That is really secret

James Taranto:

Valerie Who?

Blogress Clarice Feldman offers an odd twist on the Valerie Plame kerfuffle. She quotes from a January 2004 Vanity Fair profile of Plame and her swaggering spouse, Joe Wilson:

[Vice President] Cheney and his chief of staff, Lewis Libby, visited the C.I.A. several times at Langley and told the staff to make more of an effort to find evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and to uncover Iraqi attempts to acquire nuclear capabilities. One of the people who objected most fervently to what he saw as "intimidation," according to one former C.I.A. case officer, was Alan Foley, then the head of the Weapons Intelligence, Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center. He was Valerie Plame's boss. (Foley could not be reached for comment.)

Feldman says she wrote to Foley to inquire about this and received the following reply last week:

I didn't know that Valerie Plame or Joseph Wilson existed until after the Novak article [in July 2003]. I have never met nor communicated with either of them. Nor did I have any responsibility or authority relating to them, the reported trip to Niger, or the subsequent leak investigation. . . . Please do not contact me again.

Wow, Valerie Plame's identity was so secret, her own boss didn't know who she was!