Why Woodward Matters
Truth Out of the Woodward

Bob Woodward (everytime I type his name these days, my fingers subliminally type "Boob" and I have to backspace) was on Larry King tonight trying to salvage some last shreds of his reputation. Think Progress highlights an important exchange:

Question: Your source, did the source indicate whether Ms. Plame was an undercover agent or a desk analyst?

Woodward: Good question. And specifically said that — the source did — that she was a WMD, weapons of mass destruction, analyst. Now, I’ve been covering the CIA for over three decades, and analysts, except — in fact, I don’t even know of a case. Maybe there are cases. But they’re not undercover. They are people who take other information and analyze it. And so — and if you were there at this moment in mid-June when this was said, there was no suggestion that it was sensitive, that it was secret.

This is important because...

From the indictment, we learned that Vice President Cheney told Scooter Libby that Plame worked in the “Counterproliferation Division,” an agency in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations (DO) – see fact #9. The DO is well-known as the clandestine arm of the CIA.

The “agency on weapons of mass destruction,” however, is part of the Directorate of Intelligence (DI), which is “on the overt side of the CIA.”
[...]
So, at some point along this chain, it appears someone in the Bush administration changed Valerie Plame’s job affiliation with the CIA in order to convince reporters that it was ok to report on her. Did Woodward, Miller, Novak, and Cooper all get intentionally deceived about Plame’s status? The answer to this vital question will prove important to understanding the motives of the White House’s smear campaign against Joseph Wilson.