Agent accuses US Govt of 'recklessly' blowing her cover

Ex-CIA agent Valerie Plame told a House of Representatives committee that White House and State Department officials “carelessly and recklessly” revealed her secret identity.

She said she was the victim of a politically motivated smear of her husband.

The scandal involving the leaking of the former CIA officer’s position resulted in last week’s criminal conviction of vice president Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff after a federal investigation.

Lewis “Scooter” Libby was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice, but no one has been charged with a crime for leaking Plame’s identity.

Since Democrats took control of Congress in January, they have sought to expose what they see as repeated White House efforts to intimidate officials seen as out of line with its policies.

The Bush administration has been contending this week with an uproar over its dismissal of eight top federal prosecutors, which some Democrats say was a politically motivated purge.

Plame’s appearance before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee created more of a stir by her presence in the congressional hearing room than by her testimony.

It was a moment of political theatre that dramatised Democrats’ drive to use their control of Congress to expose what they see as White House efforts to intimidate dissenters.

“My name and identity were carelessly and recklessly abused by senior officials in the White House and State Department,” Plame testified in her first public comments about the case. “I could no longer perform the work for which I had been highly trained.”

Under questioning, Plame recounted feeling “like I had been hit in the gut” on the July 2003 morning when she saw a newspaper story by syndicated columnist Robert Novak that identified her.

Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman, the panel’s chairman, called Plame a victim in a White House drive to discredit her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, for publicly disputing President George Bush’s assertion that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was on the brink of acquiring a nuclear bomb.

“I find that troubling, that in the zeal for their political positioning that there (is) a lot of collateral damage around, including a war that didn’t have to be fought,” Waxman said.

News cameras whirred and spectators craned their necks to catch a glimpse of Plame as the blond former operative took her place alone at the witness table for her 90 minutes of testimony.

Rep. Tom Davis, the committee’s senior Republican, called the session a partisan hearing that would do little to illuminate how Plame’s identity came to be exposed or how such disclosures could be prevented.

“It’s a terrible thing that any CIA operative would be outed,” Davis said. But “there’s no evidence here that the people that were outing this and pursuing this had knowledge of the covert status” of Plame’s job.

Plame repeatedly described herself as a covert operative, a term that has multiple meanings.

Plame said she worked undercover and travelled abroad on secret missions for the CIA.

But the word “covert” also has a legal definition requiring recent foreign service by the person and active efforts to keep his or her identity secret.

Critics of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation said Plame did not meet that definition for several reasons, and that was why nobody was charged with the leak.

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

Plame said she was not a lawyer and did not know her legal status but said it shouldn’t have mattered to the officials who learned her identity.

“They all knew that I worked with the CIA,” Plame said. “They might not have known what my status was but that alone – the fact that I worked for the CIA - should have put up a red flag.”

Plame said she did not select her husband for a CIA fact-finding trip to Niger. Wilson later wrote in a newspaper column that his trip debunked the administration’s prewar 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.

That conflicts with senior officials at the CIA and State Department, who testified during Libby’s trial and told Congress that Plame recommended Wilson for the trip.

Prosecutor Fitzgerald was not on the hearing’s witness list. He told politicians on Wednesday that 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, where the first disclosure of Plame’s identity occurred, or the CIA.

James Knodell, director of the White House security office, testified that no internal investigation into the leak was conducted, and no disciplinary action was taken against those involved.

Also yesterday, Waxman released a letter to White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten in which he requested “a complete account” of the steps the White House took after the disclosure of Plame’s identity.

The hearing, “raised new concerns about whether the security practices being followed by the White House are sufficient to protect our nation’s most sensitive secrets,” Waxman wrote.

Columnist Novak has said that former Deputy State Department Secretary Richard Armitage first revealed Plame’s job to him, and Bush’s political adviser, Karl Rove, and CIA spokesman Bill Harlow confirmed it.

Wilson has written a book, and Plame is working on one, “Fair Game.”

Plame’s book is subject to mandatory review by the CIA.

On Thursday, Simon & Schuster spokesman Adam Rothberg would say only that the book was “in progress” and that publication was expected soon.