Cover Me
Rove-a-Palooza

Much has been made by conservative commentators and bloggers about Valerie Plame's undercover/covert status when she was outed--that she had a desk job at Langley (CIA headquarters), and thus shouldn't be considered covert and thus Rove did nuthin' wrong. Media Matters has a round-up of some of these comments:

Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund and Republican National Committee (RNC) chairman Ken Mehlman repeated the Associated Press' false assertion, since corrected, that former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV acknowledged in a recent TV interview that his wife, Valerie Plame, was not a clandestine CIA operative when syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak first publicly exposed her identity. In fact, Wilson's statement during a July 14 interview on CNN's Wolf Blitzer Reports merely emphasized that his wife's cover was blown the moment Novak revealed her identity in a July 2003 column.

NPR's Day to Day news show from Thursday had a story, where former CIA undercover/covert operatives commented on Plame's status, and they also counter this assertion by the Right's Noise Machine (highlights provided from the Real audio stream found at the NPR link above):

Alex Chadwick: Was she truly undercover? She had a desk job at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, when her name was made public two years ago. She drove to work openly from her home. If she wasn't covert, then there was no crime in revealing her identity. NPR's Mary Louise Kelly has been talking with former CIA covert officers and finds this consensus: Valerie Plame was undercover and her unmasking may have caused real damage to national security.

Kelly goes on to lay the groundwork definitions for undercover and covert operatives, including NOC (non-official cover):

Mary Louise Kelly: NOCs pose as employees of phony front companies or, sometimes, as employees of real Fortune 500 companies. Valerie Plame worked as a NOC during her career. Her cover was a shell company in Boston called Brewster Jennings. But, for some time, Plame had been based at Langley. Under the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act, the statute administration officials are accused of violating, a covert agent is defined as someone serving outside the US or who has served outside the US in the past five years. Thus, the contention that Plame doesn't count. Melissa Boyle Mailey: I think that is a grave misunderstanding of what cover is. Kelly: Melissa Boyle Mailey is a friend of Plame's. She spent 14 years undercover herself. Mailey argues that where Plame was based is irrelevant, that the CIA frequently rotates spies back and forth between Washington desk jobs and the field. What's more, the 1982 law doesn't stipulate you have to be based overseas. As an expert on weapons proliferation, Valerie Plame traveled regularly. Lindsay Moran, a CIA covert officer from 1998 to 2003 says plenty of her former colleagues worked under deep cover, running foreign agents while sitting at CIA headquarters. Lindsay Moran: And many of these officers are sent on temporary tours of duty overseas, you know, for 30 or 60 or 90 days at a time. And they still are taking as great a risk as someone who's overseas for two or three years at a time.