What Valerie Plame Really Did at the CIA

The woman at the center of the CIA leak case “was no analyst or paper-pusher;” rather, she was chief of operations on the CIA’s clandestine Joint Task Force on Iraq, which was heading up the CIA’s intelligence hunt for Saddam’s WMD. Thus, her outing by Bush administration officials was a serious breach of national security — not to mention a career-killer. The Nation’s David Corn has the scoop in his new book, “Hubris.”

The Nation’s David Corn:

… The Novak column triggered a scandal and a criminal investigation. At issue was whether Novak’s sources had violated a little-known law that makes it a federal crime for a government official to disclose identifying information about a covert US officer (if that official knew the officer was undercover). A key question was, what did Valerie Wilson do at the CIA? Was she truly undercover? In a subsequent column, Novak reported that she was “an analyst, not in covert operations.” White House press secretary Scott McClellan suggested that her employment at the CIA was no secret. Jonah Goldberg of National Review claimed, “Wilson’s wife is a desk jockey and much of the Washington cocktail circuit knew that already.”

Valerie Wilson was no analyst or paper-pusher. She was an operations officer working on a top priority of the Bush Administration. Armitage, Rove and Libby had revealed information about a CIA officer who had searched for proof of the President’s case. In doing so, they harmed her career and put at risk operations she had worked on and foreign agents and sources she had handled.

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