While they strut and lie

About the Plame matter, as stated below it should be noted that more than just Valerie Plame was outed by Bob Novak, later he outed the shell-company she nominally worked for as an energy analyst, Brewster Jennings & Associates, a CIA front company.

The outing of Plame and the outing of her front company (which was actually exposed just by outing her really, its subsequent naming by Novak was just another pinch of douchebaggery) potentially exposed many, many CIA agents or contacts.

An excellent diary by Sherlock Google at the Daily Kos brings this home:

Pictured above is the CIA Memorial Wall to honor the agents killed in the line of duty. Below the stars is The Book of Honor, containing the names of de-classified agents and unnamed gold stars without names for the agents whose covers are still classified. Note that under 2003 there is a gold star with a blank space for a classified name. The other 3 agents in 2003 were killed in Afghanistan.

But the blank space for 2003 is intriguing. Could that be an agent who died as a result of the Plame Leak? It's pure speculation, but given what we know about the Brewster Jennings & Associates cover being blown, and that Tenet and Pavitt almost certainly gave Fitzgerald a full Damage Assessment on Brewster Jennings, a dead agent is a real possibility in the Plame case.

That may be why there were 8 pages redacted in the judge opinions by Tatel and Sentelle--for national security reasons, because the Brewster Jennings Damage Assessment is part of the case and still classified.

We may never know, but there is the empty space for a dead agent in 2003. They add the agent names into the Book of Honor the year after in an annual ceremony.

What's interesting is that the stars are in chronological order and Helge Boes was killed on Feb. 5, 2003, while Carlson and Mueller died on October 25, 2003.

So the unknown agent in between was killed sometime between Feb. 5 and October 25, 2003, while the Plame Leak was July 14 and Novak's Brewster Jennings Leak was July 22.

We may not know the circumstances of that anonymous CIA agents death, but undoubtedly Patrick Fitzgerald does.