Fair Game; My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House [From the Dust Jacket]

Julie Brothers (Jacket photograph) and Christopher New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007. First Simon & Schuster Hardcover Edition [stated]. Second Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. ix, [3], 411, [9] pages. Text has been redacted by the CIA. Publisher's Note. Footnotes. Illustrations (most in color). Appendix. Afterword by Laura Rozen provides historical background and recounts portions of Valerie Plame Wilson's life and career that she was unable to include herself. Signed by Valerie Plame Wilson on title page. Valerie Elise Plame Wilson (née Plame, August 13, 1963) is a writer, spy novelist, and former operations officer who worked at the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). As the subject of the 2003 Plame affair, also known as the CIA leak scandal, Plame's identity as covert officer of the CIA was leaked to the press by members of the administration of George W. Bush and subsequently made public. In the aftermath of the scandal, Richard Armitage in the U. S. Department of State was identified as one source of the information, and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Chief of Staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, was convicted of lying to investigators. Laura Rozen is Al-Monitor's diplomatic correspondent based in Washington, DC. She has written for Yahoo! News, Politico and Foreign Policy. On July 6, 2003, four months after the United States invaded Iraq, former ambassador Joseph Wilson's now historic op-ed, "What I Didn't Find in Africa," appeared in The New York Times. A week later, conservative pundit Robert Novak revealed in his newspaper column that Ambassador Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, was a CIA operative. The public disclosure of that secret information spurred a federal investigation and led to the trial and conviction of Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, and the Wilsons' civil suit against top officials of the Bush administration. Some of what has been reported about her has been frighteningly accurate, serving as a pungent reminder to the Wilsons that their lives are no longer private. The CIA still deems much of the detail of Valerie's story to be classified. An Afterword by national security reporter Laura Rozen provides a context for Valerie's own story. Derived from a Publishers Weekly article: This book has been heavily redacted by the CIA. In order to understand Plame it helps to read journalist Laura Rozen's afterword basically a straight forward Plame biography first. Plame's story is now part of the history of the Iraq War. An undercover CIA agent, she suggested that her husband, former Iraq ambassador and Africa expert Joseph Wilson at the urging of the vice president's office be sent to Niger to investigate whether Saddam Hussein tried to obtain yellow cake uranium one of the Bush administration's apocalyptic talking points for the war. After he wrote an op-ed article in the New York Times called What I Did Not Find in Africa, Plame was outed as a CIA operative by columnist Robert Novak. In a drawn out melodrama, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald rounded up the usual Beltway suspects before a grand jury, but eventually Lewis I. (Scooter) Libby, VP Cheney's chief-of-staff, was the only one sentenced in the case for perjury and obstruction of justice. Plame's personal nightmare began with Bush's 2003 State of the Union address when the president declared the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa the 16 famous words which directly contradicted Wilson's Niger findings. When Condoleezza Rice denied on Meet the Press that anyone in the White House knew that the Niger pancake uranium stories were untrue, Plame says it was the last straw for her husband and he wrote his Times piece. Kudos go to special prosecutor Fitzgerald and barbs go to Judith Miller of the New York Times. Plame also has harsh words for the Washington Post and its editorial writer Fred Hiatt: I suddenly understood what it must have felt like to live in the Soviet Union and have only the state propaganda entity, Pravda, as the source of news about the world. She continues to batter the press at what came out at the Libby trial, which showed how eagerly [journalists] accept spoon fed information from official sources...The trial did not show American journalism at its finest hour. Plame is blunt in acknowledging that the controversy surrounding them put a strain on their marriage, which seemed balanced on a knife's edge. There was apparently resentment on Wilson's part that his CIA wife could not defend him against some of the attacks. She also reveals the intimate details of her post-partum depression which followed the birth of her twins in 2000. Plame seems paranoid about events that have happened to her. Was an IRS audit normal or was it triggered by something else? Why did the bolts on a brand new deck suddenly come out? And why did the CIA almost scuttle her book through censorship. Plame asks: Was the White House also responsible for the stalling of my book? Condition: Very good / Very good.

Keywords: Valerie Plame, Joseph Wilson, Robert Novak, CIA, Scooter Libby, George W. Bush, Richard Armitage, Espionage, Intelligence Operations, Covert Operations, Secret Agents

[Book #85903]

Price: $125.00

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