Fair Game

Book Review: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House By Valerie Plame Wilson

Reviewed by Mohammad Gill


Wilson’s wife is fair game. (Karl Rove)

The story of Valerie Plame’s outing remains on the news network ever since it first became public. Joe Wilson’s account of his trip to Niger, at the behest of CIA, also received great publicity. The two events became conjoined. Now finally Valerie Plame has put down the story of her career in CIA, her operations, and outing in her book “Fair Game,” in her own words.

The book is considerably marred by heavy redactions by CIA. Whole pages such as, 50, 51, 52, 53, 63, 72,.. have been redacted with the result that the account has become somewhat disjointed and obscure. Several others are also redacted here and there. For example, only 1 of 27 pages of the first chapter was free of any redaction. Even in the chapter on Motherhood, only 6 pages out of 13 were free of redactions.

The book consists of 16 chapters, Epilogue, Afterword (by Laura Rozen), Appendix, and Acknowledgments and is spread over 411 pages. The title of Chapter 3 is completely redacted and blotted out. The chapter is thus without any title. Chapter 2 is partly redacted and reads “- Tour.” In this chapter, one doesn’t find the name of a country in which her tour took place. The gaps created by such redactions are partly filled by the information provided in “Afterword,” which has been written by Laura Rozen completely independently. Valerie saw this section only when the book was published.

In spite of the defects caused by redactions, the book is worth reading if only because it describes the story of how ignominiously the White House outed one of CIA’s secret operatives in Counterproliferation Division. The White House ignorantly believed it would discredit the authenticity of Joe Wilson’s (Valerie’s husband) findings that there was no deal between Iraq and Niger on yellowcake, and hush up the public criticism of Iraq war. It had entirely the opposite effect; it only stoked the fires and kept Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson in news for the last 4-5 years.

One of the things that had intrigued me and I failed to understand was the rationale of outing Valerie Plame. The claim that it somehow detracted the evidence that there was no deal for yellowcake between Niger and Iraq because Joe Wilson was Valerie’s husband didn’t make any sense to me. The evidence was either true or false. If it was false, factual information should have been provided for it. Joe Wilson’s relationship to Valerie should not have had any bearing on its truthfulness or falsity.

This confusion was mentioned by Laura Rozen also in Afterword. She wrote, “The White House and its surrogates would orchestrate a highly organized campaign to try to discredit Joe Wilson by whispering in Journalists’ ears, ’Don’t get too far out’ on Wilson because the reason he had been sent to Niger was that his wife was a weapons of mass destruction operative at the CIA, and the (unpaid) Niger fact-finding mission had been some sort of junket or boondoggle arranged by his wife. It’s not easy to understand how an unpaid week interviewing ex-officials in the second-poorest country on earth could be construed as a boondoggle by even the most avid political operative, and the nepotism talking point did little to neutralize Joe Wilson’s fundamental and still-compelling claim: that the White House exaggerated the case for war to the American public. It’s a claim that teams of CIA-led Iraq weapons hunters did nothing to dispel when they delivered their findings to Congress shortly thereafter that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.” The intent of outing Valerie seemed to be malice only to hurt her and her husband personally. Vengeance was the name of the game. With the outing, her career at CIA came to an end.

The story also became sensational because the ever unfolding trail of “Who did it?” led to Vice President and President themselves. Quoting Jeff Lomonaco, Rozen wrote, “And Libby’s trial made very clear that the President and Vice President played significant and troubling roles at the very heart of the case… Published reports have indicated that Bush told Cheney something to the effect of “Get it out,” or “Let’s get this out,” referring to information that would damage the case Joe Wilson was making against the administration.”

The book however is not only about making the case for or against Iraq war; it is much more than that. It contains the personal story of Valerie Plame, how she got into CIA, her ascent in the cadre, her marriage, motherhood, family life and children, work at Counterproliferation Division (CPD) and spying into Dr. Qadir Khan’s nuclear network, and much else. At one place in the book (p.70), she writes, “I shared my quarters, dubbed the ‘secret squirrel den’ – complete with the rare and much-coveted windows – with a small group of people devoted to tracking and bringing down the A.Q. Khan nuclear proliferation network., Khan a Pakistani, was a one-man proliferator. For decades he had made a personal fortune by selling high-tech nuclear components to Libya and North Korea, among others, Operations against this elusive and cagey target ( ..redacted..) eliminated in October 2003 with the dramatic seizure of uranium enrichment gas-centrifuge components bound for Libya’s secret nuclear research facilities. Muammar Qaddafi’s public announcement that Libya was abandoning work on its nuclear program in December 2003 was one of CPD’s most brilliant successes to date and the result of years of unrelenting work by dedicated CIA professionals.”

In the chapter on motherhood, she writes, “After years of proving every bit as tough as a man, I was suddenly longing for pampering and acknowledgment that motherhood was something quite difficult.” Her description of her postpartum depression is so real and down-to-earth and has nothing to do with Iraq, Niger, and counterproliferation that it shows a glimpse of her being an ordinary human being.

Describing her training at the Farm (in CIA) she narrates the harshness of her training schedule and notes, “After nearly ten weeks of physical conditioning..(redacted).., we felt we could eat nails for breakfast.” She also describes that CIA was completely dominated by the males and their masochistic egoism. Women were considered naturally inferior to the males, no matter what. She writes, “According to the study (Glass Ceiling), in 1991 women made up 40 percent of the work force but held only 9 percent of the Senior Intelligence Service (SIS) positions, that is, those above the rank of GS-15. In the DO (Directorate Office), a traditional male bastion, the numbers were even worse: women made up 17 percent of the directorate but only accounted for1 percent of the SIS…The dinosaurs were still running the show in the DO and most just thought women were not up to the job…I felt that in general, female officers didn’t even know they were at bat when the ball was being pitched.”

The book was published by Simons and Schuster in 2007 and is dedicated to Joe.