By PHK
Over a lengthy, boozy lunch this past fall at the swank and discreet Café Milano in Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown, Richard Armitage told FT Pentagon and intelligence correspondent Demetri Sevastopulo that one of the lowest points in his career was his role in leaking (Valerie) Plame’s identity to columnist Robert Novak.
It’s obvious from Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House, Plame’s recently published memoir, that this was also one of the lowest points in her career. In fact, Armitage’s outage of Plame – inadvertent or not – signaled the beginning of the end of her profession as a CIA operations officer working under deep commercial cover.
I found Fair Game intriguing for a number of reasons. First, despite the hatchet job by US government censors – apparently not only by the CIA worried about national security but more significantly by a White House more concerned about staying in power and saving well padded rear ends from uncomfortable, and perhaps drafty jail cells – there was enough left between and around the black-out lines to make Plame’s book well worth reading.
To begin at the beginning . . .
Plame began by providing me with a far better understanding of the kind of training CIA gave its operatives in the 1980s when she entered the Agency, how she and her colleagues viewed State Department colleagues (not favorably but then State and USIA Foreign Service Officers didn’t regard CIA operatives in a positive light either) and the intelligence agency’s female officer “glass ceiling” advancement problems. Similar promotion problems also barred too many women professionals from reaching the higher levels in State and USIA until glacially slow law suits that took years to wend their way through the courts began to change things. Just in time, I might add, for the post Cold War downsizing to destroy far too many careers regardless of gender or race.
I can only compare Plame’s entry level training with mine as a US Information Agency officer trainee in 1970. But I can assure you that Plame’s paramilitary classes did not even cross the minds of those in charge of teaching us the public diplomacy ropes – or, at the time, should they have. Besides, my USIA class largely trained with State Department colleagues so we, and the State crowd, learned the ins-and-outs of Foggy Bottom, how Embassies functioned and most importantly for the State officers amongst us the nitty-gritty of issuing – and not issuing – passports and visas. We in USIA were thankfully exempted from first tours in visa mills by our separate Agency status until after the 1999 merger in the State Department. While our State colleagues spent three weeks in Consul General Roslyn learning the consular game, we had three far more pleasant weeks discovering the basics of international media, education and cultural relations.
Don't ask, don't tell what?
I found more than enough in ensuing chapters of Plame’s memoirs to convince me that she had worked under deep cover and in positions directly related to the highly sensitive area of nuclear non-proliferation – or counter proliferation. The amount of censors’ black ink expended on these portions of the text alone is an excellent indication.
For individuals in the White House to claim that she wasn’t under deep cover when they leaked her name and agency affiliation to the media in clear retribution for her husband’s publicly authoritative questioning of the Bush administration’s erroneous rationale for invading Iraq is simply one of the many stupid, unthinking, short term calculating and illegal things Rove, Libby and others did while drawing far too large salaries and remaining ensconced in their plush and powerful executive office sinecure. Vice President Cheney should, in my view, also have been implicated. Whether W was in the loop is beyond me – he may well have been too preoccupied pedaling on his exercise bike or chopping wood at Crawford to have been told or remembered what he was told about his minions’ illegal behavior – but then again, one has to wonder.
Black on black
I have no access to the blacked out portions of Fair Game so I can only guess at what is missing. Regardless, I find it ludicrous that even Plame’s dates and posts of service and where and when she met her husband Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, IV were considered national security risks if, in fact, the information had been included in her original text which I suspect it was. That information was already part of the public record – as the book’s lengthy "Afterward" by journalist Laura Rozen points out.
Ironically, it was hunky-dory for Plame to write that she had studied a hard language in preparation for a junior officer embassy assignment in an unspecified southern European country in the late 1980s yet she couldn’t name the country. Give me a break. At that time there was only one southern European country that fit the criteria where a difficult language was spoken. There was also a nice photo of her at the Acropolis one wintry day in 1990 - not exactly tourist season – in the event you hadn’t already figured out her Greek posting.
