One dreary day in February 2002, a young and capable officer rushed into my office. Normally somewhat reserved and calm, she looked unusually animated and alarmed. She hurriedly told me that someone from the Vice-President’s office had called on her green secure line. Apparently, the caller, a staffer, said they were intrigued by an intelligence report that the Italian Government had passed to the US Government. It alleged that in 1999 Iraq had sought yellowcake uranium, the raw material used for the uranium enrichment process, from the impoverished West African country of Niger. The Vice-President had been told, was interested and wanted more information. If the report was true at all, I knew that it would be damning evidence indeed that Iraq was seeking to restart its nuclear programme.

Thinking through the options available, the first and most obvious choice would be to contact our office in Niger and ask it to investigate these allegations using local sources available on the ground. Unfortunately, the severe budget cuts of the mid1990s had been particularly devastating for the Africa Division and many of our offices on the continent were closed, including the one in Niamey, Niger. Where else to go and who could do it for us? A mid-level reports officer who had joined the discussion in the hallway enthusiastically suggested: what about talking to Joe about it? He knew of Joe’s history and role in the first Gulf War, his extensive experience in Africa, and also that in 1999 the CIA had sent Joe on a sensitive mission to Africa on uranium issues.

The reports officer and I walked over to the office of the Chief to discuss our available plans of action. Bob, our boss, listened carefully and then suggested that we put together a meeting with Joe and the appropriate agency and state officers. He finished with, “When you see Joe tonight, could you please ask him if he would be willing to come into headquarters next week to figure out what we’re going to do? Oh, and send a Lotus note to Scott [our acting Division Chief] and let him know what we’re thinking.” I hurried back to my desk and drafted a quick e-mail to Scott to explain the situation and added that my husband has good relations with both the PM and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity.

Months later, those words would be ripped out of that e-mail and cited as proof that I had recommended Joe for the trip.

Three weeks later, in early March, Joe left on an evening flight from Washington to Niamey, Niger, via Paris. Joe undertook the mission pro bono: the Agency paid only his travel expenses of a few thousand dollars. Joe was happy to go. He figured that if the Vice-President had asked a serious and legitimate question, it deserved a serious answer and he would try to help to find it. When Joe returned home nine days later, the twins and I rushed out to the taxi to greet him. Before long, the doorbell rang and two clean-cut CIA officers, one of whom was the reports officer who had suggested sending Joe to Niger in the first place, stood on the doorstep, clearly eager to debrief Joe so they could immediately write up an intelligence report on his trip. All of us had every reason to believe that their finished report would be sent to the Vice-President’s office as part of the established protocol.

Our bedroom was beginning to show the first hints of morning light on July 14 when Joe marched in, dropped the newspaper on the bed, and said in a tight voice, “Well, the SoB did it.”

He set a steaming mug of coffee on my bedside table and left the room. What? I struggled to wake up. I sat up, switched on the lamp, and opened The Washington Post to the op-ed page. Robert Novak had written in his column that “Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction.” The words were right there on the page, in black and white, but I could not take them in. I felt like I had been sucker-punched, hard, in the gut. Although we had known for several days that he had my name and knew where I worked, we never believed that he would actually print it or that the Agency would allow it. It was surreal.

As I walked downstairs to the kitchen in a fog, I pondered the fate of my career with the CIA as a covert operations officer. How exactly did Novak get my name? Why did he think fingering me was newsworthy? Joe’s trip to Niger was obviously no boondoggle.

And why did Novak use my maiden name — Plame — when I had used Wilson since I married in 1998? I could barely breathe.

Of all days, that morning I was scheduled to begin a week-long “management and leadership” course. As I sat in Washington’s terminally congested traffic en route to a CIA classroom in an outbuilding somewhere in the Virginia suburbs, I felt a new emotion bubble up — anger. I had served my country loyally. I had played by all the rules. Was it all about to be thrown away in a moment? And if so, why? And what about my friends and family who didn’t know I worked for the CIA? Would they hate me for lying to them?

