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Valerie Plame speaks at Stambaugh
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Valerie Plame, a former CIA operative who was outed in 2003 by Washington Post columnist Robert Novak, spoke Wednesday evening at Stambaugh Auditorium. Novak outed Plame after he was given her name by a State Department official. The leak ended her CIA career.
By Jeanne Starmack
Youngstown
When Valerie Plame began her career at the CIA in the 1980s, women were just beginning to make pathways into its division known as the Directorate of Operations.
It was a months-long process to get hired, with interviews by psychologists, physical examinations and background checks.
For Plame, though, the effort was well worth it. She came from a family with a strong background in civil service, and she saw it as an opportunity for interesting work and a chance to serve her country at the same time.
“It was an old boys’ network in the ’60s and ’70s,” she told a packed house Wednesday at Stambaugh Auditorium who came to hear her speak as part of Youngstown State University’s Skeggs Lecture series.
“Women had support roles,” she said — such as secretaries.
In the 1980s though, women were being recruited as operatives.
“I learned to spot and develop foreign recruits,” she said. “I traveled the world and recruited spies for the United States.”
Plame worked for the agency for 20 years.
She married former U.S. Ambassador Joe Wilson in 1998, and they are the parents of twins, a boy and a girl, born in 2000. They lived in an affluent Washington suburb.
Then, on July 14, 2003, life as she and her husband knew it ended.
Conservative columnist Robert Novak of The Washington Post had written a column outing her as a CIA operative. She was covert at the time, not overseas, but still traveling, she said. She knew, she said, when her husband threw the newspaper on their bed that morning that her career was over. She was worried about her assets still overseas, and the security of the couple’s then-3-year-old twins.
“I don’t know if you’ve ever been sucker-punched, but that’s what it felt like,” she said.
Why did Novak, who had been around Washington long enough to know better, she said, out a CIA agent?
“Political payback for a column by my husband,” she said. Her name had been given to Novak and a half-dozen other national journalists by Bush administration officials.
It’s documented history now. The CIA had sent Wilson to Africa to investigate a claim that the country had sold 500 tons of yellowcake uranium to Iraq. If true, it was proof enough the Bush administration needed to gain support for an invasion of Iraq because it was evidence Saddam Hussein was starting up a nuclear program.
Two weeks later, Wilson came back and said there was too much oversight of Niger’s uranium supply, and that no sale could have taken place.
But a year later in President George W. Bush’s state of the union address, he said the British government learned that Saddam recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
Also in 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell gave the United Nations false information about mobile weapons laboratories from an informant whom the intelligence community knew to be unreliable.
“I realized the U.S. was going to go to war, regardless of what the intelligence showed,” Plame said. “To commit our sons and daughters to die in our name is a most solemn decision, and I had to think he had information I didn’t.”
After the war began and weeks went by, Plame said, no weapons of mass destruction were found.
“Joe was asking his former colleagues at the State Department about the yellowcake and was told the president was referring to Niger,” she said.
In 2003, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice talked about an unnamed American ambassador who went to Niger and said the story about the yellowcake wasn’t true, but “‘it was down in the bowels of the agency’” and the administration knew nothing about it, Plame said.
So Wilson wrote his op-ed piece, saying that intelligence had been manipulated to mislead the American people into supporting the war.
Not everyone involved in the Plame outing has suffered fallout.
Novak was never prosecuted, nor was Richard Armitage of the State Department, who gave her name to him and the other journalists.
Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who was Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice related to the leak. No one was ever convicted of the leak itself. Bush eventually commuted Libby’s prison sentence, after saying earlier that he would fire whoever was responsible for outing Plame.
There was, also, according to the special prosecutor in the case, “a cloud over the vice president,” said Plame. She believes Libby took the fall for Cheney.
Today, Plame and her husband live in Santa Fe, N.M. She writes books and lectures and she tells people that what happened to her still matters.
“Why does it matter now?” she said. Because Islamic State “can be traced back to this ill-fated idea that we needed to conquer, invade and occupy Iraq. You have to question and hold your government to account for its deeds.”