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Valerie Plame

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For detail on the political scandal, see Plame affair
Valerie and Joseph
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Valerie and Joseph

Valerie Elise Plame WilsonWhile officially named "Valerie Wilson," she has been better known in the media by her maiden name, Plame. The convention has been to refer to Valerie Wilson as "Plame," while "Wilson" refers to Joe Wilson. The New York Times reported on 5 July, 2005, that her "husband said she has used her married name both at work and in her personal life since their 1998 marriage." Real estate records corroborate this. Joe Wilson told NBC's Today on July 14 2005, "My wife's name is Wilson, it's Mrs. Joseph Wilson. It is Valerie Wilson." Robert Novak printed her maiden name, Plame, which he claims he easily could have retrieved from Joseph Wilson's Who's Who in America entry, since Novak referenced that publication as a source of information on Joseph Wilson and his wife. (born April 19 1963 in Anchorage, Alaska) was a United States Central Intelligence Agency officer, who was identified as a CIA operative in a newspaper column by Robert Novak on July 14, 2003. The ensuing political controversy, commonly referred to as the Plame affair, or the CIA leak scandal, led, in late 2003, to a Justice Department investigation into possible violation of criminal statutes, including the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982.

Resulting from the October 2005 investigation, one of President George W. Bush's closest assistants on national security, and Chief of Staff for the Vice President Dick Cheney, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, is now indicted. The charges are perjury and obstruction of justice.

Contents

Background

On April 3, 1998, Plame married former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. Plame met Wilson at a Washington D.C party in early 1997. She was unable to reveal her CIA role to him when they first met. She initially told Wilson she was an energy consultant in Brussels. At the time, Wilson was separated from his second wife Jacqueline, a former French diplomat. Wilson and Plame are the parents of five-year-old twins.

Plame (rt.), date similar to photo above.
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Plame (rt.), date similar to photo above.

Education

Plame is a 1985 graduate of the Pennsylvania State University, the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK, and the College of Europe, an international-relations school in Bruges, in 1995. Soon after graduation, she started working for the U.S. government in Washington D.C. During her time at Penn State, she had worked on the business side of PSU's student newspaper, The Daily Collegian. According to an October 9, 2003 Collegian article, she previously attended Lower Moreland High School in Huntingdon Valley, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania.

Career

Little is known of Plame's professional career. While undercover, she had 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. "Brewster Jennings" was first entered into Dun and Bradstreet records on May 22 1994, but D&B would not discuss the source of the filing. D&B records list the company as a "legal services office," located at 101 Arch Street, Boston, Massachusetts.

David Armstrong, an Andover researcher for the Public Education Center, believed that the Brewster Jennings & Associates cover had not been done convincingly and that other covers would have been established for her by the CIA.

Former CIA official Larry C. Johnson, who left the CIA in 1989, indicated Plame had been a "non-official cover operative" (NOC). He explained: "...that meant she agreed to operate overseas without the protection of a diplomatic passport. If caught in that status she would have been executed." Later, he wrote that "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, supposedly, being exposed by Karl Rove and Scooter Libby."

Valerie Plame Wilson was identified in the New York Times as a N.O.C. by Elisabeth Bumiller, who wrote (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.
An investigation by the Chicago Tribune in 2006 revealed that in the early 1990s, Plame's address was once listed as "AMERICAN EMBASSY ATHENS ST, APO NEW YORK NY 09255". A former senior American diplomat in Athens who remembered Plame told the Tribune "he had been aware that Plame, who was posing as a junior consular officer, really worked for the CIA." The former senior diplomat also recalled "that she served as one of the 'control officers' coordinating the visit of President George H.W. Bush to Greece and Turkey in July 1991." The Tribune also reported that "after the completion of her Athens tour, the CIA reportedly sent Plame to study in Europe." According to Tribune sources, intelligence officers serving in American embassies would have "diplomatic cover", and their indentities would be known to both "friendly and opposition intelligence services alike". This information has lead some to question whether or not Plame was a "genuine NOC". A CIA veteran with 20 years of service was quoted in the Tribune article as saying "the key is the [embassy] address. That is completely unacceptable for an NOC. She wasn't an NOC, period."

