WASHINGTON, May 31 (UPI) -- Three GOP senators are asking outed CIA agent Valerie Plame to explain what they say are discrepancies in several accounts she has given of her role in the decision to send her husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, to Niger in 2002 to investigate reports that Iraq was trying to buy uranium yellowcake for nuclear weapons there.
"One area of inquiry which now seems to be unresolved is why (Plame) provided different testimony to the CIA inspector general, (Senate Intelligence) committee staff and the House Committee on Oversight and Reform," they wrote in additional views to a Senate report about pre-war intelligence on Iraq, published Friday.
The additional views were submitted by Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Vice Chairman Kit Bond, R-Mo., and Sens. Orin Hatch, R-Utah, and Richard Burr, R-N.C.
Wilson's trip became the focus of media attention in 2003 after he said, first privately and then in public, that his inquiries in Niger the previous year had debunked the yellowcake reports -- long before they became part of President Bush's case for war against Iraq.
The media firestorm burned especially brightly because the claim that Iraq was seeking yellowcake had been made by the president during the State of the Union address -- after it had been removed from a previous speech because the CIA was not satisfied it was accurate.
In the ensuing controversy, several administration officials told reporters that Plame, a covert employee who used non-official cover, worked for the CIA and had suggested her husband for the trip. A subsequent criminal investigation into the leak resulted in the prosecution of vice presidential aide I. Lewis Libby for perjury and obstruction of justice.
In the additional views, the three senators publish for the first time the full text of an e-mail message sent by Plame on Feb. 12, 2002, in which she writes that Wilson "may be in a position to assist" the CIA's inquiries into the Niger reports.
This, they say, is consistent with what Plame told the CIA's inspector general, who testified to the committee that she had "made the suggestion" that Wilson look into the matter for the agency.
"Additional information recently made available to the committee indicates that this information came from (Plame's) own testimony to the CIA inspector general," they write.
But they point out that, in sworn testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in March this year, Plame said the Senate committee had "taken out of context a portion" of her e-mail to "make it seem as though I had suggested or recommended him."
"I did not recommend him. I did not suggest him," she said.
Instead, she said, his name was brought up by a colleague in a conversation following a query from the vice president's office, and she subsequently sent the e-mail at the request of her supervisor.
But the additional views note that although the e-mail was sent Feb. 12, there is no evidence of any queries from the vice president's office until Feb. 13.
Moreover, she had previously told Senate committee staff that she did not recall whether it was she or her supervisor who had originally suggested her husband's name.
In their additional views, the senators say that Bond has written to the CIA requesting interviews with Plame and the other participants in the conversation she described before the House committee "to enable us to tie up these loose ends once and for all."
A CIA spokesman said the agency had received the letter but had no comment to make.
Plame could not be reached, and no one at the Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington -- a non-profit whose attorneys represent her in a civil suit against Libby -- responded to requests for comment.
A spokeswoman for the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform had no comment.
The exact timing and genesis of Wilson's trip is important because of the differing explanations that have been given regarding why officials leaked Plame's name -- sparking a prosecution that exposed the inner workings of the vice president's spin-control efforts and cast a shadow over the White House.
Plame and Wilson have said that the motive was revenge -- to punish him for speaking out against the administration by putting her life in danger.
Former officials, however, have told UPI that Plame's employment at the CIA was revealed to help rebut Wilson's statement that he had been sent in response to the vice president's query about the Niger reports -- and to undermine his credibility by suggesting the trip was a junket he got because of his wife.
The leak ended in the conviction in March this year of Libby, and the GOP senators' additional views were published the same day as a new prosecution filing in his case sought to put to rest once and for all the vexed question of Plame's exact status at the agency when her name was leaked to the press in July 2003.
The jury found Libby guilty of lying to investigators about when he learned of Plame's identity and what he told reporters about it. But because no one was ever charged directly with a crime in connection with the leak, Libby's supporters have questioned whether it was ever prosecutable under the law -- a 1982 statute dubbed the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.
Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald looked into possible violations of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act and the Espionage Act. In a sentencing memo filed Friday, Fitzgerald writes that the grand jury "obtained substantial evidence indicating that one or both of the ... statutes may have been violated."
"At the time" of the leak, reads an unclassified summarized history of her employment and cover status at the CIA Fitzgerald filed along with it, Plame "was a covert CIA employee for whom the CIA was taking affirmative measures to conceal her intelligence relationship to the United States."
