Who was Valerie Plame and what did she do?
Valerie Plame. As the subject of the 2003 Plame affair, also known as the CIA leak scandal, Plame's identity as covert officer of the CIA was leaked to the press by members of the administration of George W. Bush and subsequently made public.
Was Valerie Plame a covert CIA agent?
Libby, online posting of public document, The Next Hurrah (blog), May 26, 2007: 2–3. ^ Cf. "Valerie Plame, Covert After All" ("Though some on the right have denied it, Plame was a covert CIA operative when she was exposed by Robert Novak. Read the document that proves It."), Salon, May 30, 2007, accessed August 12, 2007.
Was Valerie Plame's lawsuit dismissed?
^ Associated Press, "Valerie Plame's Lawsuit Dismissed", USA Today, July 19, 2007, accessed July 19, 2007. ^ "Judge Tosses Out Ex-Spy's Lawsuit Against Cheney in CIA Leak Case", CNN.com, July 19, 2007, accessed July 19, 2007.
How did the Washington Post find out about Plame?
On July 14, 2003, Robert Novak, a journalist for The Washington Post, used information obtained from Richard Armitage, Karl Rove, and Scooter Libby, to reveal Plame's identity as a CIA operative in his column. Legal documents published in the course of the CIA leak grand jury investigation, United States v.
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Who is Valerie Plame?
Valerie Elise Plame (born August 13, 1963), is an American writer, spy novelist, and former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer. As the subject of the 2003 Plame affair, also known as the CIA leak scandal, Plame's identity as a CIA officer was leaked to and subsequently published by Robert Novak of The Washington Post .
Where was Valerie Plame born?
Valerie Elise Plame was born on August 13, 1963, on Elmendorf Air Force Base, in Anchorage, Alaska, to Diane (née McClintock) and Samuel Plame III. Plame says that her paternal grandfather was Jewish, the son of a rabbi who emigrated from Ukraine; the original family surname was "Plamevotski". The rest of Plame's family was Protestant (the religion in which Plame was raised); she was unaware, until she was an adult, that her grandfather was Jewish.
What was Valerie Wilson's memoir about?
On October 31, 2007, in an interview with Charlie Rose broadcast on The Charlie Rose Show, Valerie Wilson discussed many aspects relating to her memoir: the CIA leak grand jury investigation; United States v. Libby, the civil suit which she and her husband were at the time still pursuing against Libby, Cheney, Rove, and Armitage; and other matters presented in her memoir relating to her covert work with the CIA.
When was CIA officer Plame?
Although the CIA will not publicly release the specific dates of Plame's employment from 1985 to 2002, due to security concerns, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald affirmed that Plame "was a CIA officer from January 1, 2002, forward" and that "her association with the CIA was classified at that time through July 2003.".
When did the first book of Plame come out?
The first book in the series, titled Blowback, was released on October 1, 2013, by Blue Rider Press, an imprint of the Penguin Group.
Who was the CIA operative in the Plame affair?
Main articles: Plame affair, Plame affair grand jury investigation, and Plame affair criminal investigation. On July 14, 2003, Robert Novak , a journalist for The Washington Post, used information obtained from Richard Armitage, Karl Rove, and Scooter Libby, to reveal Plame's identity as a CIA operative in his column.
When did Fitzgerald explain the need for secrecy?
In his press conference of October 28, 2005, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald explained the necessity of secrecy about his grand jury investigation that began in the fall of 2003—"when it was clear that Valerie Wilson's cover had been blown"—and the background and consequences of the indictment of then high-ranking Bush Administration official Scooter Libby as it pertained to her.
Who was Valerie Plame's leaker?
In January 2004, the Justice Department chose prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald to investigate the leak of Valerie Plame's identity. From the outset, he was made fully aware that the leaker was Armitage, who resigned from the State Department in November 2004 but remained a subject of the inquiry until February 2006 when Fitzgerald told him in a letter that he would not be charged. The New York Times reported on Sept. 2, 2006:
How did Novak get Valerie Plame's last name?
