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<snip>
One thing that has always struck me as odd about this whole affair – and I wasn't the only one – is a seemingly minor detail: why did Novak's original column, which started all this brouhaha, identify Valerie Plame by her maiden name? After all, most married women – even in this era of Women's Liberation – defer to the tradition of taking their husband's name, but I have to admit that, even after wondering about it for a brief moment, I shrugged and moved on. As it turns out, however, this is an important detail, because now we have Rove's lawyer saying that he at no time gave out Valerie Plame's name: but if Rove identified her as Joe Wilson's wife, what the heck is the difference?
The difference is that, as Valerie Plame, Mrs. Wilson was affiliated with a CIA front company, Brewster-Jennings & Associates, engaged in tracking and stopping the proliferation of nuclear weapons. As soon as her name was made public, the implications for U.S. national security amounted to a grave breach – far more of a crime than merely violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which has only had a single prosecution since its passage in 1982. As the Washington Post reported when the Plame scandal broke:
"A former diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity said yesterday that every foreign intelligence service would run Plame's name through its databases within hours of its publication to determine if she had visited their country and to reconstruct her activities. 'That's why the agency is so sensitive about just publishing her name,' the former diplomat said."
The publication of her maiden name not only endangered Valerie Wilson, but also blew the cover of a CIA front and imperiled anyone she might have come in contact with during her stint overseas. This isn't just a matter of of violating a statute that, at most, entails a 10-year jail sentence and a fine – this is a question of possible espionage.
What also seems fairly clear is that Karl Rove would not have had direct knowledge of Plame-Wilson's covert activities on behalf of the CIA, and that only a very few people high up in the national security bureaucracy had the clearance to get access to her name. So who was it? If Rove leaked to Novak, and half a dozen Washington reporters, then who leaked to the leakers?
This isn't about Rove.
It's about a cabal of war hawks inside the administration who passed on this information to others without telling them about Plame-Wilson's deep cover status, perhaps suggesting that she was just an analyst working at a desk rather than a covert operative involved in a vitally important overseas operation, the knowledge of which was highly compartmentalized and only dispensed on a need-to-know basis. When Rove and his shills blabbed to reporters and anyone who would listen, they didn't realize that they were aiding and abetting an elaborate ploy to stick it to the CIA.
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