Who really blew cover on Wilson’s CIA wife?

Did a White House leaker compromise the identity of a CIA employee to columnist Robert Novak? Or did the CIA employee and her ambassador husband blow her cover themselves?

The highly partisan Joseph C. Wilson IV accused a top administration official of leaking his wife’s identity as political payback for his attempts to discredit President Bush’s statement that Saddam Hussein tried to buy uranium from an African country.

But a veteran intelligence expert shows how Wilson and his wife already had compromised her cover in public documents.

“When Wilson wrote a op-ed in the New York Times in July and revealed that he had gone to Niger on a CIA assignment, he called attention to his wife. CIA people who are really undercover are very careful about not identifying themselves or their families within the agency,” writes Herbert Romerstein in Human Events.

Wilson revealed his wife’s maiden name, which she uses as a CIA employee, in his biography on the web site of the Saudi-funded Middle East Institute, where he is an adjunct scholar.

“When a CIA officer under deep cover is assigned to a hostile country, he knows that the enemy counter-intelligence service will do a background check. Any involvement of a relative with the CIA will endanger the officer’s cover,” Romerstein writes. “Mrs. Joe Wilson also helped shred her cover when she made a contribution to the Al Gore for President campaign and listed her cover company in the Federal Election Commission filing. If she were ever posted overseas under cover, that would provide the hostiles with a lead to unravel her CIA connection.

“No one should identify covert CIA officers or their agents. Even though Joe Wilson IV and his wife showed such a cavalier attitude toward her cover, it was wrong to identify her,” says Romerstein. “By writing his article, Wilson exposed an important CIA weakness: They did not have the sources in Niger that could supply the information.”