Word: covertly
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...investigation tightens into the leak of the identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame, sources tell TIME some White House officials may have learned she was married to former ambassador Joseph Wilson weeks before his July 6, 2003, Op-Ed piece criticizing the Administration. That prospect increases the chances that White House official Karl Rove and others learned about Plame from within the Administration rather than from media contacts. Rove has told investigators he believes he learned of her directly or indirectly from reporters, according to his lawyer...
...inside, and her look is icy as she asks, "Is my husband expecting you?" A British journalist had recently turned up at the door unannounced, and she's still angry. "I almost tackled you," she admits to TIME's Massimo Calabresi, and you have to wonder what a trained covert operative who was known as a crack shot with an AK-47 would care to do at the moment to the reporters and Administration officials who had laid her secret bare...
...spotlight shifts once more, to Fitzgerald and what he has learned about the motives and methods behind the outing of Valerie Plame. It is no longer clear even what crime he is investigating: the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act makes it a federal offense to intentionally reveal a covert operative's identity. (See story on page 32.) But the law was designed to be hard to break, and last week lawyers with knowledge of the case suggested that Fitzgerald might be investigating a different crime--perhaps perjury or obstruction of justice. It had to be something serious, they suggested...
...insisted Rove's surrogates last week when asked to explain why he was talking about a covert operative at all. His warning to Cooper, Rove's lawyer Robert Luskin told TIME, was not meant to encourage Cooper to write about Plame; it was meant to deter him from writing credulously about Wilson or at least from lending weight to charges that Cheney's office had deliberately ignored Wilson's findings. "What he was trying to do was discourage Cooper from printing allegations about the Vice President that were going to be proven false," Luskin says. While it was true that...
Thus Rove's defenders have claimed that he can hardly be guilty of outing a spy who was effectively outed already. "She was done," says a senior Republican Senate aide when asked whether Plame's career had been damaged by the disclosure of her covert identity. "She'd had her two kids. She'd come back to headquarters. And how do you maintain your cover when your husband is saying, I was sent on a mission...