Valerie Plame Wilson: No Ordinary Spy

This segment was originally broadcast on Oct. 21, 2007. It was updated on Aug. 14, 2008.

When former CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity was published in a newspaper column five years ago, an investigation traced the leak all the way to the White House and it became apparent this was no ordinary spy story.

Her cover was blown after her husband - former ambassador Joe Wilson - criticized the Bush administration about the Iraq war. Was it retaliation? Administration supporters said no, dismissing her as a low level analyst. One congressman even called her "a glorified secretary."

Valerie Plame Wilson kept her silence about all this for years, until last October when she granted her first interview to 60 Minutes and Katie Couric.

60 Minutes met the most famous spy in America in Santa Fe, N.M., where she moved with her family two years ago. And she wanted to clear up some misconceptions.

"When I was outed on July 14th, 2003, I was, until that moment, covert," Plame Wilson says.

Asked what that means, Plame Wilson tells Couric, "That means no one outside of a very small circle knew where I really worked."

She believes her identity was leaked in a newspaper because her husband publicly accused the president and others of lying to justify the invasion.

"We understood that he would be criticized deeply. I never once considered that in fact this administration would betray my identity as payback for his criticism," Plame Wilson says.

She says seeing her name in print was "horrifying, absolutely horrifying."

Horrifying, because Plame Wilson was no glorified secretary. In fact, as it's spelled out in her book, "Fair Game," published by Simon & Schuster, which like CBS News and CBSNews.com is owned by CBS, she spent 20 years at the CIA, rising to top-level positions. Her assignments took her all over the world, where she gathered information, recruited spies, and worked for many years deep undercover. In 1998, she was working at headquarters, spying for the newest CIA division, counter-proliferation.

"Our mission was to make sure that the bad guys, basically, did not get nuclear weapons," Plame Wilson explains.

By the time her name was leaked in 2003, she was chief of operations for the CIA's joint task force Iraq, in charge of dozens of officers and analysts. It was before the Iraq war, and she was trying to find evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

At the time, Plame Wilson says this didn't sound so far-fetched. "It's not as though Saddam Hussein had not pursued this and had not used WMD on his own people," she says.

"You and your team were meeting with Iraqi scientists before the invasion. What kind of intelligence were you getting from those people?" Couric asks.

"Thin. Very thin, very patchy," Plame Wilson says.

"Could it be you just weren't getting enough intelligence at the time?" Couric asks.

"Exactly. That was the horror. You didn't know if maybe if you just found the right scientist. If you just got to the right person, he would be able to give you the plans or give you, you know, really critical stuff that would help put all these pieces together," Plame Wilson says.

One of those pieces was of particular interest to the vice president's office: an intelligence report saying Iraq was buying 500 tons of uranium ore - which can be used to build nuclear weapons - from the African nation of Niger. It was a report that later turned out to be based on forged documents.

In early 2002, Plame Wilson says an officer from her task force got a call from one of Dick Cheney's staffers, asking the CIA to look into the allegation.

"And just as we were talking and pondering this, another colleague of mine came by, overheard us. And he suggested, he said, 'Well what about Joe? Why don't we send Joe?'" she recalls.

Send "Joe," as in her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

When it was brought up, Plame Wilson thought it was a reasonable idea. "Because Joe has the independent credentials to do this. He knew Iraq and Saddam Hussein. He had served many years in Africa. He had in fact, knew the governments, the different governments of Niger," she says.

"He had, in fact, gone to Niger for the CIA before," Couric remarks.

"Yes. He had done some missions. Yes," Plame Wilson says.

So her CIA superiors dispatched him back to Niger, where he concluded the uranium sale was "highly unlikely." That was March 2002. Almost a year later, during the State of the Union address, President Bush uttered these 16 words: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

"I just thought it sounded odd. Of course, I already thought back to Joe's trip, but I'm thinking, 'Well, there are other countries in Africa that produce uranium, yellow cake uranium. Niger is not the only one.' So…," says Plame Wilson.

At first she was willing to give the president the benefit of the doubt. But eight days later, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell gave a presentation to the United Nations, making the case for war. It was then she realized - based on firsthand knowledge - that things were not adding up.

"Because I knew what we had from months and months of working and trying to find this intelligence. And here was a highly respected secretary of state, and he's talking about things that, in my world, I knew not to be entirely accurate," Plame Wilson recalls. "I think it was for me the first time that I stepped back a little bit from the operational weeds and said, 'What is going on here?' Because it was clear we were going to war, and I thought it was a very thin case. They were taking bits and pieces, cherry-picking, intelligence to make their case for war."

Her husband shared that view. And four months after the invasion of Iraq he went public in an opinion piece in the New York Times, called "What I Didn't Find In Africa," alleging the pre-war "intelligence was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat." At the time, his wife was still undercover at the CIA's joint task force Iraq.

"Did you ever talk to him, weigh the pros and cons of going public with this?" Couric asks.

"No, he had thought long and hard about doing this before writing this piece, this op-ed piece," Plame Wilson says. "It had nothing whatsoever to do with me."

"You never for a moment thought this could potentially jeopardize my career?" Couric asks.

"It's called living your cover. This had nothing to do with what I was doing," Plame Wilson says.

"But admit it. It comes awfully close to what you were doing, even covertly. I mean, you were trying to ascertain if Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. He's writing an article saying it's really not valid, this one assertion. I mean, can't you see how those two things might collide in a very dangerous way?" Couric asks.

"Listen, he had information that was firsthand information that was in stark contrast to the lie, the 16 words that appeared in the president's State of the Union address. He wasn't supposed to say anything?" Plame Wilson replies.

