...And gave it to Rove. Otherwise, he never could have leaked it because her identity was one of the nation's top secrets.
As a Non-Offical Cover agent, Plame and her company were on a need-to-know basis. Only one pinhead residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue had that clearance.
Here's more on it from Robert Parry and Consortiumnews.com:
Rove's Leak Points to Bush ConspiracyBy Robert Parry
July 11, 2005
A key national security principle for dealing with top-secret information, such as the identity of undercover CIA officers, is strict compartmentalization, often called “the need to know” – which raises the question why George W. Bush’s chief political adviser Karl Rove would know anything about the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame.
The answer to that mystery – why was Rove involved – may be more crucial to unraveling who was behind the illegal leaking of Plame’s name and the subsequent cover-up than even the identity of which Bush officials passed the information to right-wing pundit Robert Novak for his infamous column on July 14, 2003.
But rather than focusing on how and why Rove knew about Plame, the latest controversy around the case has centered on whether Rove explicitly used her name in an interview with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper three days before Novak’s column.
Rove’s lawyer Robert Luskin told the Washington Post that his client didn’t identify Plame by name, only mentioning her in giving Cooper guidance about who was responsible for authorizing a fact-finding trip by Plame’s husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, to Niger in February 2002.
According to an internal Time e-mail (obtained by Newsweek), Cooper informed his editor that Rove offered a “big warning” not to “get too far out on Wilson” and that “KR said” the Niger trip was authorized by “wilson’s wife, who apparently works at the agency (CIA) on wmd issues.”
CONTINUED...
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/071105.html
We may see the whole bloody lot busted on treason charges, folks. Keep spreading the word on these bed-wetting bastards.