From The Times
October 24, 2007

Brought to book

The unmasking of Valerie Plame as a CIA agent was treason, she claims in a new book. But in an interview with her, our US Editor argues that it was just another Washington insider scandal, and everyone wins
Gerard Baker

Some years ago, during an interview for basic training as an undercover operative for the Central Intelligence Agency, Valerie Plame was asked an unexpected question: What would you do if you were conducting a debriefing alone with a foreign agent in a hotel room when there was a knock at the door and you heard someone shout, "Police!"? Quick as a flash, the young Miss Plame responded: she would strip off her blouse and leap into bed with her accomplice, she said, thereby providing an immediate and wholly plausible alibi, and saving the agent and herself from certain discovery.
It was this sort of quick thinking that marked Plame out as a young woman with a promising future in the CIA. And it is an image I am struggling to get out of my head as I sit in a hotel room in New York with her this week – and someone knocks at the door. The mind races but, needless to say, the flesh remains static: I’m not a foreign agent; it’s not the police, only the bellboy; and Plame is no longer a spy.
Indeed, Valerie Plame is probably the most familiar, most talked-about, most glamorous ex-spy in the world. In the past few years she has shot to improbable stardom as a kind of icon for all those who are anti-Bush. It was her name that was famously leaked to the press by Bush Administration officials four years ago in what soon became a full-blown Washington scandal that kindled in the President’s critics brief dreams of another Watergate.
Plame, with her Hollywood-blonde bangs, her disarming smile and touchy-feely charm, probably epitomises the odd transformation that the CIA has undergone in the past few years.
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‘It felt like I’d been punched hard in the gut’
There was a time when, to those who feared and loathed America, the agency was the greatest object of their animus. When it wasn’t toppling democratically elected regimes in South America, it was infiltrating student movements and trade unions in Europe or putting exploding cigars in Fidel Castro’s beard. It was the black heart of American foreign policy and it loved practising its black arts wherever it could.
But something strange happened. In the past ten years, and especially over the issue of the handling of intelligence that led to the Iraq War, the CIA became the good guys in this narrative. They were the honest stiffs, trying to inject some truth and accuracy in the headlong rush to war. It was the CIA that was most doubtful about the case for war. While the Pentagon and the White House, especially Vice-President Cheney’s office – ably assisted by Tony Blair, supposedly – twisted the intelligence, the CIA harboured grave doubts. The organisation once seen as a rogue agency conducting its own foreign policy from Santiago to Sydney was now the last repository of truth and honesty, manipulated by unscrupulous politicians.
That, at least, is the version of history according to Plame and others. In 2003, after several years in clandestine posts in the US and overseas, she found herself head of a counter-proliferation group that was investigating Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programmes under Saddam Hussein.
That summer, her name was leaked to a newspaper columnist after her husband had written an article attacking a key piece of evidence that the Bush Administration had used to justify the war.
Joseph Wilson wrote how he had, a year earlier, been sent to investigate claims – backed by British intelligence – that Iraq had been trying to acquire uranium for nuclear weapons from Niger in Africa. After a brief tour and meetings with some old contacts (he had been an ambassador in Africa) he reported back to the CIA that he had found no evidence of the Iraqi programme. He attacked the Bush Administration for continuing to insist – after he had supposedly proved otherwise – that Iraq was still seeking the uranium in Africa.
The Bush team, not surprisingly, pushed back. They cast doubt on Wilson’s credentials, said his visit had not been all that conclusive in any case and, fatefully, said he was no real expert on any of this stuff but had been sent on the trip only because his wife worked on counter-proliferation policy at the CIA. It was all a cozy piece of nepotism, they suggested.
Now, as it happens, much of this is accurate. The problem, though, was that Ms Plame, his wife, was an undercover CIA official – and unauthorised publication of the identity of an undercover agent is a crime punishable by many years in prison.
So began Plamegate. A special prosecutor was appointed to investigate the leak amid fevered speculation that Karl Rove, President Bush’s mastermind and alter ego, and Scooter Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff, were behind it and were heading for the slammer.
In the event, after an investigation that lasted three years and included the bizarre spectacle of a prosecutor sending a reporter to jail for not revealing her sources – egged on by the editors of her own newspaper – Libby was found guilty by a jury of obstruction of justice and perjury. He was later pardoned by President Bush. No charges were ever brought against Rove. Now the woman at the centre of the storm is speaking out.
The title Fair Game is a mocking reference to a remark said to have been made by Rove to a TV reporter, when the White House was busy trying to rebut Wilson’s contentions. "Wilson’s wife is fair game," he said.
