[Vision2020] Valerie Plame, Telling the (Edited) Inside Story

[Gray Tree Crab aka Big Bertha]

*Valerie Plame, Telling the (Edited) Inside Story*

By Alan Cooperman
senior editor for non-fiction at Book World
Monday, October 22, 2007; C01

*FAIR GAME*

*My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White
House<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/The+White+House?tid=informline>
*

By Valerie Plame<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Valerie+Plame?tid=informline>Wilson

Simon & Schuster. 411 pp. $26

Mothers who are spies, it turns out, face the same juggling act as other
working moms.

After a year at home following the birth of twins, Valerie Plame Wilson
returned to work in April 2001 in the
Iraq<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Iraq?tid=informline>branch
of the
CIA<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Central+Intelligence+Agency?tid=informline>'s
Counterproliferation Division. "When I had to deal with pressing operational
issues I had no choice but to bring the toddlers into my office on a
Saturday," she writes in her memoir, published this week. "Making decisions
on how much money to offer a potential asset while handing crayons to my
daughter who sat under my desk was strange indeed, but not without humor."

Since senior administration officials whispered "Valerie Plame" and "CIA" in
the same breath to half a dozen journalists in 2003, some people have not
very subtly suggested that her work couldn't really have been all that
hush-hush if she had an office job, not to mention blond hair and little
kids. "She was not involved in clandestine activities," Robert D.
Novak<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Robert+Novak?tid=informline>,
the syndicated columnist who first published her name, wrote earlier this
year in his dueling memoir. "Instead, each day she went to CIA headquarters
in Langley where she worked on arms proliferation."

There are lots of she said-he said moments in the Plame affair, matters on
which an impartial observer can only conclude that, well, both sides have a
point. But this is not one of them.

Before her retirement in 2006, Wilson spent more than 20 years in the CIA,
including six years, one month and 29 days of overseas service. We know this
because the agency, in a bureaucratic blunder, put it in an unclassified
letter about her pension eligibility that it later tried desperately to
recall, and that she has included as an appendix to "Fair Game."

We also know that she worked on the operations side, the part of the CIA
that runs agents and covert activities, rather than on the analytical side,
which tries to make sense of all the information flowing in. From her former
CIA "classmates," we know that she went through the agency's elite Career
Trainee program, including paramilitary training at the classified location
known as the Farm, and was one of just three in her class of 50 who were
chosen to be NOCs (pronounced "knocks"), or non-official cover officers, the
most clandestine in the agency. And from her memoir, we now know how deeply
secrecy was ingrained in her.

Imagine when, in her mid-20s, after a first CIA tour in
Greece<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Greece?tid=informline>under
diplomatic cover as a junior State
Department<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/U.S.+Department+of+State?tid=informline>official,
she gave up her diplomatic passport and any public affiliation
with the U.S. government and switched to being a NOC. Part of the transition
involved coming home to the United States, ostensibly jobless, and moving
back into her parents' house while studying French. How many 20-somethings
still living with Mom and Dad fantasize about saying, "Actually, I work for
the CIA"? In young Valerie Plame's case, it was true -- and she apparently
didn't tell a soul. When she became famous a decade later, her dearest
friends were stunned, and she feared they might not forgive her for all
those years of lying.

True, the CIA recalled her from
Europe<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Europe?tid=informline>in
1997, fearing that her name might have been passed to the Russians by
the
mole Aldrich Ames. But, she writes, she still took different routes to work
each day, "traveled domestically and abroad using a variety of aliases" and
continued to hope for another foreign posting.

There is no reason to doubt that Wilson wrote "Fair Game" herself. To put it
kindly, the memoir lacks the sheen of a ghostwriter's work and has the voice
of an ordinary person caught up in extraordinary events. It doesn't help
that the CIA redacted the manuscript heavily before approving it for
publication. Each time she is about to launch into a juicy anecdote, it
seems, lines are blacked out, sometimes for pages on end.

The book is, however, greatly assisted by an afterword by Laura Rozen, a
reporter for the American Prospect. Rozen faithfully echoes Wilson's point
of view but fills in many of the censored dates, places and other details
from published sources. Readers would be smart to turn to the afterword
first, before tackling Wilson's disjointed narrative.

