I almost tackled you, she says, pouring a glass of ice water in the granite-countered kitchen. Her five-year-old twins, Trevor and Samantha, play on the floor of the room across the hall, while her husband finishes a phone conversation in the living room. The house is open and clean, decorated with Oriental carpets and contemporary art. She apologizes. One resourceful reporter for the British Sunday Telegraph recently tracked down their address and arrived unannounced, and she's still angry. British journalists, mutters Joseph Wilson as he enters the room. Plame pours him a soda water and cranberry juice, and they exchange details about the groceries they need.
As she putters around the house in a white T-shirt and slacks before making a run to a store, Plame declines to answer any questions about her work at the CIA. She also says she won't talk about the scandal that has periodically gripped Washington since her cover as an employee in the Directorate of Operations at the Agency was blown two years ago. What she will say about her life is that things have been busy—I have five-year-old twins. She just returned to work at the CIA last month, her husband says, after an eight-month unpaid leave taken at her own request. She goes out to Langley five days a week, he says, but only part-time.
Wilson declines to say much about why his wife took the time off—personal reasons, he says. But he also says that her career has been hurt by the disclosure of her identity. There's a whole part of her career that she can no longer do, says Wilson as he smokes a cigar on his back porch, with a view of the Washington Monument and planes coming down the Potomac River on final approach to Reagan National Airport. Professionally, obviously she can't work with the same amount of discretion she was able to work in before, he adds. It would be very difficult for her to do overseas assignments.
Her adversaries say Plame and Wilson are exaggerating the damage. Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, said last week that Plame could hardly have been under deep cover if she was openly driving to work every day at CIA headquarters. She was done, says one senior Republican Senate aide, when asked if Plame's career had been hurt. She'd had her two kids, she'd come back to headquarters. And how do you maintain your cover when your husband is saying I was sent on a mission by the CIA?
Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, the intelligence committee's top Democrat, says that's not the point. President Bush's top advisor, Karl Rove, and others who identified Plame as a CIA employee were picking on someone smaller than them, he says. If you're among the top three or four people in the top place in Washington—the White House—you have to be incredibly scrupulous, Rockefeller told TIME. It just doesn't set well. When you have a calculated effort to defame a person whom you've never met, I don't think that's forgivable.
It's clear that Plame's relationship with her employers has been strained. Wilson says his wife tried to write an op-ed that would support his arguments against his critics, but that the CIA did not want it to be printed. She was told it might hinder her work and that it wouldn't advance Agency interests, he says. Which I take to mean, 'might get us in hot water with the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.'
Wilson dismisses the argument that Rove didn't name her, but said she was Wilson's wife. Valerie's name has been Valerie Wilson since we married in April of 1998, he says, Her name is Valerie Wilson on her passport; it is Valerie Wilson on her credit cards; it's Valerie Wilson on the mortgage note for this house; and it's Valerie Wilson on her driver's license. So when you say 'Wilson's wife,' you have essentially identified Valerie Wilson, Mrs. Wilson.
Most difficult, he says, is the shift in her dealings with people she has known for twenty years while under cover. In terms of her personal life, he says, Relationships that she's made over the past 20 years have all had to be recalibrated as people she has known have had to come to terms with the fact that she's not the Valerie Plame they thought she was. Friends who have said, 'Why didn't you tell me?' or 'You betrayed our confidence.' And she's had to patiently go through what it means when you live life as a cover.