Fair Game

My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House

Valerie Plame Wilson

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9781416537625
• eBook ISBN: 9781416583363
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

On July 6, 2003, four months after the United States invaded Iraq, former ambassador Joseph Wilson's now historic op-ed, "What I Didn't Find in Africa, " appeared in The New York Times. A week later, conservative pundit Robert Novak revealed in his newspaper column that Ambassador Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, was a CIA operative. The public disclosure of that secret information spurred a federal investigation and led to the trial and conviction of Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, and the Wilsons' civil suit against top officials of the Bush administration. Much has been written about the "Valerie Plame" story, but Valerie herself has been silent, until now. Some of what has been reported about her has been frighteningly accurate, serving as a pungent reminder to the Wilsons that their lives are no longer private. And some has been completely false -- distorted characterizations of Valerie and her husband and their shared integrity. Valerie Wilson retired from the CIA in January 2006, and now, not only as a citizen but as a wife and mother, the daughter of an Air Force colonel, and the sister of a U.S. marine, she sets the record straight, providing an extraordinary account of her training and experiences, and answers many questions that have been asked about her covert status, her responsibilities, and her life. As readers will see, the CIA still deems much of the detail of Valerie's story to be classified. As a service to readers, an afterword by national security reporter Laura Rozen provides a context for Valerie's own story. Fair Game is the historic and unvarnished account of the personal and international consequences of speaking truth to power.

CHAPTER 1

Joining the CIA

Our group of five—three men and two women—trekked through an empty tract of wooded land and swamp, known in CIA terms as the “Farm.” It was 4 A.M. and we had been on the move all night. Having practiced escape and evasion from an ostensible hostile force—our instructors—we were close to meeting up with our other classmates. Together we would attack the enemy, then board a helicopter to safety. This exercise, called the final assault, was the climax of our paramilitary training. Each of us carried eighty-pound backpacks, filled with essential survival gear: tents, freeze-dried food, tablets to purify drinking water, and 5.56 mm ammunition for our M-16s. The late fall weather was bitter, and slimy water sloshed in our combat boots. A blister on my heel radiated little jabs of stinging pain. My friend Pete, a former Army officer, usually ready with a wisecrack and a smirk, hadn’t spoken in hours, while John, our resident beer guzzler, carried not only his backpack but at least fifty extra pounds of body weight. His round face was covered with mud and sweat.

When our point man gave the hand signal, we gratefully stopped, shrugged off our backpacks, and slumped together for a moment against a small protected knoll. Then we fell into formation again and moved toward the landing zone. When we finally reached a clearing at dawn, I could barely make out the blades of an enormous helicopter rotating slowly, and the friendly faces of my other classmates, Sharon, David, and Tex. I heard Pete mutter, “Finally.” We all surged forward, energized by relief and hope. I began to imagine the hot shower I would enjoy when this was over. Then suddenly the sharp firecrackers of light from magnesium flares exploded over our heads and the repetitive sound of machine-gun fire sent adrenaline rushing through my veins.

I dropped to the ground and crawled over to Pete, thinking he would know what to do. Despite three months of hard training, my idyllic suburban upbringing had not prepared me for incoming fire and the overwhelming physical sensations that accompanied it. Dragging me a few yards away to a crest of land, Pete pointed at the helicopter. “Get your ass over there!”

Before I knew it, we brushed aside any pretense of military discipline and made a dead run at the helicopter. As we careened down the hill at full speed, M-16s blazing, I caught the eye of a classmate running alongside me. His expression suggested a hint of enjoyment, or at least his awareness of the absurdity of the situation. Soon enough, I threw myself into the open door of the helicopter and caught my breath beneath the noise of artillery and the deafening sounds of the rotors and engines. I shrugged off my pack, and as we were lifted to safety, I marveled at how I came to be at the Farm.

[Text has been redacted here.]

[Text has been redacted here.]

[Text has been redacted here.]

[Text has been redacted here.]

[Text has been redacted here.] As a teenager, I read William Stevenson’s A Man Called Intrepid, about the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) days during World War II. The OSS was the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency. I loved the book and I found the history intriguing. I began to seriously consider what working for the CIA meant. If I joined, what would I be asked to do? Was it dangerous? Did I believe in what the CIA did? My family had always valued public service and kept a quiet patriotism. On Memorial Day and the Fourth of July we always put out the flag in a big flowerpot. My father, Samuel Plame, was a retired Air Force colonel. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, he was studying at the University of Illinois in Champaign. He remembers that the next day the campus was a ghost town; all the eligible male students had left to sign up for military service. He was soon on his own way to enlist in the Army Air Corps—the Air Force predecessor—in San Diego. He served in the South Pacific during World War II and has a seemingly inexhaustible supply of corny jokes, stories, and songs from his time there. My brother, Robert Plame, older than me by sixteen years, joined the Marines in 1966 and was promptly sent to Vietnam. One day in 1967, as my parents and I returned home from some errands, the neighbors told us that two uniformed Marines had been knocking at our door. We learned that Bob was MIA. My stricken parents assumed the worst and, for a few days, we did not know if Bob was dead or alive. He was finally located on a hospital ship. During a reconnaissance mission behind enemy lines, he had been badly wounded in his right arm. He endured years of multiple, painful operations to restore some sensation in his limb. Incredibly, with just one working arm and hand, he went on to learn how to fly, ski, write, and tie shoelaces. He has been happily married to Christie, a nurse, for nearly thirty years and is the proud father of two bright and beautiful girls. I thought that if I served in the CIA it would extend a family tradition. Still, I had my nagging doubts. Hadn’t the CIA tried to kill Castro with an exploding cigar?

