Soccer Mom, Armed and Dangerous
The Washington Post had a long article about Ms. Plame yesterday. Just another typical soccer mom, with AK-47 skills:
Plame was recruited by the agency shortly after graduation from Pennsylvania State University, sources said. She later earned two master’s degrees, one from the London School of Economics and one from the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium.
Plame underwent training at “The Farm,” as the facility near Williamsburg, Va., is known to its graduates. As part of her courses, the new spy was taken hostage and taught how to reduce messages to microdots. She became expert at firing an AK-47. She learned to blow up cars and drive under fire — all to see if she could handle the rigors of being an undercover case officer in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, or DO. Fellow graduates recall that off-hours included a trip to the movies to watch the Dan Aykroyd parody “Spies Like Us.”
Plame also learned how to recruit foreign nationals to serve as spies, and how to hunt others and evade those who would hunt her — some who might look as harmless as she herself does now as a mom with a model’s poise and shoulder-length blond hair…
Five years ago Plame married Joseph Wilson — it was her second marriage, his third. They crossed paths at a reception in Washington. “It was love at first sight,” Joseph Wilson reports. When they met, in 1997, Wilson held a security clearance as political adviser to the general in charge of the U.S. Armed Forces European Command.
For the past several years, she has served as an operations officer working as a weapons proliferation analyst. She told neighbors, friends and even some of her CIA colleagues that she was an “energy consultant.” She lived behind a facade even after she returned from abroad. It included a Boston front company named Brewster-Jennings & Associates, which she listed as her employer on a 1999 form in Federal Election Commission records for her $1,000 contribution to Al Gore’s presidential primary campaign…
Friends and neighbors knew Valerie Wilson as a consultant who traveled frequently overseas. They describe her as charming, bright and discreet. “She did not talk politics,” said Victoria Tillotson, 58, who has often socialized with the Wilsons.
“I thought she was a risk assessment person for some international investment company,” said Ralph Wittenberg, a psychiatrist who chairs the nonprofit Family Mental Health Foundation, where Valerie Wilson is a board member. In recent years, he said, Valerie Wilson has been an “unstinting” volunteer, running peer support groups for women who suffered from postpartum depression, as she had.
Lots of new information. But the main questions are still unanswered. Did Valerie Plame fall under the definition of covert as required by the statutes? Did the CIA, Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame make every attempt to keep her covert status secret, as required by law to be part of the criteria for a crime to exist? Who talked to Bob Novak? Who talked to any other newspeople? Why are Novak and the others keeping these names secret? Why was Joe Wilson sent to Niger? Who sent Joe Wilson to Niger? Did Joe Wilson break any laws by writing about his trip and his report? Did Valerie Plame break any laws by making campaign contributions using ficticious information? Did Novak or any of the other reporters break any laws?
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