Fair Game? | CIA | Spy Sisters
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Welcome to True Spies. Week by week, mission by mission, you'll hear the true stories behind the world's greatest espionage operations. You'll meet the people who navigate this secret world. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position?

This is True Spies. The morning that the article came out, Joe came into our bedroom very early and tossed the paper on the bed. And he said, "Well, the son of a bitch did it." And I just felt like I had been sucker punched. I was immediately afraid for the safety of my twins. Episode 3: Fair Game. My name is Valerie Plame. I was a covert CIA operations officer.

My first job overseas was as a case officer. My last job was as a manager of some extremely compartmented secret programs that dealt with nuclear proliferation. In true spy fashion, Valerie Plame is underselling herself. Don't let the word manager fool you.

Valerie was part of the effort to track the proliferation of weapons in Iran. She was part of the team that exposed Pakistani physicist A.Q. Khan, who illegally sold nuclear weapons to some of America's most dangerous opponents.

And by the time she was forced out of the CIA, she was head of operations of the Iraq Joint Task Force. Over time, I developed an expertise in nuclear counterproliferation, essentially making sure that bad guys, whether they are terrorists, black marketeers, rogue nation states, that they did not acquire nuclear capacity or nuclear weapons. And I loved what I did.

She was right where the action was post-9/11. And then, in 2003, her brilliant career was brought to an abrupt standstill. Fed to the media hounds in a game of political football, Valerie Plame's cover was blown. Well, the covert career was done. It was over. I could no longer go overseas.

It was sad because I wasn't ready to leave. I still loved what I did. I believed in it. As the CIA likes to say, you know, not everyone knows our successes. Everyone knows our failures. So this episode of True Spies is about what happens when politics and intelligence collide and the spy becomes the scapegoat.

And it's a slightly unusual one because our spy cannot talk about anything to do with her career before 2002. Even basic, innocuous details like when she joined the CIA. Given the agency stipulations, I am not permitted to say myself. Or how long she served. I cannot say what years precisely that I served in the CIA. So you're going to have to trust me to fill in the blanks.

Valerie Plain joined the CIA in 1985, a time of transition and social change as the agency realized women could gather intelligence too, not just control the schedules of the men who traditionally had. Like many of our true spies, public service was in her blood. My father was an Air Force officer, career. He served in World War II in the South Pacific. He was a military officer.

My brother is a Vietnam veteran. He was a Marine, wounded. And my mother was a public school teacher. So when the CIA asked me

To join their ranks, I was thrilled because it felt like another way that I could serve my nation in my family's tradition. And it also seemed like it was a lot more interesting than whatever my friends were doing. 250 applicants made the cut that year, and Valerie was in the vanguard of women recruited specifically to go into operations into the CIA. The CIA is essentially broken into four main areas of mission.

One is a Directorate of Operations. Operations. They are the ones that are responsible for human intelligence. That's the raison d'être of the CIA. They are the ones who spot, assess, develop and recruit foreign assets. There's a Directorate of Intelligence. Intelligence. They are responsible for collecting the intelligence from the sources, assessing its quality, assigning it at certain values, and then redistributing it throughout the intelligence community.

There's a director of science and technology. Science and technology. Which is sort of the, all the cue from James Bond sort of things, all the cool gadgets and spy gear and overhead satellite stuff. And then finally director of administration. Administration. And they make the whole thing run. Are you adventurous? Love to travel?

Have a punch on for role play. Then being a case officer is the job for you. It's their job to recruit foreign assets, mark them, stalk them, charm them, and lure them in to provide critical intelligence to the policymakers back home. So how did the CIA spot a future case officer in the young, all-American Valerie? Perhaps it was this that did it.

I still and always will remember an episode whereby I'm being asked possible vignettes or how would you handle this? So the woman who that day happened to be interviewing me was a very proper older woman. I think she had a twin set on, set of pearls, her gray hair and a very nice bob. And she asked me the following question.

