Please allow me to plug my new book in declaring that another Plamegate mystery has been solved.
Last week HUBRIS: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal and the Selling of the Iraq War, by Michael Isikoff and myself (and out this week), revealed that Richard Armitage was the original souce for the Robert Novak column that outed Valerie Plame Wilson as a CIA officer. Today, a new excerpt of the book discloses what Valerie Wilson did at the CIA.
Was she merely analyst--as Bob Novak and others have claimed? Was she only a desk-jockey--as Jonah Goldberg of The National Review insisted? No. She was operations chief of the Joint Task Force on Iraq (JTFI), a unit of the Counterproliferation Division of the clandestine Directorate of Operations.
For the two years prior to her outing, Valerie Wilson worked to gather intelligence that would support the Bush White House's assertion that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was loaded with WMDs. This means that Armitage--as well as Karl Rove and Scooter Libby--leaked classified information about a undercover CIA officer whose job it had been to look for evidence of Saddam's WMD programs. Any irony here? During this part of her career, Valerie Wilson traveled overseas to monitor operations she and her staff at JTFI were mounting.
This is all explained in an article based on HUBRIS that is appearing in the next issue of The Nation and that has been posted on the magazine's website today. Click here to see the full story.
HUBRIS and The Nation piece also report new revelations that undermine the charge that Valerie Wilson sent her husabnd, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, on his trip to Niger.
HUBRIS--which chronicles the inside intelligence battles that occurred at the CIA, State Department, Capitol Hill and the White House in the run-up to the war--arrives in bookstores in a day or two. It contains many other revelations that are unrelated to the leak case. For more information on the book, you can go to its Amazon.com page here. Or visit my own blog at www.davidcorn.com.