February 1997
At the time, (Joe) Wilson was based in Stuttgart, serving as the political adviser to George Joulwan, the U.S. general in charge of the European command; Plame was based in Brussels. Meeting in Paris, London, and Brussels, they got very serious very quickly. On the third or fourth date, he says, they were in the middle of a "heavy make-out" session when she said she had something to tell him. She was very conflicted and very nervous, thinking of everything that had gone into getting her to that point, such as money and training.
She was, she explained, undercover in the C.I.A.
In 1997, Plame moved back to the Washington area, partly because (as was recently reported in The New York Times) the C.I.A. suspected that her name may have been on a list given to the Russians by the double agent Aldrich Ames in 1994.
snip
Wilson was caught off guard when around July 9 he received a phone call from Robert Novak, who, according to Wilson, said he'd been told by a C.I.A. source that Wilson's wife worked for the agency. "Can you confirm or deny?" Wilson recalls Novak as saying. "I need another source."
Wilson says he replied, "I'm not going to answer any questions about my wife."
At this point, Wilson says, he and his wife thought the leak could be contained if no one picked it up.
One aspect of that account I find striking: it seems odd that Plame didn't seem concerned about blowing her own cover to a virtual stranger while stationed overseas and concerned that she may have been compromised by Aldrich Ames, but once she came back to Washington and her husband publicly discussed his own work with the CIA, it suddenly became a big deal when Robert Novak mentioned it.