The Plame/Wilson affair: the column that started it

This is the original column by conservative journalist Robert Novak that presumably blew the cover of Valerie Plume (see previous post): "Mission to Niger".

This is the relevant part to the scandal:

That's where Joe Wilson came in. His first public notice had come in 1991 after 15 years as a Foreign Service officer when, as U.S. charge in Baghdad, he risked his life to shelter in the embassy some 800 Americans from Saddam Hussein's wrath. My partner Rowland Evans reported from the Iraqi capital in our column that Wilson showed "the stuff of heroism." President George H.W. Bush the next year named him ambassador to Gabon, and President Bill Clinton put him in charge of African affairs at the National Security Council until his retirement in 1998.

Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him. "I will not answer any question about my wife," Wilson told me.

Bush's critics suggested at the time that leaking information that Plame was an undercover CIA operative was meant not only to create pressure on Wilson to limit his public criticism of Bush's Iraq War policies. But that it was also meant to intimidate other former officials who might be tempted to criticize some aspect of Bush's conduct.

Tags: joseph wilson, robert novak, valerie plame