Valerie Plame warms up at the Carpenter Center

It’s funny: four years after Valerie Plame was outed by Scooter Libby, Karl Rove, Ari Fleischer and Dick Armitage as a covert operative of the CIA working in nuclear counter-proliferation, I forget there are people who haven’t quite heard of the affair.

“Valerie Plame . . .” friends would say when I told them I would be interviewing her. “Remind me . . .”

My pleasure!

Joe Wilson, former ambassador to Iraq and diplomat in Africa, was sent by the CIA as a man supremely qualified to check into rumors that Saddam had tried to buy significant quantities of uranium in Niger. He found no evidence to support them, told the CIA, the CIA told the White House, the White House several times tried to put into speeches that it was so, CIA director George Tenet vetted the speeches each time and took the suspect intel out, and then in his State of the Union address on the eve of war, the President let fly with the famous 16 words: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

Wilson wrote a New York Times op-ed saying it wasn’t true, Tenet fell on his sword for having let the claim through the fourth time the White House had tried to get it past him, and very soon Robert Novak was printing in his syndicated column that Wilson’s wife—Valerie Plame—was an undercover operative of the CIA (he even included the name of her fake company, which was working on tracking loose nukes, and her middle initial) who supposedly had recommended her husband for the assignment.

How exactly that was supposed to cast aspersions on Wilson’s findings still hasn’t managed to penetrate my puny mortal brain. She explicitly denies recommending him, and . . . so what? Why on earth would it have mattered if she had? Was it like when the right wing talks in code about Dred Scott (equals abortion)—that somehow the fact that she had a job instead of doing the ladylike thing and swanning about the tennis courts spoke to the inner nutcase of The Base? Or . . . what?

I don’t know. I don’t understand those people at all.

In the aftermath, the Justice Department investigated on a complaint from the CIA, and reporter Matt Cooper of Time testified that Karl Rove leaked the info to him; Dick Armitage at State gossiped it to Bob Woodward; White House spokesman Ari Fleischer may have accidentally told a reporter or two (he also swore the president would fire anyone who was found to have leaked Plame’s name); Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff Scooter Libby was letting it fly all over town; and nobody was ever indicted except Libby, for perjury and obstruction of justice (which was what everybody was so mad at Bill Clinton for) and then he was convicted and immediately pardoned, and everybody else kept their jobs except for Valerie Plame, who after a 20-year career quit the CIA.

Plame is currently on a speaking tour to, well, speak about the whole affair and promote her book Fair Game. She’ll appear at the Carpenter Center, on the campus of Cal State Long Beach, Nov. 5.

Has there ever been an after-action report to determine if any harm has come to any of your contacts or your former company’s contacts overseas due to your outing?

A damage report was done. I did not see it, and I don’t believe any members of Congress have seen it.

It was odd: in the Village Voice, of all places, there was an article about the whole mess, and it started off by blaming Democrats in Congress, then your husband, and then called out all the hippies who hate the CIA until the White House outs an agent. But hippies have always been for tracking loose nukes, and—correct me—but that’s what counter-proliferation is, right?

[Laughs] Exactly. This has nothing to do with Democratic or Republican politics; it has everything to do with national security. Whether you’re a hippie or a Wall Street investment banker, you want your national security to be free of partisan political games.

How strange is it that the GOP claimed the CIA was a radical outfit out to get the president?

It’s laughable. Historically, just by the nature of the business, the Agency tends to be staffed with conservatives.

I’ve been reading your new book, Fair Game, and the CIA’s redactions [left in the book as an unintelligible series of gray bars, sometimes for pages] almost seem absurd. It’s like in Catch-22, when Yossarian is censoring the enlisted men’s letters and he makes up games like “redact all modifiers,” or sometimes “delete everything except ‘and’ and ‘the.’”

It’s really absurd. The Agency’s starting proposition was that I couldn’t acknowledge my Agency position prior to 1992, even though it’s all in the public record. The vast majority of their redactions deal with this issue rather than national security. [The Agency has in fact even redacted the meeting, courtship and marriage of Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame. It is very odd.] My publisher, Simon & Schuster, and I filed suit. We lost the first round, but we appealed. All the court documents are at FairGamePlame.com if you want to mention that! It really has been an Alice in Wonderland experience. Unfortunately, what we are seeing is how the Agency has allowed itself to be used as a tool in a political game.

What about all those red herrings the echo chamber kept throwing out: Rove is innocent of leaking your name because Dick Armitage was the one who talked to Bob Woodward.

Apparently the bright minds in Washington couldn’t accept there might have been parallel efforts. What Armitage did [gossiping with Woodward] was very foolish, but people would say, “Well, he’s no partisan gunslinger, so everybody must be innocent.”

I never understand how the smear was supposed to work: Was it a question of it being some posh junket? Because he needed his wife to get him work?

The notion of nepotism was designed to distract, to make it about Joe and Valerie Wilson rather than the 16 words. The very fact that we’re even discussing this demonstrates the right wing’s ability to stay on message. It is really very good.

VALERIE PLAME WILSON AT THE CARPENTER CENTER | 6200 ATHERTON BLVD | LONG BEACH 90815 | 562.985.4274 | MON 7PM | $10-35

Tags: carpenter center, cia, dick cheney, iraq war, karl rove, Long Beach, valerie plame