Retired CIA employee Valerie Plame and her husband, diplomat Joe Wilson sued Bush Administration administration officials in 2006, charging that vice-president Dick Cheney, his aide, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, and presidential adviser Karl Rove destroyed her career when they leaked her identity to the press.
Photograph by: CHIP SOMODEVILLA GETTY IMAGES, McClatchy-Tribune
Valerie Plame was an undercover CIA agent working to curtail nuclear proliferation. In 2003 her career was assassinated. Plame’s secret CIA job was illegally exposed by the Bush administration in an attempt to discredit her husband, Joe Wilson, who had accused the White House of falsifying intelligence to mislead the public and build a case for invading Iraq.
Wilson, a diplomat posted to Africa and Iraq during the first Bush administration, conducted the CIA’s 2002 fact-finding mission to Niger, investigating rumours that Saddam Hussein’s regime sought to buy 500 tons of yellowcake uranium. His report concluded the story was bogus.
When President Bush reiterated the Niger allegations -the now-famous 16 words -in his 2003 State of the Union address, Wilson went public with his findings in the New York Times. His wife’s undercover status was blown in retaliation a week later.
The White House reprisal endangered Plame’s foreign contacts, torpedoed the couple’s careers, impugned their integrity and pushed their marriage to the brink.
Plame’s life as a spy and her betrayal by the White House is the subject of the Hollywood drama. Fair Game. I spoke with Plame and Wilson by phone from their Santa Fe, N.M., home last month.
What was it like to go from a life of secrecy to unintended celebrity?
VP: Very difficult. I went from a career where obviously discretion is paramount and literally overnight
all that changed. I have found it very difficult to be a public person. One positive thing that has come out of it is I have been able to advocate publicly for things I was doing while at the CIA, which was counter-proliferation. (Plame appeared as an on-screen expert in the anti-nuke documentary Countdown to Zero released this year.)
Some of your critics charge that you appear to be enjoying your celebrity too much, profiting from book and film deals and hobnobbing in Hollywood.
JW: I wrote an article asserting the administration had possibly skewed the intelligence to justify a war in which now over 4,000 Americans and 100,000 Iraqis have been killed. Two days after my article appeared, the White House press spokesman acknowledged that the 16 words should never have been in the State of the Union address. Everything else has come about as a consequence of defending myself and my wife and my family against their attacks. If they had never attacked me, we wouldn’t be here. If they stop attacking me, they won’t have to worry about the sequel.
VP: None of this happened so we could write books, I assure you.
Joe, in the film you are portrayed as a man of considerable ego. How did that feel?
JW: What ego? I’ll just put it to you this way. When during the course of your adult life it has come upon you to face down Saddam Hussein and subsequently George W. Bush, then it becomes difficult to take people named Scooter seriously. (Vice presidential chief of staff Scooter Libby, one of the sources of the leak, was convicted of five counts of lying and obstructing justice.) I think my arrogance is leavened with more of a sense of humour than Sean shows.
How truthful is Fair Game?
VP: It’s not a documentary. It’s condensed, and there is some composting of characters. But I think it does a really good job of portraying what we went through, and the truth of the matter.
There’s a scene where someone accosts Joe in a restaurant as he is having a business meeting and accuses Valerie of being a traitor. Did that actually happen?
JW: I was in a restaurant in Washington, D.C., and I got up and left. This person went over to the people I was having lunch with and said, “If you work with Wilson you’ll never work in this town again.” But that actual confrontation did not happen.
Did the actors meet with you to study your voice and mannerisms?
JW: I spent a lot of time with Sean both here in Santa Fe and in New York.
VP: Naomi didn’t come here but we spent a lot of time together and we’ve become quite good friends.
What would you tell someone coming to you for advice about a career in government service?
JW: The 21st century is going to be perhaps more dangerous than the 20th century was. We’re going to need the very best and the brightest in our military services, our intelligence services and our diplomatic services and they are all great, great careers.
VP: I loved doing what I was doing and was proud to serve my country. Despite what happened to us, there are so many ways to engage. It doesn’t have to be at the federal level, but trying to effect positive social change, there are a lot of ways to do that.
Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/centre+Fair+Game+real+people/3781322/story.html#ixzz15NSS5RZG
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