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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Selectric II who wrote (470073)	10/2/2003 11:51:20 PM
From: TigerPaw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

I know two CIA agents Are you sure you know their roles? Maybe you think they are analysts and have always been alalysts when in fact they have organized covert teams. Do you know? What are their names? TP

To: Selectric II who wrote (470073)	10/3/2003 12:13:11 AM
From: Doug R	Respond to of 769670

So these CIA "agents" you allegedly "know" are not under cover or have light cover...so? 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.