Valerie Plame

MINNEAPOLIS: Valerie Plame Wilson was an undercover CIA agent working to curtail nuclear proliferation. In 2003 her career was assassinated. Plame's secret CIA job was illegally exposed by the Bush administration in an attempt to discredit her husband, Joe Wilson, who had accused the White House of falsifying intelligence to mislead the public and build a case for invading Iraq.

Wilson, a diplomat posted to Africa and Iraq during the first Bush administration, conducted the CIA's 2002 fact-finding mission to Niger, investigating rumors that Saddam Hussein's regime sought to buy 500 tons of yellowcake uranium. His report concluded the story was bogus.
When President Bush reiterated the Niger allegations - the now-famous 16 words - in his 2003 State of the Union address, Wilson went public with his findings in the New York Times. His wife's undercover status was blown in retaliation a week later.
The White House reprisal endangered Plame's foreign contacts, torpedoed the couple's careers, impugned their integrity and pushed their marriage to the brink.
Plame's life as a spy and her betrayal by the White House is now the subject of a Hollywood drama. "Fair Game," based on the couple's memoirs, stars Naomi Watts and Sean Penn, and was produced by Minneapolis film financier Bill Pohlad. I spoke with Plame and Wilson by phone from their Santa Fe, N.M., home last month.
Q: What was it like to go from a life of secrecy to unintended celebrity?
VPW: Very difficult. I went from a career where obviously discretion is paramount and literally overnight all that changed. I have found it very difficult to be a public person. One positive thing that has come out of it is I have been able to advocate publicly for things I was doing while at the CIA, which was counterproliferation. (Plame appeared as an onscreen expert in the anti-nuke documentary "Countdown to Zero" released earlier this year.)
Q: Some of your critics charge that you appear to be enjoying your celebrity too much, profiting from book and film deals and hobnobbing in Hollywood.
JW: I wrote an article asserting the administration had possibly skewed the intelligence to justify a war in which now over 4,000 Americans and 100,000 Iraqis have been killed. Two days after my article appeared, the White House press spokesman acknowledged that the 16 words should never have been in the State of the Union address. Everything else has come about as a consequence of defending myself and my wife and my family against their attacks. If they had never attacked me, we wouldn't be here. If they stop attacking me, they won't have to worry about the sequel.
VPW: None of this happened so we could write books, I assure you.
Q: The film is a portrait of a marriage under strain. How did it feel to see your marital issues dramatized?
VPW: It's very painful for us to watch those scenes in the movie, because they're powerful ones. When we met it really was love at first sight. That line, "They don't get to take my marriage," I really said that. My children are the most important things in my life.

Q: There's a scene where someone accosts Joe in a restaurant as he is having a business meeting and accuses Valerie of being a traitor. Did that actually happen?
JW: I was in a restaurant in Washington, D.C., and I got up and left. This person went over to the people I was having lunch with and said, "If you work with Wilson you'll never work in this town again." But that actual confrontation did not happen.
Q: Director Doug Liman's father, Arthur Liman, was chief counsel for the Senate Iran-Contra hearings in the mid-1980s. Did his deep ties to Washington help him understand the mentality of the city in ways other filmmakers might not?
VPW: We knew who his father was and we had known his work previously. He made it clear he wanted this to be entertainment. He wanted people to see this film, not just some art-house flick. But he was also very dedicated to truth and accuracy, much more than the way the CIA is portrayed in "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" or "The Bourne Identity."
Q: Did the actors meet with you to study your voice and mannerisms?
JW: I spent a lot of time with Sean both here in Santa Fe and in New York.
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