For Plame, life is now a desk job at the CIA

updated 1:56 p.m. ET Oct. 30, 2005

WASHINGTON - Joe Wilson says it was mutual love at first sight when he and Valerie Plame spotted each other at a crowded diplomatic reception eight years ago.

Well, yes and no.

For Plame, the stars in her eyes that night were quickly followed by a LexisNexis computer search the next day to make sure the guy with all the fantastic stories about his life as a globe-trotting diplomat was really legit.

It is classic Valerie Plame: The silhouetted woman at the center of the CIA leak investigation is said to be warm and genuine, but also a savvy professional. Tough, too, fellow CIA officers would add.

Joining the agency soon after graduating from Penn State with an advertising degree, Plame excelled in a rigorous training regimen that washed some others out.

“Valerie was not a crier and she wasn’t a wimp,” recalls Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst who was part of her 1985 training class. “She was 22 and very young coming into the CIA, but she was very mature, very professional.” Other fellow trainees remember her as a head-turning blonde who did well wielding an AK-47.

In testimony to Congress, Johnson described their training at what CIA recruits call The Farm:

“We slogged through the same swamps on patrols, passed clandestine messages to our agents during exercises, survived a simulated terrorist kidnapping and interrogation, kicked pallets from cargo planes, completed parachute jumps and literally helped pick ticks off each other after weeks in the woods at a CIA training facility.”

Fast forward to 2003: Valerie Plame is married to Joe Wilson (the former ambassador’s tales of diplomatic exploits checked out), and they are the parents of 3-year-old twins.

Known by her married name, she lives a relatively quiet life in an upscale Washington neighborhood, helps run a support network for women suffering from postpartum depression and professes to work for a Boston-based energy consulting firm.

In truth, she is a covert operative for the CIA and a specialist in weapons of mass destruction, a fact unknown even to close friends and neighbors.

‘Really stricken’
Chris Wolf, the Wilsons’ next-door neighbor, remembers backing off when she first identified herself as a consultant. “In Washington, that often means you’re unemployed,” he explains.

On July 14, 2003, Wolf was sitting on his deck eating breakfast and reading Robert Novak’s column in The Washington Post, when something jumped out at him. The column, citing two Bush administration officials, identified Wilson’s wife as a CIA “operative on weapons of mass destruction.”

Incredulous, Wolf called over to Wilson, who had ventured out onto his deck at about the same time. “He seemed really stricken,” Wolf recalled, “and signaled for me to keep my voice down.”

Victoria Tillotson, the Wilsons’ next-door neighbor on the other side, was certain that Novak had it wrong.

“I fully believed she was an economic consultant and went to foreign countries,” says Tillotson, whose grandchildren are frequent playmates of the Wilson twins.

This is when Plame’s world turned upside down and the couple began what Wilson refers to as “Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.”

“She was stoic in her manner but I could see she was crestfallen,” Wilson wrote in his memoir. “Twenty years of loyal service down the drain, and for what, she asked after she had read it.”

Then, instinct kicked in. She began making a list of things to do to minimize damage to projects she was working on.

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