Okay, what would you do, Valerie, if you are in an operational meeting with an asset, a man, you're in a seedy hotel room, he's passing you very secret papers, and all of a sudden you hear pounding at the door and you hear, police, open up! What would you do? Pause. Before we hear what Valerie did, what would you do in her shoes?

You have five seconds to come up with an answer. Five, four, three, two, one. I wasn't very worldly in many ways, but I realized the only good reason a man and a woman would be together in a hotel room is, well, there's only one good reason. So I said, look, everyone takes off their clothes real fast and jumps into bed. Was that what you were thinking?

Okay, so you've shown you can think on your feet. What else makes you stand apart from the rest? They're looking for a pretty unique sort of set of characteristics. That you are a risk taker, and yet you're not going to go out so far beyond what you've been tasked with that you become vulnerable.

unstable or go far beyond your brief. On one hand, you like the framework and the security of what a government job will give you. On the other hand, you are asking people to lie for you and on behalf of your government. So while you have to have

the utmost integrity, personal integrity, you're asking people to do things that you yourself never would. So it's a unique set of characteristics. Of course, you can't tell anyone about it, except some of your colleagues, not even all of them. So you have to be pretty self-sufficient, pretty self-motivated. And it goes without saying, your loyalty to your country always comes first.

In 1989, our fledgling case officer landed her first foreign posting in a city of smoky cafes and subterfuge. Oh, I loved it. I loved it. Valerie's not at liberty to tell you where that was, but I can reveal she was sent to Athens in Greece. The late 80s was a time of significant danger for US officials in the country.

Over the past decade, the Greek leftist terrorist group 17N, 17 November to give them their full name, had killed several US officials, beginning with the CIA station chief in 1975. Just a year before Valery arrived, the US Embassy's naval attaché was killed by a booby trap in his armoured car.

It was during her time in Greece that Valerie cemented some potentially life-saving habits into her daily routine. I like to think I have pretty good situational awareness. I can still do surveillance detection in my vehicle. I'm always paying very close attention to where the exits and entrances are. If something should go wrong, I'm out of there fast.

Valerie's job in Athens was, in essence, to recruit well-informed locals to report to her with inside information, political machinations and insights to help the U.S. government better understand and influence political developments in Greece. I think I can say that a lot of my portfolio was focused on politics.

counter-terrorist efforts because this country had not only its own set of indigenous terrorists, a lot of other terrorists from other countries would pass through. It was quite a large meeting point for many subversive groups. So I felt that that was really meaningful. You're in a foreign country. You're just working out the lay of the land, but you're on the clock.

It's your job to bring business to the agency, and business means sources. It's been suggested to you that a certain person who frequents a certain cafe might be willing to spill his country's secrets. It's your job to reel him in. How are you going to do it? Think back. What have you been taught? What do you need? First and foremost, a genuine curiosity about other people. You can't fake it.

I really am interested in other people and what their stories are and how they got there and what drives them. Everyone's got a story. You just need to ask. And some people are quite lonely. And maybe you're the first person to ask about them in a really long time. And if they're in a position of access to something that the U.S. intelligence community would want, all the better. It definitely takes patience.

You kind of have it or you don't, where you have that curiosity about other people that is sincere. You have to have common sense, which is not so common, just practical sense. How do you do that? And you have to be able to think out a couple steps beyond of, you know, I want to get to this next meeting. And then what do I want out of that? And then three steps beyond that.

They try to teach you this stuff at the farm to a certain extent, but ultimately it is on-the-job training. You have to understand their reason for talking to the enemy. It could be money. Simple greed. It could be, my child is sick and you have medicine. It could be ego.

Someone finally is paying attention to you. Or it could be a little bit of all of them, which it generally is. And you have to feel that and understand that and be able to be the solution to their problem. And everyone has a problem. And you are there to help them get out of that problem.

