May 11, 2025 • 38 mins
Former undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame was outed by The Bush Administration when her husband exposed the lie behind the claim of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq that was used as justification for the U.S. to invade. - A REAL government conspiracy
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'sha. I was a
CIA officer stationed around the world in high threat posts
in Europe, Russia, and in Asia.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East
and in war zones. We sometimes created conspiracies to deceive
our adversaries.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
Now we're going to use our expertise to deconstruct conspiracy
theories large and small.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Could they be true? Or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 1 (00:26):
This is mission implausible.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
I had to do a little research for the Introduction's
holy shit, where do I? How do I introduce you?
But let me, let me, let me try. So today
we're really pleased and proud to introduce our agency colleague.
We're all formers, and we'd like to welcome Valerie Plane
to the show today. So, Valerie is a former CIA officer.
(00:52):
Unlike John or I, who were under official cover is diplomats,
Valerie was a non official cover officer. So as a
business person who doesn't get diplomatic community, if she gets
into trouble, I'm like John or Iwould. But there's so
much more to Valerie. She's You're the author of two
really fine spine novels, you've dabbled in politics, You've had
(01:14):
a Hollywood movie Fair Game with Sean Penn and Naomi Watts.
Speaker 3 (01:20):
I want you to head up operations. It's his top priority.
Speaker 4 (01:23):
You're in business with a terror organization. Who if you
get out of this car? I can't protect you. You
have no idea what we can and cannot do.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
You are the center of a huge political scandal and
a victim of an actual conspiracy theory by the government.
You're also a mom and an activist for countering nuclear proliferation.
And maybe my most maybe the most impressive thing is
I'm actually a fan of the music group the Decembrists,
and they have a song Valerie Plane.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
Oh Valerie play.
Speaker 4 (01:57):
That really is your name. I would shout the same.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
The world.
Speaker 4 (02:04):
Dear battery play. So they made a wreck cover the
rest of you when I'll get the world.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
Valerie. Welcome to the show. It's really good to have you.
Speaker 4 (02:18):
Yeah, it's been a journey.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
As I say, you've lived in interesting times whatever that
needs right.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
Problem is, you probably didn't intend to live in interesting times, right.
You normally would have worked at CIA, had a career,
retired and quietly.
Speaker 4 (02:30):
There, which my career goal was to be chief of
station somewhere, which is like you run your own private fiefdom.
And I thought that was the be all and the
end all, and I but I miss my career. I
love what I did. I was proud to deserve my
country and it ended before I was ready.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
So the political scandal that you were the victim of
was huge, Bick twenty three some odd years ago. It
was a government conspiracy and you got and with the
victim of it. Could you take us through real quick
what happened and then what it's like to be like
a real victim of a conspiracy.
Speaker 4 (03:08):
So I'll recap for your listeners to refresh your memory.
In July two thousand and three, we had invaded Iraq,
and we invaded in March. By July, no WMD had
been found, even though the Bush administration had promised, and
that was what they predicated the whole war on. We
don't want to see the smoking gun in the shape
(03:30):
of a mushroom cloud, if you recall from then National
Security Advisor Condoise Rice and my husband at the time,
Ambassador Joe Wilson, wrote an op ed piece in The
New York Times entitled What I Did not find in Africa,
and in it he went after the central premise that
the Bush administration had given the American public for launching
(03:54):
a war of choice into a rock, which was Saddam
Museana's nuclear weapons. He went right after the Bush administration,
although in today's terms is probably relatively mild, but he
had said that the intelligence had been cherry picked, that
the intelligence was fit around the policy, and so forth.
