TERRORISTS & SPIES > SPIES

Valerie Plame

By Tricia Romano

The Book And The CIA

By the middle of 2004, the Wilsons were under siege. Their marriage was under tremendous strain due to the media circus that their lives had become. While Wilson was free to talk and be the front man against the administration, his wife, because she was still in the CIA, was largely muzzled. She couldn't go to bat for him—if she did, it would cost her any prospect of a future in the CIA.

In the end, the job lost.

After several intermittent leaves of absence, she returned to the Counterproliferation Division in May 2005. She resigned, though, in January 2006 and set out to tell her story, signing a book contract with Simon & Schuster for an undisclosed amount. She soon found that that would be much more difficult than she'd imagined. Even though large swaths of her history had been written about in published articles, and entered into evidence in the Libby trial—making it public record, the CIA redacted large portions of her manuscript for Fair Game. Believing that many of their objections were unreasonable and amounted to censorship, she sued J. Michael McConnell, Director of National Intelligence, and Michael V. Hayden, Director of the CIA in 2007 over the redactions, and lost.

Six years after George Bush uttered his 16 incendiary words, significant weapons of mass destruction have yet to be found in Iraq, where U.S. forces continue anti-insurgency operations to install a functioning democratic government at a cost to date of over 3,000 American and tens of thousands more Iraqi lives. The mid-term elections of 2006 overturned the 12-year Republican majority in Congress, and the 2008 Presidential election resulted in the inauguration of one of the few nationally prominent politicians to have unambiguously opposed the invasion of Iraq from its conception. Valerie Plame's glamorous, dangerous life as a spy, though, is over. In 2006, Plame and Wilson moved out of the media spotlight of Washington. to Sante Fe, N.M., where they raise their twins, now nine years old.

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1. 16 Words
2. Something's Wrong
3. They Meet
4. The Vice President's Request
5. The Trip To Niger
6. The New York Times
7. The Leak: The Novak Article
8. Plame's Name
9. Becoming A Spy
10. Spy Training
11. Assignments
12. The Administration Strikes Back
13. SSCI Report
14. Plame In The Spotlight
15. The Investigation
16. Administration Tactics
17. The Book And The CIA