The NOC Program: A Look at Valerie Plame's "Nonofficial Cover" as a CIA Operative

We now to turn to the CIA leak case that has recently been dominating the headlines. In the latest news, President Bush is appearing to backtrack on his pledge to fire anyone involved in the outing of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame. Bush said on Monday he will fire anyone who "committed a crime" in the leak.

On June 10, 2004, Bush was asked whether he stood by an earlier White House pledge to fire anyone found to have leaked the officer's name, Bush replied: "Yes." On Monday, he added the qualifier that it would have to be demonstrated that a crime was committed.

While it is clear that chief presidential advisor Karl Rove played a role in the outing of Plame as a CIA operative, whether he broke the law or not is still a matter of debate

Under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, prosecutors would have to prove that Rove knew Plame was operating undercover. During the 1990's, Plame posed as a private energy consultant while actually working for a CIA department tracking weapons proliferation. The Los Angeles Times reported this weekend, that Plame worked under what is known as "nonofficial cover" or NOC.

* Robert Dreyfuss, investigative reporter and contributing editor at Mother Jones, the Nation and American Prospect. He was the first American reporter to cover the CIA's Non-Official Cover program, or NOC. His new book is "Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam." It is coming out in October from Henry Holt as part of the American Empire Project.

Read Dreyfuss' two-part series on an exit strategy from Iraq:
- The Vietnam Solution
- An Iraqi Peace Process

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