Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, is a CIA official who monitors the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction .
She has described herself as an energy analyst for the private company Brewster Jennings & Associates, which was subsequently acknowledged by the CIA as a front. It has been reported that this cover was not executed very convincingly.
Plame is the wife of former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. Wilson is her second husband. Plame met him at a Washington party in early 1997. She was able to reveal her CIA role to him while they were dating because he held a high-level security clearance. At the time Wilson was married to, but separated from, his second wife Jacqueline, a former French diplomat. Wilson and Plame are the parents of five-year old twins.
A July 11, 2003 e-mail from Cooper to his bureau chief indicated that Rove had told Cooper that it was Wilson's wife who authorized her husband's trip to Niger, mentioning that she "apparently" worked at the CIA on weapons of mass destruction issues. Newsweek reported that nothing in the Cooper e-mail suggested that Rove used Plame's name or knew she was a covert operative. ([5])
In other interviews Novak confirmed that his sources warned him not to mention Plame. His motivation to disregard the warnings is suggested by this comment in "The CIA Leak:" "I was curious why a high-ranking official in President Bill Clinton's National Security Council (NSC) was given this assignment." Just four days before he revealed Plame's name Novak wrote, "Bush's Enemy Within." Therein Novak excoriates the Bush Administration's appointment of Frances Fragos Townsend to an important national security post explaining she could later betray Bush because two of her former superiors were liberal democrats and she had served in the US Attorney's office in Manhattan. According to Novak this office was "notoriously liberal laden."
"'Nobody in the Bush administration called me to leak this,' Novak said on CNN, saying the information was disclosed to him while he was interviewing a senior Bush administration official.... Novak said the administration official told him in July that Wilson's trip was 'inspired by his wife,' and that the CIA confirmed her 'involvement in the mission for her husband.' ... 'They asked me not to use her name, but never indicated it would endanger her or anybody else,' he said, adding that a source at the CIA told him Plame was 'an analyst -- not a covert operator and not in charge of undercover operators.'"