Part of her game is evidently to show how unreasonable her opponents are. She is greatly helped in this by the silly decision by her former bosses at the agency to insist on blocking out large pieces of the book’s text – redactions, as they are known in American legal parlance – on the ground that they might compromise national security.
The effect can be comical at times. An entire chapter on her early life as a spy in a (redacted) European country is entitled "(Redacted) Tour" and all references to that country have been similarly blacked out – even though a quick Google search from other sources, and obvious readable references in the chapter will tell you that it was almost certainly Greece. Chapter 3’s entire title, and most of its contents, are redacted. And we’ll never get to know how she made the acquaintance of her husband, because all that is classified too.
Plame thinks this is not the result of pettifogging bureaucracy but a sinister and continuing attempt by the administration to destroy her.
"This is continued political payback, and in a sense, further demeaning to me and demeaning of my role and responsibilities. Because if you diminish me then you diminish the crime." Some of her observations will disappoint those who believe the whole war was funded on a deliberate fiction about Iraq’s WMD. As a senior intelligence official, in fact, she was quite happy to endorse the Administration’s general view of Saddam Hussein. "There was no doubt he was a man of evil intent and certainly he used WMD on his own people – you can’t give him the benefit of the doubt – and certainly not in the aftermath of 9/11." She adds, however, that it was only when Colin Powell, then Secretary of State, made his famous argument to the UN Security Council in February 2003 that she became truly uncomfortable with the march to war.
But she doesn’t stint in her accusations against Bush and his aides about their motives and behaviour in leaking her identity after the Niger kerfuffle.
"My cover was secure and the last possibility we anticipated was that they would commit treason," she says, almost casually dropping the T word into the conversation.
Steady on, I say. Treason, punishable by death, surely means a wilful effort to hand the country over to its enemies. Wasn’t Plamegate just a rather nasty political squabble, elevated to a scandal by the indefensible, but surely inadvertent, outing of her role as a spy by people who ought to have thought a little bit before they spoke? "Treason," she insists.
No one would seriously argue that the leaking of a covert agent’s name is deeply damaging to national security, as Plame explains.
"By outing someone’s covert identity", she tells me, "it puts in jeopardy all these assets we have promised we would keep secret – not to mention any future sources who may have information of critical intelligence".
But she never manages to shake off the impression that she was by far and away the most effective publicity-seeker herself. It was, after all, she who first put a face to the name that had been outed, when she happily appeared in a front cover story in Vanity Fair, looking every bit the Hollywood maven, complete with Grace Kelly-type headscarf, cast as the femme fatale in one of the greatest spy scandals of all time.
"It’s been more trouble than it’s worth," she acknowledges, but adds, "if that’s the worst thing that can be said about me, I can live with that." Plame tries valiantly to make the case that her extraordinary moment in the glare of public attention was an event of epoch-making significance in American political history. Plamegate was supposed to have been the ultimate scorching revelation into the inner crookedness of the evil Bush empire. It was to have blown the gaffe on the manipulation of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq War. It was, in the wilder imaginings of the Administration’s critics, proof that the war was illegal and criminal.
But what did it actually amount to? A Senate committee (including Democrats) investigating the conclusions of Plame’s husband about his famous trip to Niger found them unconvincing. The British Government to this day stands by the claim that Saddam Hussein was seeking uranium in Africa. Despite all this, the Bush Administration did actually officially retract – long before the scandal really exploded – the claim that Iraq had been seeking nuclear materials in Niger, and it had never been a central part of the intelligence case for war in any case.
The man who actually did first reveal Ms Plame’s identity to the press was not in fact Libby but Richard Armitage, the Deputy Secretary of State at the time. And he was never prosecuted for it because the special investigator was never convinced that it was a prosecutable crime in any case. The burden of proof in such a case is very high, and requires the perpetrator to have acted with malicious intent. The man who was prosecuted, Libby, was convicted, not of the underlying crime (there wasn’t one) but, in the classic Washington manner, caught in a perjury trap by a zealous prosecutor.
It was all, despite the grandiose claims, simply another theatrical and expensive remake of the classic Washington scandal. In Washington the pattern these days is to criminalise every political difference. In an often deadlocked political system, the best way to make progress is by asserting some breach of the criminal law.
Everybody claims that the system has been demeaned and defiled, that the very essence of American democracy is under threat. Then we discover nothing very much. So everybody gets to write a book and if they’re really lucky, a contract for the film rights.
And just as it has always been in Washington, in a curious way, everybody wins.


