Valerie Plame to Congress: I Was Covert

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One of the unresolved issues of Plamegate is whether or not Valerie Plame was covert when she was outed as a CIA agent in Bob Novak’s column. Conservatives have long maintained that she was not (Sean Hannity earlier this month: “She did not meet the criteria, in any way, shape, matter or form as a covert agent.”) and have speculated that because no one was ever charged with revealing the name of a covert agent, Plame must not have met the strict definitions of “covert” under the law. Reporting from over a year ago said that Plame did covert work within five years of the leak, but was unlikely to do any more.

Well, for what it’s worth, Valerie Plame went before Congress today and said that she was in fact covert. She’s in a position to know, obviously. ThinkProgress has video, but her statement was:

“In the run-up to the war with Iraq, I worked in the Counterproliferation Division of the CIA, still as a covert officer whose affiliation with the CIA was classified.”

“While I helped to manage and run secret worldwide operations against this WMD target from CIA headquarters in Washington, I also traveled to foreign countries on secret missions to find vital intelligence.”

Update: A congressman is claiming that CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden recently told Reps. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Silvestre Reyes (D-TX) explicitly that “Ms. Wilson was covert.”