Administration officials later said Plame had proposed sending her husband to Niger to investigate the uranium claim, casting the trip as a boondoggle. But Plame insisted that was not the case: "No. I did not recommend him, I did not suggest him, there was no nepotism involved."
Rather, Plame said, the idea was proposed by another officer in her division. She said her only role was to ask her husband whether he would be interested.
"I was somewhat ambivalent at the time," Plame said. "We had 2-year-old twins at home, and all I could envision was me by myself at bedtime with a couple of 2-year-olds."
Wilson traveled to Niger and returned to file a report with the CIA that he found no evidence backing up the uranium claim. The allegation was nevertheless included in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address. After the U.S.-led invasion, when it became evident that Iraq had no banned weapons, Wilson publicly accused the White House of twisting the prewar intelligence, prompting a White House campaign to discredit him.
Plame said she was at home in bed when she first learned her name had been published in a syndicated column by Robert Novak. She said her husband threw a copy of the newspaper on the bed and said, "He did it," meaning Novak had printed her name.
"I felt like I had been hit in the gut," she said.
She also said she immediately recognized -- and was subsequently informed by a superior at the agency -- that her clandestine career was over.
Plame was able to testify in part because the criminal investigation of the leak ended last week when I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's former chief of staff, was convicted on four felony counts of lying to investigators. Neither Libby nor any other government official has been charged with leaking Plame's identity.
When asked by the committee about a statement Bush made as the leak investigation was unfolding that he would fire anyone involved with unmasking her, Plame responded: "Karl Rove clearly was involved in the leaking of my name, and he still carries a security clearance. I believe it undermines the president's word." Rove is Bush's chief political advisor.
Even so, Waxman said, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden had informed the committee that at the time Plame's identity was exposed, she was an undercover officer and that any disclosure of her agency employment status was prohibited by executive order.
In a measure of the disparity in political enthusiasm over hearing Plame testify, nine of the 11 members who attended the hearings were Democrats.
Westmoreland, one of the two GOP attendees, sought to highlight the partisan backdrop by asking Plame the party to which she and her husband belong.
Plame acknowledged she was a Democrat, and said of Wilson: "Although my husband comes from a Republican family with deep roots in California, I would say he's a Democrat now."
greg.miller@latimes.com