From The Times
October 24, 2007

‘It felt like I’d been punched hard in the gut’

An extract from Fair Game by Valerie Plame Wilson

One dreary day in February 2002, a young and capable officer rushed into my office. Normally somewhat reserved and calm, she looked unusually animated and alarmed. She hurriedly told me that someone from the Vice-President’s office had called on her green secure line. Apparently, the caller, a staffer, said they were intrigued by an intelligence report that the Italian Government had passed to the US Government. It alleged that in 1999 Iraq had sought yellowcake uranium, the raw material used for the uranium enrichment process, from the impoverished West African country of Niger. The Vice-President had been told, was interested and wanted more information. If the report was true at all, I knew that it would be damning evidence indeed that Iraq was seeking to restart its nuclear programme.
Thinking through the options available, the first and most obvious choice would be to contact our office in Niger and ask it to investigate these allegations using local sources available on the ground. Unfortunately, the severe budget cuts of the mid1990s had been particularly devastating for the Africa Division and many of our offices on the continent were closed, including the one in Niamey, Niger. Where else to go and who could do it for us? A mid-level reports officer who had joined the discussion in the hallway enthusiastically suggested: what about talking to Joe about it? He knew of Joe’s history and role in the first Gulf War, his extensive experience in Africa, and also that in 1999 the CIA had sent Joe on a sensitive mission to Africa on uranium issues.
The reports officer and I walked over to the office of the Chief to discuss our available plans of action. Bob, our boss, listened carefully and then suggested that we put together a meeting with Joe and the appropriate agency and state officers. He finished with, "When you see Joe tonight, could you please ask him if he would be willing to come into headquarters next week to figure out what we’re going to do? Oh, and send a Lotus note to Scott [our acting Division Chief] and let him know what we’re thinking." I hurried back to my desk and drafted a quick e-mail to Scott to explain the situation and added that my husband has good relations with both the PM 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.
Months later, those words would be ripped out of that e-mail and cited as proof that I had recommended Joe for the trip.
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Brought to book
Three weeks later, in early March, Joe left on an evening flight from Washington to Niamey, Niger, via Paris. Joe undertook the mission pro bono: the Agency paid only his travel expenses of a few thousand dollars. Joe was happy to go. He figured that if the Vice-President had asked a serious and legitimate question, it deserved a serious answer and he would try to help to find it. When Joe returned home nine days later, the twins and I rushed out to the taxi to greet him. Before long, the doorbell rang and two clean-cut CIA officers, one of whom was the reports officer who had suggested sending Joe to Niger in the first place, stood on the doorstep, clearly eager to debrief Joe so they could immediately write up an intelligence report on his trip. All of us had every reason to believe that their finished report would be sent to the Vice-President’s office as part of the established protocol.
Our bedroom was beginning to show the first hints of morning light on July 14 when Joe marched in, dropped the newspaper on the bed, and said in a tight voice, "Well, the SoB did it."
He set a steaming mug of coffee on my bedside table and left the room. What? I struggled to wake up. I sat up, switched on the lamp, and opened The Washington Post to the op-ed page. Robert Novak had written in his column that "Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction." The words were right there on the page, in black and white, but I could not take them in. I felt like I had been sucker-punched, hard, in the gut. Although we had known for several days that he had my name and knew where I worked, we never believed that he would actually print it or that the Agency would allow it. It was surreal.
As I walked downstairs to the kitchen in a fog, I pondered the fate of my career with the CIA as a covert operations officer. How exactly did Novak get my name? Why did he think fingering me was newsworthy? Joe’s trip to Niger was obviously no boondoggle.
And why did Novak use my maiden name — Plame — when I had used Wilson since I married in 1998? I could barely breathe.
Of all days, that morning I was scheduled to begin a week-long "management and leadership" course. As I sat in Washington’s terminally congested traffic en route to a CIA classroom in an outbuilding somewhere in the Virginia suburbs, I felt a new emotion bubble up — anger. I had served my country loyally. I had played by all the rules. Was it all about to be thrown away in a moment? And if so, why? And what about my friends and family who didn’t know I worked for the CIA? Would they hate me for lying to them?