Novak got Valerie’s last name from Wilson’s bio in Who’s Who. But after he used it in his column, the name Valerie Plame became big news in the media and caused quite a storm. On October 1, 2003, after reading a second column by Novak on the case, Armitage, alarmed by the clamor in the press for the name of the leaker who had outed a covert CIA agent, revealed his role to his boss Secretary of State Colin Powell. They took up the matter with State Department lawyer William H. Taft IV, who then spoke with White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, who allegedly told Taft that he did not want to know. But why didn't Taft or Powell go directly to the President with this important information?
Why did Armitage not tell Bush?
But Mr. Armitage kept his actions secret, not even telling President Bush because the prosecutor asked him not to divulge it , the people said.
How long was Judith Miller in jail?
Thus, Times reporter Judith Miller spent 85 days in jail for refusing to reveal her sources to the prosecutor. She was finally released when she agreed to testify before a grand jury.
Who read the report and made the leak?
Apparently not, for it was Armitage who supposedly read the report and made the leak, not Libby. Nevertheless, it was Libby whom Fitzgerald decided to indict. The jury found Libby guilty, not of revealing Valerie Plame’s name to the press, but of perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements.
Was Valerie Plame made public?
In any case, since Libby was not the person who made Valerie Plame’s name public, he should not have been the subject of a prosecutor, whose aim seems have been to justify his more than two years of investigation in the nation’s capital, with all of its perks, good restaurants, and plush accommodations.
When did the President say he didn't know the truth about Wilson's wife?
Less than a week later, on October 7 , 2003, there was a cabinet meeting. At the end of it, the press came in for a photo opportunity, and there were questions about who had leaked the information that Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA. The President said he didn’t know, but wanted the truth.
What was Valerie Plame's job?
Valerie Plame was recruited into the CIA in 1985, straight out of Pennsylvania State University. After two years of training to be a covert case officer, she served a stint on the Greece desk, according to Fred Rustmann, a former CIA official who supervised her then. Next she was posted to Athens and posed as a State Department employee. Her job was to spot and recruit agents for the agency. In the early 1990s, she became what’s known as a nonofficial cover officer. NOCs are the most clandestine of the CIA’s frontline officers. They do not pretend to work for the US government; they do not have the protection of diplomatic immunity. They might claim to be a businessperson. She told people she was with an energy firm. Her main mission remained the same: to gather agents for the CIA.
When did Valerie Wilson leave the CIA?
Valerie Wilson left the CIA at the end of 2005. In July she and her husband filed a civil lawsuit against Cheney, Rove and Libby, alleging they had conspired to “discredit, punish and seek revenge against” the Wilsons. She is also writing a memoir. Her next battle may be with the agency–over how much of her story the CIA will allow the outed spy to tell.
What branch of the CIA did Valerie Wilson join?
In 1997 she returned to CIA headquarters and joined the Counterproliferation Division. (About this time, she moved in with Joseph Wilson; they later married.) She was eventually given a choice: North Korea or Iraq. She selected the latter. Come the spring of 2001, she was in the CPD’s modest Iraq branch. But that summer–before 9/11–word came down from the brass: We’re ramping up on Iraq. Her unit was expanded and renamed the Joint Task Force on Iraq. Within months of 9/11, the JTFI grew to fifty or so employees. Valerie Wilson was placed in charge of its operations group.
What was Novak's column about?
At issue was whether Novak’s sources had violated a little-known law that makes it a federal crime for a government official to disclose identifying information about a covert US officer (if that official knew the officer was undercover). A key question was, what did Valerie Wilson do at the CIA? Was she truly undercover? In a subsequent column, Novak reported that she was “an analyst, not in covert operations.” White House press secretary Scott McClellan suggested that her employment at the CIA was no secret. Jonah Goldberg of National Review claimed, “Wilson’s wife is a desk jockey and much of the Washington cocktail circuit knew that already.”
