Plame Headed Wmd Search, Says New Book

Valerie Plame, a covert CIA agent whose identity was leaked by the Bush administration at the height of a political feud with her husband, was in charge of operations aimed at finding out if Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, according to a new book.

The Plame affair has dogged the White House since July 2003, when her cover was blown, but the nature of her job had been unknown. In Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal and the Selling of the Iraq War, two Washington journalists, Michael Isikoff and David Corn, say she was the chief of operations of the CIA's joint taskforce on Iraq.

According to an early extract, it was her job to recruit informants who might give insight into Saddam's arms programmes. By the time the war began in 2003, her unit had failed to find evidence and was sceptical about the information from Iraqi defectors. Her identity seems to have been leaked because her husband, the former ambassador Joseph Wilson, criticised the invasion of Iraq. A former chief of staff to the vice-president is due to go on trial next year for lying to investigators. But the first official to mention her job to a journalist was a state department moderate apparently unaware of the sensitivity.

Writing in the online edition of The Nation magazine yesterday, Mr Corn quoted a CIA officer as saying: "The war came so suddenly. We didn't have enough information to challenge the assumption that there were WMDs."