CIA spy speaks out on leak scandal

By Andy Sullivan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The ex-CIA spy whose unmasking led to the conviction of Vice President Dick Cheney's top aide broke her silence on Friday to accuse the Bush administration of destroying her career for political reasons.

Speaking publicly for the first time, Valerie Plame Wilson told a congressional committee that she felt betrayed when her name appeared in a newspaper column in July 2003, shortly after her husband emerged as an Iraq war critic.

"I felt like I had been hit in the gut," Plame said at the hearing, which drew dozens of reporters and photographers and was shown live on cable TV news channels. "I could no longer do the work which I had been trained to do."

The leak of Plame's identity to reporters prompted an investigation to determine if government officials had broken any laws.

Nobody was charged with blowing her cover, but Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's former chief of staff, was found guilty earlier this month of lying and obstructing the investigation.

Evidence at that trial showed Libby and several other White House and U.S. State Department officials leaked her identity to discredit her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had accused the administration of twisting intelligence to build a case for invading Iraq.

The CIA sent Wilson to Niger in 2002 to examine Iraq's nuclear ambitions. His 2003 account of that trip put the White House on the defensive over whether it had misled the public about Iraq's nuclear capabilities, a key reason for starting the war.

The narrow focus of the Libby trial left unanswered many questions about the significance of the disclosure of Plame's identity.  Continued...