[Mb-civic] Side Issue in the Plame Case: Who Sent Her Spouse to Africa? - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Side Issue in the Plame Case: Who Sent Her Spouse to Africa?

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 11, 2005; Page A08

The origin of Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV's trip to Niger in 2002 to 
check out intelligence reports that Saddam Hussein was attempting to 
purchase uranium has become a contentious side issue to the inquiry by 
special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who is looking into whether a 
crime was committed with the exposure of Valerie Plame, Wilson's wife, 
as a covert CIA employee.

After he went public in 2003 about the trip, senior Bush administration 
officials, trying to discredit Wilson's findings, told reporters that 
Wilson's wife, who worked at the CIA, was the one who suggested the 
Niger mission for her husband. Days later, Plame was named as an "agency 
operative" by syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak, who has said he did 
not realize he was, in effect, exposing a covert officer. A Senate 
committee report would later say evidence indicated Plame suggested 
Wilson for the trip.

Over the past months, however, the CIA has maintained that Wilson was 
chosen for the trip by senior officials in the Directorate of Operations 
counterproliferation division (CPD) -- not by his wife -- largely 
because he had handled a similar agency inquiry in Niger in 1999. On 
that trip, Plame, who worked in that division, had suggested him because 
he was planning to go there, according to Wilson and the Senate 
committee report.

The 2002 mission grew out of a request by Vice President Cheney on Feb. 
12 for more information about a Defense Intelligence Agency report he 
had received that day, according to a 2004 report of the Senate Select 
Committee on Intelligence. An aide to Cheney would later say he did not 
realize at the time that this request would generate such a trip.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/10/AR2005081001918.html?referrer=email

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