The CIA agent whose outing and led to a criminal inquiry that extended to the highest reaches of the Bush Administration today broke her silence about the affair.

Valerie Plame, whose name and position were leaked to journalists during the first summer of Iraq war, accused the White House of casually using her identity to try and discredit her husband.

“My name and identity were carelessly and recklessly abused by senior officials in the White House and State Department,” Ms Plame, 43, told a US congressional hearing. “I could no longer perform the work for which I had been highly trained.”

“It was a terrible irony that administration officials were the ones who destroyed my cover,” Ms Plame testified. “If our Government cannot even protect my identity, future foreign agents who might consider working with the Central Intelligence Agency and providing needed intelligence would think twice,” she added.

Ms Plame's identity was made public in a column written by the conservative columnist, Robert Novak, in July 2003. It appeared days after her husband, Joseph Wilson, a former Ambassador, accused the Bush Administration of distorting intelligence he gathered in Africa during the run-up to the Iraq war.

Ms Plame and her husband believe her name was made public in order to suggest that she had somehow helped organise his trip to Niger to investigate claims that the regime of Saddam Hussein was trying to buy uranium there. Today she denied having any such power.

“I did not recommend him. I did not suggest him. There was no nepotism involved. I did not have the authority," she said.

Once Ms Plame's name was leaked, the Department of Justice launched a criminal inquiry that led to the imprisonment of a New York Times journalist and, last month, the conviction of Vice President Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on charges of perjury and the obstruction of justice. No one was charged with the actual disclosure of her name.

To knowingly blow the cover of a CIA agent is a federal offence in America and carries a 10 year prison sentence.

Ms Plame's appearance before the Democratic-controlled House Oversight and Government Reform Committee was ordered to help determine "whether White House officials followed appropriate procedures for safeguarding" her identity, an aim which Republicans say is little more than a political exercise.

During the trial of Libby, defence lawyers claimed that Ms Plame's name and position were so widely known in the White House that nobody knew whether the information was classified or not, an argument which led Representative Tom Davis, the ranking Republican on today's committee, to say that the hearing was unlikely to shed more light on the matter.

“No process can be adopted to protect classified information that no one knows is classified,” said Mr Davis. “This looks to me more like a CIA problem than a White House problem.”

Ms Plame is writing a book about her experience, provisionally entitled Fair Game, according to The Washington Post, but it still has to be cleared by the CIA and has no firm publication date. She and her husband are suring Mr Cheney and other White Houise officials, claiming their constitutional rights were violated.

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