Former CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson says her alleged betrayal by the White House was an act of political revenge.
Plame Wilson, whose new book "Fair Game" sheds light on two decades as a secret agent and the stunning moment her cover was blown, appeared on CTV's Canada AM on Thursday from Washington.
She says she was exposed as a CIA agent in 2003 because her husband Joe Wilson, the former ambassador to Iraq, had criticized the Bush administration's buildup to the Iraq invasion in 2001.
"In July of 2003, he wrote a 1,500-word piece for the New York Times entitled 'What I Did Not Find in Africa,' and it refuted the administration's primary rationale for going to war in Iraq, the nuclear threat," Plame says.
"The administration was furious with my husband, Joe Wilson, and they went after him. And then they went after me."
Plame's identity was revealed by columnist Robert Novak in The Washington Post just one week after Wilson's column slammed U.S. President George Bush for invading Iraq on faulty intelligence.
In the column, Wilson contradicted Bush's claim that Saddam Hussein had tried to purchase yellowcake uranium from Niger. Wilson had travelled to Africa a year earlier to look into the allegations, and found no evidence to back up the charges.
"It was clearly out of political revenge," Plame tells Canada AM.
"They were very undone by Joe's audacity at having attacked them and they went after him. And I was working at the time on proliferation issues of great importance to our national security. So yeah, it doesn't make a lot of sense."
Scooter Libby, chief of staff to U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney, was eventually indicted on federal obstruction of justice and perjury charges after a federal investigation into what took place. His 30-month sentence was later commuted by Bush.
Much of the investigation has been kept secret, and Plame said she and Wilson are pursuing a civil action against the agency to try and get to the bottom of what actually happened, including who started the movement to reveal her covert status.
They lost the first round, and are now planning an appeal.
Even Plame's book contains blacked out sections that were deemed unpublishable by the CIA.
"The agency has taken the position that I am not permitted to acknowledge my agency affiliation prior to January, 2002, despite the vast amount of material available in the public domain on my career and my background," Plame says.
"My publisher Simon and Schuster and I made the decision to keep in the black redacted lines so the reading public had a good idea of what the CIA considered to be classified and we considered to be in fact further punitive action by this administration toward me and my husband."
The book goes into detail about how Plame and Wilson were treated by the White House, citing "fear mongering, defamation of character and shameless disregard for the truth, and distortions of reality" as some of the tactics used against them by Libby and others.
She says the fact that the book has been published, despite the blacked-out sections, is a victory.
"We have finally been able to publish something. And it's a story of a cautionary tale of speaking truth to power."
If her cover had never been blown, Plame says, she would probably still be doing undercover work for the CIA and living her life under the radar.
As it stands now, she and her family have had to go a little further to be left alone, moving to Santa Fe, New Mexico.
She said there is little public spotlight there, and "that's just the way I like it."