Can you be their best friend, their therapist, or their financial advisor? And just like an actor, learn new skills in order to inhabit their lives? Case officers are famous for you. Oh, you love tennis? I love tennis! Tennis is fantastic! Let's play. And then you're off. Birdwatching? Oh my gosh. I love birdwatching. Where do you go? Can we go together? Next thing you know, you're their new best friend.

Can you forgive their sins and protect them regardless? Look, you know, they're not great people. Sometimes they're really awful people. But nevertheless, they're taking a huge risk, typically, to do this. And they should be protected at all costs. Their identity, their secret. They should be treated with the respect that they deserve by doing this. I never felt that I had to compromise my values.

in any way. Yes, you are lying. So let's start with that. But it always felt like there was a very good reason to do that, that it wasn't whimsical, particularly as I started working on more and more on nuclear counterproliferation issues or biological or chemical weapons issues, warfare stuff. I figured what I was doing was

was on the better side of that scale. How do you slowly peel away each layer of your cover? Every mask you remove opens you up further to exposure, to eventually let the person know who you really are and what they could do for you. It's very nerve-wracking the first time you recruit someone, or at least try to. But the truth is, you should already know the answer.

You should know the answer by the time you get to that. Because if it goes wrong, it can go spectacularly wrong. And it doesn't always go the way you think it will, but you should have worked toward this so ideally the person you're recruiting looks at you when you put down the question finally and they should say, "Oh God, what took you so long?" In 1992, Valerie left Athens to return to the US.

Again, an understatement.

Whatever Valerie got up to in Greece, it brought her to the attention of her superiors back in Washington, D.C., and she was chosen to become a non-official cover officer, or NOC, the most clandestine position in the agency. Valerie, of course, can neither confirm nor deny this, but she can give us a more general guide to the sort of covers an operations officer might use throughout the course of her career. It just depends on the circumstance.

On one end of that spectrum, you have very light cover where it's hardly backstopped at all. You can just walk into, say, some sort of reception and you maybe have a card with you. And it says that you are Ringo Starr and that you run a consulting service or whatever it might be. I mean, if they Google you, you're dead, but it's for that moment, very light cover.

And then at the other end of the scale would be what we call a knock officer, non-official cover. That is where you have no affiliation with the U.S. government, but you are doing some of the most sensitive, dangerous work because the U.S. government can deny, there's deniability. And that sort of cover takes, frankly, quite a long time and a great deal of patience to build.

and to maintain. It's very, very difficult to do, but it's absolutely necessary. Those under knock cover have a much higher degree of risk because they don't have a get out of jail free card. If something should happen and it's in the US interest to deny that they had anything to do with it, well, you might be sitting in jail for quite a while. So you erase all visible connections with your government,

You give up the diplomatic immunity that all field officers are entitled to, and you begin your double life. For Valerie, that meant developing and inhabiting a new private sector career and professional identity. One that would serve as a useful cover to meet and develop potential sources of intelligence value to the agency, without revealing herself as an agent of the US government.

It takes time and it takes knowledge. What you learned during training won't be enough to pass yourself off as an expert. So where do you start? You go back to school. I have a graduate degree, master's degree from the London School of Economics and another graduate degree from the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium. European Studies and International Relations. In 1996, Valerie settled in Brussels,

and began her public career as a consultant. Her business card described her as VP International for a small petroleum-related company. But in 1997, Valerie was ordered home and invited to work in the new Counter-Proliferation Division, handpicked by the division chief.

Counterproliferation Division was stood up in the mid-90s when it was shortly after there was a sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway. And it was the first time the U.S. government really focused on this notion of weapons of mass destruction, either chemical, biological, or nuclear. So they set up this division that was focused on that issue globally. My area became primarily the nuclear threat.

When I joined the Canopyliferation Division, I was given a choice of working either on the North Korea issues of nuclear proliferation or Iraq. And so I said, "Oh, I'll do the Iraq thing," simply because I thought I had a little bit more understanding.

