"Shades of Cover" -LAT on Plame and other agency operatives

[Rose Siding]

WASHINGTON — Several months after her identity as a CIA operative was exposed in a newspaper column, Valerie Plame had dinner with five of her classmates from the agency's training academy.

Four had left the CIA, and they spent the evening catching up on what they'd done during their clandestine careers, as well as the jobs and moves that followed. But even though Plame's "cover" had been cracked wide open, her dinner companions didn't pry for details. Even in that tight circle, no one wanted to spill any more secrets.

"Cover is a mosaic, it's a puzzle," said James Marcinkowski, a former CIA case officer who attended the dinner. "Every piece is important because you don't know which pieces the bad guys are missing."
...
Still, her clandestine career is over, and the outrage among many current and former case officers lingers because cover is something they go to such great lengths to protect.

"It doesn't matter whether he used her name," Marcinkowski said of the recent disclosures surrounding Rove. "It doesn't matter what her status was. He gave up a piece of the puzzle and he had no right to do it."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-cia16jul16,0,5815740.story?coll=la-home-headlines