Exactly. However, something else is going on here and not just about outing CIA agents.
The question we should all be asking is why is Judith Miller sitting in jail for a source if Plame was not covert? Who is Miller's source?
According to UNNAMED CIA sources a referral was given because "If she was not undercover, we would have no reason to file a criminal referral,"...
Now there is only one thing you can conclude from that statement. Whether it is true or not, I guess, remains to be seen.
A former CIA covert agent who supervised Mrs. Plame early in her career yesterday took issue with her identification as an "undercover agent," saying that she worked for more than five years at the agency's headquarters in Langley and that most of her neighbors and friends knew that she was a CIA employee.
"She made no bones about the fact that she was an agency employee and her husband was a diplomat," Fred Rustmann, a covert agent from 1966 to 1990, told The Washington Times.
"Her neighbors knew this, her friends knew this, his friends knew this. A lot of blame could be put on to central cover staff and the agency because they weren't minding the store here. ... The agency never changed her cover status."
Mr. Rustmann, who spent 20 of his 24 years in the agency under "nonofficial cover" -- also known as a NOC, the same status as the wife of Mr. Wilson -- also said that she worked under extremely light cover.
In addition, Mrs. Plame hadn't been out as an NOC since 1997, when she returned from her last assignment, married Mr. Wilson and had twins, USA Today reported yesterday.
The distinction matters because a law that forbids disclosing the name of undercover CIA operatives applies to agents that had been on overseas assignment "within the last five years."
"She was home for such a long time, she went to work every day at Langley, she was in an analytical type job, she was married to a high-profile diplomat with two kids," Mr. Rustmann said. "Most people who knew Valerie and her husband, I think, would have thought that she was an overt CIA employee."
Asked whether his wife had been compromised before the press leak, Mr. Wilson said, "I have no idea," though he said that her work has had to change since the leaks
*****I found the above post on the David Gold web site