And it turned into the hottest place to be. An early win for the team was the takedown of Pakistani nuclear engineer A.Q. Khan, who for decades had been making a personal fortune by selling high-tech nuclear components to Libya and North Korea, among others. If not for A.Q. Khan, we really wouldn't have to worry too much about North Korea or Iranian nuclear programs. And I worked on that team

for some years to really bring him to justice and to shut down his nuclear peddling ring. In October 2003, the US government boarded several ships off the coast of Italy and seized the cargo. Thousands of black market parts for centrifuges, components bound for Muammar Gaddafi's secret nuclear research facilities. Worth tens of millions of dollars, the ships were just two days away from their destination.

That led to Libya saying, "Okay, we're going to renounce any sort of nuclear program. You know, we're done. You caught us. Our hand was in the cookie jar. We're not going to do it anymore." And so that was a huge turning point. And a personal win for Valerie. So who better to be made head of operations of the Iraq Joint Task Force? Her job? A simple one: find Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

I was traveling extensively and we were trying to figure out really what Saddam Hussein had. We knew he was boastful about his military and chemical and nuclear biological prowess, but we had very little intelligence. We had closed our embassy there after the first Gulf War in '91, and then he kicked the UN weapons inspectors out in 1998, so we had very little intelligence.

when 2002 came around and the Bush White House looked squarely at the CIA and said, "What do you got on Saddam Hussein and his nuclear program?" So I was in charge of the group of people trying to figure that out. Where were they buying or purchasing their materiel? Very little was made indigenously. How were they financing it? What was their state of research? And so forth.

So how do you do it? You draw on your experience as a case officer and you use all the resources at your disposal to recruit the people with access to the weapons programs. So they were everyone from key scientists as well as support people who might, although their title was not impressive, they were in a really important position to be able to say, oh, yeah, they just ordered weapons.

a thousand box of widgets that are going to be delivered to Abu Dhabi and then put on a ship that will bring them up ultimately to Iraq. But the intelligence coming in was overwhelming. In the run-up to the war with Iraq, there was so much information coming over the transom because people all over the world knew that the United States government was going to pay them good money for any sort of intelligence on Iraq.

So that was the first day of hunting season, if you will. Everyone shows up. Everyone's got something to say. Everyone's trying to peddle their information for money or whatever their agenda is. So we spent a lot of time trying to validate what we consider to be some of the best intelligence. What's the source? Can you corroborate it? Did you hear it again? Did you hear it from another source? And it frankly takes a lot of patience to do it properly.

And because there was such a rush toward war from the Bush White House, I always felt that we were behind where we needed to be to understand completely the picture of this, how far along Iraq was with their nuclear program. Because it takes time to develop those sources and to test them and to go back and double check them. And time is running away from you.

I remember at one point during the run-up in the months, crazy months before we went to war, we got intelligence from an Iraqi defector that he had been to an Iraqi biological weapons site where prisoners were being tied to their bed and tested with different BW agents. And he described a scene out of Dante's Hell. It just...

And then there was Curveball.

the Iraqi defector whose testimony allegedly convinced the administration to go to war. Hello, True Spies listener. This episode is made possible with the support of June's Journey, a riveting little caper of a game which you can play right now on your phone. Since you're listening to this show, it's safe to assume you love a good mystery, some compelling detective work, and

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And I absolutely love all the little period details packed into this world. I don't want to give too much away because the real fun of June's journey is seeing where this adventure will take you. But I've just reached a part of the story that's set in Paris.

Hello, listeners. This is Anne Bogle, author, blogger, and creator of the podcast, What Should I Read Next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week, I tech all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read. This is Anne Bogle, author, blogger, and creator of the podcast, What Should I Read Next?

They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately. And I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years, and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment, whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change, or a frothy page-turner to help them escape the stresses of work, or a book that they've been reading for years.

