WASHINGTON - It's just a 12-letter name - Valerie Plame - but the
leak by Bush administration officials of that CIA officer's identity
may have damaged U.S. national security to a much greater extent
than generally realized, current and former agency officials say.
Plame, the wife of former ambassador and Bush critic Joseph
Wilson, was a member of a small elite-within-an-elite, a CIA
employee operating under "nonofficial cover," in her case as an
energy analyst, with little or no protection from the U.S.
government if she got caught.
Training agents such as Plame, 40, costs millions of dollars and
requires the time-consuming establishment of elaborate fictions,
called "legends," including in this case the creation of a CIA front
company that helped lend plausibility to her trips overseas.
Compounding the damage, the front company, Brewster-Jennings
& Associates, whose name has been reported previously,
apparently also was used by other CIA officers whose work now could
be at risk, according to Vince Cannistraro, formerly the agency's
chief of counterterrorism operations and analysis.
Now, Plame's career as a covert operations officer in the CIA's
Directorate of Operations is over. Those she dealt with - whether on
business or not - may be in danger. The DO is conducting an
extensive damage assessment.
And Plame's exposure may make it harder for American spies to
convince foreigners to share important secrets with them, U.S.
intelligence officials said.
Bush partisans tend to downplay the leak's damage, saying Plame's
true job was widely known in Washington, if unspoken. And, they say,
she had moved from the DO, the CIA's covert arm, to an analysis job.
But intelligence professionals, infuriated over the breach and
what they see as the Bush administration's misuse of intelligence on
Iraq, vehemently disagree.
Larry Johnson - a former CIA and State Department official who
was a 1985 classmate of Plame's in the CIA's case officer-training
program at Camp Peary, Va., known as "the Farm" - predicted that
when the CIA's internal damage assessment is finished, "at the end
of the day, (the harm) will be huge and some people potentially may
have lost their lives."
"This is not just another leak. This is an unprecedented exposing
of an agent's identity," said former CIA officer Jim Marcinkowski,
who's now a prosecutor in Royal Oak, Mich., and who also did CIA
training with Plame.
The leak of Plame's identity to syndicated columnist Robert Novak
and other journalists is the subject of a Justice Department
investigation that has rattled President Bush's White House.
Knowingly revealing the identity of a covert agent is a crime.
Critics say the leak was meant to intimidate critics such as
Wilson, a former ambassador who traveled to the African country of
Niger to investigate claims that Iraq was seeking uranium ore for
nuclear weapons. Wilson found no basis for the claims and later
publicly criticized Bush's description of Iraq's nuclear weapons
program.
One mystery is how one or more officials at the White House knew
of Plame's work, since the CIA and other intelligence agencies guard
the identities of their covert officers, often even from their
political masters.
"The background on an agent typically is not common knowledge,"
said a U.S. intelligence official, speaking on condition of
anonymity. "Whoever leaked (the information) probably wasn't
supposed to have access to it."
Intelligence officials said Plame worked on an issue high on
Bush's list of priorities: the spread of missiles and nuclear,
biological and chemical arms, collectively known as weapons of mass
destruction.
Human intelligence - as opposed to electronic surveillance -
about WMD development and weapons transfers is hard to come by,
especially in "hard target" countries such as Iraq, Iran and North
Korea.
Much about Plame's career remains a mystery, and probably will
stay that way. The CIA refuses to acknowledge her employment or
anything else associated with the case.
Born in 1963, she graduated from Pennsylvania State University
and was recruited quickly by the CIA, attending training classes in
1985.
In 1990 and 1991, Plame was attached to a U.S. embassy in Europe,
according to address records, suggesting she may have operated under
official cover for a time. Knight Ridder voluntarily is withholding
the precise location of the embassy. Plame's name doesn't appear in
State Department telephone and embassy directories from that period.
In April 1999, Plame, using her married name of Valerie E.
Wilson, donated $1,000 to then-Vice President Al Gore's 2000
presidential campaign. She listed her employer as Brewster-Jennings
& Associates.
The name suggested work in the energy field: The late Brewster
Jennings was president of the old Socony-Vacuum oil company,
predecessor to Mobil, now Exxon Mobil Corp.
A June 2000 listing in Dun & Bradstreet for a Boston-based
"Brewster Jennings & Associates" names the company's CEO and
only employee as "Victor Brewster" and says it had annual sales of
$60,000.
While that might seem like flimsy cover, former intelligence
officials say that in fact meticulous steps are taken to create a
life-like legend to support and protect CIA officers operating under
nonofficial cover.
The corps of officers using nonofficial cover is small, said
former CIA analyst Melvin Goodman, a critic of Bush's handling of
intelligence. The program was the subject of an internal battle, he
said, opposed by traditionalists, who favored the orthodox method of
having spies pose as American diplomats or military officers.
"It was always controversial. There were never a lot. And there
are fewer now than there were," Goodman said.
Johnson, the former CIA and State Department official, said
espionage training could cost several million dollars, including
$350,000 for the first year alone.
It appears that the Brewster-Jennings front was more than what is
called "nominal cover," and was used as part of Plame's espionage,
Johnson said.
That means anyone she met with could be in danger now, said
Johnson, who described himself as "furious, absolutely furious" at
the security breach.
On a personal level, if Plame's covert career wasn't over
already, it is now.
"My wife's career will certainly change as a consequence of this,
but my wife is a star in her business," Wilson said last Sunday on
NBC. He added: "I have every expectation that her culture will
embrace her and that she will continue to be a productive national
security officer. But clearly her responsibilities will have to
change as a consequence of this."
Wilson has said his family is taking unspecified security
precautions. His wife won't talk to reporters.
"The bottom line is, she's lost her career," said former
classmate Marcinkowski.
As a CIA officer operating overseas, "There's only one entity in
the world that can identify you. That's the U.S. government. When
the U.S. government does it, that's it," he said.
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(Researcher Tish Wells contributed to this article.)
