ARREST VALERIE PLAME!

Jack Shafer is the voice of reason on L'affaire Plame, citing the applicable law to argue that it's very unlikely that the alleged leaker actually broke any laws:

1) That the individual has or had "authorized access to classified information that identifies a covert agent." If Novak's administration sources had only unauthorized access to the information about covert officer Plame, learning about her identity and her mission, say, in a hallway conversation from a visiting CIA officer, the law wouldn't apply here. Perhaps they might go after the hypothetical CIA officer, but they'd run in to a slew of other legal problems sketched out below.

2) That in addition to having had authorized access to the information about the covert agent, the individual must have "intentionally" disclosed it to an individual not authorized to receive classified information. This clause protects the government employee or member of Congress who might accidentally blurt out the name and identity of a covert agent. (In 1991, Sen. David Boren, D-Okla., mentioned the name of a CIA station chief as he emerged from a closed-door session.) So, in addition to the other tests, a prosecutor would also have to prove the leaker's intent to blow the agent's cover. This poses a huge problem in the Novak case because the vague language of his column doesn't identify Plame as covert, but as a "CIA operative on weapons of mass destruction." It's plausible that Novak's source didn't know—as we now know—that Plame was "undercover."

3) That the individual knew he was disclosing information that identifies a "covert agent and that the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such covert agent's intelligence relationship to the United States."

Based on the above criteria, which boil down to the leaker having had access to classified information, intentional disclosure of an agent or agents undercover, and that the individual was aware that the disclosing info identified a covert agent that the country is actively concealing, it's clear that if Plame was using non-official cover status, at least one individual broke all three rules.

Her name is Valerie Plame.

According to Maureen Dowd's column last week, Plame leaked to her beau very early in their courtship:

Valerie Plame and Joseph Wilson both happened to alight in Washington, their jet-set schedules intersecting, and spotted each other across a cocktail party filled with foreigners. "I saw this striking blonde," he recalled, still sounding smitten six years later. At first she said she was an energy analyst, but confided sometime around the first kiss that she was in the C.I.A. "I had a security clearance," grinned Mr. Wilson, then a political adviser to the commander of U.S. forces in Europe.

Presuming that she had proper credentials, and how could she not if she was undercover, Plame had access to classified material. If she was undercover, she knew it when she told Wilson that she was CIA. And she disclosed information that identified an agent that the US was actively concealing at the time--herself.

So arrest her already. She was a lawbreaking security risk.

Yes, I'm being facetious. A little.

On a more serious note, it's nearly always the case that undercover CIA ops are not allowed to tell those closest to them that they are working undercover. Over the years I have made acquaintance with a couple of NSA types, neither of which had ever told their spouses even the slightest detail about their jobs and wouldn't tell me a thing even after I'd known them for a while, and they were at least able to disclose that they worked for No Such Agency. If Plame was really working undercover as some kind of energy specialist, and she told her suitor(s) about it, she was in fact a security risk. Which is why when this story shakes out, I suspect we'll find out that her CIA career was less clandestine than we've been led to believe thus far.

Either way, it's pretty much over. If there was a leaker, and six reporters know the truth on this but are hiding behind some kind of journalist's privilege to put the country through hell when they could stop it with a word, that leaker has outed her. And she was apparently all too willing to out herself.

On the other hand, no one has published a picture of her to date. At least not that I've seen. And it's a fair bet that if she was working undercover, she probably wasn't using her real name. So it's entirely possible that some semblance of her cover might be intact.

UPDATE: Well, was she really an undercover op or not? Joe Wilson--and the CIA for that matter--won't answer. But while Ms. Plame "would rather cut of her right arm" than talk to the press Gumshoe Joe keeps insisting that a crime was committed, heads should roll, Karl Rove is Beelezbub, etc.

I get more skeptical of this story every day. It may turn out that there was no leak, that Wilson himself is the one who tried to get his wife's status into stories to bolster his own credibility, and the White House made things worse by calling the "leaker" a lawbreaker.