(04:15):
And in retaliation, a week later, conservative calumnist Robert Novak
wrote a column and in it he named me Valerie
plain talking about Joe Wilson and what he had said
in his op ed. And by the way, his wife,
Valerie Plame, works at the CIA. So I knew immediately
(04:37):
when Joe tossed the paper to me that morning, at
five point thirty in the morning, that everything rushes through
your head where your life is completely different than what
it had been five seconds before. I knew the assets
with whom I had worked were in jeopardy people even
that I knew, in an innocuous fashion overseas, they too
(05:01):
could come under suspicion. I knew that my covert career
was finished. Because this column was syndicated appeared everywhere it
was my true name, and of course I was worried
about my three year old twins who were asleep in
the room next door. Because not everyone thinks highly or
(05:23):
kindly of the CIA. So that launched this huge political
scandal that actually went on for years. What happened was
the agency referred it the leak of my name to
the Justice Department, and they started digging. I mean, I
never wanted to be a public person. Obviously, I worked
(05:43):
for the CIA. I was perfectly happy with my kudos
coming from my covert colleagues. And our lives were turned
upside down. It was really a dark time. I was
called a glorified secretary because I guess because I'm a
girl that was by a member of Congress. We were
accused and called traders and liars because this really went
(06:05):
against what the Bush administration had laid out as the
reasoning behind the invasion. It ended up, or at least
that chapter of it ended, in two thousand and seven,
when the Special Prosecutor Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald indicted and
then convicted the Vice President Chenese chief of staff Scooter
(06:28):
Libby on lying and.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
At sat of Justice perjury.
Speaker 4 (06:33):
Auction of Justice exactly perjury. I like lying because it's
just so much clear what's happened. But and I ultimately
resigned from the agency because I felt I had the
best job in operations. I didn't want to stay too
much had happened. The agency did not treat me particularly
well in the aftermath. I was totally radioactive. They didn't
(06:57):
know what to do with me. We moved from Washington,
d See where all this happened, to where we're in
New Mexico now. Joe Wilson has gone sadly, and then
I just began the next part and I, you know,
just how to figure it out. And I've done a
(07:17):
lot of interesting things. You play the hand you're dealt.
It's not what I wanted. I loved my career. I
felt working on weapons of mass destruction, in particular the
nuclear threat was meaningful and it was satisfying. But that's
not what I got to do.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
I recall those times really well, and I didn't work
on Iraq or WMD. I was working on Russia things
and stuff at the time, and I think probably people
today have forgotten the intensity of it. So the administration
again went, like you said, went to war for war
of choice to get rid of Saddam Hussein, and it
wasn't going well, and so I think they wanted to
(07:54):
create a narrative of success. The president wasn'ting to run
for presidency again, and so anybody who against them to
try to say that things weren't going well like they
do today, and politics can get quite ugly, and public
servants usually are stay out of the political line, and
you got pulled into it. Scooter Libby was eventually convicted,
(08:16):
Bush commuted his sentence. Trump eventually pardoned him.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
But there's a lot of.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
People here, Novak, Carl Rove, Scooter Libby, Richard Armitage, Dick
Cheney who were involved in going after Did any of
them ever apologize, that's my question.
Speaker 4 (08:30):
No, with the exception of Dick Armitage, who did not
call me up personally. But I saw in some interview
he's hemmed in had and acknowledge that's probably he shouldn't
have done that, which, of course not. He'd been around
Washington more than a minute and knew. I mean, he
was just all of them were banning about my name
(08:51):
and whether a person to be a covert or overt
status with the CIA. You don't share that like candy
with journalists, which Dick Armitage did. And typically I'm not
a conspiracy minded person, but it really does apply in
this case. The special Prosecutor Fitzgerald really wanted to go
after and he tried to get convictions on Karl Rove
(09:14):
and many others. There were many in the White House
that were determined to make Joe Wilson and Valerie Plain
look like, oh they're you know, they're just ridiculous. There's
the shiny object look over here, anything to distract from
the real disaster of what was going on in a rock.
So it was a there was a conspiracy, and I'm
(09:36):
I can only imagine that Fitzgerald wanted I don't know
ninety percent that he would be able to convict and
because Scooter Libby took the fall for all of them,
he couldn't quite gather what he needed to make that happen.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
It's a long story, but I actually know Pat fitzghieald
one of the most guys with the highest integrity and
a really guy. He was voted one of the most
eligible bachelors in the US when I knew he wasn't
married yet, and he applied to get a rescue kitten,
and they turned him down because he was honest, and
he said, I work fifteen hours a day and I
(10:13):
sleep three times a week in my office. But so
on this show, we talk a lot about deconstructing and
debunking conspiracy theories, most of which are not true or
only have a German truth. But this is really different.
