LAT: Plame Is Set to Leave the CIA

Plame Is Set to Leave the CIA
The operative whose covert identity was revealed in a 2003 column wants to spend more time with her family, friends say.

By Richard B. Schmitt, Times Staff Writer


WASHINGTON -- Valerie Plame, the diplomat's wife whose secret resume was exposed in a newspaper column that eventually led to the indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, is leaving the CIA on Friday, people familiar with her plans said.

Plame, 43, worked undercover for the CIA tracking weapons proliferation but saw her clandestine career imperiled after she was identified as an agency operative in the summer of 2003 in a syndicated column by Robert Novak.

Friends said the mother of 5-year-old twins wanted to spend more time with her family, and that although she once appeared in a photo spread about the case with her husband in Vanity Fair magazine, she had no plans to speak out.

There has also been speculation that she would file a civil lawsuit against the Bush administration, which she contends leaked her identity and damaged her career.

"She did not have a career left," said Larry C. Johnson, a former CIA officer and a friend of Plame since the two were in the same agency training class in the 1980s. "She was no longer able to work as a clandestine officer, which was her reason for being."...


http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-plame6dec06,0,4176250.story?coll=la-home-headlines&track=morenews

after being outed was because she had to be there for 20 years to get her full pension. Otherwise, she'd have had to forfeit a certain percentage of her retirement.

We will never know how much real damage has been done by outing her and her cover company.

We should deduct her retirement pay from Bush and all his complicit cronies.

Thank you, Amb and Mrs Wilson, for your long years of dedication to our country. We appreciate it more than words can say.

Hekate

You've earned every penny of that pension.

for the insanity and lawlessness of the current mis-administration.

for years this point was just not mentioned. The irony - and threat to national security - that the WH busted up a major intel operation to track WMD proliferation across the world, in order to "score" political points - has always been central to those outraged by the story. But to the public, nada, nothing about WHAT she worked on and the irony that the issue used by the admin to get american support for the IRaq war is so lightly viewed as a serious threat by this administration that disrupting our ability to track (and thus prevent acquisition by rogue states) of WMDs and WMD materials was brooked.

That's a mighty tame word for what happened to this woman's career and her life and the lives of her co-workers and every WMD project she was working on at the time! Sheesh.