Two days after the opinion piece ran, the White House admitted the 16 words "did not rise to the level of inclusion in a presidential speech."

A week later, Valerie Plame's name and CIA affiliation were printed in a newspaper by conservative columnist Robert Novak. Eighteen years of meticulously crafted cover were gone in an instant.

"I can tell you all the intelligence services in the world that morning were running my name through their databases to see, did anyone by this name come in the country? When? Do we know anything about it? Where did she stay? Who did she see?" Plame Wilson says.

Asked what the ramifications of that would be, Plame Wilson tells Couric, "Well, it's very serious. It puts in danger, if not shuts down, the operations that I had worked on."

"Did you ever hear about anything that happened to anyone with whom you had contact as a result of the leak?" Couric asks.

"Yes I have, that's all I can say," Plame Wilson asks.

"Is it safe to say people were put in danger?" Couric asks.

"There was a damage report done by the CIA. I never saw it. I certainly didn't reach out to my old assets and ask 'em how they're doing, although I would have liked to," Plame Wilson replies.

"You probably can speculate about the damage though. If you had to write your own damage assessment, knowing what you know, how serious would it be?" Couric asks.

Says Plame Wilson, "It would be serious."

It was so serious, the president promised to fire anyone involved in revealing her identity to the press. "If somebody did leak classified information, I'd like to know it, and we'll take the appropriate action," President Bush announced.

An investigation was launched. But as it dragged on, the Wilsons hardly kept a low profile, appearing at glamorous public events, political fundraisers for the Democratic party, and in "Vanity Fair" magazine.

"You know, you're a covert CIA agent for X number of years and suddenly, you know, you're in this Greta Garbo pose in your husband's Jaguar," Couric remarks, referring to a photo that ran with the Vanity Fair article.

"It was more trouble than it was worth. And it was, I was not interviewed for the article. I was not identifiable. The damage had already been done," Plame Wilson says.

Asked if she regrets the photo, Plame Wilson says, "You have my answer."

"What about those who think you and Joe have become too partisan?" Couric asks.

"Again, that's how it's how the 'right' has chosen to frame us," Plame Wilson says.

"You have become very partisan though. Would you agree with that?" Couric asks.

"After what we've been through and how I've seen this administration react, not
just on this issue, but on others, yes," Plame Wilson says.

But she says it's with good reason. Eventually the leak of her name was traced all the way back to the vice president's office. One piece of evidence released by a special prosecutor: Dick Cheney's own copy of Joe Wilson's op-ed piece, with handwritten notes asking, "Have they done this sort of thing before?" "Send an ambassador to answer a question?" "… or did his wife send him on a junket?"

The Wilsons believe it was the beginning of a smear campaign.

"Why do you think the administration made such a big deal over who exactly sent your husband to Niger?" Couric asks.

"Because this sets up this erroneous charge of somehow there was nepotism involved. And therefore, if I could be accused of sending him, then what Joe reported on was invalid," says Plame Wilson.

And nepotism was the key charge top administration officials made when they leaked her name to reporters.

The special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, found evidence there were four leakers: deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, the vice president's Chief of Staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby, President Bush's closest confidante Karl Rove, and White House spokesman Ari Fleischer.

All avoided the most serious charges by claiming not to know she was undercover. But Joe Wilson says that's no excuse.

"It was a mafia-like tactic. And the idea of going after your family, even in Washington, was an outrage. Nobody went after Karl Rove's family. Nobody went after Scooter Libby's family. They went after my family," Wilson says.

"But in all fairness, Karl Rove's wife doesn't work for the CIA," Couric remarks.

"How do you know?" Wilson says.

"Scooter Libby's wife doesn't work for the CIA," Couric says.

"How do you know? How do you know?" Wilson asks.

"I don't know for sure. But I think it's a safe assumption," Couric replies.

Says Wilson, "Yeah, you don't know. And we don't know what they did because nobody went after their families. And that's the way it should be. That's the way it would be. However you wanna play the game, the idea of going after somebody's family is an absolute outrage."

"You are still seething," Couric says.

"Oh, I think - absolutely," Wilson admits, laughing. "Absolutely. I'm seething because it was first and foremost a great betrayal of the national security of the country."

In March 2007, Libby was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice. Fitzgerald said that by lying, Libby had prevented him from getting to the bottom of the leak, and he said "there is a cloud over the vice president," and "there is a cloud over the White House." A few months later, President Bush commuted his prison sentence.

"When all is said to done, the top aides to both the president and the vice president, leaked your name to reporters. Do you think President Bush was in on this?," Couric says.

"I don't know about that," Plame Wilson says. "But I, like most other Americans, saw President Bush say on TV that he would fire anyone from his administration found to be involved in leaking my name. It turns out the President is not a man of his word."

She hopes her book will allow her to clear the air. But even this, she says, has been a bitter fight and her manuscript has the scars to prove it: CIA censors blacked out 10 percent of the copy.

Today, their shared office in Santa Fe speaks volumes. On one side sits the outspoken former ambassador, his walls adorned with pictures and mementos from a storied career. On the other, the walls are practically bare, reflecting the secret life of a 20-year veteran of the CIA.

"Our critics would love nothing more for us to go away, and just be quiet. And we won't give them that satisfaction," Plame Wilson tells Couric. "We have young children that one day when they understand more of what's happened and what's transpired, we wanna be able to say to them, you know, we did our best. And we told the truth. We weren't perfect. But we tried to do the right thing."

Produced By Graham Messick