Valerie Plame, the covert CIA operative outed by members of the Bush administration, is known to have been working undercover to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

The Raw Story is reporting that intelligence agency sources say that Plame was tracking the WMD programs in Iran.

According to current and former intelligence officials, Plame Wilson, who worked on the clandestine side of the CIA in the Directorate of Operations as a non-official cover (NOC) officer, was part of an operation tracking distribution and acquisition of weapons of mass destruction technology to and from Iran.

Speaking under strict confidentiality, intelligence officials revealed heretofore unreported elements of Plame's work. Their accounts suggest that Plame's outing was more serious than has previously been reported and carries grave implications for U.S. national security and its ability to monitor Iran's burgeoning nuclear program.

Plame, remember, was outed in retaliation for her husband's, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, writing a column in the New York Times in which he detailed his mission to Africa to determine whether nor not Iraq could have purchased Uranium from Niger as claimed by President Bush in a State of the Union speech. Wilson's mission, several months prior to Bush's speech, clearly found that Iraq could not have purchased uranium and that the evidence held by the Bush administration was a forgery.

Plame's name first appeared in a column by conservative Robert Novak on 14 July 2003. Vice President Dick Cheney's former Chief of Staff, "Scooter" Libby, has been indicted in relation to the outing and has since claimed that he was acting under authorization from his superiors. Investigation into the outing are ongoing, and may be a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act signed by President Reagan in 1982.

Recently, Iran has resumed uranium enrichment. Unfortunately, the covert program that Plame was working with may have been hobbled, if not destroyed, due to the political machinations of members of the Bush White House.