There are three kinds of spies. Every U.S. embassy and many of our consulates have people that work for the CIA, DIA, and other intelligence agencies. They have different job descriptions. Maybe they 'work' with the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), or maybe they work with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) or U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). Wherever they are 'supposed' to work, that job is just a cover for their 'real' job, which is recruiting people (agents) to betray their country and give us secrets. These intelligence officers have 'official cover' but they are still covert. They tell everyone but their spouses that they work for the State Department or the Justice Department or the Department of Agriculture. This is called 'official cover'.

If you are a foreign country it is a pretty easy task to identify who the spies are in each embassy. After all, the roster of people that work there is relatively small. But embassy employees are protected by diplomatic immunity. If they get caught spying they usually get recalled.

There is a second class of spies and they do not enjoy the protection of diplomatic immunity. They do not pretend to work for some innocuous government agency. They pretend to work for some corporation or other private concern. Maybe, like Valerie Plame, they are an 'energy consultant'. Maybe they are a 'journalist'. These people have non-offical cover and are known as NOC's. If they get caught spying they can be arrested and they can be executed. Because NOC's hide the fact that they work for the government, they are not stationed in the U.S. embassy, and they probably avoid the embassy like the plague. NOC's may not focus primarily on penetrating a foreign government, but rather on unraveling a drug or arms smuggling operation. They may be required to make trips to a variety of countries and their targets may be stateless (like al-Qaeda).

The third category of spies are the agents that are recruited by our intelligence officers (both official-cover and non-offical cover).

Valerie Plame was an non-official cover operations officer working on unraveling weapon of mass destruction proliferators. Most of the time she was stationed in Langley, but she went on occasional missions abroad as part of her official duties. When she went abroad, she went, ostensibly, as an employee of Brewster-Jennings, an energy consulting business. When people asked her where she worked, she said she worked at Brewster-Jennings. When she donated money to a political candidate, she complied with the disclosure requirements by saying she was an employee of Brewster-Jennings.

Brewster-Jennings was a front-company set up by the CIA for the express purpose of providing non-official cover for some of their operations officers. The entire point of the company was to provide cover. It had no other purpose.

These basic facts about cover seem to mystify many people on the right.

Ms. Plame, didn't you 'out' yourself when you made a $1,000 contribution to the Al Gore presidential campaign and listed your CIA 'cover' company as your employer in your Federal Elections Commission filing? Didn't you say you worked for Brewster-Jenning and Associates, a fictitious Boston-based firm designed to provide cover for some CIA operatives and employees? Are you aware these are public records?

It's hard to overestimate how stupid these questions are. Ms. Wilson could hardly maintain the fiction that she worked at Brewster-Jennings if she said she worked at Merrill Lynch, now could she? The whole point of her cover is for her to pretend to work for Brewster-Jennings. Of course they are public records. That is so any foreign country looking into Ms. Wilson's life will see that she in an employee of an energy consulting firm and not the CIA. My god.

Let's look at questions the ironically named American Thinker wants answered when Valerie Plame testifies tomorrow:

When you learned that Joe Wilson had included your name in his bio at the Middle East Institute, did you make a report that your identity had been compromised?

Think about this for a moment. Joe Wilson is a man with a wife. He goes to people's houses for dinner, he goes out to the movies, he goes to sporting events. Sometimes he takes his wife. His wife's name isn't classified. Her true employment is.

When you informed Joe Wilson that you worked at the CIA, did you file a report that your identity had been compromised?

You are allowed to tell your spouse you work at the agency.

It's amazing how stupid these people are. They don't understand the first thing about the intelligence business.

When Valerie Plame Wilson testifies tomorrow she probably will not be able to discuss much about her former profession. Even though her cover has been blown for four years, along with anyone else that used Brewster-Jennings as a cover, foreign intelligence agencies can still piece together clues from any revelations she makes about what she did. But she should be able to confirm that she traveled abroad as a non-official cover officer in the five years before she was outed. And that means she put her life and freedom on the line to try to protect this country from weapons of mass destruction. And Dick Cheney sold her out to cover up his lies. That's all anyone needs to know.