Was Valerie Plame Really a Covert Agent?
There appear to be many people who believe that the Valerie Plame outing is really just a tempest in a teapot because, at the time that Robert Novak wrote about her on July 14, 2003, Plame was no longer in the field and was instead stationed at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Keep in mind that while she was in the field, Plame’s cover was that she was an energy consultant. Lost in the uproar is the fact that Novak’s outing of Plame allowed foreign intelligence agencies to easily discover that her cover company, Brewster Jennings & Associates of Boston, was really a CIA front. In so doing, Novak exposed not only Valerie Plame, but any other CIA agent who ever used that fake company as his or her cover. It should also be clear that any other covert agents who worked with Plame lost their covers as well. But putting all this aside, let’s take a look at why an agent would retain her covert status years after leaving the field. Although the scenario that follows deals with Plame, it
