Hold on to your hat. The plot is about to thicken.

Behind the scenes, the single most important reason for the Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson farce is that CIA Director Porter Goss has finally started to clean house at Langley. Goss's long—overdue shake—up is clearly backed by the White House, the top levels of the Pentagon and State Department, and the new National Director of Intelligence,  John Negroponte.

Judging by Director Goss's remarks at his Senate confirmation hearings, those whose jobs are most in danger include the CIA "experts" in WMD proliferation — Valerie Plame's outfit — who completely failed to anticipate the Indian and Pakistani nukes, and just couldn't figure out what was going on with Iraqi WMDs. Valerie Plame's bosses are facing the axe for decades of failures.

And it's about time, because Iran is within sight of its first nukes. You don't suppose that has anything to do with the Plame/Wilson publicity stunt, do you?

Clearly the CIA managers who failed the United States so terribly on 9/11 should have been fired four years ago. Others now worried about their careers include officials who have long resisted the onerous task of building a topnotch human intelligence capability in the most dangerous parts of the world. 

Porter Goss's new broom should also sweep away:

1)      personnel who utterly failed to thwart critical technology theft by China during the Clinton years;

2)      those who constantly undermine the war on terror;

3)      the ones who make a regular habit of dropping media stinkbombs against the White House. 

4)      Finally, there is the faction that supported Saddam Hussein's hold on power, as Joe Wilson did. 

It could be a bloodbath, and the Permanent Establishment knows it.

The farcical Plame/Wilson assault on Karl Rove is a shot across the bow of the White House. The spook bureaucracy is fighting for its perks, hand—in—hand with the Democrats and the media. This is exactly the same iron triangle that destroyed Richard Nixon.

The charge against Rove is based on a blatantly forged document, purporting to show that Saddam tried to buy Niger yellowcake uranium. We now know that the document was forged by the French government to embarrass Secretary Colin Powell, and undermine the American case against Saddam at the UN. It was classic disinformation bait. Powell flourished the Niger forgery at the Security Council, and the very next day "European intelligence agencies" leaked word that it was a laughable fraud.

Months later, the London Telegraph published the fact that it was all a French disinformation ploy.

The CIA has to know all about the French forgery, just as it knows that Joseph Wilson's famous trip to Niger was pure bilgewater. Nobody sends a has—been diplomat to Africa to drink mint tea with corrupt old President Tandja Mamadou, expecting to discover whether Mamadou has secretly been selling nuke materials to Saddam.

That's pure Inspector Clousseau.

Valerie Plame's CIA bosses took care not to ask Mr. Wilson to sign a confidentiality agreement, routine in such cases, almost as if they wanted him to make a public fuss. They were not surprised, one might think, when Mr.

Wilson promptly took his story to New York Times Op—Ed Editor Gail Collins, one of the great Bush—haters of all time. As Joseph DiGenova, former US Attorney for DC, recently said, "The CIA isn't stupid. They wanted this story out."

It was a publicity stunt from the get—go. Wilson's "confidential trip" to Niger gave him the superficial credentials to publish his "expose" in the Times. He'd gone there, talked to the top officials face to face, and by gum, they told him it was all a lie!  Not even Gail Collins could possibly believe this banana sauce, but Wilson's charges provided a useful stick with which to beat the White House.

What Karl Rove apparently did was to hint to reporters about the fraudulence of the whole Wilson stunt, and for that the media mob wants him drawn and quartered. No good deed goes unpunished.

Everything else Wilson has been saying on his two—year speaking tour around the country has been shown to be lies, but well—designed lies ——— lies that fit right into the mad—dog world of the Democrat Left.

Telling lies to confirm somebody's paranoid beliefs is a classic disinformation gambit, right out of Spy School 101. But such gambits would be far more usefully employed against al Qaeda, our opponent in war. If the United States is attacked again by terrorists, one reason will be that our CIA has wasted time fighting the White House rather than the enemy.

