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The following is what Wikipedia says about Valarie Plame.
Due to the nature of her clandestine work for the CIA, details about Plame's professional career are still classified. While undercover, she described herself as an "energy analyst" for the private company "Brewster Jennings & Associates", which the CIA later acknowledged was a front company for certain investigations. According to Boston Globe reporters Ross Kerber and Bryan Bender, who searched for "Brewster Jennings" in Dunn & Bradstreet, the New Jersey operator of commercial databases, "Brewster Jennings" first entered D&B records on May 22, 1994; but, when contacted directly, D&B personnel would not discuss the source of the filing. Although D&B records list the company as a "legal services office," located at 101 Arch Street, Boston, Massachusetts, given the CIA's later acknowledgment and the dead end reached by Kerber and Bender in their attempts to learning more about it, one does doubt that Plame actually "worked" for it.[7]
Valerie Plame was identified as a NOC by Elisabeth Bumiller, in an article published in the New York Times on 5 October 2003:
But within the C.I.A., the exposure of Ms. Plame is now considered an even greater instance of treachery. Ms. Plame, a specialist in non-conventional weapons who worked overseas, had "nonofficial cover", and was what in C.I.A. parlance is called a NOC, the most difficult kind of false identity for the agency to create. While most undercover agency officers disguise their real profession by pretending to be American embassy diplomats or other United States government employees, Ms. Plame passed herself off as a private energy expert. Intelligence experts said that NOCs have especially dangerous jobs.[8]
In "NOC, NOC. Who's There? A Special Kind of Agent", an article published in the October 19, 2003, issue of Time magazine, Michael Duffy and Timothy J. Burger highlight that "The unmasking of Valerie Plame sheds light on the shadowy world of NOCs, spies with nonofficial cover", relating:
Plame worked as a spy internationally in more than one role. Fred Rustmann, a former CIA official who put in 24 years as a spymaster and was Plame's boss for a few years, says Plame worked under official cover in Europe in the early 1990s say, as a U.S. embassy attache before switching to nonofficial cover a few years later. Mostly Plame posed as a business analyst or a student in what Rustmann describes as a "nice European city." Plame was never a so-called deep-cover NOC, he said, meaning the agency did not create a complex cover story about her education, background, job, personal life and even hobbies and habits that would stand up to intense scrutiny by foreign governments. "[NOCs] are on corporate rolls, and if anybody calls the corporation, the secretary says, 'Yeah, he works for us,'" says Rustmann. "The degree of backstopping to a NOC's cover is a very good indication of how deep that cover really is." . . . . Though Plame's cover is now blown, it probably began to unravel years ago when Wilson first asked her out. Rustmann describes Plame as an "exceptional officer" but says her ability to remain under cover was jeopardized by her marriage in 1998 to the higher-profile American diplomat.[9]
Larry C. Johnson, "a former CIA analyst who was in Plame's officer training class in 1985-86"[10], left the Agency in 1989, and later served as Deputy Director for Special Operations, Transportation Security, and Anti-Terrorism Assistance in the U.S. State Department's Office of Counter Terrorism until October 1993, has posted as a "special guest" in a blog on 13 June 2005 that prior to Novak's column of 14 July 2003 Valerie Plame was indeed a "non-official cover operative" (NOC):
Valerie Plame was an undercover operations officer until outed in the press by Robert Novak. . . . Valerie Plame was a classmate of mine from the day she started with the CIA. I entered on duty at the CIA in September 1985. All of my classmates were undercover--in other words, we told our family and friends that we were working for other overt U.S. Government agencies. We had official cover. That means we had a black passport--i.e., a diplomatic passport. If we were caught overseas engaged in espionage activity the black passport was a get out of jail free card.
A few of my classmates, and Valerie was one of these, became a non-official cover officer. That meant she agreed to operate overseas without the protection of a diplomatic passport. If caught in that status she would have been executed.
