Outed spy Valerie Plame reinvents herself as anti-nuke activist

When Valerie Plame lived in the cloak-and-dagger world of espionage, she collected information for the CIA in an effort to stop the spread of nuclear weapons.

Plame managed top-secret covert programs designed to keep terrorists and rogue nation states from acquiring these weapons of mass destruction.

That stopped when officials in the George W. Bush Administration leaked her identity in retaliation for an op-ed her diplomat husband had written — called “What I did not find in Africa” — that said there was no evidence Iraq had purchased uranium from Niger, something Bush had used as justification for invading Iraq.

Plame’s life as an undercover CIA agent was over and she was transferred to a desk job at headquarters and left the agency a few years later. But she never lost her passion as an advocate for nuclear nonproliferation. She’s come to the Twin Cities to talk about that, as well as the rigors experienced by women in the CIA.

Plame, 61, will speak Tuesday at the Woman’s Club of Minneapolis, Norway House and Macalester College. But speaking engagements are just one of the many things Plame has been involved in since she was stripped of her anonymity in 2003 by conservative columnist Robert Novak, who identified Plame as a covert CIA agent.  

Plame worked in Europe and other countries under what’s known as “nonofficial cover,” which means they frequently use fake job descriptions and fake names and work two jobs — that of their “cover” and that involving their CIA duties.

Those include handling foreign agents in the field and recruiting new ones. Agents like Plame do not have any diplomatic protection and can be executed or imprisoned by a hostile regime.

So, leaking the name of an undercover agent is also a federal crime, punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Former vice president chief of staff Lewis “Scooter” Libby was convicted of the leak to Novak. His sentence was commuted by Bush and he received a full pardon by Donald Trump in 2018.

“I’m pretty sure Donald Trump had no idea who he was,” Plame told MinnPost.

Her outing shook Washington, D.C., and resulted in books by Plame and her former husband and ambassador, Joe Wilson, as well as a movie based on those books called “Fair Game” in which Sean Penn played Wilson and Naomi Watts played Plame.

“I feel like things have barely slowed down,” she said of the two decades since her cover was blown in what was known as “the Plame Affair.”

Plame also wrote two spy novels — “Blowback” and “Burned” — and tried her hand at politics, running unsuccessfully for a congressional seat in New Mexico, where she lives in Santa Fe. “Thankfully, I didn’t win,” she said. “Congress seems to be a crazy place.”

She said fate took her down a different path. “You play the hand you are dealt,” Plame said.

A new no-nuke movement

Once glad to be ignored, the former spy now welcomes the limelight if it helps her promote her anti-nuke cause and a documentary called “Countdown to Zero” that focuses on the real threat of weapons of mass destruction.

“Despite everything that happened, I still have a wide streak of idealism,” she said.

Plame said the possibility of nuclear war is growing as the world’s stockpile of nuclear weapons grows. Right now, a U.S. president is the “sole authority” of the deployment of nuclear weapons,” she said. Plame said it’s clear that a strike on the United States must be handled quickly, but she is lobbying for the elimination of “sole authority” when it comes to an offensive strike by the United States.

“We have shown that we are not trustworthy,” she said. “And I believe we are in the most dangerous moment as far as a nuclear threat since the Cuban missile crisis … many of the guardrails that we had during the Cold War have fallen to the wayside.”

Plame said she came from a military family that imbued her with a sense of public duty and the opportunity to travel to different countries. She was recruited by the CIA right after her graduation from Penn State.

“I really had no idea what I was signing up for,” she said. While she said she “fell into” the world of espionage, she eventually “realized that I was good at it.”

“It’s not a standard office job,” she said “If you screw up, really bad things can happen.”

Plame still has connections to the CIA. She holds “Spies, Lies and Nukes” conferences with the help of some of her former CIA colleagues and other experts on national security. The last one was in Santa Fe.

Next year, however, the conference will be held on a cruise ship on the Mediterranean with ports of call in Malta, Greece, Turkey and other places soaked in espionage history.

Onboard panels on disguises, how to recruit a foreign agent and other things spies are trained on will be included, Plame said.

The post Outed spy Valerie Plame reinvents herself as anti-nuke activist appeared first on MinnPost.