Wednesday, February 5th, 2003.

Mr. President, Mr. Secretary General, distinguished colleagues. Secretary of State Colin Powell addresses the UN to make the US case to invade Iraq. This important day for us as we review the situation with respect to Iraq. He cites intelligence his agencies have gathered that shows the case is overwhelming.

He cites a source, an Iraqi chemical engineer, who has provided intelligence of biological weapons. The purpose of that resolution was to disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction. Let me take you inside that intelligence file and share with you what we know from eyewitness accounts.

"We have first-hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails," he said to the world leaders gathered in Geneva. "In a matter of months, they can produce a quantity of biological poison equal to the entire amount that Iraq claimed to have produced in the years prior to the Gulf War." The problem was the source, Curveball, made it all up.

He had never even met a U.S. official, let alone been interviewed by one. We never did speak with him. He was held by the Germans. The German intelligence was debriefing him. Turned out he was an alcoholic. But he was giving us what we considered to be at the time and what the Germans considered to be at the time.

really amazing information about biological weapons labs, how they would move them around. He described the trucks, how they were refrigerated, how they were fitted out, where they were held, how they were moved, the schedules. And it was incredibly detailed. And it turned out none of it was true.

And here was the US Secretary of State claiming this was from, in intelligence speak, a reliable source with access. It doesn't come more solid than that. They talked about Curveball and we knew full well at that point in time that Curveball was completely discredited, that we had never had direct access to him. He was just fabricator.

And his reports had been sort of stamped with that and all returned. And yet here the Secretary of State was using that as an underpinning for a rationale of why we should invade, conquer and occupy Iraq. Watching it in real time and then afterwards, I just kind of felt nauseous, absolutely sick.

But how can you really be sure that the rest of the intelligence the administration is referencing is not flawed? I have to say, by the time we invaded Iraq in March 2003, I still didn't have a very clear notion as to what Iraq's nuclear capabilities were. It didn't seem to me to warrant an invasion.

because the intelligence had been so weak on that front. On the other hand, the CIA, by its nature, highly compartmented. How did I know that we had not recruited someone very, very close to Saddam Hussein, who was giving us incredible access or insight into the real state of play? But I can't claim that, oh, I knew all along there was no WMD, but I did have serious doubts in it.

I was just in the operational weeds trying to make sure that my operations were safe and productive. But it just didn't add up. And we know now that the Bush administration had already made up its mind to go to war. So it all was in many ways just a charade. They really didn't care what the intelligence said. But the truth will out eventually.

Valerie and her team aren't the only ones who know dodgy intel has been used by the administration as an excuse to go to war. And it's not just Curveball. I haven't introduced you to Joe Wilson up until this point, as, frankly, he hasn't been relevant. But now he is. Joe Wilson was Valerie Plame's husband.

Joe had been head of the U.S. Embassy during the time of the first Gulf War and knew Saddam Hussein personally. He had also been ambassador to Niger. He met Valerie at a party at the Turkish embassy in Washington, D.C. The weekend she moved back from Brussels to start her new life at the Counter-Proliferation Division. By this point, Joe had started his own consulting business.

In 1999, when the CPD was investigating Pakistani physicist A.Q. Khan, Joe Wilson was asked to follow Khan to Niger to look for evidence that he had been trying to buy uranium. He found none. Three years later, in 2002, the Italians handed the vice president, Dick Cheney, a report that Iraq had been attempting to purchase uranium from Niger.

Again, Joe Wilson, given his connections to both countries, was asked to investigate. A colleague of Valerie's had suggested him for the role. Valerie agreed, and they took it to their superior. Again, in his debrief by the intelligence services, Joe Wilson said he found no evidence of attempts to illegally purchase uranium.

But 11 months later, a statement was included in President Bush's State of the Union claiming Saddam Hussein had recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. When it was revealed after the war had started that the claim was based on forged documents, the White House defended itself by saying, "At the time, nobody knew the intelligence was fake. Joe Wilson knew otherwise and decided to go public."

