Valerie Plame

About Valerie Plame

Valerie Elise Plame Wilson (born 19 April 1963), known as Valerie Plame, Valerie E. Wilson, and Valerie Plame Wilson, and the wife of former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, IV, is a former United States CIA Operations Officer, whose covert identity was classified. After working for the CIA for twenty years, she retired in December 2005, as a result of the publication and compromising of her classified cover identity by an American journalist in the summer of 2003.

On 14 July 2003, Robert Novak identified "Wilson's wife" publicly as "an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction" named "Valerie Plame" in his syndicated column in The Washington Post. In that column Novak was responding to an op-ed entitled "What I Didn't Find in Africa," written by Wilson and published in the New York Times the previous week, on July 6, 2003. In his op-ed, Wilson stated that the George W. Bush administration exaggerated unreliable claims that Iraq intended to purchase uranium yellowcake from Niger to support the administration's arguments that Iraq was proliferating weapons of mass destruction so as to justify its preemptive war in Iraq.[10]

Novak's public disclosure of Mrs. Wilson's then-still-classified covert CIA identity as "Valerie Plame" precipitated what is known as the Plame affair, leading to the CIA leak grand jury investigation, which resulted in the indictment, conviction and commuted sentence by President Bush of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby in United States v. Libby on charges of perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements to federal investigators. An ongoing civil lawsuit filed by the Wilsons, Plame v. Cheney, against current and former government officials, followed, but was dismissed on July 19, 2007, in the District Court for the District of Columbia. The Wilsons appealed the decision the next day. On August 12, 2008, in a 2-1 decision, a three-judge panel of the D.C. federal appeals court upheld the dismissal,[11][12] which the Wilsons may ask the full D.C. Circuit Court to review and may appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.[11][13]