“Imagine you are meeting an agent in a foreign hotel room and there is suddenly a loud banging at the door. You hear ‘Police, let us in!’ What do you do?” This question was being put to me by a kindly looking older woman wearing pearls and a surprisingly bright yellow blouse during my initial CIA interview in Washington. I [Text has been redacted here.] had checked into a modest—well, seedy—hotel in Arlington, Virginia. I had no idea what to expect but the interview the next day, in a beige building in the suburbs of Washington, followed along the traditional lines of “What are your strengths, what are your weaknesses, why do you want to work for the CIA”—until now. This question veered off the conventional path and was more interesting. My immediate thought was that excluding espionage, there is only one good reason for an unrelated man and woman to be in a hotel room together. “I would take off my blouse, tell the agent to do the same, and jump into bed before telling the police to come in.” Her barely perceptible smile told me I had hit on the right answer. I thought, This could be fun. I was ready for the next question.

[Text has been redacted here.] but I thought if it didn’t pan out, I could find something on Capitol Hill or in the Peace Corps. In the meantime, I found a job as a management trainee with a [Text has been redacted here.] Washington department store [Text has been redacted here.]. Despite the 20 percent employee discount, I hated working in retail, but it was a way to pay the rent as I continued through months of CIA psychological tests, a battery of interviews, and an exacting, comprehensive physical exam. One question out of at least four hundred in one psychological test still stands out in my memory: “Do you like tall women?” I still have no idea if I got the right answer on that one. Later that summer, I was asked to take a polygraph exam. It was a weird, but relatively brief experience. [Text has been redacted here.] At the same time, the Agency was conducting a security background check on me. Several neighbors reported to my parents that “someone [Text has been redacted here.] had interviewed them to ask if I had any known drinking, drug, or other problems.[Text has been redacted here.]

[Text has been redacted here.] I nervously settled into my chair in a nondescript government classroom in a bland office building in a congested Virginia suburb. I took in my [Text has been redacted here.] classmates in our CIA introduction course. Many of the young men were clearly ex-military types, some still sporting regulation buzz cuts. Just less than half were women, but as I later learned, only a fraction of those were destined, like me, to work in the Directorate of Operations (DO). The rest were pegged to become analysts in the Directorate of Intelligence (DI) or administrative/logistical officers and the like in the Directorate of Administration (DA). A few were engineers who would ultimately work in the Directorate of Science and Technology (DST), the Agency’s research arm. It looked like I was the [Text has been redacted here.] by far and this suspicion was confirmed when a tiny woman, nearly as wide as she was tall, took me and three other (male) classmates into her office during a break. She was the DO liaison to the Career Trainees (CTs)—in other words, she would be our den mother as we worked through the initial training. It was hard to believe that this matronly woman had actually been an operator in “the field,” but she certainly knew a lot more about the CIA than any of us did. “[Text has been redacted here.] PCS meant “permanent change of Station,” in other words, assignment abroad. As the acronyms flew around us, it was clear that a paramilitary culture reigned at the CIA.

