Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House or
How a Top CIA Agency Was Betrayed by Her Own Government
Valerie Plame Wilson, 2007
Simon & Schuster
412 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781451623871
Summary
On 14 July 2003 in his syndicated column in the Washington Post, Robert Novak identified "Wilson's wife" publicly as "an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction" named "Valerie Plame". The column was a response to another, published by former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson in the New York Timeson July 6, 2003, "What I Didn't Find in Africa," in which Ambassador Wilson stated that the George W. Bush administration exaggerated unreliable claims that Iraq intended to purchase uranium yellowcake to support the administration's arguments that Iraq was proliferating weapons of mass destruction so as to justify its preemptive war in Iraq.
Novak's public disclosure of Mrs. Wilson's classified covert CIA identity led to a CIA leak grand jury investigation, resulting in the indictment and successful prosecution of Lewis "Scooter" Libby—Assistant to the President of the United States, Chief of Staff to the Vice President of the United States, Dick Cheney, and Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs from 2001 to 2005—for perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements to federal investigators.
Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White Houseis a memoir that covers Mrs. Wilson tenure in the CIA, the leak of her secret identity, and the subsequent scandal. The book provoked a lawsuit even before its launching. In May, the publisher and Valerie Wilson sued J. Michael McConnell, Director of National Intelligence, and Michael V. Hayden, Director of the CIA, arguing that the CIA was "unconstitutionally interfering with the publication of her memoir, Fair Game, which is set to be published in October, by not allowing Plame to mention the dates she served in the CIA, even though those dates are public information."
The agency insisted that her dates of service remained classified and were not mentioned in the book, in spite of a letter published in the Congressional Record and available on the Library of Congress website from the C.I.A. to Ms. Wilson about her retirement benefits saying that she had worked for the agency since November 1985. The judged decided in favor of the agency. The CIA publication review board explained that the manuscript was "replete with statements" that "become classified when they are linked with a specific time frame", but cleared the way for the memoir to be published. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—April 19, 1963
• Where—Anchorage, Alaska, USA
• Education—B.A., Pennsylvania State University; M.A.,
London School of Economics; M.A., College of Europe,
(Bruges Belgium)
• Currently—lives in New Mexico
Valerie Elise Plame Wilson is a former United States CIA Operations Officer and the author of a memoir detailing her career and the events leading up to her resignation from the CIA.
Valerie Elise Plame was born on April 19, 1963, on Elmendorf Air Force Base, in Anchorage, Alaska, to Diane and Samuel Plame. Plame's paternal great-grandfather was a rabbi who emigrated from Ukraine; the original family surname was Plamevotski.
Growing up in "a military family ... imbued her with a sense of public duty"; her father was a lieutenant colonel in the United States Air Force, who worked for the National Security Agency for three years, and, according to her "close friend Janet Angstadt," her parents "are the type who are still volunteering for the Red Cross and Meals on Wheels in the Philadelphia suburb where they live," having moved to that area while Plame was still in school
She graduated in 1981 from Lower Moreland High School, in Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania, and attended Pennsylvania State University, graduating with a B.A. in advertising in 1985. By 1991, Plame had earned two master's degrees, one from the London School of Economics and Political Science and one from the College of Europe (Collège d'Europe), in Bruges, Belgium.[1][4] In addition to English, she speaks French, German, and Greek.
After graduating from Penn State in 1985, Plame was briefly married to Todd Sesler, her college boyfriend. In 1997, while she was working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Plame met former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, IV "at a reception in Washington ... at the residence of the Turkish Ambassador." According to Wilson, because Plame was unable to reveal her CIA role to him on their first date, she told him that she was an energy trader in Brussels, and he thought at that time that she was "an up-and-coming international executive." After they began dating and became "close," Plame revealed her employment with the CIA to Wilson. They were married on April 3, 1998, Plame's second marriage and Wilson's third.
Professionally and socially, she has used variants of her name. Professionally, while a covert CIA officer, she used her given first name and her maiden surname, "Valerie Plame." Since leaving the CIA, as a speaker, she has used the name "Valerie Plame Wilson," and she is referred to by that name in the civil suit that the Wilsons brought against former and current government officials, Plame v. Cheney. Socially, and in public records of her political contributions, since her marriage in 1998, she has used the name "Valerie E. Wilson."
Prior to the disclosure of her classified CIA identity, Valerie and Joe Wilson and their twins lived in the Palisades, an affluent neighborhood of Washington, D.C., on the fringe of Georgetown. After she resigned from the CIA following the disclosure of her covert status, in January 2006, they moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. In a 2011 interview, Plame said she and Wilson had received threats while living in the D.C. metro area, and while she acknowledged an element of threat remains in their new home, the New Mexico location "tamps down the whole swirl."
After graduating from college, moving to Washington, D.C., and marrying Sesler, Plame worked at a clothing store while awaiting results of her application to the CIA. She was accepted into the 1985–86 CIA officer training class and began her training for what would become a twenty-year career with the Agency.[12] Although the CIA will not release publicly the specific dates from 1985 to 2002 when she worked for it, due to security concerns Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald affirmed that Plame "was a CIA officer from January 1, 2002, forward" and that "her association with the CIA was classified at that time through July 2003. Due to the nature of her clandestine work for the CIA, many details about Plame's professional career are still classified, but it is documented that she worked for the CIA in a clandestine capacity relating to counter-proliferation.
