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This is a good piece of work. I offer two comments.

First, US intelligence officers commonly use covers that cannot survive close scrutiny. The risks are monitored and covers are abandoned and created as need arises. Good covers and the associated personal "legends" that can stand intense scrutiny are expensive, difficult, and time-consuming to create.

Plame's cover seems to have been of the first type, useful and necessary, but inherently insecure and temporary. Most likely, Plame's undercover career was mostly over before Novak's column ran, with her cover perhaps still useful in limited instances, such as servicing prior contacts.

The loss of Plame's cover due to Novak's column, if that can even be said to have taken place, does not seem to have made for any appreciable danger to Plame and other CIA officers and agents. There would have been perhaps some minor scurrying by the CIA to wind up a blown cover, a matter about as consequential or unexpected as the Chicago police having to replace a worn out patrol car.

Second, the controversy that Wilson and Plame have worked so hard to generate and promote reeks of CIA and State Department incompetence and obstructionism as to Bush's foreign policy, as well as that Wilson and his wife are Democrats seeking to get a few licks in for their team. But are those explanations fully adequate for Wilson and Plame's conduct? There is a disturbing and little explored Saudi dimension to the entire controversy.

To put it bluntly, is the Wilson/Plame controversy in some part a Saudi operation designed to weaken Bush and subvert US Iraq policy? Wilson's current gig is in an organization funded by Saudi cash and sympathetic to Saudi foreign policy. Plame's work for the CIA also seems to have been in regard to the oil industry and Aramco, which necessarily means involvement with vital Saudi interests. And, on present knowledge, the possibility cannot be ruled out that Plame's CIA work could have been in immediate alliance with Saudi intelligence.

If this was the middle or late stages of the Cold War and there were similar associations and actions benefiting a Warsaw Pact country, the persons involved would have fallen under close investigation by US counterintelligence. Of course, this is not the Cold War, but a new war on terror, with the Saudis no more reliable a US ally than De Gaulle was or Vichy France would have been in WW II. Indeed, the Saudi regime and the extended royal family so fractured that Saudi Arabia and the Saudis are best regarded as both allies and enemies, essential for their oil but otherwise unworthy of any trust.

We are only in the early stages of the war on terror, with US strategy and policy hotly contested and in flux, just as in the early years of the Cold War. The US government and its foreign policy and intelligence communities are riddled not so much by neocons as with vast numbers of Arabists and Saudi sympathizers and hirelings. Saudi cash has bought them a great many friends in the US. We know that Joe Wilson and his institute receive substantial funding from the Saudis. Is there more of a Saudi connection than that? And is the sum of all such connections essential to explaining what Wilson and Plame have been up to?

"The US government and its foreign policy and intelligence communities are riddled not so much by neocons as with vast numbers of Arabists and Saudi sympathizers and hirelings. Saudi cash has bought them a great many friends in the US. We know that Joe Wilson and his institute receive substantial funding from the Saudis. Is there more of a Saudi connection than that? And is the sum of all such connections essential to explaining what Wilson and Plame have been up to?"

Great post. And great questions.

If Wilson were a Republican and had done what he has done to a Democrat President, we would never hear the end of how he is on the Saudi payroll. It would be on the front page of the NYT above the fold for the next five years.