For four years, former CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson has faced a government trying to “silence a critic.” Monday night, Plame spoke out at Northwestern University against an ailing administration set on censoring opinion.
Plame’s visit, organized by the College Democrats, also promoted her new book Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House, which follows Plame’s career in the CIA after 2002.
“I have an important story to tell, a story of speaking the truth to power despite the consequences,” Plame said.
Plame worked as a classified covert intelligence agent for more than twenty years for the United States Central Intelligence Agency. On July 14, 2003, Robert Novak destroyed her cover when he named Plame as an “agency operative on weapons of mass destruction” in his syndicated column in The Washington Post.
According to Plame, the move was a “push-back” to punish her husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, for criticizing the United States’ war in Iraq in an op-ed piece written for the The New York Times earlier that month.
“We were prepared for push-back,” Plame said, “That’s how this administration works…but we never expected the push-back to come against me…I never expected the push-back would come at the expense of our national security.”
She said her father’s and brother’s service in the armed forces influenced her decision to become a CIA agent.
“People ask me, ‘You’re such a nice blonde little girl, why would you go into that?’,” Plame said. “My father served in the Air Force in World War II, and my brother is a wounded Marine Corp officer. I like the idea of serving my country.”
The publishing committee within the CIA blacked-out portions of Plame’s book because they were deemed to have revealed confidential information. These blacked-out sections have been included in the book to show the portions Plame was not allowed to publish.
Weinberg junior Danielle Provenzano believes that these blacked-out sections were valuable for the marketing of the book.
“It was a pretty good idea. It worked well,” Provenzano said about the inclusion of the blacked-out sections in the book.
However, Medill freshman Todd Kushigemachi said he was surprised by Plame’s forward explanation.
“I was surprised by how very direct she was in talking about her own experiences, especially concerning the faults of the Bush administration,” Kushigemachi said.
Since September 11, 2001, however, Plame says the expanded executive branch of the government has deteriorated the position of the America in the world.
“Look how we squandered opportunity of where we were. Our position in the world after 9/11, we had the world’s support,” Plame said. “President Cheney, I mean Vice President Cheney…has worked to place more powers under the executive branch…This is to our detriment.”
However, she said ordinary citizens still have power to stand up to such a government dominated by the executive branch.
“This fight is about democracy, which is only as strong as the citizens who participate in it,” Plame said.
Plame paraphrased her favorite quote from Thomas Jefferson: “‘When citizens fear their government, that’s tyranny, when government fears its citizens, that’s democracy.’”