Cover Story Kept Work for C.I.A. a Secret
By DOUGLAS JEHL and DAVID STOUT
WASHINGTON, Oct. 1 — Valerie Plame was among the small subset of Central Intelligence Agency officers who could not disguise their profession by telling friends that they worked for the United States government.
That cover story, standard for American operatives who pretend to be diplomats or other federal employees, was not an option for Ms. Plame, people who knew her said on Wednesday. As a covert operative who specialized in nonconventional weapons and sometimes worked abroad, she passed herself off as a private energy expert, what the agency calls nonofficial cover.
nytimes.com
"Non-official cover" is the deepest kind of clandestine role.
A rundown of types of cover:
No cover. Upper management, college recruiters, congressional liaisons, Director George Tenet: These men and women are publicly acknowledged CIA employees.
Light cover. Many of the CIA's analysts and scientists fall under this category. Their families and friends might know who they really work for, but publicly, they claim to be employed by some other innocuous government agency or group. One former intelligence officer described this as "the cover you use if your airplane gets hijacked": It's safe enough to use on a quick visit overseas, say to meet with intelligence counterparts in a friendly country, but insufficient cover for spies stationed abroad.
Official cover. Most CIA employees engaged in operations overseas are given official cover: a sham job in the U.S. embassy (or working for another government agency) that affords them diplomatic immunity. These spies work under varying degrees of secrecy—the CIA station chief in a major ally nation may be well-known on the diplomatic cocktail circuit, but his subordinates, who actually recruit new informants, may not be. Such spies probably confide in their immediate families, but otherwise are unlikely to reveal their true occupation. (Although some operatives working in allied nations are "declared" officers, which means the CIA informs the host government that they are spies.) The advantage of official cover is that if officers are caught, they enjoy the benefits of diplomatic protection; at worst, they'd be publicly outed and sent home in disgrace.
Nonofficial cover. NOCs (the word rhymes with "rocks") are the most covert CIA operatives. They typically work abroad without diplomatic protection (often they pretend to work for some commercial enterprise). If these spies are caught, there's no guarantee that the United States would admit their true identities. When using official cover could put a spy's life and work at risk, NOC is the only alternative.
Why is it such a big deal that someone outed Valerie Plame? For starters, it's a felony. And Plame was also reportedly a NOC with years of experience investigating weapons of mass destruction. If this is true, her discovery could compromise intelligence operations she was involved with around the world, which would explain why she maintained her nonofficial cover even when she was back in the United States. "Hard target" countries like China and North Korea often keep records of every known meeting between Americans and their scientists and officials. Almost certainly, those lists would have been frantically reviewed when Plame's identity was revealed, and any sources she recruited could have been exposed.
So her role wasn't an "open secret," or a sort-of secret, or a nudge-and-wink secret. It was a secret secret, until someone in the Bush White House decided to punish her husband by wrecking her career.
That means, for example, that the "someone who had formerly worked in the government" who told Clifford May "in an offhand manner" that Joseph Wilson's wife worked for the CIA, "leading [May] to infer it was something that insiders were well aware of, was (1) deceiving May (who seems, in all conscience, to have been quite willing to be deceived); (2) breaching an important security taboo; and (3) committing an aggravated felony.
I'm looking forward both to May's retraction and to his appearance before a grand jury.
In fact, I'm looking forward to a lot of retractions from the people who have been pushing the "We still don't know if her role was secret" line. Skepticism is healthy. But the word skepsis properly means "inquiry," not "refusal to believe." A real skeptic, having inquired and found evidence, is prepared to make up his mind.
Those who have said in the past that there might be no scandal here because there might have been no breach of secrecy now owe it to the rest of us to admit that their question has been answered, or to explain why they think it hasn't. To leave their readers in doubt, when no legitimate doubt remains, would amount to deception.
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