Red Carpet Spy

Red Carpet Spy
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Published: September 24, 2010
SANTA FE, N.M
VALERIE PLAME WILSON, America’s best-known ex-spy, was looking chic in black bustier and flowing white pants, posing for paparazzi on the red carpet earlier this month at a film festival in Deauville, France.

A few days later, she was standing in her Santa Fe dining room, sans makeup, in sneakers and sweatshirt, fighting off jet lag as she presided over some run-of-the-mill domestic chaos. She had children — 10-year-old twins Samantha and Trevor — to hustle to school and a frisky dog to walk. Her husband, Joe, a former ambassador, had just returned from a business trip to Baghdad and was on the phone, squabbling with the airline over lost luggage. Their refrigerator was practically empty and Samantha had proclaimed her English muffin “disgusting.”

Ms. Wilson took a bite. “Sourdough,” she announced, handing the offending muffin to her husband. He dug in with feigned relish, musing that it might taste better with some worms. The little girl rolled her eyes.

For Ms. Wilson, a former undercover operative for the C.I.A. whose exposure in 2003 engulfed the Bush White House in scandal, the hectic morning was a precious sliver of normalcy in a life that has had anything but. She and her husband fled Washington’s echo chamber for Santa Fe three years ago, seeking peace and seclusion after the so-called Plame Affair destroyed his international consulting business, wrecked her espionage career and nearly took down their marriage.

Now she is making her re-entry, this time on her own terms.

The woman who spent decades guarding her privacy has found a new voice through a very public enterprise, the movie business, which is why she was in Deauville. “Fair Game,” a film based largely on her 2007 autobiography of the same name (starring Naomi Watts as Valerie and Sean Penn as Joe), is set to open this fall.

You might call it “The Spy Who Went Hollywood,” though if you did, you would get some serious pushback from Ms. Wilson. “Please, no,” she said, shaking her head. “We have had just enough peek into the world of Hollywood to know that it is just not of interest to us. It really is high school with money.”

Perhaps. But Ms. Wilson is smart enough to know that Hollywood has a bigger megaphone than Washington does, and she is making adroit use of it to reclaim her own narrative and burnish her credentials. She was featured this summer alongside a bevy of world leaders in “Countdown to Zero,” a documentary about nuclear proliferation, a topic she knew well as a C.I.A. officer tracking weapons of mass destruction. But her focus at the moment is promoting “Fair Game,” directed by Doug Liman.

THE film, which also draws on Mr. Wilson’s 2004 book, “The Politics of Truth,” will have its premiere in New York and Washington next month. It recounts how Ms. Wilson’s C.I.A. cover was blown by the conservative columnist Robert Novak after her husband, who had traveled to Niger at the C.I.A.’s behest to assess whether Saddam Hussein was pursuing nuclear weapons, challenged the Bush administration’s rationale for the Iraq war on the opinion pages of The New York Times A special prosecutor investigated the leak, which led to the conviction on obstruction of justice charges of I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, then Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff.

In Washington, where the Wilsons — especially Mr. Wilson — remain persona non grata in Republican circles, the movie will no doubt roil the waters. In 1991, Mr. Wilson was the last American diplomat in Iraq before bombs fell; upon his return, the first President Bush praised him as “a true American hero.” But loyalists to the second President Bush regard him as a publicity-seeking blowhard — “pompous, self-centered, egotistical,” wrote Karl Rove, the former Bush political strategist, who was spared indictment in the leak inquiry. Mr. Rove’s lawyer, Robert Luskin, predicts the movie will be a snooze; he says the Wilsons are “a little past their ‘sell-by’ date.” Mr. Wilson, still in “us vs. them” mode, says the movie “goes after them with a stiletto, rather than a butcher knife.”

Republicans still snicker at the way the Wilsons posed in Joe’s Jaguar convertible — he with an arm dangling over the side, she masked by a headscarf and dark glasses — for Vanity Fair at the height of the scandal. The photograph, along with a collection of signed political cartoons, hangs in the Wilsons’ guest bathroom in Santa Fe, one of the few signs of their Washington life. (The Jaguar is gone; Ms. Wilson insisted her husband sell it when they moved.)

As much as it is a political movie, “Fair Game” is a personal one, the story of the tensions that nearly ripped the couple apart as he publicly accused the Bush White House of a “smear campaign,” while she remained silent, terrified for her children and her C.I.A. “assets,” people she had cultivated overseas. As her career crumbled and his consulting clients fled, they struggled, as Ms. Wilson wrote in her book, “to stop the slow slide of our marriage into nothingness.”

For Mr. Liman, the movie’s director, whose credits include “The Bourne Identity,” it was the elusive Ms. Wilson who was especially captivating. “She’s clearly a survivor,” he said. “She definitely loved her life as a spy, and worked very hard to earn the position that she had achieved, and all that was taken away from her. Yet you don’t get the feeling like she’s holding a grudge.”

