Afghanistan. Something which has thoroughly lacked for over a decade.
Update:
In the comments people point to Cryptocomb.org which claims to have a copy the original media pool report. In that version one "Mike Raiole" is named as Chief of Station Kabul, not Gregory Vogel. That contradicts the WSJ report pictured above. Gregory Vogel was station chief in Kabul for years. Has that changed? There is no way for me to decide which of these reports is correct.