This isn't just a conspiracy that I'd like to drill
down with more against you, or that wasn't so much
against you. It was against your husband and you were
(10:35):
collateral damage. But there was other conspiracies involved in this.
And I just like to make a couple of statements
and hey, have you maybe run with it. The first
is that right after nine to eleven, within week, Vice
President Cheney was talking about going after a Rock, and
they had several different narratives. One of the narratives was
that Rock and al Qaeda were you know, technical term,
(10:58):
in cohoots with each other. The right and the CIA
and the intelligence community basically said there is no evidence
for this at all. But then they had the fallback
was he's getting weapons of mass destruction. But Cheney was
saying they have weapons before we'd even tried to investigate
it really right. And so one of the ways that
(11:19):
he claimed that they did was that they were getting
uranium yellow cake out of I think it was the
Zier And that's where your husband basically throw the bullshit
flag and said, I went and I investigated, they're not
getting it. And so he basically said, you're wrong, and
they came up with this office, the Office of Special
Plans under Doug Fight. There was all these neocons, Wolfowitz
(11:41):
and Richard Pearl and then this guy Machalabi who was
in a rocky and basically it was a conspiracy. They
created their own intelligence unit not to find out what happened.
They already knew what they wanted to say. They were
just looking for any evidence they could cherry pick to find.
So I was wondering if you could just talk about
(12:02):
how you view the conspiracies that brought us into this
horrific war that costs thousands of American lives and hundreds
of thousands of Iraqi lives and cost me several years
of my life in Iraq later.
Speaker 4 (12:15):
Sure, let's start at the beginning. Nine to eleven happens,
and we know within a matter of a week ten
days Cheney is at Camp David, and he's unfolding a
map of Iraq, saying, there's not that many targets in Afghanistan,
but in Iraq. Now you know there's something there. And
(12:35):
we know that the neocons would have been in the
wilderness for some years had prepared what is it called
Blueprint for American Century, Proposal for American Century. They had
put this together their dog, this manifesto in nineteen ninety eight,
and it called for a horrific sort of attack or
(12:55):
some sort of precipitating event, to thereby launch American might
and military power in ways to remake the world in
the ways they thought it should be. And lo and behold,
nine to eleven happens. So now the neocons are in power,
and they only have to take that proposal off the shelf,
(13:16):
blow off the dust, and get to work. I get asked,
why do we go to war with the rock. I
think it is best explained as a waterfall of events,
cascading events. You have neocons in power, you have a
president who's not terribly comfortable in the whole foreign realm
of his presidency, having just been to China when his
(13:37):
dad was ambassador there. He's relying very heavily upon a
vice president who really wanted to see the so called
unitary executive theory that is bolstering the executive power. And
of course he came up with this one percent doctrine.
If there's even a one percent chance that there's some
(13:57):
sort of harm to come to the United States, we're
gonna So all these things come together, we pivot from Afghanistan.
We could have a whole show on what that caused,
but we don't have time. So we quickly begin beating
the war drums for a rock and why they wanted
to remake the Middle East in a much more pliable
(14:20):
way for American and Israeli ambitions. And you spoke about Cheney,
so talk about a conspiracy. Another word for it is
circular reporting. He would leak something to whether it's Judith Miller,
who had great real estate on the front of the
New York Times, or any of these others. Cheney would
(14:41):
then go and meet the press and go just in
Sunday's paper, they talk about whatever. A lot of it
was these aluminum tubes, which he claimed were being used
as centrifuges to build up a rocks presumed nuclear program,
and the agency did get sucked in. As you know,
it was highly, highly unusual for anyone from any administration
(15:05):
to cross the Potomac River and come to CIA headquarters
and all of a sudden, all of a sudden, you've
got Scooter Libby and his little minions showing up a
lot more talking to analysts. Now, I do understand their
heightened concern. Of course, we all were after nine to
eleven the world had changed drastically and we didn't know
(15:28):
what the hell was going on. Frankly, but they also
were looking back to the early nineties. If you recall,
Saddam Hussein's son in law had defected, went to Jordan.