What was the JTFI's primary target?
There was great pressure on the JTFI to deliver. Its primary target was Iraqi scientists. JTFI officers, under Wilson’s supervision, tracked down relatives, students and associates of Iraqi scientists–in America and abroad–looking for potential sources. They encouraged Iraqi émigrés to visit Iraq and put questions to relatives of interest to the CIA. The JTFI was also handling walk-ins around the world. Increasingly, Iraqi defectors were showing up at Western embassies claiming they had information on Saddam’s WMDs. JTFI officers traveled throughout the world to debrief them. Often it would take a JTFI officer only a few minutes to conclude someone was pulling a con. Yet every lead had to be checked.
Was Valerie Wilson a paper pusher?
Valerie Wilson was no analyst or paper-pusher. She was an operations officer working on a top priority of the Bush Administration. Armitage, Rove and Libby had revealed information about a CIA officer who had searched for proof of the President’s case. In doing so, they harmed her career and put at risk operations she had worked on and foreign agents and sources she had handled.
Did the JTFI find Saddam's WMDs?
The JTFI found nothing. The few scientists it managed to reach insisted Saddam had no WMD programs. Task force officers sent reports detailing the denials into the CIA bureaucracy. The defectors were duds–fabricators and embellishers. (JTFI officials came to suspect that some had been sent their way by Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, an exile group that desired a US invasion of Iraq.) The results were frustrating for the officers. Were they not doing their job well enough–or did Saddam not have an arsenal of unconventional weapons? 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.)
Who is Valerie Plame?
In that column, Novak also claims to have learned Mrs. Wilson's maiden name "Valerie Plame" from Joe Wilson's entry in Who's Who In America, though it was her CIA status rather than her maiden name which was a secret.
Who were the Bush administration officials who were involved in the Valerie Plame case?
Libby, Bush administration officials Richard Armitage, Karl Rove, and Lewis Libby discussed the employment of a then-classified, covert CIA officer, Valerie E. Wilson (also known as Valerie Plame ), with members of the press. The Wilsons also brought a civil lawsuit against Libby, Dick Cheney, Rove, and Armitage, in Wilson v.
What was the name of the CIA leak scandal?
Wilson v. Libby. The Plame affair (also known as the CIA leak scandal and Plamegate) was a political scandal that revolved around journalist Robert Novak 's public identification of Valerie Plame as a covert Central Intelligence Agency officer in 2003.
How long is Judge Walton's sentence?
The Probation Office's recommended sentence to Judge Walton was cited in court documents to be no more than 15 to 21 months of incarceration. According to court documents, the Probation Office states its opinion that the more serious sentencing standards should not apply to Libby since "the criminal offense would have to be established by a preponderance of the evidence, ... [and] the defendant was neither charged nor convicted of any crime involving the leaking of Ms. Plame's 'covert' status."
When did Valerie Plame Wilson's memoir Fair Game come out?
In her memoir, Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House, Valerie Plame Wilson states that after her covert and then-still-classified CIA identity "Valerie Plame" appeared in Novak's column in July 2003, she feared for her children's safety but was denied protection by the Agency.
Was Woodward told of Plame?
On November 16, 2005, in an article titled "Woodward Was Told of Plame More Than Two Years Ago", published in The Washington Post, Jim VandeHei and Carol D. Leonnig revealed that Bob Woodward was told of Valerie Wilson's CIA affiliation a month before it was reported in Robert Novak's column and before Wilson's July 6, 2003 editorial in The New York Times. At an on-the-record dinner at a Harvard University Institute of Politics forum in December 2005, according to the Harvard Crimson, Woodward discussed the matter with fellow Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein, responding to Bernstein's claim that the release of Plame's identity was a "calculated leak" by the Bush administration with "I know a lot about this, and you're wrong." The Crimson also states that "when asked at the dinner whether his readers should worry that he has been 'manipulated' by the Bush administration, Woodward replied, 'I think you should worry. I mean, I worry.'"
