FAIR GAME

Reviewed 11/14/2007

Fair Game, by Valerie Plame Wilson

FAIR GAME
Valerie Plame Wilson
Laura Rozen (Afterword)
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007

Rating:

4.5

High

ISBN-10 1-4165-3761-9 410pp. HC/FCI $26.00

A bit of background

Valerie Plame worked on countering nuclear proliferation as a CIA officer. Her beat was somewhere in Europe, and her status was NOC. This stands for "no operational cover" and it means that, had she been identified, there would have been no protection under diplomatic immunity; she would have been on her own. In 2003, she was identified — by Robert Novak, a columnist who learned about her from two Bush administration officials. This leak followed closely upon a column critical of the administration by her husband Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador.

There has been much disputation about details of the case: who really leaked her name, and at whose behest; whether that leak was justified; and even whether she really was operating undercover at the time. It's a tangled tale, and I'm not going to try and sort it out here. Suffice it to say that I support her side.1

In this book, she finally gets to tell her side — sort of. Every CIA officer agrees to submit any manuscripts they might wish published to the Agency for review. The valid reason for this is to protect national security assets, including agents who might be put at risk by disclosure. However, it can also serve to hide embarrassment, and often is used for that purpose. Seldom is publication of the entire manuscript forbidden; in most cases passages containing sensitive information are blacked out — a process known as redaction.

Fair Game is heavily redacted. In some cases, two or three successive pages have been blanked out in their entirety. More often the "implacable melanostripes" cover a paragraph, or just a few words. Sometimes I can guess that those shorter obscurations conceal a date or location, the name of a colleague of Plame's, or perhaps some clue such as the name of a local dish that would give away the country where she was working. Such redaction makes sense, though it might be obsolete caution. But there are also redactions that are apparently nonsensical. Hiding Valerie Plame's height or weight, or the fact that she is Caucasian, would serve no purpose2 even if that information was not a matter of public record. (I discuss this in more detail below.)

Even putting aside the redacted passages, the chapters describing Plame's early career seem somehow disjointed, as if she had struggled to compress everything into too few pages and ended up dropping important details and neglecting transitions between episodes. This is in sharp contrast to her writing when she turns to the leadup to the current war in Iraq. From that point, beginning with Chapter 7, Trip to Niger, the narrative flows smoothly and coherently. I can only surmise the reason for the difference, but I believe it is that the early chapters were the subject of so much redaction and rewriting that they suffered structurally.3

Impact on Plame and her family

It is well known that exposing Valerie Plame resulted in potential risk to her and those with whom she worked while covert,4 and the stressful loss of her cherished career. But this was not the only harm that exposure brought to the Wilsons. After leaving the foreign service, Joe Wilson started a private consultancy business, and the notoriety and controversy attending his battle with the administration drove away many prospective clients. These factors also put a severe strain on their marriage.

As the attacks rained down on us, Joe took the worst of the barrages, by far. The hard Right went after his international consulting business. * * * Over the course of 2004, Joe's domestic and international clients left one by one, uncomfortable with his notoriety. His enemies learned who some of his clients were and published their names in their right-wing blogs, bringing them unwanted attention. New business dwindled to nothing. A nonpartisan Washington think tank that dealt with Middle Eastern policy did not renew Joe's unpaid position as an "adjunct scholar"—implying that a connection with Joe wouldn't be good for fundraising. At one point, a close business partner of Joe's was contacted by a powerful Republican operative and told in no uncertain terms that his continued association with Joe might cost him a valuable international contract. * * * A longtime friend who ran an international consulting firm listed Joe on her Web site as a senior advisor. During a meeting with a potential client who happened to be a Republican with ties to the administration, she was questioned closely and skeptically about Joe and his involvement in her business. Joe's speaking engagements, upon which we had begun to rely more heavily for family income, all but dried up. Republican benefactors threatened to withdraw their support for universities if Joe were allowed to speak on campus. The few places that asked for Joe wanted him to speak for free, usually giving him a coffee mug or a plaque as a thank-you. The concerted attacks ultimately began to affect the sales of Joe's book. * * * By the end of the summer, the damage had been done and Joe's business, which relied so heavily on personal recommendations and discretion, was on life support.

– Pages 194-196

The upshot is that Valerie Plame Wilson's memoir is much like that of her husband: it describes her early life (understandably, in somewhat less detail than his) and focuses on the events surrounding the leak and her reactions to them. She devotes ten of her sixteen chapters to that ongoing story, and covers it in great detail. The very honest narrative reveals a woman who is bright, adaptable, competitive, who was an asset to the CIA and to her country. It makes a convincing case that she and her family were treated shabbily by the Bush administration for selfish and short-sighted reasons.

An Afterword by Laura Rozen reprises Plame's life and career and reveals some of the information redacted by the CIA. It is a useful adjunct to the main text and is thorough in citing its sources. An Appendix reproduces some documents relevant to the case.

The book has defects in it. A number of minor errors are listed as usual on my Errata page. But the chief shortcomings are the disjointedness I mentioned above, and the fact that there is no index. The story continues to unfold as the Wilsons, now out of government, pursue civil action against various Bush administration officials. Resolution of its complex questions is some ways off, and perhaps will not arrive for decades, when crucial documents are declassified. Meanwhile, despite extensive redaction which undoubtedly conceals information relevant to Plame's case, Fair Game is worth reading for an insight into the matter that is free of Republican distortion.

1 I will mention that the book includes a two-and-one-half page list (pages 187-189) of the findings of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq. These include the finding that Iraq already had 550 tons of uranium oxide. If this were true, why would Iraq want to buy more, especially from Niger? (Of course, as George Piro revealed in January 2008, the WMD threat was a gambit by Saddam Hussein to deter Iran from attacking — a gambit that worked only too well on Western intelligence agencies.)
2 What I mean is that identifying someone solely by their height, weight and ethnic background is next to impossible. This assumes no picture of them is public. True, having a picture known to be the person in question makes it easy, and the CIA was correct to criticize Plame for her Vanity Fair photo shoot. But by then, thanks to Novak, enough information was already public to permit anyone who wanted to identify her to do it without working too hard.
3 Or, conceivably, her recollection of that period of her life was affected by her postpartum depression after the birth of her twins, which she describes in Chapters 5 and 6. But I doubt that.
4 As always when covert operatives are exposed, the CIA has done a damage assessment. But it is top secret; even Plame herself has not seen it.
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