During our lunch breaks, taken at our desks or in nearby cafes, I got to know my classmates. I couldn’t help but feel intimidated—most either had gone to prestigious universities, or had at least a master’s degree or some years of military experience. All seemed much more sophisticated, smarter, better traveled, and wittier than I was. Feeling overwhelmed, I vowed to keep my mouth shut and learn as much as possible. Perhaps no one would notice that I had precious little meaningful life experience and was educated at a state school. Over the next few weeks, an interesting dynamic emerged. We had all taken the Myers-Briggs psychological profile test during the interview process. Most of the future operations officers, myself included, scored varying degrees of “ENTJ”—Extrovert, Intuitive, Thinking, Judgmental. ENTJ personality types tend to be strong leaders and feel the need to take command of a situation. The Myers-Briggs description of an ENTJ says that “although ENTJs are tolerant of established procedures, they can abandon any procedure when it can be shown to be indifferent to the goal it seemingly serves…They are tireless in the devotion to their jobs and can easily block out other areas of life for the sake of work. The ENTJ female may find it difficult to select a mate who is not overwhelmed by her strong personality and will.” ENTJs appear in approximately 5 percent of the population; apparently, that’s what the CIA was looking for in its future operations officers. We were drawn to one another, not just because we would be doing the same training and ultimately the same job, but because we had similar personalities. Wherever the future case officers gathered on breaks, they were usually the loudest, most social, and I thought, most entertaining. The air seemed to crackle with excitement. I began making friends in the class and despite our different backgrounds, we began to form deep bonds. I looked forward to attending the CIA introductory course every day where we learned how the Agency was organized, how intelligence was collected and analyzed, and how the wider intelligence community functioned. One of the most gripping guest speakers was a woman who had served her first tour as a case officer in Moscow. She told us in harrowing detail how she had been surveilled by Soviet intelligence while picking up and setting down “dead drops”—fabricated rocks or other innocent-looking containers with notes, money, and instructions to an important Soviet double agent. She was thrown out of the country (declared persona non grata, or PNGed in CIA lingo) but her agent, the spy for whom she was responsible, was not so lucky. He was executed. We all sat in stunned silence as we digested the huge responsibilities and the consequences of making a mistake.

Finally, after about three months of “CIA 101,” as we affectionately called the course, we were all sent on our way to our various “interims” to begin some on-the-job training. Being a CT on an interim at the Agency was comparable to pledging a sorority or fraternity: you were assigned the most tedious tasks and spent lots of time walking cables and memos to distant parts of the Headquarters building or waiting for a dossier in the vast underground space known as the file room [Text has been redacted here.], as I was beginning my first interim phase [Text has been redacted here.]

[Text has been redacted here.] female case officers were either former secretaries who doggedly worked their way out from behind their desks to field work, or the wives of case officers who got tired of being the only ones at home with the children while their husbands were out having all the fun being spymasters. There were a rare few who did not fit into these categories, but these older, tough-as-nails women who had triumphed through the entrenched discrimination scared me. I occasionally came into contact with them during my early interims, and I admired their ambition and perseverance, but it was clear that they paid for it with their personal happiness. Most went home in the late evening to a cat. In my class of fifty or so, just fewer than half were female. Of that number, about four were destined to go into operations. Either through ignorance of youth or naïveté, I did not see myself in the vanguard of a new CIA; I simply wanted to do well at my job and did not expect to find any sort of discrimination because of my gender.

I was assigned to interims mostly in the European Division of the DO. I generally enjoyed my work, menial as it was, but was anxiously counting the days until we could go to the Farm for our paramilitary training. Finally, the time arrived for me to pack a few items in my car and head south with the other young CTs. I had more and longer interims than most of my original classmates—[Text has been redacted here.] and as a consequence, I joined another training class. As instructed early on by the Agency, I had told my friends and family that [Text has been redacted here.] my time away from Washington was for some vague, undefined “training.” No one questioned this, or at least did so directly to me. All my friends outside the Agency were busy starting their own careers and so training was part of everyone’s early professional life. Only my parents and brother knew where I really worked. My mother and I agreed not to tell my uncle: her brother was an early Air Force jet jockey and would have been so proud of my career choice he could not have kept it to himself. As I sped along the highway toward the Farm, I was looking forward to this next phase of training, one that would move me much closer to a field assignment as a case officer.

“Check your sizes, only take one, keep the line moving! Let’s go!” barked the instructor in camouflage fatigues as we shuffled into a cavernous corrugated-tin warehouse in an open field at the Farm. In the dim light of the warehouse we picked combat boots, fatigues, webbed belts, caps, canteens, backpack gear, and other paraphernalia out of enormous bins. This stuff would see us through the next three months of military training. As our arms overflowed with equipment, the instructors, all ex-military types, took us next to the Quonset huts located deep in the scruffy pine woods. These would be our sleeping quarters. The women’s barracks was lined on both sides with bunk beds and had a spartan bathroom at the end. I had never had to wear a uniform at school, but as I changed into my fatigues, I liked the idea of not having to figure out my outfit every day—which shoes and belt would go together—for the next few months.

Our training quickly assumed a pattern: up at 5 A.M. for physical training, which involved running or walking in formation while singing bawdy songs to keep tempo, just as military recruits have done for decades; followed by a quick breakfast, then a morning class in a military discipline. Lunch [Text has been redacted here.] a throwback to traditional southern cooking. Almost everything was dipped in batter and deep-fried, and a salad bar was considered newfangled. This was usually followed by an outdoor activity, then dinner—more deep-fried food—then some brief free time before lights-out at nine. There was naturally plenty of complaining—some good-natured, some bitter—among the class members, but the instructors, [Text has been redacted here.] were more than capable of subduing a bunch of whiny suburbanites and kept us in line. For many the physical demands of the course were tough—running at least three miles in the morning, trekking through the woods with eighty-pound backpacks and an M-16 rifle—and more than one overweight trainee gave up in the middle of a march or quit well before completing the required sit-up reps. Fortunately, I had always been athletic, and though the physical requirements of the course were a challenge I was able to do them all. I began to see the Farm experience as camp for adults.

