unless we can find the original of this it is mere speculation. We need some hardcopy and timelines to prove that Wilson outed his wife.
I know... guess we need to start recording liberal sites with like acrobat or somethin' on a regular basis.
Excerpts:
"Valerie Plame-Wilson was never a covert operative in terms of what American spy-thrillers perceive them to be: trench-coated spies skulking around the back alleys of Berlin or Moscow, meeting their equally secretive counterparts and gathering top secret information.
Plame-Wilson did her "spying" during diplomatic parties as she plied half-drunk diplomats with enough martinis that they would be enticed into revealing confidential information that could be used by her employer.
Wilson's op-ed piece might have ended up as a "do-do" sheet for someone's birdcage (a fitting end for the Washington Post) except for the curiosity of Novak who wondered why Bush-43 would employ a very partisan Clinton hack on a mission that could possibly embarrass the White House if handled wrong or inappropriately leaked to the media, since Wilson was both a vocal opponent of George W. Bush and an avid supporter of Al Gore, Jr. during the 2000 election. (Bush-43 has a reputation of holding his friends close and cutting his detractors off at the knees.)
Hiring a detractor to undertake such a sensitive mission for the Administration just didn't make sense to Novak. And, because it didn't, Novak called a Bush-43 official he knew and raised the question why Wilson had been picked to go to Niger.
Note: according to Novak, he made the call to the official, not the other way around.
When Novak voiced the question, the contact admitted that Wilson had been recommended by a CIA employee (not a covert operative)--the diplomat's wife. It was an offhand remark, Novak said in his rebuttal argument in the Washington Post on Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2003, because everyone inside the beltway knew that Wilson's wife was a mid-level administrative official for the CIA at Langley.
(The "covert" work done by the petite, 40-ish very attractive Valerie Plame Wilson, as suggested above, was done on the arm of her ambassador husband in his official capacity as a U.S. ambassador in the Arab world. Plame-Wilson played the stereotyped dumb blonde wife as she flirted with Arab leaders and gathered tidbits of dropped information for the CIA. The only thing that revealing Valerie Plame's name may have done for Wilson's career is to make him ineligible for any foreign service assignments should Hillary win the White House, since the ambassador will no longer be trusted by any foreign ministry anywhere in the world.)
By helping the Democrats now, Wilson very likely hopes to secure a berth as an under-Secretary of State in a new Clinton administration."
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"Inside Langley, everyone knew that Plame-Wilson urged Tenet to hire her husband to go to Niger. One Clinton hack helping out another Clinton hack. That's how it works inside the beltway.
When Novak called the Agency to confirm that Wilson's wife engineered the assignment to Niger, the CIA official designated to brush off reporters asked Novak not to use Plame-Wilson's name--not because she was a covert operative, since she was not, but because the Agency eschews the use of anyone's name in connection with the invisible spook agency even if the person is an administrative official, which Plame-Wilson was at the time."
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"Novak caused part of the diplomatic flap in his telltale op-ed piece when he revealed her name for the first time since he referred to her as an "operative" and not as an employee. It sounded much more "CIA-ish." The CIA maintains (probably for the scenario cited above) that Plame-Wilson is a "covered" employee whose name cannot be revealed because, they said, she was working under the guise of another agency. That agency, of course, was the State Department. Plame-Wilson's role was that of wife of an American diplomat."