Valerie Plame Wilson, retired CIA operations officer, told her story of public service and work in the intelligence community before the Iraq war to a capacity crowd in the Hughes-Trigg theater Tuesday night.
Plame said that it is not good for CIA operatives to be well known. She is however, in the public eye for the incident in which her husband, Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador, wrote a column in the New York Times entitled “What I Didn’t Find in Africa.”
The column called into question the Bush administration’s rationale behind believing Sadam Hussein was buying yellowcake uranium from Africa for a nuclear weapons program. Wilson had previously gone to Africa for the CIA to investigate the very claim of yellowcake sale and found to it be bogus.
After the column ran on July 6, 2003, Robert Novak wrote a response in a syndicated column for the Washington Post and named Plame as Wilson’s wife and outted her as a CIA operative.
Novak’s public disclosure of Plame’s then-classified identity led to what was known as the “Plame affair” and a CIA leak grand jury investigation.
Plame agreed to tell her story at the Raggio lecture and began with why she decided to join the CIA in the first place.
“I grew up in a household where civil service was regarded as a noble practice,” Plame said. “Implicitly there was this idea that you should serve your country.”
Plame said the CIA offered her a unique chance to serve her country without having to be in the public eye. She said that it was a thankless job, but could help a lot of people.
Plame took the captivated audience through her early training at the CIA calling it “the farm” and comparing the army style training she received to “extreme camp for adults.”
The story of the “Plame Affair” began on Feb. 2, 2002, when her husband was selected for a mission to Africa to investigate the yellowcake sale. Upon her husband’s return, Plame said that her husband found no evidence of such a sale going on in Africa.
Plame moved through 2002 when she was appointed to the head of what she called the “Iraq task force” to “the infamous 16 words in January of 2003.”
She said in the President’s State of the Union Address President Bush said, “the British government has learned that Sadam Hussein has sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa”
Plame remembered questioning the speech finding it “weird,” especially after her husband found nothing during his trip to Africa.
Plame then recalled former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s infamous speech to the United Nations to “try and sell the world on the Iraq war.”
“I was at CIA headquarters watching with rapt attention,” Plame said. “As I watched it unfold, my heart turned. It was very clear that what he was basing his arguments on was very weak and patchy, I knew from all the intelligence we had.
“To this point I had not looked at the broader picture, and for the first time I found myself saying that what I knew didn’t match up with what the administration was saying.”
The U.S. went to war shortly after Powell’s UN address in March of 2003.
Plame said that her husband used all of his contacts to find out why the administration’s information did not match up with what he had found.
After National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice dismissively said that some “lower-level CIA bowels might have known about the falseness of the info” and warnings from journalists that the story was about to break, Wilson decided to write the op/ed piece Plame said.
Plame discussed her discovery that she had been named in the Washington Post column and the beginning of the end of her career at the CIA.
“On July 14, Joe came in our bed room early in the morning and just said, ‘well the SOB did it,'” Plame recalled. “I am immediately thinking that the career that I love is now over, and even more the safety of my twins sleeping next door, what happens to them?”
In January 2006, Plame decided to resign from the CIA and “turn the page in her life.”
She then turned to write her memoirs of all the events and her career at the CIA when the agency had deemed that she could not acknowledge her employment before 2002 in her book, making it hard to write a memoir, she joked.
“I felt like I had fallen down the rabbit hole; black was white and white was black,” she said. “Apparently I didn’t exist and just fell from the sky in January 2002.
Plame has since filed class-action law suits against the CIA to get her memoirs published.
Plame closed with the message urging young people toward a career in public service despite what had happened to her.
“I would urge any and all young people toward a career in public service. We need all hands on deck right now,” Plame said. “There are too many things that need to be fixed, I know it sounds corny but it is true: you are working for something bigger than yourself.”
