Former Spy's Memoir Contains a Paradox

If Valerie Plame's memoir was intended to lay to rest the conflicting accounts of how she came to be outed as a covert CIA agent, it fails. Instead, she paints herself as a naïve, whinging victim of circumstance married to an angry, obstreperous egotist who volunteered to involve himself in a vicious battle between the White House and the CIA over how President Bush came to make untrue statements in a State of the Union speech.

"Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House" (Simon and Schuster, $26) shows how mistaken her husband's judgment was. Not long after Ambassador Joseph Wilson wrote a piece for the New York Times condemning the president for suggesting, on advice, that Saddam Hussein was trying to buy yellowcake uranium in order to make nuclear weapons, his business collapsed, and his marriage was in tatters.

"The frequent fights, seething accusations, hurtful words, and entrenched bitterness pushed us both to the brink," Ms. Plame writes. And she is talking about her fights with her husband, not Karl Rove.

"Joe is a formidable opponent in any circumstance, and I felt I was always on the losing side, unable to make my case coherently because so much emotion was involved and so much at stake personally. When communication nearly halted entirely, it became obvious that our marriage was in deep trouble. We retreated further into our shells and each began to contemplate life without the other."

Ms. Plame found herself pinned in a shooting match between the White House and the CIA, led by the flawed George Tenet at the time, after her husband reported from Niger on whether Iraq had been trying to buy yellowcake.

Whether Ms. Plame, an agency expert on weapons of mass destruction, was responsible for his going to Niger is one of the key mysteries in the whole affair. So did she send him? It depends upon which page you read. Page 168: "I neither suggested Joe nor recommended him." Yet on page 109, "a mid-level reports officer" said to her, "What about talking to Joe about it? … The reports officer and I walked over to the office of the [redacted] Chief to discuss our available plans of action. Bob, our boss, listened carefully and then suggested we put together a meeting with Joe and the appropriate Agency and State officers."

And on page 186, Ms. Plame explains she wrote an e-mail that read: "My husband has good relations with both the [Niger] PM and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity."

When this e-mail came to light, in a Senate Intelligence Committee report, the high-strung Mr. Wilson once again launched into a temper tantrum. "Midway through the silent meal, Joe abruptly got up, dumped his unfinished plate in the sink, and left the room in a wordless rage. ... Despite my best efforts to explain the innocence of the e-mail, Joe was too upset to listen. He just glared at me."

Mr. Wilson comes out badly according to his wife's account: invariably abusing her, storming off, or on the verge of tears, and when the White House concedes that the yellowcake mention was wrong, he does not accept victory graciously but needs to hurl himself angrily onto the national stage to draw the apology to everyone's notice. While Ms. Plame is left home in Washington looking after 7-year-old twins, anxious and exposed, her job in jeopardy, he is gallivanting around America talking to conspiracy theorists and peaceniks in community colleges. Ms. Plame was only one of many eventually drawn into the mire. Soon, a reporter, Judith Miller, went to prison, Robert Novak lost his gig on CNN, and the vice president's aide, Lewis Libby, was found guilty of obstruction. Although the CIA, unsurprisingly, is shown to be not the most steadfast of employers, Ms. Plame's job remained safe until she chose to resign. The only time she was reprimanded was when she agreed to be photographed for the cover of "Vanity Fair," which she accepts was a poor decision.

When it emerged that Richard Armitage, a friend of Secretary Powell and no ally of Vice President Cheney, leaked Ms. Plame's status as a CIA agent, and not the Wilsons' suspects — Messrs. Rove, Cheney, and Libby — Ms. Plame turns on the Washington Post. "I was furious. I suddenly understood what it must have felt like to live in the Soviet Union," she writes.

Similar scattershot paranoia runs through the book, most conspicuously in the decision to replace each word redacted by the CIA with a thick grey line, to suggest unbearable censorship. The paradox — that the whole gist of Ms. Plame's argument is that it was profoundly wrong to break the oath of secrecy that protects employees of the agency — is quite missed on her.

nwapshott@nysun.com