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Some of the reasons for this not making sense include the fact that US citizens simply don't do that stuff.

Covert intelligence ain't like Alias or JAG; the US types are there to find, recruit, train, control, locals who do the shaky stuff. It's pretty simple, 007 was clearly a Brit, Ms Plame is clearly an American, US born Chinese are clearly not Taiwanese or Shanghainese ... to borrow a quote from "Patton", the idea is to get the other poor dumb (citizen) to risk his or her life. In the mean time, maintain plausable denial for the US asset.

It is fairly rare for a US person to unload a dead drop or do much more than provide bonafides for the locals. And in those cases the US person is either a) tightly bound to diplomatic immunity or b) in so deep that their cover would be have required more years than this lady ever spent in one spot. The idea is that the local asset, such as the guy lost when Toricelli blew his name, is either at risk or placed so highly that the risk to our guy is worth it (and there is a back door available).

She might have been a courier, or some other transient actor, but I really, really, doubt she had to prove she was "a hell of a shot with an AK-47,...(or)...skilled in throwing hand grenades".

On the same note, she and her hubby might well have been "assets" in the business of providing information they picked up along the way. (That's pretty common and I think some of the rules have been liberalized - journalists and doctors etc. being more in use than before.) For that matter, she might have had Mr. sweet tea assigned an asset number without his even knowing about it. Still, not risking a US citizen with any retribution other than the risk of a hasty persona non grata type departure from those "messy places".

At least on the surface, this thing looks like a couple of (typically) self serving and ambitious bureaucrats overplayed their combined hand and slipped into overt partisan politicsl: and were 'outed' for that.

What I found amusing about this article is this guy kind of rips Novak for disclosing the name of this woman, and then, in the same article he drops the name of a CIA front company ("Brewster-Jennings & Associates, a C.I.A. front company"), and, the name of another possible CIA agent that trained with this woman ("classmates at the C.I.A. training "farm," Jim Marcinkowski, recalls"). I my be knit picking a bit here, but didn`t he just do exactly what he accused Novak of doing?