Private Spy and Public Spouse Live at Center of Leak Case
July 5, 2005
By SCOTT SHANE
WASHINGTON, July 1 - For nearly two years, the investigation into
the leak of a covert C.I.A. officer's name has unfolded clamorously
in the nation's capital, with partisan brawling on talk shows,
prosecutors interviewing President Bush and top White House
officials, and the imminent prospect that reporters could go to jail
for contempt of court.
But the woman at the center of it all, Valerie E. Wilson, has kept
her silence, showing the discipline and discretion that colleagues
say made her a good spy. As her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, has
become a highly visible critic of the administration and promoted
his memoirs, Ms. Wilson has ferried their 5-year-old twins to
doctors' appointments, looked after their hilltop house in the
upscale Palisades neighborhood of Washington and counseled women
with postpartum depression.
On June 1, after a year's unpaid leave, Ms. Wilson, now known to the
country by her maiden name, Valerie Plame, returned to a new job at
the Central Intelligence Agency, determined to get her career back
on track, her husband said. Neither the agency nor Mr. Wilson would
describe her position, except to make what might seem an obvious
point: she will no longer be working under cover, as she did
successfully for almost 20 years.
"Before this whole affair, no one would ever have thought of her as
an undercover agent," said David Tillotson, a next-door neighbor for
seven years who got to know the Wilsons well over back-fence chats,
shared dinners and play dates for their grandchildren with the
Wilsons' children, Trevor and Samantha.
"She wasn't mysterious," Mr. Tillotson said. "She was sort of a
working soccer mom."
He recalled his incredulity on July 14, 2003, when his wife,
Victoria, spotted in The Washington Post, in a syndicated column by
Robert Novak, a line identifying their neighbor by her maiden name
and calling her an "agency operative." Ms. Tillotson kept calling
out: "This can't be! This can't be!"
The Wilsons ' neighbor on the other side, Christopher Wolf, was
similarly aghast. As he sat on his deck staring at the Novak column,
Mr. Wilson came out his back door.
"I said: 'This is amazing! I had no idea,'" Mr. Wolf recalled. "He
sort of motioned to me to keep my voice down."
A Jaguar-driving, cigar-smoking, silver-haired former ambassador,
Mr. Wilson, 55, interpreted the leak of his wife's C.I.A. connection
as an act of vengeance from White House officials for his public
accusations of deceit in building a case for the Iraq war. Days
before the leak, he had gone public in a New York Times Op-Ed
article and television appearances to charge that the administration
had covered up his own debunking of reports that Iraq had bought
uranium in Africa .
What he calls a "smear campaign" against the couple has catalyzed
his transformation from nonpartisan diplomat - he worked closely
with the first President Bush and his top aides during the first
gulf war - to anti-Bush activist.
On Wednesday, a federal judge is expected to decide whether two
reporters, Judith Miller of The Times and Matt Cooper of Time
magazine, will go to jail for refusing to cooperate with a grand
jury investigation into the leak. That the leaker appears willing to
permit journalists to be incarcerated rather than taking public
responsibility for his actions simply shows the leaker's "cravenness
and cowardice," Mr. Wilson said.
It is not known what information, if any, Mr. Novak supplied to
prosecutors, but he is not facing jail time.
Meanwhile, Ms. Wilson, 42, whose husband said she has used her
married name both at work and in her personal life since their 1998
marriage, declined to speak for this article. She has guarded her
privacy, with rare exceptions. She posed with her husband for a
Vanity Fair photographer, wearing sunglasses and with a scarf over
her blond hair. She drafted an op-ed article to correct what she
felt were distortions of her and her husband's actions, but the
C.I.A. would not authorize its publication, saying it would "affect
the agency's ability to perform its mission."
Former C.I.A. officers differ on the impact of Mr. Novak's
identification of Ms. Wilson, who had been working against weapons
proliferation in Europe and elsewhere while posing as an analyst for
a shell company in Boston , Brewster Jennings & Associates, set up by
the agency.
Clandestine service officers working under such "nonofficial cover" -
rather than the traditional guise of diplomat - are considered to
hold the most sensitive and vulnerable jobs in intelligence, lacking
the protection of diplomatic immunity if they are unmasked overseas.
Disclosing the C.I.A. employment of officers under cover can
endanger the officers, their operations and their agents, as well as
violate the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, the law
that prompted the current leak investigation.
"This situation has been very hard on her, professionally and
personally," said Melissa Boyle Mahle, a former C.I.A. case officer
and a friend of Ms. Wilson. "Not only have you removed from the
playing field a very knowledgeable counterproliferation officer at a
time when we really need her services. But before this she was on a
fast track as a candidate for senior management at the agency. With
something like this, her career will never recover."
But other former C.I.A. officers say that by 2003 Ms. Wilson's cover
was already thin. Any serious inquiry would have revealed that
Brewster Jennings was little more than a mailbox. Though she
traveled regularly, Ms. Wilson, who speaks French, German and Greek,
had been working for some time at agency headquarters in Langley ,
Va. And her marriage to a senior American diplomat, Mr. Wilson,
ended any pretense of having no government ties.