Indeed she says she is not, though in her own controlled way she still seethes over what she calls “the Republican playbook, denigrating me and discrediting Joe.” The safety fears linger; for this article, Ms. Wilson preferred to be photographed outside her home, not in it, and the children were off-limits.

Santa Fe is, psychically and geographically, far removed from the toxic political climate of Washington, which is why the Wilsons moved here, to a sprawling adobe house on a ridge overlooking the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Aspens line their driveway, wildflowers bloom in the fall and their hummingbird feeder once attracted a bear. Ms. Wilson had come to know the city from business trips to Los Alamos National Laboratory nearby; she and her husband left Washington as soon as the Libby trial was over.
“We kind of looked at each other, and said, ‘Now, why are we here?’ ” she said, during a morning hike with the dog. “We didn’t have any jobs. We didn’t have any family there. It just seemed ...” Her voice trailed off, but the sentence did not need finishing. They had to escape to survive.
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Alex Wong/Getty Images

Ms. Wilson, right, at a news conference with the Global Zero U.S. Chairman Richard Burt and Queen Noor of Jordan.
Related

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Times Topic: Valerie Plame

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Valery Hache/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Arriving at the Cannes film festival with the actress Naomi Watts, who plays Ms. Wilson in “Fair Game.”
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Anne-Christine Poujoulat/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Ms. Wilson and her husband, Joe, at Cannes.

The early months here were a blur, as she fretted over the bills while “living on air.” They met the director of the Santa Fe Opera, who was enchanted with Trevor and cast him as Falstaff’s page. Mr. Wilson “became an opera dad,” his wife said, “staying for the whole rehearsal, sitting in the back, growing a beard.”

Today, Ms. Wilson can barely walk down Santa Fe streets without turning heads. When she arrived for lunch at a local cafe, the hostess was beside herself.

“Naomi Watts! Spectacular! How do you feel?” the woman gushed.

“A little nervous,” Ms. Wilson replied.

The Wilsons had just come from a church, where they had told their story to senior citizens. In a city that voted 3-to-1 for President Obama, the crowd, not surprisingly, was friendly. The first question: “Why aren’t Dick Cheney and George Bush in jail?”

When the talk was over, a gentleman approached and reached into a small bag. Ms. Wilson eyed him warily as he withdrew a pair of smooth buckeye nuts — good luck tokens, he said. He asked where their children went to school.

“A local public school,” Ms. Wilson replied cryptically. The man persisted, saying he was a retired educator. Ms. Wilson sized him up and relented, naming the school.

Later, at the cafe, over champagne and a vegetable frittata, she talked about her “life passage” from private spy to public figure. She feels “more integrated” now, she said. One thing she has learned: “I’m not terribly confrontational, but I’ve gotten better at holding my ground.”

Hollywood has opened doors. “Countdown to Zero” has offered her a chance to put her C.I.A. expertise to use in the public sphere — and to befriend Meg Ryan and Queen Noor of Jordan, fellow advocates of eliminating nuclear weapons. Both films took her to Cannes last spring, where Giorgio Armani hosted a party on his yacht for “Fair Game,” and where Ms. Wilson strode the red carpet with Naomi Watts at her side. At the “Countdown” New York premiere in July, she dished with Whoopi Goldberg and Elisabeth Hasselbeck on “The View.”

But when “Countdown to Zero” was shown at C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va., in a secure auditorium known as The Bubble, Ms. Wilson was not there.

“I wasn’t invited,” she said wistfully. “It would have been awkward.”

Both Wilsons were consultants on “Fair Game,” taking turns on the set in New York so that one or the other could be home with the twins. Mr. Penn visited them in Santa Fe (“I made him clean up after dinner,” Ms. Wilson said), and she and Ms. Watts are now pals, trading “funny, gossipy e-mails,” the actress said.

“This is her new life, and she didn’t choose it, but why shouldn’t she enjoy it and embrace it?” Ms. Watts said. “She’s using her voice, and her beliefs.”

Still, it seems a reluctant embrace. Spies do not reveal themselves easily, and there is more in the public domain about Ms. Wilson than she can disclose. Her book was published with big chunks blacked out after a protracted legal battle with the C.I.A., and she is bound by its secrecy agreement. Inquiries about her work — or whether certain scenes in “Fair Game” are truthful — are met with raised eyebrows and a standard reply: “I can’t speak to specifics.”

At 47, Ms. Wilson wants her story known, but does not want the scandal to forever define her. “It’s a piece of our fabric, not the entire fabric,” she says. Last year, her husband, now 60, became chairman of the Africa subsidiary of Symbion Power, a construction company, and Ms. Wilson works part time doing community outreach for Santa Fe Institute, a scientific research organization. She is also collaborating with Sarah Lovett, a local author, on — what else? — a spy novel.

But for now she has a movie to promote. On the way back from Deauville, she stopped in Paris for interviews, and visited the Mariage Frères tea salon in the Marais. All the while, she said, she was wishing Trevor and Samantha could be there. She wanted to sip lemonade with them at the Café de Flore, and take them to the top of the Eiffel Tower.
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