Plame is known to have served in a classified position as a CIA officer. At his October 28, 2005, press conference, Special Counsel Fitzgerald noted:

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.
A controversy continues to surround the question of whether Plame was a covert agent. According to USA Today, Plame worked in the Langley, Virginia, CIA headquarters since 1997, when she returned from her last assignment, and married Joe Wilson and had her twins. Columnist Robert Novak wrote that an Agency source said Plame "has been an analyst, not in covert operations." It has been speculated that Plame may have worked in the CIA administration in the office of former CIA Deputy Director of Operations (DDO) James Pavitt.

During the press conference, Fitzgerald was asked if he knew whether Libby revealed Plame's covert status knowingly; he 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.
This distinction between "covert" and "classified" is important because had Ms. Wilson been "undercover" or "covert" when her identity was leaked to the press, those responsible could have been charged under the "Inteliigence Identity Protections Act." However, If a designation of the lessor "classified" could only be established, then no charges could be filed.

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 addidavit, 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." 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 stated:
As to the leaks’ harmfulness, although the record omits specifics about Plame’s 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 years”—representations I trust the special counsel would not make without support. (8/27/04 Aff. at 28 n.15.)
A Newsweek article published for the week of February 13, 2006 interpreted the information in the released documents to mean that Fitzgerald had indeed determined Valerie Plame was a covert agent. A National Review article published the same week had a differing opinion.

Joe Wilson, Plame's husband, 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." 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." This comment has been misinterpreted, but Wilson later explained his meaning to Associated Press: "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."

A Washington Times article by Bill Gertz has asserted 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." The article goes on to say 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 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.

The Boston Globe also editorialized: "Once before, Plame was caught up in a case illustrating how costly it can be for a CIA officer to be in danger of having her cover exposed. The agency called Plame home in 1997 in fear that Aldrich Ames, the notorious Soviet mole inside the CIA, had revealed her true identity to his KGB handlers.... Such betrayals might have been expected in the Cold War. They should not occur because political operatives in the White House want to tarnish the reputation of a critic or settle scores with a CIA they may regard as too reluctant to tailor its analyses to the talking points of a vice president or a president."

Washington Post reporter Dana Priest notes that these possible compromises of her identity did not change her undercover status: "Plame's case is different in that she was burned -- not once, but twice. The first time was by Aldrich H. Ames, the CIA turncoat who is believed to have given the Russians the name of every covert operative in the Soviet/East European Division over 10 years beginning around 1985. Not knowing exactly whom he had outed, the CIA recalled hundreds of operatives, including Plame, for their safety. Still, her undercover status remained intact until July, when syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak identified her by name as a CIA 'operative' in a column about her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, whom the CIA had sent to Niger to check on allegations that Iraq was seeking to purchase uranium oxide there."

On July 12, 2006 in an article written in Robert Novaks Home paper the Chicago Sun Times, he wrote, "Following my interview with the primary source", (still undisclosed), presidential adviser Karl Rove, was his second source, and Bill Harlow, the CIA public information officer was his CIA source for the column confirming Mrs. Wilson's identity. Novack continued, "I sought out the second administration official and the CIA spokesman for confirmation. I learned Valerie Plame's name from Joe Wilson's entry in "Who's Who in America."

Is Plame still employable in intelligence work? As quoted above, according to Elisebeth Bumiller of the New York Times,

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.
While her work on nuclear proliferation issues without diplomatic cover may be temporarily or permanently compromised, it would seem that there are no limits to work she can do as a federal employee with a diplomatic passort.

On 16 July 2006, Robert Novak stated that Valerie's work did not involve actual espionage operations and that he did not think her life would be endangered in any way:

I don’t think I outed her. I think she was outed by Aldrich Ames before. I don’t think she was a, a covert operative.

Plame affair

In one of his first statements on the plan to invade Iraq, Joseph C. Wilson — Plame's husband and a George H. W. Bush administration official — was quoted in the March 3, 2003, edition of magazine The Nation that "America has entered one of its periods of historical madness" in regards to the Iraq War.