"At that point, she looks, walks and quacks like an overt agency
employee," said Fred Rustmann, a C.I.A. officer from 1966 to 1990,
who supervised Ms. Wilson early in her career and calls her "one of
the best, an excellent officer."
Yet outside the spy world, word of her real employment came as a
shock. To have such a carefully nurtured identity shattered in a
single stroke was traumatic, Mr. Wilson said. "Your whole network of
personal relationships over 20 years are compromised," he said.
Ms. Wilson had to explain to friends and relatives that she had
never leveled with them since joining the agency shortly after
graduating from Pennsylvania State University with a degree in
journalism in 1984.
"My sister-in-law turned to my brother," Mr. Wilson recalled, "and
said, 'Do you think Joe knew?' "
Joe knew. As their relationship grew serious after they met at a
1997 reception at the Turkish ambassador's residence, Valerie Plame
revealed her real job to Mr. Wilson, who had a top secret clearance.
Three months after they married, he retired from the State
Department after a 23-year career that included an ambassadorship to
two countries, Gabon and São Tomé and Príncipe. Now he consults on
business projects in Africa as J. C. Wilson International Ventures.
Their marriage was her second and his third; he is also the father
of 26-year-old twins from his first marriage. Friends say that after
the birth of their twins in 2000, Ms. Wilson suffered postpartum
depression, which prompted her to become active in helping other
mothers.
The Wilsons have had a low-key social life, friends say. Mr. Wilson
said they had attended only one "A-list Washington party," given by
Ben Bradlee, the retired Washington Post editor. Before July 2003,
some neighbors knew them from the playground only as "Trevor and
Samantha's mom and dad."
Their turn in the limelight changed that temporarily, as liberal
celebrities embraced them; they were honored in late 2003 at a
dinner at the guesthouse of the television producer Norman Lear,
with guest list that included Warren Beatty.
The couple's actions in 2002 have become, in the polarized politics
of the Iraq war, subject to divergent interpretation. All agree that
Mr. Wilson traveled to Niger in February 2002 at the C.I.A.'s
request to assess reports that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy
uranium there. There the agreement ends.
In the version of his Republican critics, laid out in part by
members of the Senate Intelligence Committee last year, Mr. Wilson's
trip was a junket orchestrated by his wife. Further, the critics
say, Mr. Wilson's findings on the uranium question were equivocal.
But as a partisan Democrat, they say, he exploited his minor
involvement to attack the president, asserting that Mr. Bush misled
the American people by citing the questionable uranium claim in his
2003 State of the Union address.
Mr. Wilson has laid out his own account in interviews and in his
memoir, "The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies That Led to War and
Betrayed My Wife's C.I.A. Identity." The 514-page book, which
features on the back cover photographs of Mr. Wilson with the first
President Bush, President Bill Clinton and Saddam Hussein, has sold
60,000 copies in hardcover, according to the publisher, Carroll &
Graf. The just-published paperback includes an 11,000-word essay by
Russ Hoyle, an investigative reporter recruited by Carroll & Graf to
examine factual disputes raised by the case.
Mr. Wilson said that though his wife wrote a memorandum describing
his expertise at the request of a C.I.A. superior, she did not
propose him for the Niger trip. He scoffs at the notion that a trip
to one of the poorest countries on earth, for which he was paid only
his expenses, was some kind of prize.
He has acknowledged he may have misspoken about a few details, like
the date he became aware of forged documents purporting to show a
uranium sale. But conservatives' attacks on his credibility, he
said, are merely an effort to distract Americans from a far graver
fact: that the United States went to war on the basis of flimsy,
distorted evidence.
"I'm deeply saddened that the debate before the war did not
adequately take into consideration issues that a number of us had
raised," Mr. Wilson said.
While his wife has shunned publicity, he has become an always-
available news media voice, lending the weight of international
experience and insider status to criticism of Mr. Bush's conduct of
the war.
Despite conservatives' efforts to portray him as a left-wing
extremist, he insisted he remained a centrist at heart. But after
his tangle with the current administration, he admits "it will be a
cold day in hell before I vote for a Republican, even for dog
catcher."
Mr. Wilson ended a long interview in a downtown hotel when he
realized he was late to pick up the twins. As the first gulf war
loomed, and Mr. Wilson was the last American official to meet with
Saddam Hussein, his older twins, Joe and Sabrina, were 12 years old,
and worried that their father might not make it out of Baghdad to
join them in the United States , he said.
During this war with Iraq , the gravest danger to him has been
political vilification. He and his wife, Mr. Wilson said, have tried
to insulate their children from the hubbub that followed the leak of
her name.
It has not always been easy. Once, when Trevor was 3, he recognized
his father on yet another show.
"He banged on the TV," Mr. Wilson recalled, "and said, 'Dad, get out
of the box!' "
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