The outlines of the story are familiar: In 2002, the CIA sent her husband,
former U.S. ambassador Joseph C. Wilson
IV<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Joseph+Wilson?tid=informline>,
on an unpaid, eight-day fact-finding trip to
Niger<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Niger?tid=informline>.
Within hours of his return, he told eager CIA debriefers (while Valerie
Wilson was ordering takeout Chinese food for them) that there was no
evidence that Iraq had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from the African
nation.

When President Bush<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/George+W.+Bush?tid=informline>nevertheless
included the uranium allegation in a State of the Union
address, Joe Wilson<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Joe+Wilson?tid=informline>wrote
an op-ed for the New
York Times<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/The+New+York+Times+Company?tid=informline>accusing
the administration of misleading the American people. Both of the
Wilsons firmly believe that she was outed, in retaliation, by White House
officials who sought to discredit him by telling reporters that his trip was
arranged by his wife, who worked for the CIA. Tapped to investigate the leak
of her name, special prosecutor Patrick
Fitzgerald<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Patrick+Fitzgerald?tid=informline>put
that theory before a jury, which never got to the heart of the matter
but did convict the vice president's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter"
Libby, of perjury and obstruction of justice. Bush then commuted Libby's
30-month prison sentence.

The question remains: Was she behind her husband's trip to Niger? "Fair
Game" gives a nuanced answer that is largely, but not entirely, in her
favor.

She says that when the vice president's office asked the CIA about the
uranium allegation, a "midlevel reports officer" suggested in a hallway
conversation that the agency could send Joe Wilson to investigate. The
suggestion made sense because Wilson had served as an ambassador in
Africa<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Africa?tid=informline>,
was the top Africa expert on the National Security
Council<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/White+House+National+Security+Council?tid=informline>in
the Clinton administration and made a previous trip to Niger at the
CIA's
request in 1999. She and the midlevel officer brought the idea to their
boss, who liked it and asked her to send an e-mail up the chain of command.
"My husband has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the
former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of
whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity," she wrote.

Thus, by her own account, Valerie Wilson neither came up with the idea nor
approved it. But she did participate in the process and flogged her
husband's credentials. When Joe Wilson learned about her e-mail years later,
she says, he was "too upset to listen" to her explanations.

"Fair Game" reveals some intimate details of the Wilsons' lives, including
her battle with postpartum depression. Sudden fame and withering political
attacks made Washington so "toxic" to them that they began fantasizing about
moving to New Zealand<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/New+Zealand?tid=informline>and
ultimately decamped to New
Mexico<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/New+Mexico?tid=informline>.
Relatives came forward, and, like Madeleine
Albright<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Madeleine+Albright?tid=informline>,
Valerie Wilson discovered she was part Jewish. But the book is less
forthcoming about her politics; she does not mention, for example, that she
made a $1,000 contribution to Al
Gore<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Al+Gore?tid=informline>'s
campaign in 1999.

One other matter begs clarification. As Rozen notes in the afterword, there
is "an undeniable irony to Valerie Wilson later being exposed by the White
House in a subterranean tussle" over prewar intelligence because "Valerie
was not one of the intelligence community dissidents arguing against the
threat posed by Saddam
Hussein<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Saddam+Hussein?tid=informline>
."

Quite the contrary: Wilson makes clear in "Fair Game" that she and her
colleagues in the Counterproliferation Division were very worried that Iraq
would use chemical or biological weapons on U.S. forces. They were
dumbfounded when no weapons of mass destruction were found, and, in a
telling passage, she says their spirits were "briefly buoyed" when coalition
forces in northern Iraq discovered curious flatbed trailers that the CIA
thought, at first, might be mobile bio-weapons labs.

Yet, in one of the memoir's deeper insights, "Fair Game" suggests that if
you knew what she knew at the time, you would have feared both that Saddam
Hussein had WMDs and that the Bush administration was overstating the case
for war. In the bowels of the CIA, she and her colleagues clustered around a
TV as Secretary of State Colin
Powell<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Colin+Powell?tid=informline>laid
the evidence before the United
Nations<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/United+Nations?tid=informline>on
Feb. 5, 2003. "It was a powerful presentation," she writes, "but I
knew
key parts of it were wrong."


Submitted by:
Gray Tree Crab aka "Big Bertha"
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