Originally posted by: ProfJohn
Originally posted by: MonkeyK
Sorry, but the CIA has already definitively stated that she was covert. It doesn't matter how you interpret her life story.
Sorry, but covert is a BS title that is being used to make it seem like her cover was really important.
As I said in a post long ago, any CIA employee who works over seas does so in a 'covert' fashion. If I had taken that job as a radio room operator I would have been 'covert' every time I went over sears because my 'official' employer would have been the State Department, but my real employer would have still been the CIA.
Here is more from the Chicago Tribune
link
When the Tribune searched for Plame on an Internet service that sells public information about private individuals to its subscribers, it got a report of more than 7,600 words. Included was the fact that in the early 1990s her address was "AMERICAN EMBASSY ATHENS ST, APO NEW YORK NY 09255."
So much for the whole Brewster Jennings cover huh?
And here is the good stuff...
After Plame left her diplomatic post and joined Brewster-Jennings, she became what is known in CIA parlance as an "NOC," shorthand for an intelligence officer working under "non-official cover." But several CIA veterans questioned how someone with an embassy background could have successfully passed herself off as a private-sector consultant with no government connections.
Genuine NOCs, a CIA veteran said, "never use an official address. If she had [a diplomatic] address, her whole cover's completely phony. I used to run NOCs. I was in an embassy. I'd go out and meet them, clandestine meetings. I'd pay them cash to run assets or take trips. I'd give them a big bundle of cash. But they could never use an embassy address, ever."
Another CIA veteran with 20 years of service agreed that "the key is the [embassy] address. That is completely unacceptable for an NOC. She wasn't an NOC, period."
And just as a reminder, the second she married a former ambassador her ability to work 'under cover' or 'covert' if you prefer was ruined, how covert can you be when you are married to a person known to work for the US government? And they were married in 1998, 5 years before this whole mess.
Yes, at one point in her life Valerie Plame was in fact a covert office of the CIA and she may have in fact been a ?spy?, but those days were long over when this story broke.