page_title: Valerie Plame
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Valerie Plame / Career
caption_attribution_description: This photo is on the Valerie Plame wikipedia page - released into public domain.
context_page_description: Valerie Elise Plame Wilson, is an American writer, spy novelist, and former officer who worked at the United States Central Intelligence Agency. As the subject of the 2003 Plame affair, also known as the CIA leak scandal, Plame's identity as a CIA officer was leaked to and subsequently published by Robert Novak of the Washington Post.
  In the aftermath of the scandal, Richard Armitage in the U.S. Department of State was identified as one source of the information, and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Chief of Staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, was convicted of lying to investigators. After a failed appeal, President George W. Bush commuted Libby's sentence and in 2018, President Donald Trump pardoned him. No one was formally charged with leaking the information.
  In collaboration with a ghostwriter, Plame wrote a memoir detailing her career and the events leading up to her resignation from the CIA. She has subsequently written and published at least two spy novels. A 2010 biographical feature film, Fair Game, was produced based on memoirs by her and her husband.
context_section_description: After graduating from college and moving to Washington, D.C., Plame worked at a clothing store while awaiting results of her application to the CIA. She was accepted into the 1985–86 CIA officer training class. Although the CIA will not publicly release the specific dates of Plame's employment from 1985 to 2002, due to security concerns, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald affirmed that Plame "was a CIA officer from January 1, 2002, forward" and that "her association with the CIA was classified at that time through July 2003. Details about Plame's professional career are still classified, but it is documented that she worked for the CIA in a non-official cover capacity relating to counter-proliferation.
  Plame served the CIA at times as a non-official cover (or NOC), operating in Athens and Brussels. While using her own name, "Valerie Plame", her assignments required posing in various professional roles in order to gather intelligence more effectively. Two of her covers include serving as a junior consular officer in the early 1990s in Athens and then later as an energy analyst for the private company (founded in 1994) "Brewster Jennings & Associates," which the CIA later acknowledged was a front company for certain investigations.
  A former senior diplomat in Athens remembered Plame in her dual role and also recalled that she served as one of the "control officers" coordinating the visit of President George H. W. Bush to Greece and Turkey in July 1991.  The matter of whether she actually had covert status is disputed. After the Persian Gulf War in 1991, the CIA sent her first to the London School of Economics and then the College of Europe, in Bruges, for Master's degrees. After earning the second degree, she stayed on in Brussels, where she began her next assignment under cover as an "energy consultant" for Brewster-Jennings. Beginning in 1997, Plame's primary assignment was shifted to the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
  During this time, part of her work concerned the determination of the use of aluminum tubes purchased by Iraq. CIA analysts prior to the Iraq invasion were quoted by the White House as believing that Iraq was trying to acquire nuclear weapons and that these aluminum tubes could be used in a centrifuge for nuclear enrichment. David Corn and Michael Isikoff argued that the undercover work being done by Plame and her CIA colleagues in the Directorate of Central Intelligence Nonproliferation Center strongly contradicted such a claim.
caption: Presenting a lecture on her book Fair Game, at Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island, on December 4, 2007.
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