Court Silences CIA Operative Despite Yellowcake Scandal: Via Threat Level.

Valerie Plame Wilson cannot publicize details of her work as a CIA operative, even though a government official already outed her as an agent in an attempt to discredit her husband, Joseph C. Wilson, a federal appeals court says.

Plame Wilson, who served as chief of the unit responsible for weapons proliferation issues related to Iraq, argued that confidentiality agreements she signed to win her employment more than two decades ago should be nullified. The CIA has prohibited her from discussing her pre-2002 employment in her 2007 memoir, Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House.

She maintained the confidentiality agreement should be set aside because government officials leaked to the press that she was an agent. Also, as part of a battle to obtain retirement benefits, her 20-year-employment status became part of the congressional record.

Given that she has been revealed as a operative, the First Amendment allows her to sidestep her confidentiality agreement, she argued.

But the appeals court, in siding with a lower court and a CIA review board prohibiting her from describing her work prior to 2002, said the nation’s national security could be compromised (.pdf) by the disclosures she’d planned in her book. In addition, the court said, it was irrelevant whether it was widely known that she was working under cover. [ Read more ... ]