Wilson later wrote an Op-Ed piece on July 6th, 2003, in the New York Times entitled, "What I Didn't Find in Africa," in which he claimed that he had found no evidence of Iraqi pursuit of nuclear material during his trip to Africa. He also criticized the administration for using allegedly unreliable documents (Yellowcake forgery) to make its case against Iraq. These documents, known as the Yellowcake documents, stated that Iraq attempted to buy yellowcake uranium, necessary for the creation of nuclear weapons, from the country of Niger. On 11 July 2003, five days following the publication of Wilson's Op-Ed piece, the CIA issued a statement discrediting what it called "highly dubious" accounts of Iraqi attempts to purchase uranium from Niger. In the press release, CIA Director George Tenet said it should "never" have permitted the "16 words" relating to alleged Iraqi uranium purchases to be used in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address, and called it a "mistake" that the CIA allowed such a reference to be used in the speech. The Senate Intelligence Committee Report of July 2004, however, indicates that Wilson's piece prematurely decided on what seems to be an open question about whether an Iraqi envoy attempted to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger.

Syndicated columnist Robert Novak described Plame as "an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction" in a column published eight days after Wilson's Op-Ed. Other journalists have also mentioned her identity.

The revelation of Plame's identity by Novak is the basis for the "Plame affair" (aka. "CIA leak scandal"). US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald is investigating the events surrounding the naming of Valerie Plame to determine what crimes, if any, were committed in the process. In October 2005, the Vice President's Chief of Staff Lewis Libby was indicted on 5 counts of perjury and obstruction of justice.

Court papers released on April 5, 2006, revealed that Libby testified that “he was specifically authorized in advance" of his meeting with New York Times reporter Judith Miller to disclose the "key judgments" of the October 2002 classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE). According to Libby's testimony, "the Vice President later advised him that the President had authorized defendant to disclose the relevant portions of the NIE [to Judith Miller]." The information Libby was authorized to disclose to Miller "was intended to rebut the allegations of an administration critic, former ambassador Joseph Wilson". A couple of days after Libby's meeting with Miller, Condoleezza Rice told reporters that "We don't want to try to get into kind of selective declassification" of the NIE, adding "We're looking at what can be made available." A "sanitized version" of the NIE in question was officially declassified on July 18, 2003, ten days after Libby's contact with Miller, and was presented at a White House background briefing on weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq. The NIE contains no references to Valerie Plame or her CIA status, but the special counsel has suggested that White House actions were part of "a plan to discredit, punish or seek revenge against Mr. Wilson." Bush had previously indicated that he would fire whoever outed Plame.

A court filing by Libby's defense team argues that Valerie Plame was not foremost on the minds of administration officials as they sought to rebut charges made by her husband, Joseph Wilson, that the White House manipulated intelligence to make a case for invasion. The filing indicates that Libby's lawyers don't intend to say he was told to reveal Plame's identity. The papers also said that "Mr. Libby plans to demonstrate that the indictment is wrong when it suggests that he and other government officials viewed Ms. Wilson's role in sending her husband to Africa as important,"

Libby's lawyers also plan to call Karl Rove to the stand. According to Rove's lawyer, Fitzgerald has decided against pressing charges against Rove.

Bob Novak reported on July 11, 2006 that: "For nearly the entire time of his investigation, Fitzgerald knew--independent of me--the identity of the sources I used in my column of July 14, 2003. A federal investigation was triggered when I reported that former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, was employed by the CIA and helped initiate his 2002 mission to Niger. That Fitzgerald did not indict any of these sources may indicate his conclusion that none of them violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act." With this new information many are questioning how and why Fitzgerald continues to shield other sources used by Novak.

On July 13, 2006, a civil suit was filed by Joseph and Valerie Wilson against Vice President Dick Cheney, his former Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, top Presidential advisor Karl Rove and other unnamed senior White House officials, for their role in the public disclosure of Valerie Wilson's classified CIA status.

Book deal

In May 2006, the New York Times reported that Valerie Wilson agreed to a $2.5 million book deal with Crown Publishing, an imprint of Random House. The memoir, currently titled "Fair Game" is scheduled for a fall 2007 release. Steve Ross, senior vice president and publisher of Crown, told the Times that the book would be Ms. Wilson's "first airing of her actual role in the American intelligence community, as well as the prominence of her role in the lead-up to the war." The Times later reported that the book deal fell through, and that Ms. Wilson was in exclusive negotiations with Simon and Schuster. Ultimately, the Simon and Schuster deal was confirmed, though financial terms were not disclosed to the public and no publication date has yet been set. .

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