The lies by people like Victoria Toensing, Representative Peter King, and P. J. O'Rourke insist that Valerie was nothing, just a desk jockey. Yet, until Robert Novak betrayed her she was still undercover and the company that was her front was still a secret to the world. When Novak outed Valerie he also compromised her company and every individual overseas who had been in contact with that company and with her.[11]
Johnson, joined by ten other CIA officials, has presented a formal statement to the U.S. Congressional investigation into this matter dated July 18, 2005, addressing the consequences of disclosing Plame's identity in detail.[12]
Special Counsel Fitzgerald affirmed further that Plame served in a classified position as a CIA officer and the necessity for protecting such classified information during his October 28, 2005 press conference:
Valerie Wilson was a CIA officer. In July 2003, the fact that Valerie Wilson was a CIA officer was classified. Not only was it classified, but it was not widely known outside the intelligence community. Valerie Wilson's friends, neighbors, college classmates had no idea she had another life. The fact that she was a CIA officer was not well-known, for her protection or for the benefit of all us. It's important that a CIA officer's identity be protected, that it be protected not just for the officer, but for the nation's security. Valerie Wilson's cover was blown in July 2003. The first sign of that cover being blown was when Mr. Novak published a column on July 14th, 2003.[13]
"[T]he 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act . . . makes it a crime to knowingly disclose the name of a covert agent" (italics added).[14] When asked if he could ascertain whether or not Libby had revealed Plame's covert status "knowingly," Special Counsel Fitzgerald responded:
Let me say two things. Number one, I am not speaking to whether or not Valerie Wilson was covert. And anything I say is not intended to say anything beyond this: that she was a CIA officer from January 1st, 2002, forward. I will confirm that her association with the CIA was classified at that time through July 2003. And all I'll say is that, look, we have not made any allegation that Mr. Libby knowingly, intentionally outed a covert agent. We have not charged that. And so I'm not making that assertion. (Italics added.)[13]
Early in November 2005, posting in his own personal blog No Quarter, former CIA officer Larry C. Johnson responds further to the ongoing dispute about Valerie Plame's status as a CIA NOC:
There is the claim that the law to protect intelligence identities could not have been violated because Valerie Wilson had not lived overseas for six years. Too bad this is not what the law stipulates. The law actually requires that a covered person served overseas in the last five years. Served does not mean lived. In the case of Valerie Wilson, energy consultant for Brewster-Jennings, she traveled overseas in 2003, 2002, and 2001, as part of her cover job. She met with folks who worked in the nuclear industry, cultivated sources, and managed spies. She was a national security asset until exposed. . . .[15]
On February 3, 2006, court papers were released to the public pertaining to arguments held a year earlier before the United States Court of Appeals for the Distict of Columbia regarding the need for testimony from Judith Miller and Matt Cooper. Also released was a August 27, 2004 affidavit of Patrick Fitzgerald. In the affidavit, Fitzgerald states "[Judith Miller's] testimony is essential to determining whether Libby is guilty of crimes, including perjury, false statements, and the improper disclosure of national defense information."[16] In a footnote to that argument, Fitzgerald writes:
If Libby knowingly disclosed information about Plame's status with the CIA, Libby would appear to have violated Title 18, United States Code, Section 793 [the Espionage Act] if the information is considered "information respecting the national defense." In order to establish a violation of Title 50, United States Code, Section 421 [the Intelligence Identities Protection Act], it would be necessary to establish that Libby knew or believed that Plame was a person whose identity the CIA was making specific efforts to conceal and who had carried out covert work overseas within the last 5 years. To date, we have no direct evidence that Libby knew or believed that Wilson's wife was engaged in covert work.
In the February 15, 2005 ruling on the issue, the court's opinion states:
As to the leaks harmfulness, although the record omits specifics about Plames work, it appears to confirm, as alleged in the public record and reported in the press, that she worked for the CIA in some unusual capacity relating to counterproliferation. Addressing deficiencies of proof regarding the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, the special counsel refers to Plame as a person whose identity the CIA was making specific efforts to conceal and who had carried out covert work overseas within the last 5 yearsrepresentations I trust the special counsel would not make without support. (8/27/04 Aff. at 28 n.15.) (Italics added.)[16]
An article published in Newsweek on 13 February 2006 construes the information in the released documents as implying that Fitzgerald had indeed determined Valerie Plame was a covert agent.[17][18]
Plame's husband, Joe Wilson, stated in a July 14, 2005 interview with Wolf Blitzer of CNN that "My wife was not a clandestine officer the day that Bob Novak blew her identity."[19] When asked by Wolf Blitzer "But she hadn't been a clandestine officer for some time before that?", Wilson responded by saying "That's not anything that I can talk about. And, indeed, I'll go back to what I said earlier, the CIA believed that a possible crime had been committed, and that's why they referred it to the Justice Department." Wilson later claimed to the Associated Press what he had meant was something different than the way the comment was received: "In an interview Friday, Wilson said his comment was meant to reflect that his wife lost her ability to be a covert agent because of the leak, not that she had stopped working for the CIA beforehand. His wife's 'ability to do the job she's been doing for close to 20 years ceased from the minute Novak's article appeared; she ceased being a clandestine officer,' he said."[20]
In the Washington Times, Bill Gertz asserts that "Mrs. Plame's identity as an undercover CIA officer was first disclosed to Russia in the mid-1990s by a Moscow spy, said officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity."[14] Gertz says that the Cuban government learned of Plame's CIA status "in confidential documents sent by the CIA to the U.S. Interests Section of the Swiss Embassy in Havana. The documents were supposed to be sealed from the Cuban government, but intelligence officials said the Cubans read the classified material and learned the secrets contained in them, the officials said."
