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Plame criticizes Bush, media for leak scandal
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Lucrative deal to write book
Plame reportedly received a seven-figure deal to write the book. Though it represents the first time Plame has publicly discussed the scandal in detail, few revelations were left after the monthlong trial, countless news articles and her congressional testimony.
Some of the details Plame had planned to offer, including discussion of her CIA career and her job responsibilities, are redacted from the book. Sometimes that means whole pages of blacked-out text. The CIA objected to the material’s release and Plame lost a court fight to include it.
As a solution, journalist Laura Rozen recounts Plame’s early years in the agency as part of the book’s lengthy afterword. Rozen, who writes for liberal publications The American Prospect and Mother Jones, is not covered by the CIA’s publication rules.
Critics have argued for years that if Plame was concerned about her CIA cover, she should not have let Wilson discuss his mission to Niger publicly nor write about it in the New York Times. She touches on this only briefly in the book, saying neither of them ever considered the possibility it would jeopardize her cover.
Ex-agent rips Senate panel
Plame also revisits the debate over whether she suggested her husband for the Niger trip. Government officials have testified she did. In her book, she says a CIA colleague suggested it and a supervisor asked Wilson to come in to discuss it.
She harshly criticizes a Senate intelligence panel that investigated the leak. Testifying before a committee of young staffers, she said, “felt like a setup.” She criticized the “Republican senators’ complete disregard for the truth” and said they twisted the testimony.
Plame said the CIA refused to let her colleague clarify that it was he who first suggested Wilson for the trip.
She has kind words for Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who led the leak investigation and forced several journalists to testify about their sources. She said she didn’t understand why “well-meaning but self-righteous talking heads” decried that effort.
“It was the Pentagon Papers or Watergate turned on its head,” she writes, adding, “These reporters were allowing themselves to be exploited by the administration and were obstructing the investigation.”
After reading a Washington Post editorial criticizing her husband, Plame writes that she “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.”
The book’s title is drawn from a comment Rove is said to have made about Wilson’s wife being “fair game.” “The next time we were in line for Communion,” she writes, “I would pass him the wafer plate and whisper softly, ’My name’s Fair Game, what’s yours?’ “
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