Recent Articles



































Valerie Plame



         


Valerie Plame is an American Central Intelligence Agency employee whose identification as a CIA "operative" by pundit-columnist Robert Novak on July 14, 2003 resulted in a Justice Department investigation into possible violation of U.S. criminal law regarding exposure of covert government agents. In March 2004, the independent counsel subpoenaed the telephone records from Air Force One, resulting in a political scandal. The probable source of the information given to Robert Novak and other conservative Republican columnists is Karl Rove.

Plame, the wife of former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, was exposed by Novak as a CIA covert operative, who wrote, "Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate" the allegation.

According to Novak, administration sources claimed that it had been at Plame's suggestion that the CIA sent her husband to Niger in 2002 to investigate the Yellowcake Forgery, documents implying that Iraq had attempted to illegally purchase uranium from that country. This appeared to contradict Wilson's claim that he was sent to Niger at the request of Vice President Cheney. Cheney has denied any knowledge of Wilson's Niger visit.

Wilson charged that his wife's CIA association had been deliberately exposed by the White House in order to destroy her career, in retaliation for his public charge that the Bush administration had lied to the American people about U.S. intelligence concerning weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. In an article in The New York Times on July 6, 2003, Wilson denounced the Bush administration, saying that "some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."

The exposure of covert government agents is a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act carrying a maximum sentence of 10 years. To justify White House betrayal of national security in this case WSJ.com columnist James Taranto offered a perverse reading of the law that may be one the second Bush administration's legal defenses: for the leakers to have violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, they would have to have known that [Plame] was covert and that the government was "taking affirmative measures to conceal" her relationship to the CIA. If political appointees in a presidential administration expose a CIA agent then it is not a violation because it suggests the absence of such "affirmative measures." If accepted by the courts, legal reasoning such as this would undermine all efforts to deter and punish political crime.

The matter is currently under investigation by the Justice Department and the FBI. Patrick Fitzgerald currently heads the investigation. Because the Justice Department is headed by Republican Attorney General John Ashcroft rapid and effective action is unlikely.

Corn had that the investigation would die in the CIA - George J. Tenet would stay loyal to George W. Bush and quash this." JOM adds: "Evidently not. One guess - Mr. Tenet, pondering Bush's declining poll numbers and faced with in-house annoyance, decided to do the right thing. One presumes that, with Congress back in town, Mr. Tenet checked with his supporters on both sides of the aisle before proceeding."

Both and have made recent comments on the matter, according to JOM.

For obvious reasons, little is known of Plame's professional career. She described herself as an energy analyst for a private company, Brewster Jennings & Associates, which was subsequently acknowledged to be a CIA front company.

Plame met Wilson at a Washington party in early 1997. She was able to reveal her CIA role to him while they were dating because he held a high-level security clearance. The couple are the parents of three-year-old twins.

[Top]

Novak's response

In an effort to escape legal responsibility for his actions, Novak has asserted that Plame was an analyst, not an operative, at the CIA—the difference being that analysts are not undercover, so exposing their identities is not a crime. This has been countered by several ex-CIA operatives who knew Plame giving interviews in which they claim she was an official undercover operative, or a NOC (no official cover) (c.f., Larry Johnston).

Novak has also attempted to defend his exposure of Plame by claiming that her CIA employment was an open secret in Washington —if true, Novak claims, this would contradict the claim that administration sources were revealing classified information.

[Top]

Reverse timeline

"Administration officials told columnist Robert D. Novak then that Wilson, a partisan critic of Bush's foreign policy, was sent to Niger at the suggestion of Plame, who worked in the nonproliferation unit at CIA. The disclosure of Plame's identity, which was classified, led to an investigation into who leaked her name.

The report may bolster the rationale that administration officials provided the information not to intentionally expose an undercover CIA employee, but to call into question Wilson's bona fides as an investigator into trafficking of weapons of mass destruction. To charge anyone with a crime, prosecutors need evidence that exposure of a covert officer was intentional."


[Top]

Reaction/Response to Plame "Leak"

  • "Regardless of whether or not a special prosecutor is selected, I believe that Ambassador Wilson and his wife -- like the DNC official once did -- should file a civil lawsuit, both to address the harm inflicted on them, and, equally important, to obtain the necessary tools (subpoena power and sworn testimony) to get to the bottom of this matter. This will not only enable them to make sure they don't merely become yesterday's news; it will give them some control over the situation."
[Top]




  View Live Article   This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License