<font size="+2"><b>Valerie Plame, Telling the (Edited) Inside Story</b></font><br><p><font size="-1">By Alan Cooperman<br>senior editor for non-fiction at Book World<br>Monday, October 22, 2007; C01<br></font></p><p><i>FAIR GAME
</i></p><p><i>My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/The+White+House?tid=informline" target="">White House</a></i></p><p>By <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Valerie+Plame?tid=informline" target="">
Valerie Plame</a> Wilson</p><p>Simon & Schuster. 411 pp. $26</p><p>Mothers who are spies, it turns out, face the same juggling act as other working moms.</p><p>After a year at home following the birth of twins, Valerie Plame Wilson returned to work in April 2001 in the
<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Iraq?tid=informline" target="">Iraq</a> branch of the <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Central+Intelligence+Agency?tid=informline" target="">
CIA</a>'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."</p><p>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," <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Robert+Novak?tid=informline" target="">Robert D. Novak</a>,
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."</p><p>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.</p><p>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."</p><p>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.</p><p>Imagine when, in her mid-20s, after a first CIA tour in <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Greece?tid=informline" target="">
Greece</a> under diplomatic cover as a junior <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/U.S.+Department+of+State?tid=informline" target="">State Department</a>
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.</p><p>True, the CIA recalled her from <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Europe?tid=informline" target="">Europe</a>
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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>The outlines of the story are familiar: In 2002, the CIA sent her husband, former U.S. ambassador <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Joseph+Wilson?tid=informline" target="">Joseph C. Wilson IV
</a>, on an unpaid, eight-day fact-finding trip to <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Niger?tid=informline" target="">Niger</a>.
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.</p><p><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/George+W.+Bush?tid=informline" target="">When President Bush</a> nevertheless included the uranium allegation in a State of the Union address, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Joe+Wilson?tid=informline" target="">
Joe Wilson</a> wrote an op-ed for the <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/The+New+York+Times+Company?tid=informline" target="">New York Times</a>
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 <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Patrick+Fitzgerald?tid=informline" target="">Patrick Fitzgerald</a>
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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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 <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Africa?tid=informline" target="">Africa</a>, was the top Africa expert on the <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/White+House+National+Security+Council?tid=informline" target="">
National Security Council</a>
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.</p><p>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.</p><p>"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 <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/New+Zealand?tid=informline" target="">New Zealand</a> and ultimately decamped to <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/New+Mexico?tid=informline" target="">
New Mexico</a>. Relatives came forward, and, like <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Madeleine+Albright?tid=informline" target="">Madeleine Albright</a>,
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 <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Al+Gore?tid=informline" target="">Al Gore</a>'s campaign in 1999.</p><p>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 <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Saddam+Hussein?tid=informline" target="">Saddam Hussein</a>."</p><p>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.</p><p>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 <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Colin+Powell?tid=informline" target="">Colin Powell</a> laid the evidence before the <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/United+Nations?tid=informline" target="">
United Nations</a> on Feb. 5, 2003. "It was a powerful presentation," she writes, "but I knew key parts of it were wrong."</p><br clear="all"><br>Submitted by:<br>Gray Tree Crab aka "Big Bertha"