We debriefed him and were like, oh my god, we
had no idea rock had been so far advanced in
their nuclear programs. Stupidly, the son in law, red Effects,
(15:49):
goes back and he shop by Sudamasain. But that's an aside.
So there was a heightened sense of we really don't
know what's going on. So when I show up on
the IRAQ D desk and there's clearly the whole machinery
of state is looking to focus on a rock, what
we had was nothing because saddamusin had kicked out the
(16:13):
UN Weapons Inspectors in nineteen ninety eight. We didn't have
a station there, we didn't have an embassy, so we
had to start at zero in building up assets and
starting combing the world to see what did we know
about saddamis aid. Now, when Joe Wilson went to Niger
to investigate these reports of five hundred tons of yellow
(16:35):
cake uranium that allegedly had been shipped from Nize to
a Raq If that had proven to be true, that
would have been significant because clearly Saddam Ussein was seeking
to reconstitute his nuclear program. But Joe went to Nizer
determined this is all totally bogus. And he wasn't the
only one. There were a lot of other The ambassador
(16:56):
there forced our general all things like, this is totally bogus.
Not but boy, the administration latched on to that, and
in fact, the infamous now sixteen words that appeared in
George Bush's stated the Union Address of January two thousand
and three, before we went to war, references significant quantities
(17:17):
of uranium.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
The British government has learned the Saddam Hussein recently sought
significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
Speaker 4 (17:26):
So all this is this pot is stirring. The pot
is stirring, and we go to war and by the
time Joe Wilson writes his outbed piece, we hadn't found
any WMD, not nothing. The only thing that was happening
was the Bagdad Museum, which held countless precious ancient artifacts,
(17:46):
was being looted, and the insurgency was ramping up. And
I think the reason it all blew up then. I
don't know, this is just my speculation, but at that
particular moment in time, the Bush administration was feeling a
little bit anxious about all their things that they had
said we were going to find. We hadn't found anything.
(18:10):
And here comes along this ambassador. He had been in
a rock during the First Golf War, had dealt with Sudama,
Zane Tarika's Ease and the rest of the gang. And
he's like, no, this is you know, you're it's not
the best idea we had. And furthermore, your intelligence is
totally cooked. And it just hit at a moment in
(18:30):
time that Rove Cheney the rest of them were feeling
a little apprehensive, and so they went into overdrive. I
don't think this is all planned out. It's not, but
they quickly had to turn it and make it seem
that Joe Wilson and Valerie Plane were ridiculous. They were traders,
(18:50):
they were liars. She works with the CIA, so you
can't trust her all this, and it just went off
from there.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
That's possible a second, we'll be right back.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
When your husband puts the up edd the New York
Times at a time where they are politically feeling vulnerable
because their policy is not going so well and there's
concern that maybe there isn't weapons of mass destruction, which
was the reason for going to war. Your name is leaked.
It's becomes a big sort of issue. People are already saying, hey,
that's wrong. But then what they did, I think go
(19:33):
back after you too. Valerie clearly sent her husband. She
worked for the CIA, and so the CIA, through Valerie
sent her husband in Nigier to embarrass the administration.
Speaker 4 (19:45):
Yeah. I you know, my mother has gone now, but
she was around then, and bless her heart, she's like,
why would they say that that's not true? You know?
I know, Mom. A year before Joe Writer's up ed piece,
it was when he had gone to Niger and investigated this.
It's not as though we had some sort of crystal
(20:08):
ball to understand that we were going to go to
war for sure, and how can we best discredit the
Bush administration? Joe and I were both although we were
socially liberal, and it doesn't matter how we voted. The
fact is, you serve as as you well know, when
you're overseas, you serve as an American. You don't serve
(20:29):
as a Republican or a Democrat. Joe had served in
senior positions under both type of administrations, and it was
clearly just such a smear job in their attempt to
detract or redirect the attention of the media and the
(20:49):
failure of the policy.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
A number of people were involved, so there was a conspiracy.
