Plame Tells Tale of Betrayal in New Memoir

In her new memoir, former CIA officer Valerie Plame tells of her shock as the Bush administration presented evidence in 2003 that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction — “I knew key parts of it were wrong,” she says — as well as her take on her outing as a CIA employee.

The Washington Post:

She and her colleagues, she wrote, believed that Saddam Hussein was hiding chemical and biological weapons, which she feared would be used against U.S. troops. But there was scant evidence to support those concerns, and she was certain that the president and his aides were publicly exaggerating the nuclear threat posed by Iraq at the time.

“What we struggled so hard to obtain was much too thin and not nearly robust enough to start a war over,” she asserts in “Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House.” The book, published by Simon & Schuster, is scheduled to go on sale Monday.

The title refers to a comment attributed to Karl Rove, who during his tenure as a White House adviser reportedly told a journalist that “Joe Wilson’s wife is fair game” for a White House intent on discrediting the former ambassador. He became a target after he publicly revealed that he had investigated, on behalf of the CIA, reports that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Niger. A year after he reported that there was no evidence to support the claim, it appeared in Bush’s State of the Union speech, two months before the president ordered troops into Iraq.

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