What Valerie Wilson Really Did at the CIA
Another mystery solved. Last week a Newsweek excerpt from HUBRIS: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal and the Selling of the Iraq War, by Michael Isikoff and David Corn (and out this week), revealed that Richard Armitage was the original source 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.
She was operations chief of the Joint Task Force on Iraq, 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 CIA officer whose job it had been to look for evidence of Saddam's WMD programs. During this part of her career, Valerie Wilson traveled overseas to monitor operations she and her staff at JTFI were mounting. She was no analyst, no desk-jockey, no paper-pusher. She was an undercover officer in charge of running critical covert operations.
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.
Some Bush-backers have dismissed the CIA/Plame leak as unimportant and claimed that Valerie Wilson was an analyst and not truly a covert CIA officer. In an October 1, 2003 column, Novak reported she was "an analyst, not in covert operations." HUBRIS and The Nation article, citing CIA sources, reveal that she was in covert operations and that--ironically--she had spent two years trying to find proof of the administration's claims that Iraq posed a WMD threat. She and the Joint Task Force on Iraq, of course, came up empty-handed. The article notes:
Valerie Wilson and other JTFI officers were almost too overwhelmed to consider the possibility that their small number of operations was, in a way, coming up with the correct answer: There was no intelligence to find on Saddam's WMDs because the weapons did not exist. Still, she and her colleagues kept looking. (She also assisted operations involving Iran and WMDs.)
When the war started in March 2003, JTFI officers were disappointed. "I felt like we ran out of time," one CIA officer recalled. "The war came so suddenly. We didn't have enough information to challenge the assumption that there were WMDs....How do you know it's a dry well? That Saddam was constrained. Given more time, we could have worked through the issue....From 9/11 to the war--eighteen months--that was not enough time to get a good answer to this important question."
HUBRIS and The Nation piece also report new revelations that undermine the charge that Valerie Wilson sent her husband, 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. I'll have more on some of those later. But not so much more. You're going to have to buy the book. It will start arriving in bookstores on Wednesday.