This information about such prior compromises of Plame's CIA status was used in a court briefing filed on behalf of several news agencies seeking to prevent Judith Miller and Matt Cooper from going to jail for not disclosing their sources to Patrick Fitzgerald and the federal grand jury investigating her exposure by Robert Novak.[21]
Further information: Plame affair legal questions
Some press accounts have raised questions about whether or not the CIA still considered Plame a "covert" agentthat is, the precise nature of her "classified" status or the type of "cover" that she had and whether or not it was "official" or "non-official"at the time she was outed in the Novak column of July 14, 2003. Yet, as Johnson observes in his Congressional testimony previously cited:
These [disparaging] comments [by members of the press and others in the public debate] reveal an astonishing ignorance of the intelligence community and the role of cover. The fact is that there are thousands of U.S. intelligence officers who "work at a desk" in the Washington, D.C. area every day who are undercover. Some have official cover, and some have non-official cover. Both classes of cover must and should be protected.[12]
According to a report published in USA Today (some of whose contents have been disputed by Media Matters for America), Plame worked in the Langley, Virginia, CIA headquarters since 1997, when she returned from her last assignment, married Joe Wilson in 1998, and gave birth to their twins in 2000.[22][23]
On September 6, 2006, David Corn published an article entitled "What Valerie Plame Really Did at the CIA," citing information contained in the book Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, co-written by Corn and Michael Isikoff. According to Corn:
Valerie Plame was recruited into the CIA in 1985, straight out of Pennsylvania State University. After two years of training to be a covert case officer, she served a stint on the Greece desk, according to Fred Rustmann, a former CIA official who supervised her then. Next she was posted to Athens and posed as a State Department employee. Her job was to spot and recruit agents for the agency. In the early 1990s, she became what's known as a nonofficial cover officer. . . . She told people she was with an energy firm. Her main mission remained the same: to gather agents for the CIA. . . . In 1997 she returned to CIA headquarters and joined the Counterproliferation Division. (About this time, she moved in with Joseph Wilson; they later married.) She was eventually given a choice: North Korea or Iraq. She selected the latter. . . .
Her unit was expanded and renamed the Joint Task Force on Iraq. Within months of 9/11, the JTFI grew to fifty or so employees. Valerie Wilson was placed in charge of its operations group. . . . [Valerie] Wilson, too, occasionally flew overseas to monitor operations. She also went to Jordan to work with Jordanian intelligence officials who had intercepted a shipment of aluminum tubes heading to Iraq that CIA analysts were claiming wrongly were for a nuclear weapons program. . . .
When the Novak column ran, Valerie Wilson was in the process of changing her clandestine status from NOC to official cover, as she prepared for a new job in personnel management. Her aim, she told colleagues, was to put in time as an administrator to rise up a notch or two and then return to secret operations. (Italics added.)[24]
Moreover, Corn emphasizes, Plame worked for the CIA on determining the use of aluminum tubes purchased by Iraq.[24] CIA analysts prior to the Iraq invasion have been cited as believing that Iraq was trying to acquire nuclear weapons and that these alumninum tubes could be used in a centrifuge for nuclear enrichment.[25][26] According to Isikoff and Corn, as Corn presents their findings in "What Valerie Plame Really Did at the CIA" on September 6, 2006, however, the undercover work being done by Plame and her CIA colleagues in the Directorate of Central Intelligence (DCI) Nonproliferation Center [27] strongly contradicts those previously-reported beliefs:
"We knew nothing about what was going on in Iraq," a CIA official recalled. "We were way behind the eight ball. We had to look under every rock." Wilson, too, occasionally flew overseas to monitor operations. She also went to Jordan to work with Jordanian intelligence officials who had intercepted a shipment of aluminum tubes heading to Iraq that CIA analysts were claiming--wrongly--were for a nuclear weapons program. (The analysts rolled over the government's top nuclear experts, who had concluded the tubes were not destined for a nuclear program.)
The JTFI found nothing. The few scientists it managed to reach insisted Saddam had no WMD programs. Task force officers sent reports detailing the denials into the CIA bureaucracy. The defectors were duds--fabricators and embellishers. (JTFI officials came to suspect that some had been sent their way by Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, an exile group that desired a US invasion of Iraq.) The results were frustrating for the officers. Were they not doing their job well enough--or did Saddam not have an arsenal of unconventional weapons? Valerie Wilson and other JTFI officers were almost too overwhelmed to consider the possibility that their small number of operations was, in a way, coming up with the correct answer: There was no intelligence to find on Saddam's WMDs because the weapons did not exist. Still, she and her colleagues kept looking. (She also assisted operations involving Iran and WMDs.)
When the war started in March 2003, JTFI officers were disappointed. "I felt like we ran out of time," one CIA officer recalled. "The war came so suddenly. We didn't have enough information to challenge the assumption that there were WMDs.... How do you know it's a dry well? That Saddam was constrained. Given more time, we could have worked through the issue.... From 9/11 to the war--eighteen months--that was not enough time to get a good answer to this important question." [24]
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Sources: State Department official source of Plame leak
[edit] The "Plame affair" (The "CIA leak scandal")
Main article: Plame affair
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Patrick Fitzgerald
[edit] The Fitzgerald Grand Jury investigation into the disclosure of Valerie Wilson's CIA "cover"
Main article: CIA leak grand jury investigation
Further information: Plame affair criminal investigation
See also: United States v. Libby
In his press conference of October 28, 2005, Special Counsel Fitzgerald
