After Fair Game: The Story Valerie Plame Couldn't Tell
News: When I agreed to write the afterword for Valerie Plame's memoir, I faced a formidable task: Put together the former CIA operative's life story—including all the parts the government won't let her write about. Oh, and you can't talk to her (read an excerpt here).
December 15, 2007
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When former CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson got the redacted manuscript of her draft memoir back from the CIA Publications Review Board (PRB) earlier this year, her book publisher realized it had a problem. "We were looking at a manuscript where 20 percent of the author's story was deemed classified by her former employer [even though] much of the information was probably in the public domain," explains an editor at the publishing house, Simon & Schuster. "So the challenge was, if Valerie can't tell her own story because she is bound by her agreement, then how is this story going to be told, inside her own book, given the confines presented by the Agency and her confidentiality agreement?"
The publisher's solution was to hire a reporter to write an 80-page "afterword" for the book (which was published in October under the title Fair Game: My Life As a Spy, My Betrayal By the White House), based on interviews and any information that could be found in the public domain. Which is how, in May, I ended up with a draft of Plame's memoir, with all of the CIA's blacked-out redactions, and about six weeks to learn as much as I could, write and deliver essentially a biography of the famous former spy.
There was just one person I could not contact for the project: Valerie Plame Wilson, who had signed an agreement with the CIA that she would submit to their censorship for the rest of her days. It was a firewall that everyone involved with the book project took extremely seriously—making for a somewhat paradoxical situation: publishers, editors and writers, plus armies of lawyers and a literary agent, all sweating to make sure they were abiding by the rules of government censorship.
Not that they gave up without a fight. In May, Plame and Simon & Schuster sued the CIA and its director on first amendment grounds, charging the censorship went far beyond the requirements of preserving national security. The specific basis of the lawsuit involved a short letter. When Plame retired from the Agency two years after being outed by the White House, the CIA provided her a declassified letter listing the dates of her service, for pension purposes. After that letter had been entered into the Congressional Record, the CIA changed its mind and decided to reclassify it.
For purposes of the book, that meant that Plame could not refer to her government service before 2002. Plame had another court setback when a judge determined that the civil case she and her husband, Joe Wilson, had filed against administration officials for exposing her identity, did not fall under his jurisdiction. In updating her manuscript to reflect these developments, Plame had to submit any changes to the CIA—even as her lawsuits against it continued.
There were other challenges specific to the Afterword. Not only could I not talk to Plame, but the world she had worked in was opaque. Establishing the relevant coordinates on the CIA organization chart took some legwork. The publisher naturally wanted me to keep fairly quiet about what I was doing, even as I had to call up and interview dozens of strangers—from wary former CIA officers to Plame's family members and friends—to fill in the gaps in her story.
Such challenges aside, I was able to ascertain and confirm many facts about my subject's life and career. Valerie's mother, Diane Plame, an elegant former school teacher, turned out to have had a previously unreported role in launching her daughter's CIA career – sending her the newspaper ad that the CIA was hiring when Valerie was a senior in college trying to figure out what to do with her life.
A posse of Plame's CIA Career Trainee classmates and former colleagues, disturbed by how Plame had been treated by the government, agreed to talk with me on the record; Jim Marcinkowski's full account of how partisan operatives on the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee tried to suppress his testimony was especially arresting (see the accompanying book excerpt).
I also struck gold when I tracked down a former diplomat posted to the US embassy in Athens at the same time Plame was there: John Brady Kiesling, who had made international headlines when he resigned from the State Department to protest the march to war in Iraq. Friends of Plame's, including Janet Angstadt, helped paint a picture of Plame as a fundamentally decent, unusually down to earth person—in contrast perhaps to her glamorous public image—and made it clear that no one outside her immediate family had any idea where she really worked.
Plame's major foreign postings had been in Greece and Belgium. She had posed as a junior diplomatic officer while on assignment as a young CIA case officer in Athens, and, later, had had non-official cover (NOC) as an energy executive while based in Belgium. In 1998, she became one of a relatively few officers handpicked to work in the CIA's Counterproliferation Division, which helped take down rogue nuclear smuggler A.Q. Khan. In advance of the Iraq war, Valerie had served as the chief of operations for the Iraq task force in the CIA's CPD, as first reported by my colleague David Corn and Newsweek's Michael Isikoff in their book, Hubris. Her covert operational responsibilities—including devising ways to cultivate Iraqi scientists and graduate students living overseas—were significant.
But there were several aspects of Plame's work I never fully understood. Among the lingering questions: When she was in graduate school in London and Bruges between her Athens posting, and her nonofficial-cover posting in Belgium, was she working as a case officer, identifying potential recruits? Or just going to school? (A former CIA manager told me if it had been up to him, she would have been working.) Why do some documents filed in court in connection with the Libby trial seem to suggest that Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson did more work for the CIA than the two fact finding trips to Niger in 1999 and 2002 widely reported on? Even now, Wilson won't say; Plame has said in interviews that Wilson has made "several" trips for the CIA, suggesting more than two.
Another observation made over the course of basically triangulating Plame's story: in the intelligence world, where so much is opaque, it's not that everything will be revealed if only you find the right person who has the information. "I learned so many times with the intelligence and military communities that people don't know everything going on around them, but they think they do," says attorney Mark Zaid, who frequently represents Agency employees. "It's like you're driving in the dark and in your headlights you see a little to the right the top half of a deer. You presume you know what the other half looks like," but you may not. Officers in the operations division dismissing the Niger forgeries and Curveball were not aware that analysts in another unit were signaling through other channels that the information was credible. It doesn't always take a Curveball or a Libby to obstruct our unfettered grasp of a case.
At a party this past summer for United States vs. I. Lewis Libby book authors Jeff Lomonaco and Murray Waas, Anatomy of Deceit author and Libby trial blogger Marcy Wheeler asked me in passing if I had ever met Valerie Plame. I had just spent weeks intensively interviewing Plame's family, friends and of her former colleagues, and I was one of the few people who had read Valerie's (redacted) draft manuscript. I knew about her struggles with post-partum depression; about her brother, Robert, who had been badly wounded in Vietnam; about the strains on her marriage in the wake of her outing, and her husband's later learning from a Senate Intelligence Committee report that she had written an email to her boss recommending him for the Niger trip (though she did not initiate the idea and, as the parent of infant twins, was ambivalent about him going) But I wasn't allowed to talk about what I was doing. "No," I told Marcy, truthfully, I hadn't met Plame. "But I feel like I know her."
Read an excerpt from Laura Rozen's Afterword of Fair Game here.
Laura Rozen is Mother Jones' national security correspondent.
