Valerie Plame Was No Desk Jockey

According to Larry Johnson, former CIA agent, Valerie Plame was under Non-Official Cover when Novak (Rove?) outed her. That means that if she'd been caught overseas with her hand in the proverbial cookie jar, she could've lost her life. Read what a real expert has to say about the Plame affair. Highlight:

The lies by people like Victoria Toensing, Representative Peter King, and P. J. O'Rourke insist that Valerie was nothing, just a desk jockey. Yet, until Robert Novak betrayed her she was still undercover and the company that was her front was still a secret to the world. When Novak outed Valerie he also compromised her company and every individual overseas who had been in contact with that company and with her.

Since a slew of liars have been unleased from Mordor the White House to spin the story, let's review what outing Plame meant at the time. In October, 2003, Walter Pincus and Mike Allen of the Washington Post reported:

The leak of a CIA operative's name has also exposed the identity of a CIA front company, potentially expanding the damage caused by the original disclosure, Bush administration officials said yesterday.

The company's identity, Brewster-Jennings & Associates, became public because it appeared in Federal Election Commission records on a form filled out in 1999 by Valerie Plame, the case officer at the center of the controversy, when she contributed $1,000 to Al Gore's presidential primary campaign.

After the name of the company was broadcast yesterday, administration officials confirmed that it was a CIA front. They said the obscure and possibly defunct firm was listed as Plame's employer on her W-2 tax forms in 1999 when she was working undercover for the CIA. Plame's name was first published July 14 in a newspaper column by Robert D. Novak that quoted two senior administration officials. They were critical of her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, for his handling of a CIA mission that undercut President Bush's claim that Iraq had sought uranium from the African nation of Niger for possible use in developing nuclear weapons.

The Justice Department began a formal criminal investigation of the leak Sept. 26.

The inadvertent disclosure of the name of a business affiliated with the CIA underscores the potential damage to the agency and its operatives caused by the leak of Plame's identity. Intelligence officials have said that once Plame's job as an undercover operative was revealed, other agency secrets could be unraveled and her sources might be compromised or endangered.

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.

(Emphasis mine.)

And that's why, if Rove did it, he should be fired "at a minimum." But that ain't gonna happen.

Note: We're not positive, but the Larry Johnson mentioned above is almost certainly this Larry Johnson. If so, you might recognize him from such news organizations as Fox, ABC, NBC and the New York Times. Street cred, in other words. He commented on NPR's Morning Edition today in this story (starts just before the 2:00 mark).

BONUS: SusanG of Jeff Gannon fame answers GOP talking points on Rove/Wilson. The Left Coaster does it too.