Plame served the CIA as a non-official cover (or NOC), operating undercover in (at least) two positions in Athens and Brussels. While using her own name, "Valerie Plame", her assignments required posing in various professional roles in order to gather intelligence more effectively. Two of her covers include serving as a junior consular officer in the early 1990s in Athens and then later an energy analyst for the private company (founded in 1994) "Brewster Jennings & Associates," which the CIA later acknowledged was a front company for certain investigations.
A former senior diplomat in Athens remembered Plame in her dual role and also recalled that she served as one of the 'control officers' coordinating the visit of President George H.W. Bush to Greece and Turkey in July 1991. After the Gulf War in 1991, the CIA sent her first to the London School of Economics and then the College of Europe, in Bruges, for Master's degrees. After earning the second one, she stayed on in Brussels, where she began her next assignment under cover as an "energy consultant" for Brewster-Jennings. Beginning in 1997, Plame's primary assignment was shifted to the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The CIA’s Ishmael Jones confirmed her status as a NOC or “deep cover officer” and remarked that she was talented and highly intelligent, but decried the fact that her career largely featured US-based Headquarters service, typical of most CIA officers.
She married Wilson in 1998 and gave birth to their twins in 2000, and resumed travel overseas in 2001, 2002, and 2003 as part of her cover job. She met with workers in the nuclear industry, cultivated sources, and managed spies. She was involved in ensuring that Iran did not acquire nuclear weapons. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
[T]he story of how [Plame's] career was derailed and her C.I.A. cover blown also has its combative side. But the real proof of Ms. Wilson’s fighting spirit is the form in which her version of events has been brought into the light of day.... What emerges is a sense of Ms. Wilson as an ambitious, gung-ho professional, dedicated to her work yet colorful in ways no Hollywood storyteller would dare to make up.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
The government redacted much of the significant information in the first section of Wilson's memoir, which concerns her career in the CIA. In print, a black bar omitted the words and passages; on audio, a tone does the deleting. Once the novelty of the beeps wears off, the incompleteness of Wilson's narrative, at first tantalizing, becomes frustrating. The constant interruptions make it difficult for a listener to assemble a coherent story. Once Wilson's identity is leaked by White House insiders, the memoir's redactions cease for the most part. Unfortunately, her distress over the attempted destruction of her and her husband's professional reputations is considerably less riveting than her spy career. Whiles neither a prose stylist or an actress, Wilson reads clearly, with immediacy and sincerity and a note of barely suppressed anger. Laura Rozen's afterword (occupying the last two CDs) fills in the gaps removed by the CIA. It's intriguing and considerably more polished. The two narratives create an interesting, if not entirely satisfying, account of a disturbing contemporary scandal.
Publishers Weekly
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Fair Game:
1. What do you think of Valerie Plame Wilson? Did reading her memoir alter your view of her?
2. Why did Plame Wilson write this memoir? What was her purpose in doing so? Does the book accomplish her goals?
3. Why did Plame Wilson join the CIA? How does she describe the agency and the training the operatives through? Were you surprised by its rigor?
4. How does Plame describe the position of female officers vis-a-vis career advancement in the CIA?
5. How difficult, irritating, puzzling was it for you to read the memoir with all the redactions (blacked out text) by the CIA? Does it make sense that parts of Ms. Plame's career could not be published in her book...even though the information was already in the public domain and readily available for anyone to read?
6. What do you think of the book's Afterword by Laura Rozen? Is it helpful, illuminating, or dull and irritating? Is there anything in Rozen's revelations that might constitute a national security secret?
7. What was your understanding of the Plame Affair—in which members of the Bush administration revealed her identity as a CIA operative—before reading this book? Has your understanding changed as a result of reading the memoir?
8. Do you think it was wrong to have released—and published—Plame's name? Or do you agree with former White House officials that they did nothing wrong because Plame was no longer an undercover agent? Why was her cover blown in the first place?
9. Does this account by Plame of her activities convince you that she once worked under deep cover...which some in Washington had questioned?
10. What damage was been done by the publication of her identity?
11. Is Plame's use of "betrayal" in the subtitle the right word? In what way did the CIA betray her? What should they have done when her identity was revealed?
12. What were her friends' reactions when they found out Plame had been a spy? Were they justified in their feelings?
13. Talk about the impact her career derailment had on her marriage. Had you been a friend at the time, what advice might you have offered?
14. Plame writes "I would soon find out that in Washington, the truth is not always enough." What was she referring to...and why isn't truth enough?
15. Where does the book's title "fair game" come from?
16. How did Plame come to feel about the Bush administration? What does she mean when she says that the efforts to shut her and her husband up were "classic Karl Rove"? Do you agree, as Plame puts it that "their tactics would have made Joseph McCarthy proud"? In what way?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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