Valerie Plame
It's a hell of a thing to have your career destroyed by someone trying to make a point. You're going along great guns, doing all the right things, then blam!
Valerie Plame Wilson, who spoke at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., last night, knows that all too well. She was a CIA agent, working in the Counterproliferation Division and trying to determine whether Saddam Hussein was really trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction. By all fair-minded accounts, she was good at her job. Then in July 2003, her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times debunking Bush Administration claims, especially the now infamous "16 words" in Bush's 2003 State of the Union Address, that an African nation (Niger) had sold uranium to Saddam Hussein that could be used to make an atomic bomb. Wilson suggested that intelligence had been cooked to justify the Bush Administration's rush to war with Iraq.
We all know how that turned out. A week later, columnist Robert Novak betrayed her identity as a covert CIA agent in his column. Plame said last night that when her husband showed her Novak's column in the Washington Post, her head was spinning. "I'm thinking of my network of assets (foreigners who provided intelligence), the safety of my children, and how the career I love is over." The Bush Administration had retaliated against Wilson by ruining his wife's career. In one stroke, she could no longer be an undercover CIA agent, although she stayed on doing non-covert duties until January 2006. By her own account, she was "radioactive" at the office.
Plame said it wasn't illegal for Novak to disclose her identity, but it was illegal for Bush Administration officials with access to classified intelligence to disclose her identity to Novak. Only one of them was called to account. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, was convicted of obstruction of justice in the Plame incident last year and sentenced to 30 months in prison. President Bush--I had already forgotten this--immediately commuted Libby's sentence, calling it "excessive," and left open the possibility of a full pardon later.
Plame drew a full house at Dickinson College last night. The college required everyone attending the speech to go through a metal detector, but as college spokesman Bill Sulon pointed out, they did that for a Bob Dole speech, too. Plame is as attractive as she is often described, but shorter than I somehow expected. If you compare her to girls in your high school class, she's kind of cheerleader, D.A.R. Good Citizen, and valedictorian all rolled into one.
Plame is clearly constrained in what she can say in her speeches. The CIA has sought to legally bar her from talking or writing about her pre-2003 career with the agency, even though details of this are widely available on the Internet. Her book, "Fair Game," was published with sections deleted at the demand of the agency. Perhaps as a result, her talk last night was interesting, but didn't offer up any new information beyond what has been widely reported. For all her outward friendliness, she is clearly an angry woman who, with her husband, is pursuing legal action against Cheney and others. As Plame said more than once last night, she doesn't want this to happen to anyone else. Quite understandable.
This was a homecoming of sorts for Plame. She spent her high school years in the Philadelphia suburbs and graduated in 1981 from Lower Moreland High School (her high school English teacher, Frank McKee, was in the audience last night) in Huntingdon Valley. Then it was off to Penn State University, where she was a member of the Pi Beta Phi sorority, worked in the business section of the Daily Collegian, and got to know my Shipoke neighbor, Bill Cluck, who was also in the audience last night. Plame was a guest of Penn State president Graham Spanier this past weekend and was spotted with Spanier at the Phyrst Bar.