Valerie Plame was a classmate of mine from the day she started with the CIA.  I entered on duty at the CIA in September 1985.  All of my classmates were undercover--in other words, we told our family and friends that we were working for other overt U.S. Government agencies.  We had official cover.  That means we had a black passport--i.e., a diplomatic passport.  If we were caught overseas engaged in espionage activity the black passport was a get out of jail free card. A few of my classmates, and Valerie was one of these, became a non-official cover officer.  That meant she agreed to operate overseas without the protection of a diplomatic passport.  If caught in that status she would have been executed.

Brewster Jennings was, in fact, a well-established CIA proprietary company, linked for many years to ARAMCO. The demise of Brewster Jennings was also guaranteed the moment Plame was outed. It takes years for Non-Official Covers or NOCs, as they are known, to become really effective. Over time, they become gradually more trusted; they work their way into deeper information access from more sensitive sources. NOCs are generally regarded in the community as among the best and most valuable of all CIA operations officers and the agency goes to great lengths to protect them in what are frequently very risky missions.

As I said before it was fairly common knowledge in Washington that Mrs Wilson was a CIA agent and she wasn't under cover when her name was exposed by whomever did it.

Writing in January in the Washington Post, former Assistant Deputy Attorney General Victoria Toensing explained that she helped draft the 1982 law in question. Said Toensing: "The Novak column and the surrounding facts do not support evidence of criminal conduct." For Plame's outing to have been illegal, the one-time deputy AG explained, "her status as undercover must be classified." Also, Plame "must have been assigned to duty outside the United States currently or in the past five years." Since in neither case does Plame meet those criteria, Toensing argued: "There is a serious legal question as to whether she qualifies as 'covert.'" The law also requires that the celebrated non-spy's outing take place by someone who knew the government had taken "affirmative measures to conceal [the agent's] relationship" to the U.S.

But other former C.I.A. officers say that by 2003 Ms. Wilson's cover was already thin. Any serious inquiry would have revealed that Brewster Jennings was little more than a mailbox. Though she traveled regularly, Ms. Wilson, who speaks French, German and Greek, had been working for some time at agency headquarters in Langley, Va. And her marriage to a senior American diplomat, Mr. Wilson, ended any pretense of having no government ties. "At that point, she looks, walks and quacks like an overt agency employee," said Fred Rustmann, a C.I.A. officer from 1966 to 1990, who supervised Ms. Wilson early in her career and calls her "one of the best, an excellent officer."