Clearly Plame served her first tour at the US Embassy in Athens. So did I. In my case as a public diplomacy junior officer with the U.S. Information Service (1970-71). I served in Athens again from 1981-84 as Executive Director of the Hellenic American Union (HAU). For years this was America’s sole binational cultural center in Greece but in 1996 it was taken over in a “coup” that need not have happened. The HAU has subsequently become a cash cow English teacher language testing center while perched on land in Athen’s swankiest in-town neighborhood. The building and the land were purchased with US taxpayers’ money.
Plame loved Greece, a country about which she claimed that too many of her Embassy colleagues and particularly their nonworking spouses complained of the country’s idiosyncrasies like “impossible driving habits, bizarre store hours, corrupt and nearly nonfunctioning telephone service and . . . sullen shopkeepers” while finding solace at the Hamburger Hamlet on the now defunct US Airbase.
Well, yes. I heard this too when I served there. Too many Americans still seem to think that Greeks wear togas, spout Plato over lunch, eat grapes at any time or live like Zorba. Then they arrive in Athens to find their romanticized notions in shards and that only the grape eating survives. These Americans become quickly disenchanted with everyday life in a city with far too much traffic for its tiny, winding streets and, oh my gosh, stores that don’t stay open 24/7.
True, Greece is not the US, but speaking even some of the language changes “sullen” into “smiling” shopkeepers, learning shop opening and closing times does not take a degree in rocket science, and the country is best appreciated outside its major metropolis. Thankfully, most US military bases are long gone and Athens itself has been considerably spruced up since Plame served there.
Strange “secrets”
I still fail to understand why the green eye-shaded hatchet wielders with their indelible thick black ink pens refused to let Plame write about meeting her husband Joe Wilson in Washington, DC – or mention the obvious fact that this event even took place. His name suddenly appears in Fair Game as if from outer space– although she does tell us later that he retired from the State Department in 1998 and lost most of his consulting business as a result of the White House smear campaign against him.
Why is it that we have to learn from Laura Rozen’s "Afterword" that Wilson and Plame met at a Turkish Embassy Reception in 1997 when he was working as a political advisor for General George Joulwan, the commander of U.S. European Command forces stationed in Stuttgart, and Plame had gone to the reception with a friend of hers. Excuse me: this is a national security secret?
Returning to Athens for a minute, Plame’s tenure there was years ago - as the Cold War ended. This is now. The world has changed as did her positions thereafter as she moved up the CIA career ladder. It seems to me that the most sensitive part of her career relates to her far more recent work in the Agency’s Counter Proliferation Division not her first tour as a junior officer in Greece. Despite all the blacked out text, I still learned a lot about this new division and its work from Plame’s memoirs.
The "Afterword:" Read Plame, then maybe Rozen
I agree with the Simon and Schuster’s decision to commission Laura Rozen’s (or at least someone’s) “Afterword” to help fill the gaps created by the U.S. government’s overzealous and vindictive censors most likely under instructions to keep this book from publication. Rozen’s “Afterword” chapter on Greece, however, was the book’s low point for me. For someone who covered the Balkans as a freelancer for six years, she really should have learned Greece's political history, the US-Greek relationship and the American Embassy in Athens far better than what she demonstrates here. If you would like a few examples, I can give them to you or may do so anyway in a follow-up post, but I’d rather emphasize Plame’s text here.
I hope that Rozen’s other chapters are more accurate. I have neither the background or the inclination to comment on them authoritatively. In any event, I also realize that Simon and Schuster gave her little time to complete this daunting assignment.
Regardless, I’m glad I did not take the advice of at least one earlier reviewer to read Rozen’s “Afterword” first to make sense out of Fair Game. The publisher has the order right. Read Plame, then Rozen. In fact, now that you know Plame’s first overseas assignment was in Athens, you needn’t bother with Rozen’s chapter on Greece – it's not worth it.