In 2003, my then-husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times entitled What I Did Not Find in Africa. And Joe wrote that he believed that the intelligence surrounding that decision to go to war was cherry-picked, manipulated, and it was really against our best national security interests.

A week later, my name appeared in a conservative communist newspaper all around the world, Robert Novak. In the article, Novak claimed Joe Wilson, who was not an employee of the CIA, was sent to Niger on the recommendation of his wife, Valerie Plame, who was. The suggestion was that Valerie had sent her husband on a boondoggle, in other words, a total waste of public money.

A jolly. Crucially, Novak cited two senior White House officials as his sources. For Valerie, this was retaliation, pure and simple, for Joe's article. They wanted to discredit Joe Wilson, and his wife was the weapon they chose to do it with. Valerie's career was collateral damage or fair game, as one journalist told her husband. The morning that the article came out in our local paper, the Washington Post,

Joe came into our bedroom very early and tossed the paper on the bed, which had arrived on our doorstep. And he said, well, the son of a bitch did it. Because we had an inkling that Robert Novak was going to write this. And I just felt like I had been sucker punched, you know, really where the wind is just knocked out of you. I was immediately afraid for the safety of my twins. They were only three years old.

I was also at the same time very concerned about my assets with whom I had worked with over the years and their safety. And of course, I knew that my career was over. My covert career was over.

How do you live in Washington, the center of America's political universe, married to a former ambassador for all those years operating in the shadows? All the attention was on Joe, right? I just, when you're in Washington, you really, if you're just, quote, a spouse, no one pays you any mind, right? So all I had to say was, oh yeah, you know, I'm a consultant, I travel, whatever.

And then people just, they glaze over, right? You don't have your own car and driver. You don't have any important position. It's very much driven by your access to power and so forth. Because whether it's in Washington or so many places in the world, many, many people, frankly, discount women and what they could possibly be up to other than, say, shopping. No one knew where I worked other than my parents. Right.

And, you know, and my husband. And so Valerie, the consultant, the blonde ambassador's wife, was exposed as a spy.

I became well known much to my horror. My name and my face were in the newspapers, on TV. They were talking about me on the radio, these people named Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson. And in my particular office where I was working, it was like someone had died and no one wanted to talk about it. It was just awful. It felt surreal. It was an out-of-body experience. I had been used to being

So private. No one knew what I did. And I was perfectly fine with that. It was just a very confusing and dark time for us, my husband and I, professionally and personally.

Remember, for much of her career, Valerie's been under non-official cover. That means the people who have had dealings with her, the sources she had helped recruit, have no idea that she actually works for the CIA. And now, she and her sources are a target. Whether Al Qaeda in America or just your random, unbalanced nut job, it's hard to say. She begins to receive death threats, crank phone calls,

and disturbing letters. There was increased terrorism threat from al-Qaeda, and I received a very credible threat against me. The threat also included against the director of the CIA at that time, George Tenet, the Attorney General John Ashcroft, and Karl Rove, who was a presidential advisor at that time.

You've just been informed that your name is on the kill list of the world's most feared terrorist organization. You're conjuring the worst possible scenarios in your head. Suddenly, it's no longer just political. As you approach the corner of your street, try and see your home from the perspective of someone who is seeing it as a target. What are its vulnerabilities? How predictable are your family routines?

What are your escape routes? What are your weaknesses? Your children? America is in the midst of the war against terror. It's fighting on all fronts. Al-Qaeda, Al-Shabaab, Iraq, Iran, and your fingerprints, so to speak, are all over the Middle East.

