So the question now becomes “if she was outed by a spy in the 90’s how covert was she really?”  The public may not have known, but the intelligence community did, so how effective was her cover?

And why didn’t the CIA protect her?

The truth is clear though, that the damage to her cover had been done long before Richard Armitage outed her.  

It might explain why the CIA didn’t care he was outing her, and why that they ignored her campaign contributions.  They knew she wasn’t covert, she was compromised.

CIA officer named prior to column

The identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame was compromised twice before her name appeared in a news column that triggered a federal illegal-disclosure investigation, U.S. officials say.

Mrs. Plame’s identity as an undercover CIA officer was first disclosed to Russia in the mid-1990s by a Moscow spy, said officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

In a second compromise, officials said a more recent inadvertent disclosure resulted in references to Mrs. Plame in confidential documents sent by the CIA to the U.S. Interests Section of the Swiss Embassy in Havana.