July 14, 2003

She wrote a book. Of course she wrote a book---she was a beautiful, blonde, CIA agent. And she was at the center of one of the ugliest political, even criminal, maneuvers, in United States history, as the White House pushed the country into a war based on falsified data.

Valerie Plame Wilson, born on April 19 1963, saw her cover blown by a newspaper column published on July 14, 2003. Novak in his Washington Times column, outed her as a CIA agent. I am not aware of any tally regarding the effects of this on her contacts in the field. After the trial, her career, of almost twenty years, destroyed, she, with some help, wrote a book: Fair Game: How a Top CIA Agent Was Betrayed by Her Own Government (2008).

Here she relates that she began the Officer Training Classes involved in this career path, in 1985. She reflects on the other women in her classes:

[The] female case officers were either former secretaries who doggedly worked their way out from behind their desks to field work, or the wives of case officers who got tired of being the only ones at home with the children while their husbands were out having all the fun being spy masters. There were a rare few who did not fit into these categories, but these older tough-as-nails women who had triumphed through the entrenched discrimination scared me....I occasionally came into contact with them during my early interims, and I admired their ambition and perseverance, but it was clear that they paid for it with their personal happiness. Most went home in the late evening to a cat. In my class of 50 or so, just fewer than half were female. Of that number about four were destined to go into operations.

Beautiful. Check.

Smart. Meeh. She doesn't sound very insightful to me. Oh don't mean Valerie, I mean the cats she references.