White House denies authorising CIA leak
The White House has strongly denied allegations that it leaked secret information about an undercover CIA operative.
The Bush administration has rejected calls from the Democrats to launch an independent inquiry into the leak. Democratic presidential hopefuls Howard Dean and Wesley Clark called for a special investigator to be appointed.
Joseph Wilson, a former US ambassador to Gabon, claims that administration officials looking to discredit him or get revenge blew his wife Valerie Plame’s cover as an undercover CIA operative specialising in weapons of mass destruction.
Mr Wilson was a vocal opponent to war in Iraq and accused the Bush administration of exaggerating the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. He claims that President George W Bush’s top political adviser, Karl Rove, condoned the leak.
Mr Wilson was sent by the CIA to the West African state of Niger before the Iraq war, in order to investigate claims that Iraq had tried to buy nuclear material there. However, his report concluded that there was no evidence for the claims.
Despite this, Mr Bush referred to them in his State of the Union address in January. Mr Wilson wrote an article for The New York Times questioning the reference to the Niger claims and the White House was forced to admit its mistake. A columnist, Robert Novak, published the fact that Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA shortly after the article in The New York Times. He refused to divulge his source.
Officials said that the Justice Department had begun a preliminary inquiry to determine if there should be a full-blown investigation based on a memo from the CIA stating a leak had occurred.
The White House has agreed to cooperate with the Department of Justice and has suggested that anyone involved in the leak would be fired.
The political storm surrounding the leak has further exacerbated tensions over the failure of the coalition to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
A leak of classified information is a federal crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
