Valerie Plame Wilson's book, "Fair Game," sells for $26, but, thanks to the CIA, its readers won't get the whole story.
The spy agency has removed nearly a quarter of its former operative's just-published memoir on the grounds of secrecy, a decision backed by a federal judge.
The result is pages and pages of gray lines blotting out Mrs. Wilson's account of how her sudden and unwanted notoriety in 2003 tripped a controversy that reached deep into the Bush administration and ended her long CIA career.
"It's been a wild ride for 41/2 years, and I guess it is not over yet," sighed the ex-spy last week. "The CIA is trampling on my First Amendment rights, and my publisher [Simon & Schuster] and I are going to fight it."
When she joined the agency in 1985 after graduating from Penn State University, she signed an agreement limiting what she could disclose if she wrote a book.
"I would never write anything that would jeopardize national security," Mrs. Wilson said, "and I didn't in the book, but they took stuff out anyway."
The CIA claimed that the omissions or "redactions" were ordered because the "contexts" of Mrs. Wilson's "time frames" might reveal classified information.
Simon & Schuster challenged the decision in federal court, but it was denied. An appeal is in the works.
Had Mrs. Wilson known the agency would have made so many objections, would she have written the book another way?
Mrs. Wilson laughed at the question. "There was no other format I could have used to tell the story except chronologically. I believe the cuts were made for other reasons.
"It's just yet another piece of the pattern of misconduct by this administration simply to perpetuate its power," she said. "Their goal is to diminish me and my responsibility at the CIA."
The story of her overnight fame -- or infamy, as such right-wing columnists as Robert Novak might call it -- began after her husband, former U.S. State Department ambassador Joseph Wilson, challenged President Bush's claim in his 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq was seeking to obtain raw material for nuclear weapons in Niger.
The claim was one of several Bush made to justify invading the Middle East nation.
"It was just 16 words in the whole speech, but it made a difference," Mrs. Wilson said. "The CIA wanted those words out of the speech but lost the fight."
She added that an Army general and a diplomat had earlier found no evidence for Bush's claim, but that the CIA wanted Mr. Wilson to confirm the findings and sent him to Niger.
After Novak in a July 14, 2003, column, linked Mrs. Wilson, then a chief of operations at the CIA and a former undercover agent, to her husband's challenge of Bush's claim, she was called "fair game" for criticism by Karl Rove, former Bush political adviser.
Despite suspicion of possible violations of federal law, Novak was never charged in the subsequent criminal case that grew out of the revelation and continues to denigrate the Wilsons.
"Novak's changed his story so many times that it's funny," Mrs. Wilson said. "He's simply being used by this administration, and I find him contemptible."
The Wilsons and their 7-year-old twins live in Santa Fe, N.M., where the onetime spy intends to be a full-time mother once she finishes her book tour later this year.
"I really don't want to be defined by this issue," she said. "The fact is that had none of this happened, I'd still be at the CIA working on counter-weapons proliferation problems. But, I do look forward to raising my twins out of that atmosphere in Washington."
First Published: October 30, 2007, 8:00 a.m.