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BURIED LEDE [Cliff May]
Rather deep in the Washington Times story today by Stephen Dinan and Joseph Curl is this revelation:

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.”

If her neighbors knew she worked for the CIA, if her friends new she worked for the CIA, no crime was committed by anyone passing such information along to a reporter--as long as they didn’t know and tell that she had once been undercover, and as long as the source of their knowledge was not classified documents.

It bears repetition: Knowing Plame worked at the CIA does not mean knowing she had ever been a covert agent.

Bob Novak did not know she had been undercover--until The Nation’s David Corn suggested that, based on information that clearly came from Joe Wilson himself. And Corn was the first to raise the suggestion that Plame was a secret agent--one who had been exposed by the Bush administration to punish Wilson. (My piece on this is elsewhere on NRO today.)

Also, while I hate say I told you so, I did write on NRO back on Sept. 29, 2003:

It’s the top story in the Washington Post this morning as well as in many other media outlets. Who leaked the fact that the wife of Joseph C. Wilson IV worked for the CIA?

What also might be worth asking: "Who didn't know?"