Secrets of the Scandal
By Nicholas D. Kristof
October 11, 2003
Like any good spy story, the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson is far more complex than it seems on the surface.
I know Mrs. Wilson, but I knew nothing about her C.I.A. career and hadn't realized she's "a hell of a shot with an AK-47," as a classmate at the C.I.A. training "farm," Jim Marcinkowski, recalls. I'll be more careful around her, for she also turns out to be skilled in throwing hand grenades and to have lived abroad and run covert operations in some of the world's messier spots. (Mrs. Wilson was not a source for this column or any other that I've written about the intelligence community.)
Those operations remain secret, but there are several crucial facts that can be made public without putting anyone at risk — and together, they leave everybody looking bad. The C.I.A. is now conducting a damage assessment, which will determine what networks and operations it will have to close down. But my sense is that Democrats exaggerate the damage to Mrs. Wilson's career and to her personal security, while Republicans vastly play down the enormity of the security breach and the danger to the assets she worked with.
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