By Your Headlines They Shall Know You

What's in a headline? Or better, can you judge an article by its header? Sometimes not, since reporters don't write their own headlines. But sometimes a cigar really is just a cigar.

Joe Knippenberg lists three headlines on the Rove affair from three different papers (I've added some commentary):

NYT: Rove Reportedly Held Phone Talk on CIA Officer

(Rove's a big boy, so I hope the officer wasn't hurt.)

WaPo: Rove Confirmed Plame Indirectly, Lawyer Says.

(I didn't know Rove was ordained, and don't they still have to lay on hands?)

WashTimes: Rove Learned CIA Agent’s Name From Novak (no link)

(See again this editorial from Wednesday's WSJ.)

And don't miss this:

A former CIA covert agent who supervised Mrs. Plame early in her career yesterday took issue with her identification as an "undercover agent," saying that she worked for more than five years at the agency's headquarters in Langley and that most of her neighbors and friends knew that she was a CIA employee.

"She made no bones about the fact that she was an agency employee and her husband was a diplomat," Fred Rustmann, a covert agent from 1966 to 1990, told The Washington Times.

"Her neighbors knew this, her friends knew this, his friends knew this. A lot of blame could be put on to central cover staff and the agency because they weren't minding the store here. ... The agency never changed her cover status."

Mr. Rustmann, who spent 20 of his 24 years in the agency under "nonofficial cover" -- also known as a NOC, the same status as the wife of Mr. Wilson -- also said that she worked under extremely light cover.

In addition, Mrs. Plame hadn't been out as an NOC since 1997, when she returned from her last assignment, married Mr. Wilson and had twins, USA Today reported yesterday.

The distinction matters because a law that forbids disclosing the name of undercover CIA operatives applies to agents that had been on overseas assignment "within the last five years."

"She was home for such a long time, she went to work every day at Langley, she was in an analytical type job, she was married to a high-profile diplomat with two kids," Mr. Rustmann said. "Most people who knew Valerie and her husband, I think, would have thought that she was an overt CIA employee."