EvilYeti said:
Bump.
Any info on this?
Subgenius, any links on Plame? I love spy stuff.
In February 2002, the CIA dispatched Joseph Wilson, a retired ambassador who has held senior positions in several African countries and Iraq, to Niger to investigate claims that Saddam Hussein's government had shopped there for uranium ore that could be processed into weapons-grade material. He reported back that Niger officials said they knew of no such effort. His report has since been confirmed by U.S. intelligence officials.
On July 6, Wilson went public, saying the administration had exaggerated the case for war by including the so-called 16 words about uranium and Africa in the president's State of the Union message last January. A day later, the White House acknowledged it had been a mistake to include those words.
Novak's column suggested that Wilson got the assignment to Niger because of his wife, who was working on weapons proliferation issues for the CIA when she was outed. The agency and Wilson said Valerie Wilson was not involved in his selection. Wilson also said he was not paid for the assignment, though expenses for the eight-day trip were reimbursed.
Before the Novak column was published, at least six reporters were contacted by administration officials and allegedly told that Valerie Plame Wilson worked at the CIA. Whoever did so may have been trying to undermine the importance of Wilson's trip by implying it had been set up by his wife -- and therefore was not a serious effort by the agency to discover whether, in fact, Iraq had attempted to buy uranium in Niger.
The publication of her name left CIA officers aghast. "All the people who had innocent lunches with her overseas or went shopping or played tennis with her, I'm sure they are having heart attacks right now," said one classmate of Plame's who participated in covert operations. "I would be in hiding now if I were them."
Little is publicly known about the career of Valerie Plame (rhymes with "name"), and she did not respond to a request for an interview made through her husband. The CIA also declined to discuss her. But people close to her provided the basics of her biography: She was born in Anchorage, where her father, Air Force Lt. Col. Samuel Plame, was stationed, and attended school in a suburb of Philadelphia. Her mother, Diane, taught elementary school. She has a stepbrother, Robert, who is 16 years older.
Plame was recruited by the agency shortly after graduation from Pennsylvania State University, sources said. She later earned two master's degrees, one from the London School of Economics and one from the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium.
Plame underwent training at "The Farm," as the facility near Williamsburg, Va., is known to its graduates. As part of her courses, the new spy was taken hostage and taught how to reduce messages to microdots. She became expert at firing an AK-47. She learned to blow up cars and drive under fire -- all to see if she could handle the rigors of being an undercover case officer in the CIA's Directorate of Operations, or DO. Fellow graduates recall that off-hours included a trip to the movies to watch the Dan Aykroyd parody "Spies Like Us."
Plame also learned how to recruit foreign nationals to serve as spies, and how to hunt others and evade those who would hunt her -- some who might look as harmless as she herself does now as a mom with a model's poise and shoulder-length blond hair.
Her activities during her years overseas remain classified, but she became the creme de la creme of spies: a "noc," an officer with "nonofficial cover." Nocs have cover jobs that have nothing to do with the U.S. government. They work in business, in social clubs, as scientists or secretaries (they are prohibited from posing as journalists), and if detected or arrested by a foreign government, they do not have diplomatic protection and rights. They are on their own. Even their fellow operatives don't know who they are, and only the strongest and smartest are picked for these assignments.
Five years ago Plame married Joseph Wilson -- it was her second marriage, his third. They crossed paths at a reception in Washington. "It was love at first sight," Joseph Wilson reports. When they met, in 1997, Wilson held a security clearance as political adviser to the general in charge of the U.S. Armed Forces European Command.
For the past several years, she has served as an operations officer working as a weapons proliferation analyst. She told neighbors, friends and even some of her CIA colleagues that she was an "energy consultant." She lived behind a facade even after she returned from abroad. It included a Boston front company named Brewster-Jennings & Associates, which she listed as her employer on a 1999 form in Federal Election Commission records for her $1,000 contribution to Al Gore's presidential primary campaign.
Administration officials confirmed that Brewster-Jennings was a front. The disclosure of its existence, which came about because it was listed in the FEC records, magnifies the potential damage related to the leak of Valerie Wilson's identity: It may give anyone who dealt with the firm clues to her CIA work. In addition, anyone who ever had contact with the company, and any foreign person who ever met with Valerie Plame, innocently or not, might now be suspected of working with the agency.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A58650-2003Oct7?language=printer
The last sentence illustrates the enormity of Novak's treason.