Who leaked Plame's information?
David Corn and others suggested that Armitage and other officials had leaked the information as political retribution for Wilson's article.
Who is Valerie Plame married to?
Mirroring her own life, Valerie Plame wedded Todd Sesler, the marriage finished in separate in 1989. In 1997, while working for the Focal Insight Office (CIA), she met previous Envoy Joseph C. Wilson. They were hitched on April 3, 1998. Wilson relates in his diary, he was isolated from his second spouse Jacqueline. They separated following 12 years of marriage so he could wed Plame. Wilson and Plame separated in 2017. Prior to their separation, a few offers together two youngsters.
Where is Valerie Plame born?
Reviewing her initial life, Valerie Plame was brought into the world in Dock, The Frozen North. She holds American identity and has a place with white nationality. She was brought into the world to a dad Samuel Plame III and a mother Diane. Her fatherly granddad was Jewish, the child of a rabbi who emigrated from Ukraine. She was ignorant, until she was a grown-up, that her granddad was Jewish.
How tall is Valerie Plame?
According to the online locales, Plame has a nice stature and weight. The data about her body insights is yet to be revealed . On account of revealed, we will tell you.
When did Plame visit Greece?
W. Shrub to Greece and Turkey on July 1991.
Did Plame absolve Libby?
All things considered, in light of the fact that President Trump at last absolved Libby when the excusing proof became overpowering (an absolution that President George W. Shrubbery ought to have endorsed back in 2009), Plame introduces herself now as a survivor of Trump also. The promotion closes with Plame investigating the camera while saying, “Mr. President, I have a couple of scores to settle.”
Overview
Valerie Elise Plame (born August 13, 1963), is an American writer, spy novelist, and former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer. As the subject of the 2003 Plame affair, also known as the CIA leak scandal, Plame's identity as a CIA officer was leaked to and subsequently published by Robert Novak of The Washington Post.
Early life and education
Valerie Elise Plame was born on August 13, 1963, on Elmendorf Air Force Base, in Anchorage, Alaska, to Diane (née McClintock) and Samuel Plame III. Plame says that her paternal grandfather was Jewish, the son of a rabbi who emigrated from Ukraine; the original family surname was "Plamevotski". The rest of Plame's family was Protestant (the religion in which Plame was raised); she was unaware, until she was an adult, that her grandfather was Jewish.
Career
After graduating from college and moving to Washington, D.C., Plame worked at a clothing store while awaiting results of her application to the CIA. She was accepted into the 1985–86 CIA officer training class. Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald affirmed that Plame "was a CIA officer from January 1, 2002, forward" and that "her association with the CIA was classified at that time through July …
Personal life
After graduating from Penn State in 1985, Plame married Todd Sesler; the marriage ended in divorce in 1989. In 1997, while working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Plame met former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson. They were married on April 3, 1998. At the time they met, Wilson related in his memoir, he was separated from his second wife Jacqueline. They divorced after 12 years of marriage so that he could marry Plame. Wilson and Plame divorced in 2017. Wilson die…
Explanatory notes
1. ^ Associated Press, "The Real Valerie Plame" Archived January 16, 2009, at the Wayback Machine, reposted in Editor and Publisher, May 30, 2005, accessed August 12, 2007.
2. ^ Wilson, Valerie Plame (2007). Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House. Simon & Schuster. p. 314. ISBN 9781416583363.
External links
• Official website
• CNN Special Reports: CIA Leak Investigation at the Wayback Machine (archived March 14, 2008) compiled by CNN; incl. interactive timeline of Main Events and "Key Players" (click on photo captioned "Plame").
• Interactive Graphic: Timeline of a Leak compiled by The New York Times (double-click on photo captioned "Ms. Wilson").