They said around and said, okay, we've got to make
him look bad, and then somehow your name come up
as well. Right they did. They said, they smeared you both,
because we talk a lot about conspiracies, but we don't
often talk about people who are the victims of it,
who suffer from It's the human cost of this.
Speaker 4 (21:10):
My bit best to saying falling down Alice's rabbit hole,
where white is black and black as white. The people
that they're talking about, Joe Wilson and Valerie playing in
the media on the radio, TV, the newspapers. They have
nothing to do with us in our character is so
distorting and disabled and destabilizing, particularly given my career which
(21:35):
was covert until that moment. And yeah, it was really dark.
We had the entire machinery of the state and which
is significant behind the notion that they needed to crush us.
So Joe in his nature, he's he's He was not
a typical diplomat, right. He was rather belligerent and a
(21:58):
flamboyant character, and he went out and he was very public,
and I was just cringey. I was really in shock.
I didn't know quite what to do. And furthermore, I
was still working for the agency, so I couldn't go
on meet the press and talk about it, and the
agency was not giving me any guidance. I literally have
(22:19):
in the entire time from two thousand and three until
I stepped away in two thousand and seven, the total
amount of time I had with any senior headquarters officer
was ten minutes with Jim Patt. And if you know Jim,
he spoke nine of those minutes. And you know, look,
I'm a big girl. I don't need someone to hold
(22:42):
my hand. But you would think that there were some
equities that we needed to mutually protect. Yes, there were
death threats. I will tell you. I want to say
in two thousand and four is everything the political environments
heating up along with the presidential election and my address
in Washington, d C. They found targeting papers in someone
(23:06):
an American Al Qaeda person, right, Remember that was a
thing for a while. And I went to CIA security
and I said, look, my security is one thing, but
I've got small children at home, and I requested, just
through that period to have some extra security. The other ones,
by the way, other ones that were targeted in that
(23:29):
particular batch of intelligence were George Tenant, John Ashcroft. They
all enjoyed twenty four to seven security protection. Anyway, the
security people thought about it and then said, no, we're not, No,
we're not. You know how the agency likes to say, oh,
we're all a family, we're all in it together. Well,
(23:51):
and that was not my experience. I was very much alone.
And it was a thing that went on and onth Miller,
the New York Times reporter, she was tossed in jail
for a couple months because she refused to give up
her sources, as though she's in some priestly class. I
literally they write whole courses around that First Amendment question
(24:16):
and so forth. So I have a certain bias for
sure on that. Living through that changed us. It was,
and of course you become more cynical. You don't read
the media as you did before. In the personal toll
was profound, and I would say the most for me,
(24:38):
but just on the personal side of things. And I know,
of course thousands of US servicemen and women lost their
lives in Afghanistan, and I rock, so I'm not comparing
it to that, but I had small children. I will
never get back those years of dealing with the crazy shit.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
Be back in a room.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
I'm really surprised at the fact that the agency, for
their own purposes, wouldn't want to engage with you more
to protect it. But can you give us a little
bit more background about yourself, how you got to the CIA,
and what you did in the CIA that you can
talk about before your whole life change and became public.
Speaker 4 (25:27):
I was recruited very young. My dad was a career
Air Force, who was a colonel fought More War two.
My brother was a marine in Vietnam. He was wounded there.
So I was drawn to this idea of public service.
And when I got in it was very clear the
(25:47):
Soviets were the bad guys, and you know, the United
States are the good guys. And I thought it was
a lot more interesting than what most of my friends
were doing. To be honest, you go through the training
and turned out I was at it, and I liked it,
and I liked the people with whom I was working.
So I did my different tours abroad, primarily in Europe.
(26:10):
Then I really began to focus on what had been
stood up in the mid nineties, the kind of proliferation division.
It came along, frankly, just in the nick of time,
because the agency had been really at loose ends. The
budgets were going down, remember there was the piece dividend.
We're like, oh, let we won, let's all just go home.
