The key fact about CIA cover is that the vast majority of all case officers overseas "operate"--try to spot, develop, recruit, and run foreign agents--with little or none of it. This has been true for decades. The overwhelming majority of all CIA officers abroad--those serving within the clandestine service and those coming from other directorates--serve under "official" cover, usually as fake diplomats. Even the finest "official" cover often doesn't last long--a few months if an officer is lucky--because the bureaucratic differences between CIA officers and their State Department counterparts are significant enough to make "spot-the-spook" relatively easy for opposing counterintelligence services, foreign ministries, and savvy local businessmen and expatriates.

CIA officers also often eschew their cover work because it can be quite time-consuming, offers little professional reward inside the Agency, and is frequently more mentally demanding than "operations" (foreign service officers actually have to think more in their cable-writing, note-taking, and demarching than case officers do in arranging clandestine meetings and regurgitating headquarters debriefing notes). Official cover, even when good, often simply doesn't allow a case officer access to a sufficient number of possible targets (believe it or not, most foreign officials and Islamic holy warriors can't be convinced, seduced, or blackmailed into betraying "their" side). Most chiefs of CIA stations would gladly have their officers demolish their cover if by so doing the operatives could have some chance of meeting a target that could conceivably be recruited. Indeed, depending on the foreign target and sensitivity and prowess of the local counterespionage services, case officers regularly jettison their cover entirely, hoping that gossip and the allure of American power and money will work to their advantage.

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It is important to note that if Plame was ever a NOC, her associations overseas were jeopardized long ago by the Agency's decision to allow her to come "inside"--that is, become a headquarters-based officer (even one with a poorly "backstopped" business cover like Plame's Boston front company, Brewster-Jennings & Associates).

This officially sanctioned "outing" of NOCs is a longstanding problem in the CIA, where non-official cover officers regularly tire of their "outsider" existence ("inside" officers dominate the Directorate of Operations). It is not uncommon to find former NOCs serving inside CIA stations and bases in geographic regions where they once served non- officially, which of course immediately destroys the cover legend they used as a NOC. Foreign counterintelligence services naturally assume once a spook always a spook. ...

Whether or not Valerie Plame was engaged in serious work inside the Agency's Non- Proliferation Center, one has to ask what in the world her bosses were doing in allowing her husband, a public figure, to accept a non-secret assignment which potentially had a public profile? Journalists regularly learn the names of clandestine-service officers. Senior agency officials may well have thought very little of Ambassador Wilson's "yellowcake" mission to Niger, which explains CIA director George Tenet's statement about his ignorance of it. They may have thought Wilson an ideal candidate for this low- priority, fact-finding mission. But neither is an excuse for employing a spouse of an undercover employee if senior CIA officials thought Plame's clandestine work was valuable. The head of the Non-Proliferation Center ought to be fired for such sloppiness.

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They should ask Tenet how many clandestine officers have worked the Iraqi target since 1991. He and senior officers of the Operations Directorate should be asked to specify what cover Iraq-targeted case officers had and where they served. They should explain how the cover was supposed to aid American intelligence to penetrate Saddam Hussein's Iraq, and why they think the methodologies adopted didn't work.

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The intelligence committees should be even more rigorous in scrutinizing CIA efforts against al Qaeda. It is obvious that the CIA made no decisive recruitment within al Qaeda before the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998 through September 11, 2001. The Counterterrorism Center has grown enormously since 9/11. Has the cover and methodology of CIA officers overseas changed? Are most counterterrorism case officers abroad still using official cover as they were before 9/11?