In the late afternoon of July 21, I got home from work and walked into our den to greet Joe. He clicked off the phone just as I came into the room and he had a look on his face that I had never seen before. He said he had just been talking with the journalist and Hardball host Chris Matthews, who had told him that he had just spoken with the powerful presidential adviser Karl Rove. “Matthews told me that Rove told him that ‘Wilson’s wife is fair game,’ ” Joe said. Things were getting stranger all the time. Later that night, Newsday, a Long Island newspaper, posted an article on its website by their Washington reporters Timothy Phelps and Knut Royce. “Intelligence officials confirmed to Newsday Monday that Valerie Plame, wife of retired Ambassador Joseph Wilson, works at the agency on weapons of mass destruction issues in an undercover capacity — at least she was undercover until last week when she was named by columnist Novak.”

Not only was it very rare for the agency to validate that an officer was undercover, but no one from the agency had told me that my undercover status would be confirmed. It would have been nice to at least get a heads-up from someone at work.

When I returned to headquarters the week after my training course, my colleagues were low-key about what had happened. Some made some supportive comments, others said nothing. Most of them knew me as Valerie Wilson, not Valerie Plame, and may not have made the connection between me and the woman fingered in Novak’s column.

In mid-August 2003 I was suddenly summoned to the office of CPD’s Chief. I was to accompany him to brief Jim Pavitt, the Deputy Director for Operations, on the background and current status regarding the disclosure of my name.

DDO Pavitt greeted us warmly; he had a good working relationship with Mark, and he knew me, too, from the various sensitive programmes I had worked on. He invited us to sit at the small round conference table in his spacious office looking out on the late summer green of the trees. As is his manner, Jim did most of the talking in a fast, staccato tone. He summarised what had happened so far. He finally asked me if Joe or I knew Karl Rove. I said not really, but he and his family attended the same church that we did in northwest Washington. “Really?” Jim drew back, white eyebrows practically at his hairline. I noted that although I knew who Rove was, I doubted that he knew what I looked like. However, I promised Jim that the next time we were in line for Communion, I would pass him the wafer plate and whisper softly, “My name’s Fair Game, what’s yours?”

The weeks since the leak of my name in July had been a blend of surrealism and paralysis. A critical part of who I was — an undercover agency operative — was no longer in place and everything felt disjointed to me. On Sunday, September 28, 2003, the article on the front page of The Washington Post was headlined: “Bush Administration is Subject of Inquiry — CIA Agent’s Identity Was Leaked to Media,” and reported that the CIA had referred the leak to the Justice Department. Apparently, the Agency thought there was enough evidence to warrant an official investigation.

Even more damaging to the White House, the article quoted a senior administration official as saying “Clearly, it [the leak] was meant purely and simply for revenge.” Whatever shreds of privacy or normality our lives had until that moment were ripped away. Political dirty tricks have been around since Washington was founded. But this time, besides going after their opponent’s family, the perpetrators may have committed a crime against national security.

For Joe and me, the article validated what we had suspected all along — that the leak was in retaliation for his having angered the Administration and frustrated their attempts to portray the war and the run-up to it strictly on their own terms.

Our phone rang incessantly — it rang when I left the house in the morning and was ringing when I came home at night. When I checked our voice mail, the recorded female voice usually said “there are 15 unheard messages in your mailbox”. When I checked my personal e-mail after putting the children to bed, there were at least 20 unread notes from friends and family. Friends from high school, long-lost sorority sisters, distant cousins, all seemed to find my e-mail address — or found someone who knew my e-mail address — and reached out to me. It felt a little like This is Your Life as the parade of anyone who ever knew me went by.

If any of my close friends were angry with me over my deception, they did not express it to me.

© Valerie Plame Wilson 2007. Extracted from Fair Game, published by Simon & Schuster at £18.99. Available from Times BooksFirst for £17.09, free p&p: 0870 1608080; timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

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