So I went to the CIA head of security and we went through this and he determined they weren't going to give me any added security. And I was furious, primarily because the other three mentioned in that threat

already had sort of 24/7 security. They could go anywhere. They could go to their son's basketball game and not have to worry about it. But they did not provide that to me. And I didn't ask for it forever. I just wanted it for a period of time. And so that felt very painful, that decision. The agency she had devoted her career to for the last two decades, the agency she had lied for, risked her life for, traded time with her small children for,

had failed to protect her. I believe the agency could have prevented my name from being published. They simply could have been much more forceful in their response to Novak's questioning. I'm hardly the first CIA officer whose name might have come across someone's radar screen. And generally, the reporters understand that they need to back off, and they do.

Now, this was a very politically charged issue, but because I don't know exactly how that all went down and who spoke to whom, when and so forth, and I still don't really even understand, I have my doubts, but I only speculate how my name was passed to the White House to begin with. I don't think anyone quite understood where it was going to go. That's for sure. The purpose of exposing me was to send a very clear signal to Joe Wilson,

as well as anyone else who deemed it proper to speak out against the Bush administration and the war in Iraq. They were basically saying, "Look at what we can do to you and your family, and anyone else, step right up. We'll do the same to you." And not surprisingly, a lot of background sources that had been speaking

to reporters quietly to provide some understanding of what was going on in the intelligence community and what took us to war. All those sources dried up after that.

The incident became a political scandal, a subject of a criminal and civil investigation. The vice president's right-hand man was charged with perjury and perverting the course of justice, among other things. And one journalist was sent to jail for protecting him. But that's another story. In the years following the Iraq War, the CIA did not cover itself in glory.

It was, perhaps unfairly, blamed for the intelligence failure leading to the invasion. Then reports of secret CIA prisons and extraordinary renditions came out. But by this point, Valerie Plame had had enough. In January 2006, she resigned from the CIA after almost 20 years of service, and she decided to write her memoirs.

When you join the CIA, you sign a secrecy agreement. You agree never to divulge sources and methods. And of course, I completely uphold that. Understandably, all books written by former agency staff have to be reviewed by the CIA before they can be published. Valerie was cautiously optimistic hers would pass through with minimal fuss.

In the last decade alone, the agency had approved at least 20 books for publication by former staffers. Some have detailed the specialist training case officers like Valerie undergo. Others have criticized the administration's policy on the war on terror. There have been dozens and dozens and dozens of books written by former CIA officers that went through the process and, you know, had very few problems.

But Valerie's book was not one of those. After submitting her manuscript to the CIA for its approval, it was returned with a version that was heavily redacted. The CIA made the ruling that I cannot acknowledge any agency affiliation prior to February 2002. Why February 2002?

because that was when Joe Wilson went to Niger to investigate claims Saddam Hussein was attempting to purchase uranium. So, prior to that very specific date, Valerie cannot give details on cases she worked. She cannot talk about her covers or the places she was posted. As we know, she cannot give her years of employment or talk about her training in any detail.

She cannot even discuss how she met her then-husband, Joe Wilson. There have been some other cases where, clearly, as in mine, the redactions are in retaliation. It's a very arbitrary, ad hoc process that does nothing to actually protect our national security, which really ticks me off because...

Everyone wants to protect that, but given different times in history, political climate, and who's in power and how much they are willing to push it, sometimes what happens is what I experienced. I believe my book, Fair Game, was redacted, and it's about 10%, because it was simply retribution for the whole political thing we were going through.

This is what happens when the spy becomes the scapegoat.

As the CIA likes to say, you know, not everyone knows our successes. Everyone knows our failures. I have such ambivalent feelings, right? Because of how it ended and certain episodes of deep betrayal. At the same time, the people that I worked with were some of the best. I feel so fortunate, so smart, have deep integrity, working on things that the vast majority of Americans have no idea are truly keeping them safe. I'm really proud to be part of that.

I'm Hayley Atwell. Join us next week for another conversation with true spies. We all have valuable spy skills and our experts are here to help you discover yours. Get an authentic assessment of your spy skills created by a former head of training at British Intelligence for free now at Spyscape.com.