US govt recklessly blew cover: Plame


March 17, 2007 - 8:24AM

Valerie Plame, the CIA operative at the heart of a political scandal, told Congress senior officials at the White House and State Department "carelessly and recklessly" blew her cover to discredit her diplomat-husband.

Plame, whose 2003 outing triggered a federal investigation, said she always knew her identity could be discovered by foreign governments.

"It was a terrible irony that administration officials were the ones who destroyed my cover," she told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

"If our government cannot even protect my identity, future foreign agents who might consider working with the Central Intelligence Agency and providing needed intelligence would think twice," Plame said in response to a question.

Plame sat alone at a witness table and fielded questions about her CIA career and the disclosure of her name in July 2003 in a syndicated newspaper column. She says she was outed as retaliation against her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who criticised the administration's pre-war intelligence on Iraq.

The hearing was the first time Plame has publicly answered questions about the case, which led to the recent perjury and obstruction-of-justice conviction of Vice-President Dick Cheney's former top aide, I Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

Her appearance was a moment of gripping political theatre as Democrats questioned whether the Bush administration mishandled classified information by leaking her identity to reporters. No one has been charged with leaking her identity.

"It's not our job to determine criminal culpability, but it is our job to determine what went wrong and insist on accountability," committee chairman Henry Waxman, a Democrat, said at the outset of the hearing.

The man who led the criminal investigation, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, was not on the witness list. He told lawmakers on Wednesday federal law prohibited him from offering his thoughts on the case.

Nobody from the White House involved in the leak was scheduled to testify. Neither were officials from the State Department.

"My name and identity were carelessly and recklessly abused by senior officials in the White House and State Department," Plame testified. "I could no longer perform the work for which I had been highly trained."

Plame said she had no role in sending her husband on a CIA fact-finding trip to Niger. Wilson said in a newspaper column his trip debunked the administration's pre-war intelligence that Iraq was seeking to buy uranium from Africa.

"I did not recommend him. I did not suggest him. There was no nepotism involved. I did not have the authority," she said.

Wilson has written a book and Plame has one expected out soon. They are also suing Cheney and others, claiming their constitutional rights were violated.

Waxman says he wants to know whether the White House appropriately safeguarded Plame's identity. During the Libby trial, it was revealed that many in the Bush administration knew Plame worked for the CIA but not that it was classified.

Fitzgerald never charged anyone with the leak and he told Waxman he could not discuss his thoughts on the case.

Representative Tom Davis, the ranking Republican on the committee, said as Fitzgerald didn't charge anyone with the leak, the hearings were unlikely to add any insight.

"No process can be adopted to protect classified information that no one knows is classified," Davis said. "This looks to me more like a CIA problem than a White House problem."