I’ve finished Valerie Plame Wilson’s book, Fair Game. The book is well worth reading but it has been deliberately sabotaged by the CIA to make it as unreadable as possible. The method was relatively simple, but no less devious for being so. All CIA employees sign a non-disclosure statement and anything they write must be pre-cleared by the Publications Review Board (PRB). This is an obvious security precaution to assure that CIA officers do not inadvertently disclose classified information. But it can be misused. Valerie Wilson joined the CIA in 1985. She served in Athens from 1989-1992, ostensibly as a State Department employee. She then came home, spent two years studying in Europe helping to build her cover as an energy analyst, and was assigned as a non-official cover officer in Brussels. She was recalled from Brussels in 1997 after it was learned that Aldrich Ames had passed along information on CIA personnel to the Soviets. It is not known whether her identity was compromised, but she took on a job in the newly created Counterproliferation Division (CPD), which is part of the Operations Directorate.
She served in the CPD until 2000, when she took time off to have her twin babies. She returned to work in April 2001, and was assigned to the Iraqi branch of the CPD. That was where she was working when Robert Novak revealed her identity. She still had non-official cover…meaning that it was not known that she worked for the government and she had no diplomatic immunity when she traveled overseas.
All of this information is a matter of public record. But the PRB of the CIA decided that it could not acknowledge that Valerie worked for the agency at any time prior to 2002 (the year when her husband was sent to Niger). This is how the chairman of the PRB explained the situation in a December 22, 2006 letter to Ms. Wilson:
As we explained in our letter of 21 November 2006 and we discussed during our recent meeting, pages 1 through 124 of your manuscript, as currently drafted, would reveal classified information primarily because of the context in which the information appears and the timeframes associated with the material. At our recent meeting, you asked us to provide you with line-in/line-out edits to this part of the manuscript. We are committed to working with you and to providing you with constructive assistance in identifying changes that could be made to your manuscript to render it unclassified. However, we are unable to provide you with line-in/line-out edits in an unclassified correspondence.
The first 124 pages of your manuscript are replete with statements that may be unclassified standing alone, but they become classified when they are linked with a specific time, such as an event in your personal life, or are included in another context that would reveal classified information. A detailed description of this information along with how the timeframes and contexts are problematic would be classified…
…Additionally, there is more than one approach to revising the material in the first 124 pages of your manuscript in order to render in unclassified. For example, one approach to revising these portions of your manuscript to make them unclassified might be to separate certain statements and vignettes from the timeframes in which they currently appear in your manuscript. Another approach might be to remove the references to the times and events in your personal life. We recognize that these options might not be feasible in some instances and that the only way to avoid revealing classified information in those cases would be to recast that information or fictionalize it…
This was all a fancy way of telling Valerie that all mentions of CIA service prior to 2002 would have to be redacted. How can you write a book at about a 21-year career if all mentions of the first 17 years are redacted?
But the PRB wasn’t satisfied with this level of sabotage. They went crazy with the redactions. Consider this one, from a description of her training at The Farm (p.11-12):
Our training quickly assumed a pattern: up at 5 A.M. for physical training, which involved running or walking in formation while singing bawdy songs to keep tempo, just as military recruits have done for decades; followed by a quick breakfast, then a morning class in a military discipline. Lunch [redacted] a throwback to traditional southern cooking. Almost everything was dipped in batter and deep-fried, and a salad bar was considered newfangled.
What do you think the PRB prevented our enemies from learing in that redaction? Look at this next part. Here, Valerie discussing her problems with the PRB.
Sentences that might begin with “In my [redacted] career, I had never seen such a thing,” for example, were dutifully blacked out. I could not, however, take the [redacted] half of the manuscript with me then–they wanted it to be accompanied by a formal letter from the PRB. Any they would to hold on to [redacted] part of my manuscript, [redacted].
They redacted which half of her manuscript was causing concern. Given that the first half of the book deals with her pre-2002 career in the CIA and is HEAVILY REDACTED, I can’t see how any foreign intelligence agency could surmise that it is the half that concerned the PRB.
This is the level of harassment and sabotage this administration put on the publication of this book. Even the PRB acknowledged that they were out of line.
Naturally, as we sat around a fake wood conference table, I expressed my puzzlement and dismay at this turn of events to the PRB chairman and his staffers. They agreed completely, using terms like “ludicrous” and “absurd” to describe the decison made by unnamed senior managers. [redacted]
The PRB may not have been the most sinister harassment the Wilson’s endured, however.
It was around that same time in early summer that the owner of the lawn service company we had used for some time was walking around the house, surveying the garden. By chance, he noticed something very strange. I was writing at my desk, on our lower level when John knocked on the glass door and gestured at me to come out on the deck. I stepped outside and looked up to where he was pointing. Several of the enormous bolts that held the upper deck to the side of the house were inexplicably missing. It was not as if they had fallen out: there were none on the ground. Our upper deck is probably fifty feet above the ground and a collapse would be fatal. It didn’t make sense–we had built the deck the year before and used a reputable local firm that had done other projects for us. I called Joel, the owner of the firm, and asked him to come out. The next day he took a close look at the support beams and bolts and was as alarmed as John had been; he told us to stay off the decks until they were fixed. Joel was at a loss to explain the missing bolts; he trusted his workers and couldn’t imagine that they had forgotten to put in several large, important bolts. It was all unnerving. As the saying goes, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that they aren’t out to get you.”
It’s amazing that the Wilsons refused to back down in the face of such intimidation. Fair Game is worth reading, despite the heavily redacted portions because it reveals a lot of the personal side. It discusses Valerie’s struggles with postpartum depression, their marital and financial struggles during l’affair Plame, her difficulties at work, their sudden celebrity, and their decision to move to New Mexico. And, much of what is redacted is explained in a lengthy afterword by Laura Rozen.
Buy the book. They deserve it. And so does Karl Rove.
