By KEN CHAMBERLAIN
Observer Staff

Four years after her husband wrote an article disputing part of President George Bush’s justification for going to war in Iraq, Valerie Plame Wilson’s emotions are still raw.

“I never figured that the administration would use treason to get back at its critics,” she said Thursday during a speech sponsored by Kennedy Political Union at American University. Her speech was a part of a tour to promote her new book, “Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House.”

Plame, who was an undercover CIA agent, claimed that the Bush administration blew her cover to retaliate against her husband, Joe Wilson. He wrote a July 2003 article in The New York Times disputing the credibility of one of Bush’s main justifications for invading Iraq: reports that Iraq was trying to acquire uranium from Niger to build nuclear weapons.

Photo courtesy Valerie Plame
Outed spy

A lawyer for former Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, who discussed her identity with reporters, declined to comment to The Associated Press about the book, saying that the charges Plame made “shed no light on the public record.”

In 2002, Wilson, a former, long-time U.S. ambassador in Africa, went to Niger at the request of the CIA to investigate these reports of uranium sales to Iraq and couldn’t find any substantiation, she said. After debriefing Wilson, the CIA also concluded that the reports were probably untrue, Plame said.

Despite the conclusion that the Niger uranium reports lacked merit, Bush cited them in his 2003 State of the Union address as a reason to invade Iraq. A few days later at the United Nations, former Secretary of State Colin Powell cited similar evidence.

Plame was disturbed by Bush’s speech, but became more so after hearing Powell’s speech. She had an “absolute sinking feeling in my stomach because what Powell was saying wasn’t matching up with what intelligence I was privy to” or what her husband had found the year before, she said. “I went back to my desk and just felt sick.”

‘Do a good job’

For a significant part of its history, the CIA primarily hired white, male graduates of Ivy League colleges. “It was literally an old boys’ network,” Plame said. This history was driven home on her first day after being hired and months of training and evaluation. The first thing her new boss asked her to do was to twirl around. He concluded that “you’ll do” based on her twirl, she said.

Despite entering a culture where women historically had not had the same opportunities as men, Plame said it never dawned on her that she couldn’t do the job. Whatever she tried, “my parents encouraged me to just show up and do a good job.”

She trained to be a covert agent, a position that required her to convince foreigners to turn over information that might be of use to the U.S. government. Her position took on new responsibilities after the sarin gas release in the Tokyo subway system in 1995. The attack awoke the CIA to the dangers of weapons of mass destruction.

The attack also led the agency to create a counter-proliferation office staffed with agents with more diverse backgrounds than traditional CIA agents. The diversity of the group, labeled the “Island of Misfit Toys,” gave the agency a greater ability to collect and track information than it had with more traditional agents, Plame said. In one notable success, they were able to bring down the nuclear proliferation network established by Pakastani scientist Abdul Qadeer Kahn.

The office also was significantly involved in tracking weapons information related to Iraq and attepted to find out what was happening there. “It wouldn’t have been prudent to give Saddam Hussein the benefit of the doubt” by believing his claims that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, she said. This distrust led her office to contact Iraqi scientists and others who might have known of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

The distrust, fed in part by a phone call from Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, also led another agent and her boss to recommend that Wilson go to Niger to investigate the reports of Iraq’s attempt to purchase uranium, Plame said.

‘Best job’

She resigned from the CIA recently with regret, but with her cover blown she didn’t want to work in another position at the agency. “I had the best job in the world,” she said.

Ironically, the same administration that she said revealed her secret identity is the same one that is keeping her from fully discussing all of the details associated with her CIA experience. Plame can’t acknowledge her work with the CIA prior to 2002, for example, and a significant portion of her book has been redacted due to CIA concerns of revelations about national security. Before publication, however, she and her publisher sued the CIA to make the information public, but lost.

In response to a question about the value of entering public service, she said it is “critical to national security for people of diverse backgrounds” to seek careers in government. Such a diverse group can bring different perspectives to solving security issues. “Hopefully, in a few years,” Plame said in referring to the period after the presidential elections next year, “things will be straightened out.”