Fair Plame

After years of enforced silence, Valerie Plame Wilson finally tells all -- except for the stuff the CIA blacked out.

By Rebecca Traister

Read more: George W. Bush, Books, Memoirs, Iraq, Reviews, Book reviews, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Iraq War, Joseph Wilson, Valerie Plame, Rebecca Traister, Scooter Libby

Oct. 24, 2007 | For four years, Valerie Plame Wilson has existed for most Americans largely as a one-dimensional figure, a symbol at best. She was a misspelled scrawl -- "Valerie Flame" -- in New York Times reporter Judith Miller's notebook. She was a beautiful woman swathed in shades and scarf in a Vanity Fair photo spread. She was deemed "little more than a glorified secretary" by a Republican congressman, trying to defuse growing suspicion that her outing as a CIA covert operative, by someone high up in the Bush administration, had been an illegal breach of national security. By the left, she and her husband, former ambassador and weapons of mass destruction whistle-blower Joe Wilson, were lionized as martyrs to the antiwar cause.

But whether people saw her as a scribbled name or a glossy Mata Hari, a secretary or a Joan of Arc, it's safe to say that until recently, she was an entirely mute specter. Plame has spent years in a state of enforced verbal paralysis, forbidden from telling her own story thanks to her employment at the Central Intelligence Agency, but batted around by every Bob, Dick and Scooter who could get their claws into her.

With her book "Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House," published this week by Simon and Schuster, Plame is finally gaining her voice -- sort of. Forced to submit her manuscript to the CIA, an organization not widely known for its high regard for freedom of expression, Plame was told to remove all references to dates and details of her employment, dates and details that had already been made public elsewhere, including by the CIA itself in a 2006 unclassified letter. Plame and her publishers sued but lost and, instead of rewriting around the redactions, decided to include them. The book is riddled with gray bars that make the narrative frequently unintelligible.

The most disconcerting instance occurs at the juncture at which she apparently first encounters Wilson, soon after her return from a tour in Europe. After two pages of blacked-out text there is a perplexing paragraph about a lady pushing two pugs in a stroller. Another paragraph is redacted, and then comes the sentence "Joe and I were immediately consumed by our respective responsibilities." She has apparently met her future husband, but forget the wine and roses and violins -- we don't even know how or when or under what circumstances. Two more pages of redacted text end the chapter. The next begins with the birth of their twins. Readers learn nothing of the couple's initial interaction, courtship or wedding.

It's a shocking vision of what a life can look like when its narration is taken out of the hands of the person living it. Plame's love life, her marriage, her personal chronology ... apparently, these do not belong to her but to her former employer. Without their permission, she has no rights to them.

Plame's choice to include every bit of the redactions is a natural rebellious response, though it also means that in places, "Fair Game" makes its points as a kind of installation art, rather than as a readable book. (It is also a staggering waste of paper.) An afterword by reporter Laura Rozen, filling in some of the blanks of Plame's career based on sources already in the public record, is tacked on as a reference that helps a bit in deciphering her tale.

Because much of what Plame has, silently, come to stand for is what your country is not supposed to do to you -- sell you out, betray your years of service, leave you vulnerable to attack -- she has competing missions in this book. She must delineate the ways in which she has been buffeted by the gales of right-wing ideology, but also raise her voice and present her bona fides as a patriot, a professional, an actual undercover spy whose identity was a matter of national security and an American citizen who was ill-used. In short, Plame must justify her own life and work to a readership that has been manipulated into questioning her credentials so that they can better understand what happened to her.

The first thing that Valerie Plame would like you to know about her is that she is a badass.

She begins her story not with her suburban childhood (except for a few photos of herself as a kid, most in prescient spy-lady locations, like the cockpit of a small plane or traveling in Europe, she barely acknowledges her pre-CIA life) but with a sweaty escape and invasion exercise with helicopters at the CIA training "Farm."

The early passages in the book, in which she chronicles tests of physical and mental endurance at the hands of her agency instructors, read like a fun Bond novel, in which it's clear that the heroine is one hell of a brassy dame. Plame crows about being light enough to land on her feet and remain standing after a parachute jump, about another female trainee who was "not a nemesis per se, but [whose] superior airs got my competitive spirit going," and with coy glee about answering a hypothetical question about how to avoid suspicion if caught with a male spy in a hotel room: She tells her examiner that she would simply remove her shirt and get into bed with him. When she senses that she has answered correctly, she practically purrs, "This could be fun."

In her late 20s, Plame is sent on a foreign tour to a redacted location (also known as Athens). There she whoops it up, looking down her nose at female colleagues too lily-livered to withstand ogling from the "dinosaur" higher-ups, and at the "weak" American families who gather at hamburger huts complaining about homesickness instead of enjoying their foreign adventures. Plame is proud of her zero-tolerance policy toward weakness. When she writes later about living through months of agonizing postpartum depression after the birth of her twins, she confesses that finally telling someone she wasn't feeling up to snuff was "a huge admission for me."

It's after the birth of her kids that Plame is able to lay off the spunkiness and begin to present her credentials as an objective voice on international terrorism. She returns to work at the counterproliferation division (CPD), whose interests included weapon procurement networks in the Middle East. "Four years after the invasion of Iraq ... it is easy to surrender to a revisionist idea that all the WMD evidence against Iraq was fabricated," writes Plame, making the case that she did not go into her work convinced that Iraq's weaponry potential was nonexistent. "While it is true that powerful ideologues encouraged a war to prove their own geopolitical theories, and critical failures of judgment were made throughout the intelligence community in the spring and summer of 2002, Iraq, under its cruel dictator Saddam Hussein, was clearly a rogue nation that flouted international treaties and norms in its quest for regional superiority."

Plame also must make clear that in response to an unusual response from the office of Vice President Cheney that the CIA investigate a report that in 1999 Iraq sought yellowcake uranium from Niger, she did not put her husband up for the job. The idea, Plame reports, was first brought up by "a midlevel reports officer" in a hallway conversation about how to respond to the vice president's office's query.

This is a critical point, given the assertions by those who sought to undermine the Wilsons that Plame herself suggested sending her husband to Niger, or that his mission was the result of nepotism. She returns to it often and perhaps protests too much. Not because she's not correct but because it shouldn't matter. Wilson went to Niger; he found no evidence that Iraq could have obtained uranium there; he reported his findings; the White House disregarded them; Wilson wrote about that; and the White House retaliated against his family, compromising national security in the process. Then the president lied about the consequences for those who leaked information. To fret about whose idea it was that Wilson travel to Africa is to miss the forest for a tree in a neighboring meadow. But for the record, here is Plame's repeated avowal: Not. Her. Idea.

While performing the required elements of her self-justification routine (between the gray bars of redaction), Plame pulls off one trick with particular aplomb. Her descriptions of the ways this national saga played out in her household are very funny, and Plame makes an excellent Jane Bond, double-stroller pusher, while painting a compelling portrait of life as a woman in a mostly male institution.

In one paragraph, she writes, "In CPD's Iraq branch, the job [REDACTED] was to figure out how to mount the operations that would produce credible intelligence on suspected Iraqi WMD programs." In the next paragraph, she reveals, "I found that if I gave Samantha Magic Markers and paper, and Trevor some special snacks, I could buy myself about thirty minutes to draft some cables out to the field." She also gamely reports that her only trepidation about her husband's trip to Niger was her fear of being "left to wrestle two squirmy toddlers into bed each evening."

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