Given Wilson's Niger trip, set up by wife Valerie for Joe Wilson to publicly show that a blatant forgery was, well, a forgery, the current media attack on the White House was completely predictable.

The Permanent Establishment had a perfect dress rehearsal last year with the uproar about Richard Clarke, who also worked in the Clinton White House, possibly next door to Joe Wilson.  The barely—disguised message to George W. Bush was: if you try to get rid of us, we may pull a Deep Throat on you. J. Edgar Hoover would have seen through it instantly.

When the Twin Towers exploded in 2001, President Bush did not touch the FBI or the CIA. By comparison, after the Japanese decimated the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor in 1941, FDR and George Marshall churned the commanding ranks of the Army and Navy, elevating talented officers like Eisenhower, Bradley and Patton. They created Wild Bill Donovan's OSS, the seed of the CIA. Donovan in his turn brought street spooks to the top, political correctness (of the day) be damned.

A lot of careers were broken, and the new talent skyrocketed. It worked like a charm. The infusion of new blood into a stale bureaucracy was the key to victory in World War II. The old crew had allowed a deplorable situation to develop, and were obviously incapable of recognizing what needed to be done.

So why didn't Mr. Bush clean out the dead wood at CIA?

A reasonable guess is that his father warned against it. George Bush, Sr. is a former CIA Director, after all, and is intimately familiar with its ways. He was a GOP Congressman during Watergate, when Mark Felt destroyed Richard Nixon for thwarting his lifelong ambition to succeed J. Edgar Hoover. 

Paraphrasing LBJ's immortal words, it was smarter to keep the CIA inside the tent pissing out rather than the other way around. So George Tenet wasn't fired, and as far as we can tell, neither was anybody else. Instead, the President met with Tenet every day for five years to get the latest about al Qaeda, and surely gained a deeper understanding of the intelligence maze at the same time.

The White House has played a very careful poker game since then, picking its cards one by one until it was ready to make the big move. Today, George Tenet is out, State and Defense are in the hands of Bush loyalists, the House and Senate have GOP majorities, and the new CIA Director is not an insider. The CIA itself is now subordinate to the new National Director of Intelligence, John Negroponte, a no—nonsense diplomat in the Kissinger mold. When Goss became Director, Agency bureaucrats complained bitterly to the press. Mr. Bush now holds all the cards, and it is time to play them.

All this isn't just fun and games. It casts a deadly light on internecine warfare in Washington at a time of great national danger.

We know that Hoover blackmailed four successive Presidents by threatening to reveal confidential FBI secrets. We know that Hoover's fair—haired boy, Mark Felt, destroyed the Nixon Presidency — a  virtual coup d'etat that the media tell us was a victory of Democracy over the Secret Government. With the media as destiny's servant.

We know that Nixon taped visitors to the Oval Office without their permission, but that FDR, LBJ, and Kennedy did the same, without facing media exposure. And during the unbelievable Clinton years we know that Bill and Hillary abused presidential power in a dozen egregious ways, and may still control copies of raw FBI files to use against their domestic enemies.

But it was Richard Nixon alone who got caught by a rogue FBI bureaucrat. Deep Throat showed how a president can be destroyed by a bureaucrat.

The farcical "outing" of Valerie Plame therefore raises a genuinely frightening monster from the swamp: A subversive alliance between the intelligence bureaucracy, the Democratic Party and the media. The common thread among all the characters in this low—brow comedy is hatred of President Bush and American power. Joe Wilson's eyebrows go ballistic when he talks about the White House. Just watch him sometime.

The sneering media mob is on display on C—SPAN whenever the White House holds a press briefing.  The Left is apoplectic: "Karl Rove traitor" brought up 97,000 entries on google three days ago, and 124,000 this morning.

But Karl Rove is merely today's target for a permanent state of rage so deep and hot that it is always seeking new witches to burn. As for the failed CIA spooks who are now living in fear of losing their perks, one can only imagine the steam blowing from their ears, as the day of reckoning draws closer.

I'm cheering for the good guys.