In the late afternoon of July 21, I got home from work and walked into our den to greet Joe. He clicked off the phone just as I came into the room and he had a look on his face that I had never seen before. He said he had just been talking with the journalist and Hardball host Chris Matthews, who had told him that he had just spoken with the powerful presidential adviser Karl Rove. "Matthews told me that Rove told him that ‘Wilson’s wife is fair game,’ " Joe said. Things were getting stranger all the time. Later that night, Newsday, a Long Island newspaper, posted an article on its website by their Washington reporters Timothy Phelps and Knut Royce. "Intelligence officials confirmed to Newsday Monday that Valerie Plame, wife of retired Ambassador Joseph Wilson, works at the agency on weapons of mass destruction issues in an undercover capacity — at least she was undercover until last week when she was named by columnist Novak."
Not only was it very rare for the agency to validate that an officer was undercover, but no one from the agency had told me that my undercover status would be confirmed. It would have been nice to at least get a heads-up from someone at work.
When I returned to headquarters the week after my training course, my colleagues were low-key about what had happened. Some made some supportive comments, others said nothing. Most of them knew me as Valerie Wilson, not Valerie Plame, and may not have made the connection between me and the woman fingered in Novak’s column.
In mid-August 2003 I was suddenly summoned to the office of CPD’s Chief. I was to accompany him to brief Jim Pavitt, the Deputy Director for Operations, on the background and current status regarding the disclosure of my name.
DDO Pavitt greeted us warmly; he had a good working relationship with Mark, and he knew me, too, from the various sensitive programmes I had worked on. He invited us to sit at the small round conference table in his spacious office looking out on the late summer green of the trees. As is his manner, Jim did most of the talking in a fast, staccato tone. He summarised what had happened so far. He finally asked me if Joe or I knew Karl Rove. I said not really, but he and his family attended the same church that we did in northwest Washington. "Really?" Jim drew back, white eyebrows practically at his hairline. I noted that although I knew who Rove was, I doubted that he knew what I looked like. However, I promised Jim that the next time we were in line for Communion, I would pass him the wafer plate and whisper softly, "My name’s Fair Game, what’s yours?"
The weeks since the leak of my name in July had been a blend of surrealism and paralysis. A critical part of who I was — an undercover agency operative — was no longer in place and everything felt disjointed to me. On Sunday, September 28, 2003, the article on the front page of The Washington Post was headlined: "Bush Administration is Subject of Inquiry — CIA Agent’s Identity Was Leaked to Media," and reported that the CIA had referred the leak to the Justice Department. Apparently, the Agency thought there was enough evidence to warrant an official investigation.
Even more damaging to the White House, the article quoted a senior administration official as saying "Clearly, it [the leak] was meant purely and simply for revenge." Whatever shreds of privacy or normality our lives had until that moment were ripped away. Political dirty tricks have been around since Washington was founded. But this time, besides going after their opponent’s family, the perpetrators may have committed a crime against national security.
For Joe and me, the article validated what we had suspected all along — that the leak was in retaliation for his having angered the Administration and frustrated their attempts to portray the war and the run-up to it strictly on their own terms.
Our phone rang incessantly — it rang when I left the house in the morning and was ringing when I came home at night. When I checked our voice mail, the recorded female voice usually said "there are 15 unheard messages in your mailbox". When I checked my personal e-mail after putting the children to bed, there were at least 20 unread notes from friends and family. Friends from high school, long-lost sorority sisters, distant cousins, all seemed to find my e-mail address — or found someone who knew my e-mail address — and reached out to me. It felt a little like This is Your Life as the parade of anyone who ever knew me went by.
If any of my close friends were angry with me over my deception, they did not express it to me.
© Valerie Plame Wilson 2007. Extracted from Fair Game, published by Simon & Schuster at £18.99. Available from Times BooksFirst for £17.09, free p&p: 0870 1608080; timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst