On June 1, CIA director Leon Panetta, for the first time, acknowledged that State Department employee Gregg Wenzel, who died in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia after a "drunken driver" hit his car and sped away, was an officer of the Clandestine Services division of the CIA. The State Department job was Wenzel's "official cover" to operate in Ethiopia for the agency.
Wenzel, 33 and a New York lawyer who also previously lived in Miami, joined the CIA in 2000. The driver who slammed into Wenzel's vehicle remains a fugitive.
WMR has previously reported that after former U.S. ambassador Joe Wilson's article on not finding yellow cake uranium links between Niger and Iraq appeared in The New York Timeson July 3, which instigated a leak from the Bush White House about Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, being a CIA agent, at least one clandestine services CIA officer was killed as a result of the leak. WMR learned that officer was assigned to monitor Iran's nuclear development program. It would now appear that given the time line, a mere six days after Wilson's op-ed column appeared in the Times,that Wenzel, assigned to the capital where every member of the African Union, including Niger and the three other uranium-producing countries in Africa -- Gabon, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Namibia -- maintain delegations, may have also been a victim of the leak of Plame's name and identity.
Addis Ababa is also a major CIA post from which intelligence is collected from military and intelligence officers assigned to the African Union and associated military training activities, some of which are run by the Pentagon.
The CIA's "Damage Assessment Report" on impact of the disclosure of Plame's identity had on the agency and her own Counter-Proliferation Division within the CIA remains highly classified. Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who WMR has cited as a master cover-up artist who suppressed critical evidence in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in New York failed to indict anyone in the Bush White House for violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which is geared against those who expose covert CIA agents.
WMR has reported that after Plame's identity and that of her Brewster Jennings & Associates front company was exposed by Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff Scooter Libby, President Bush's top aide Karl Rove, and others in the White House to selected media outlets in Washington, including columnist Robert Novak, intelligence agencies around the world began investigating who had contact with Plame and her associates in various venue around the globe. Within hours of the leak, WMR was told that CIA informants and agents were picked up around the world, from Pyongyang to Iran and Pakistan and either tortured or executed or both.
Gregg Wenzel, who is the 89th star on the CIA's Memorial Wall, may have been one more victim of the treasonous leak by Bush and Cheney and their senior staff as a political payback aimed at Joe and Valerie Wilson.
It is also important to note that President Obama has retained Fitzgerald as the U.S. Attorney for Northern Illinois.
