"Apparently, Valerie Plame ceased to be a covert agent when her cover was blown years earlier. The CIA believed that Aldrich Ames (CIA agent/KGB spy/traitor) revealed her role, along with many other operatives, to the KGB before his arrest in 1994. Plame's former existence as a secret agent became little more than cocktail party chatter with which to thrill the uninitiated. Since her identity was not classified, not secret, and she had not been assigned to duty outside the US in the last five years, revealing her mundane desk job with the CIA was simply not a crime. Lots of people work for the CIA, after all."
I wonder what the difference is between "operative", "agent" and just plain "employee". I see the media often refers to Rove as a political "operative".
All of that has been printed and posted many times since Joe "RestoreHonesty" Wilson's lies about the yellowcake were revealed. I'm not recalling whether the "Ames" part is precise, but for years it had been well known in DC that Plame worked for CIA, and had her cover blown much earlier.
The identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame was compromised twice before her name appeared in a news column that triggered a federal illegal-disclosure investigation, U.S. officials say.Mrs. Plame's identity as an undercover CIA officer was first disclosed to Russia in the mid-1990s by a Moscow spy, said officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity. In a second compromise, officials said a more recent inadvertent disclosure resulted in references to Mrs. Plame in confidential documents sent by the CIA to the U.S. Interests Section of the Swiss Embassy in Havana.
The documents were supposed to be sealed from the Cuban government, but intelligence officials said the Cubans read the classified material and learned the secrets contained in them, the officials said.
Whether fact, guesswork, misdirection or otherwise, it's been discussed for at least a couple years.