Valerie Plame Still Wants to Know

Former covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson would still like to know the identity of the CIA official who passed her name to the office of Vice President Dick Cheney in the spring of 2003, and "under what circumstances."

That's just one of several unanswered questions Plame Wilson has been trying to figure out in the years since several senior officials in the Bush administration leaked her name to syndicated columnist Robert Novak and a handful of other journalists. That leak ended her two-decade CIA career.

"I'd like to know, why did Novak go with my maiden name, Plame, in his original article?" Plame Wilson said during an hour-long, two-part interview with Truthout. "I always thought that was strange. When I married, I took my married name. And then he [Novak] used Valerie Plame [in his column]. It was only the CIA who knew that I worked for them, and my maiden name."

Plame Wilson is promoting her book, "Fair Game," a memoir she wrote about the leak, her job as an intelligence operative working on counterproliferation issues, and the fallout that ensued when she became a public figure after her identity and CIA status were published in newspapers and magazines. Her book landed on The New York Times bestseller list two weeks ago and has more than 350,000 copies in print.

Perhaps the most important question yet to be answered for Plame Wilson is whether President Bush had prior knowledge about the leak of her identity.

"I'd love to know, what did President Bush know about all of this?" Plame Wilson said.

Jason Leopold is senior editor and reporter for Truthout. He received a Project Censored award in 2007 for his story on Halliburton's work in Iran.

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