Each week was devoted to a different topic [Text has been redacted here.] and the instructors struggled to whip our class into shape and instill some military discipline. The Agency clearly understood that we were rarely, if ever, going to be called upon to use these skills, but the Farm paramilitary course remained a popular class for Agency recruits because management realized it forged an esprit de corps that would last throughout one’s career. Moreover, it gave the Agency another opportunity to evaluate a new employee’s strength of character, ability to work in a team, and dedication—all skills critical to success in the Agency, no matter what your career path.

One of our first sessions involved learning about weapons and how to use them. Unlike some of my ex-military classmates, my exposure to guns had been limited: I knew that my father kept his World War II service pistol strapped to the back of the bed headboard, in the event an intruder got into the house. Learning about [Text has been redacted here.] guns was completely new to me and to my astonishment, I found I was pretty good at it [Text has been redacted here.] Probably aided by beginner’s luck, I simply followed the instructions: hold your breath steady, take careful aim, and pull the trigger slowly. I was apparently the best in our class [Text has been redacted here.], which I am sure many of my male colleagues found unnerving. My proudest moment came when I managed to score very high on a handgun test, despite having to balance on crutches after spraining an ankle during a morning run in the dark.

As the weeks went by and we learned [Text has been redacted here.] skills perhaps more appropriate for an Army ranger than a CIA case officer lurking around bars, a vague understanding hung over us that at some point we would face an interrogation exercise designed to simulate POW captivity. From the beginning we had been taught how to build and sustain our cover and we knew that we would be severely tested toward the end of the course, but we had no idea where or when this would happen. Before dawn one Monday morning, after all the students had returned from their weekend break, we were awakened with war cries and curses and flashlights being shoved in our faces as we were pulled from our bunks.

Although we had known this challenging portion of the course was coming, it was unnerving to look around and not see our instructors’ familiar faces. They were unknown authorities dressed in fatigues, most with black hoods with eyeholes. As I hurried to dress, I kept telling myself that this was just an exercise, but their rough taunts and shoves as we moved out of the Quonset hut to the woods were realistic enough to set off a surge of adrenaline. For hours in the dark, we were forced to crawl on the ground and do push-ups and sit-ups—and if you faltered in any way, you were kicked or subjected to brutal verbal abuse. After a long, exhausting march through the woods, each of us with one hand on the shoulder of the student ahead, we were thrown into a waiting army truck. We bounced over dirt roads and stopped at a small white concrete-block building surrounded by pine trees. The real fun was about to begin.

[Text has been redacted here.] at the time I had no idea what had happened to the [Text has been redacted here.] The combination of factors [Text has been redacted here.] really got to you psychologically. Your rational mind kept saying that this was just an exercise, one that you had known was coming, but another small voice in your head wondered what the hell was going on. It was certainly realistic.

At some point, hours later, I was pulled into my first interrogation. I struggled to keep my wits about me. [Text has been redacted here.] As I sat down—a slight concession that they had given us a few hours earlier—I dared [Text has been redacted here.] check my surroundings. To my delight, a classmate who had become a friend had chosen that moment as well to defy the rules. The brief smile and eye rolls we exchanged renewed my confidence that I would get through this.

[Text has been redacted here.] I fainted—from low blood sugar—and fell backward. When I came to, I was mortified to find myself being held by the elderly director of the Farm, someone I had only seen at a distance and when he addressed our class the first day. The good new...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Colophon
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Publisher’s Note
• 1.   Joining the CIA
• 2.   [Text has been redacted here.] Tour
• 3.   [Text has been redacted here.]
• 4.   Love and the Island of Misfit Toys
• 5.   Motherhood
• 6.   Mother and Part-Time Spy
• 7.   Trip to Niger
• 8.   Shock and Awe
• 9.   Exposed
• 10.  The Only Washington Scandal Without Sex
• 11.  The Year from Hell
• 12.  Stay and Fight
• 13.  Indictment
• 14.  Life after the Agency
• 15.  Alice in Wonderland
• 16.  The Libby Trial and Farewell to Washington
• Epilogue
• Afterword
• 1. THE PATH TO THE CIA
• 2. ATHENS TOUR
• 3. BECOMING A NOC
• 4. WORKING IN THE “ISLAND OF MISFIT TOYS” (1997–2000)
• 5. THE ROAD TO IRAQ (2001–2003)
• 6. EXPOSED (2003–2007)
• Appendix
• Postpartum Depression Resources
• Acknowledgments
• Afterword Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Photographic Insert