Fair Game : My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House by Valerie Plame Wilson
[I suppose most everyone knows the basics of the story. It also depends on whether you’re red or blue as to which version of events you’re wont to believe. But this is the story in her words. I have to say, it’s pretty compelling.
The redactions make it tough going in places. Parts of it read like a very disconnected series of vignettes that are hard to keep track of. The CIA redacted significant portions of some of the book – information that was in the public domain, including the Congressional Record (included in the appendix) – for reasons that become apparent when you read the supplemental afterword by Laura Rozen. Rozen, a national security reported, collected all the public information redacted from the manuscript and fills in all the blanks.
The story, in a nutshell, is Wilson’s husband, Joe, a former ambassador, was asked by the CIA to investigate a rumor that Iraq was trying to purchase uranium from Niger. He found that rumor to be highly suspect, and reported that to those who requested the trip. This information did not jive with the Bush administration’s goal of making war with Iraq and went ahead and declared it to be true in both the 2003 State of the Union Address, and Colin Powell’s address to the UN. Following that, Joe Wilson wrote an Op-Ed in the NY Times describing what he did not find in Africa, in direct contradiction to the Bush White House’s “Ministry of Truth“.
This brought out the Bush/Cheney revenge machine who ramped up a smear campaign including “outing” Joe Wilson’s wife, Valerie, as a CIA operative using the sleazebag columnist, Robert Novak. After several years of turmoil, Cheney’s chief of staff was convicted of four crimes which Bush later commuted. Several civil cases are still pending.
It’s hard to tell, really, whether all of this is absolutely true. I suspect the vast majority of it is. The parts that aren’t true aren’t so much false as interpreted through a separate set of eyes. No one knows, including Wilson, the motivation of some of the people she talks about, co-workers particularly.
The Rozen part of the book is indispensable, though, and sheds great light on the vast redactions, and once you see what’s redacted, it’s clear the motivation for the redactions was political and not to protect any classified information.
To give you an idea of the scope of the redactions, here is a text sample from the LoC.
