Who's going to take the fall? A story I told you to watch.

[mburbank]

A while back, I said I thought blowing the cover of a CIA weapons expert as retaliation against her husband was going to be an issue. It's a federal crime, and more than that, it shows that someone at the whitehouse thinks payback is more important than the security and effectiveness of our own CIA. Well, she was only a WMD spy. Maybe the Whiotehouse figured she wasn't going to turn up anything anyway.




Alleged White House leak of CIA operative's name probed


WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Justice Department is investigating the report that a Bush administration official identified the wife of former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson as an undercover CIA officer to a newspaper columnist, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said Sunday.

The CIA asked the department for a legal opinion on whether there should be an investigation of the allegation, administration officials told CNN last week.

The leak could constitute a federal crime, the Washington Post reported. Intelligence officials told the newspaper that the leak might have endangered confidential sources who had aided Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame.

The Justice Department "gets these things as a matter of routine," Rice said on "Fox News Sunday."

Plame was described as a CIA employee in a July column by Robert Novak in the Chicago Sun-Times. CNN has been unable to reach Plame.

Wilson visited Niger in early 2002 on behalf of the CIA to investigate a British intelligence report alleging Iraq had tried to buy significant quantities of "yellowcake" uranium ore there and in other African countries for possible use in nuclear weapons.

Wilson, a former U.S. diplomat with expertise in African affairs, reported finding no evidence to support the claim.

Earlier this year, Wilson criticized Bush for including in his 2003 State of the Union speech the notorious "16 words" citing the British report.

"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," Bush said in the address.

It was later revealed the British report was based in part on forged documents, and Bush backed away from the statement.

Although CIA Director George Tenet took responsibility for the error, he said the agency warned the White House not to include the information in the speech.

"Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate," wrote Novak, who is also a host of CNN's "Crossfire."

"The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him."

Novak's column said Plame "is an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction."

Though Novak has declined to reveal his sources, Wilson and others have suggested the information was fed to Novak by the White House.

Wilson said at one point that he believes the person who broke his wife's cover was Karl Rove, Bush's senior adviser and political strategist.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan called the suggestion "ridiculous" and "simply not true" at a briefing two weeks ago. A senior administration official defended Rove again Sunday.

"This is not the way the White House operates, and no one would be authorized to do such a thing," the official said.

According to the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, a federal employee with access to classified information who is convicted of making an unauthorized disclosure about a covert agent faces up to 10 years in prison and as much as $50,000 in fines.

Wilson told CNN last month the leak about his wife was directly connected to his public criticism of the administration for including the uranium report in the speech after he had already discredited it.

"The idea, it seemed to me, in going after me and then later making these allegations about my wife, was clearly designed to keep others from stepping forward," said Wilson, who was acting ambassador to Iraq in the months before the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

"I don't know if that's true or not, but you can be sure that a GS-14 or 15 with a couple of kids in college, when he sees the allegations that came from senior administration officials about my family ... in the public domain, you can be sure that he's going to be worried about what might happen if he were to come forward," Wilson said.

GS-14 or GS-15 refers to the federal General Schedule pay scale. GS-15 is the highest level, with annual salaries generally ranging from $95,000 to $125,000.

Asked whether the president will try to determine whether the White House leaked the information about Plame, Rice told NBC's "Meet the Press," "I think it's best, since it's in the hands of the Justice Department, to let it remain there."

Rice, speaking on "Fox News Sunday," said she "knew nothing of any such White House effort to reveal any of this."

"Certainly it would not be the way the president expected his White House to operate," she said.