Former CIA employee Valerie Plame, whose exposed identity spawned a Beltway scandal, warned a congressional panel Friday against “the creeping, insidious politicizing of our intelligence process.”
Democrats and Republicans alike on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee seized on the charge to advance their very different arguments.
Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., called the uncovering of Plame’s identity by the Bush administration an “extraordinary breach of national security” in an effort to discredit Plame’s husband, an anti-war critic.
Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia, the ranking Republican on the committee, noted, however, that after “spending six months and millions of dollars,” the special prosecutor investigating the leak charged no one with violating laws aimed at protecting the identities of covert operatives.
Waxman blamed that on the “extremely narrow criminal focus” of the probe.
Republicans, meanwhile, said the only politicizing going on was Plame’s appearance at the hearing, which was billed as an examination of White House security procedures for safeguarding the identity of covert agents.
“The hearing’s lead witness never worked at the White House,” Davis said. “If she knows about security practices there, she can’t say much about them in a public forum.”
Throughout Plame’s testimony, a protester in pink stood at the back of the hearing room wearing a shirt that said: “Impeach Bush Now.”
Plame told the committee she was “honored” to testify and said that her employment at the CIA had been top secret.
“It was not common knowledge on theGeorgetown cocktail circuit that everyone knew where I worked,” Plame said. That career ended, she said, in 2003 when columnist Bob Novak wrote that the reason her husband was sent on a fact-finding mission to Niger was because Plame worked at the CIA.
“I felt like I had been hit in the gut,” she said. “It was over in an instant, and I immediately thought of my family’s safety, the agents, the networks that I had worked with.”
Later that year, however, Plame posed for Vanity Fair magazine playing every bit the spy in scarves and sunglasses.
Plame and Democrats on the committee frequently named White House officials who had gotten ensnared in the four-year scandal. But one name that never surfaced during her more than two hours of testimony Friday was Richard Armitage, former deputy secretary of state who eventually admitted that he was the unintentional source for Novak’s column.
