The 'dumb blonde' who excelled as a spy

Long before Valerie Plame became America's most famous spy, she learnt Greek and moved to Athens. It was 1990, her first foreign posting and not long after graduation from Penn State University - and recruitment to the CIA - nearly everything she dreamed of.
Ambitious, blonde and beautiful, Plame, then 27, took to the job with alacrity. With 'State Department Cover' at Athens' US embassy, the secrets of her trade were easy to conceal. Greece, under the unpredictable governance of Andreas Papandreou, a former US citizen turned anti-American populist, was an interesting place. But the first Gulf war was about to happen, making the country's proximity to the Middle East critical.

As a junior operative, determined to rise through the bureaucracy, Plame would be remembered as unusually diligent and unusually good. So good that even if, privately, she displayed remarkable dexterity with an AK-47 machine gun, publicly she would use charm and good looks if it meant maintaining the interest of a potential recruit.

'She was willing to dress the part of a dumb blonde,' one colleague told The Observer. 'To let yourself be underestimated in a trade craft that is secret is not at all stupid. It shows a lot of skill.'