These are the kind of people that don't grow on trees." "She is an expert on weapons of mass destruction. Mahle says Valerie was working on important national security issues, like keeping tabs on nuclear material and the world's top nuclear scientists. "If you start to unravel one part of that, you can unravel the whole thing." We modify cover based on how we need it," says Mahle. So it's not really that serious.' Well, I would say that's a very fallacious way of looking at this because a cover is for a clandestine officer can be different things at different times. "People have said, 'Oh, well, Valerie wasn't serving in a sensitive position. She left the agency three years ago, and recently struck up a friendship with a woman whose career ran parallel to her own: Valerie Plame Wilson. I went overseas, I recruited agents," says Mahle.
FEMALE SPY AGENT SERIES
"We give our most sensitive cases to those officers serving under non-official cover," explains Melissa Mahle, who spent 14 years in the Middle East as a covert CIA operative maintaining a series of fictitious "legends," or cover stories, created by her superiors. To this day, the CIA denies he was an agent. "Out there" like Hugh Redmond, a NOC who was caught spying in Shanghai in 1951 and died after 19 years in a Chinese prison. You're out there, what they would call naked." You don't have that kind of a protection when you're a NOC. "With diplomatic immunity, the worst that can happen is you get kicked out of the country. Working overseas as an NOC, without official cover, was a dangerous assignment, says Marcinkowski. In other words, she had no diplomatic immunity. Embassy or any other government agency when she worked overseas, which would have provided her protection if she was caught spying. Valerie Plame was also exposed as a "NOC," an agent working under non-official cover. So they may have been using Brewster-Jennings just like her." "There is a possibility that there were other agents that would use that same kind of a cover. The problem, says Marcinkowski, is that exposing Brewster-Jennings could lead foreign intelligence agencies to other spies. Even though the business directory Dun & Bradstreet had a listing for the firm in a Boston office building, Brewster-Jennings & Associates was a CIA fiction, created to provide cover for agents like Valerie Plame. There is no such firm, I'm convinced," Novak said on CNN. "And she listed herself as an employee of Brewster-Jennings & Associates. Robert Novak, the columnist who first printed her name, revealed that, too. In recent years, she told people she worked at an energy consulting firm called "Brewster-Jennings & Associates." She spent her early years in the CIA in Europe, where she received advanced degrees from the London School of Economics and the College of Europe, in Bruges, Belgium. And when the White House did that, it was particularly outrageous, because if I have to keep those secrets, they should be held to that same kind of standard," he explains.Īs the investigation into who leaked her name got underway in Washington, more details about Valerie Plame's life emerged. So we held a particular trust for 18 years and never gave each other up. "We kept that trust in protecting her identity. Marcinkowski was so angry, he went public, something former CIA agents rarely do, blaming the White House, even though nobody has been charged with the actual leak. Two years ago, when columnist Robert Novak put the name "Valerie Plame" into the public debate over the war in Iraq, Marcinkowski says it took him a few weeks to determine that it was "Val P." who had been compromised. He says the three dozen members of his CIA class were a close-knit group that continued to see each other at class reunions. And it's always interesting when someone that has never fired a weapon kind of beats everybody else that did." "Some people had never fired weapons before, and some of us had. "Did all of you have firearms training?" Bradley asked. Marcinkowski says he knew her simply as Val P., since recruits went by the initial of their last name. That's where he first met a 22-year-old graduate of Penn State University named Valerie. Like all recruits, he was sent to the agency's top-secret training facility in Virginia known simply as "the farm." In the late 1980's, he was a covert CIA agent spying in Central America. And no one knew that she was working for a spy agency until she was exposed," says Jim Marcinkowski, a deputy city attorney in Royal Oak, Mich. And you don't expose people working for a spy agency.