(26:31):
The wall came down. But within a few years it
was clear that the interception of terrorism in WMD was
a real national security problem. So I was delighted to
be able to work on that as I could. So
I really I love what I did, and that's that
(26:51):
was as as my father said, why are they not
telling their truth? I was working on what the agency,
or more importantly, what the minister duration said was their priority,
what they cared about fail.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
What's your sense now, twenty five years later when you
look at like conspiracy theories that are completely without merit,
like the twenty twenty election was stolen, right? Or yeah, yeah,
we were conspiracy theories not only rife, but their Laura
Lumer goes in with the conspiracy theory right and gets
(27:26):
the head of the NSA fired, right, and.
Speaker 4 (27:29):
Some crazy shit there. I think that's the technical term.
I think that we are living in a time where
critical thought is no longer understood or applied. Of course,
we're deeply polarized as a nation. Everyone's in their own foxhole,
and it's an echo chamber of what you want to
(27:51):
hear because it's very satisfying to have your world views validated.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
Let me gently push back on that just a little bit,
and that we're all in our own foxholes, right, we
all watch what happened on January sixth. It was not
a parade of love. It was a violent incident. There's
no evidence that twenty twenty election was stolen, right, But
there is a set of fis and it's really one
side more than the other.
Speaker 4 (28:14):
Now I agree with you that said, here's what's happening.
For instance, where we are right now, we're in the
throes of the early days of the tariffs. We don't
know where this is going to go. If you read
the New York Times, of Wall Street Journal or other
mainstream lamestream media, you will see that the stock market
(28:34):
is crashing. If you go on Fox News or Newsmax
or any of the others on the right, the top
story is some blonde girl got kidnapped or something that
you know, Hunter Biden has done. And so we are
inhabiting very different universes.
Speaker 1 (28:51):
So you talked a little bit about what it was
like right then and you know, threats and dealing with
your kids. Tell us a little bit about, you know,
the rest of your lifew this impacted it and how
you've gotten past it if you.
Speaker 4 (29:02):
Have the truth is it was I wasn't shocked for
a few years, and it took me a while to
find my footing again. And it didn't really happen for
me because I was like, what am I gonna do,
send out a resume, what do I put? How do
I find another job? At the time, I was still
really young. I'm not ready to golf. So what happened
(29:27):
was in two thousand and nine I was contacted by
the producers who did an Inconvenient Truth Al Gore movie
on climate change, and they wanted to do for the
nuclear threat what they had done for climate change, and
they made a documentary count Down to Zero, and I
helped narrate it and was very much involved. Various groups
(29:50):
have been focused on acquiring weapons of mass destruction, in
particular nuclear weapons.
Speaker 3 (29:56):
All the black market seizures that I'm aware of were.
Speaker 4 (29:59):
Caught luck at a Russian naval base in the early
nineteen nineties.
Speaker 3 (30:03):
Potatoes reguarded better, and.
Speaker 4 (30:07):
That was a light bulb moment for me. I thought, oh,
I can actually still advocate for this that I used
to do covertly in a way that was more overt
and it's meaningful to me. So that started it. So
I did write my memoir Fair Game, which was a
horrible experience because I had to sue the agency they
wanted they blacked out, you know, So like I didn't
(30:30):
exist until two thousand and three when my husband's article
came out. Of course we all as signed secrecy agreements.
I would show off my right arm before I would
ever reveal classified information. But I wasn't. I was talking
about my story and it wasn't particularly flattering to the agency,
but you know, it was the truth. It was the
(30:51):
truth classified not classified, but they so they made it
very difficult. So then I wrote these two spy thrillers,
all which is, you know, you can tell a lot
more truth in fiction sometimes, So that was fun. And
then in twenty nineteen I ran for Congress in northern
New Mexico and I lost in the primary, and I'm
(31:15):
can I tell you how happy I am?
Speaker 1 (31:17):
I mean, your ad was good, though, Yeah, it was
a great It was a good ad through the car
and stuff.
Speaker 4 (31:22):
Here. I come from Ukrainian Jewish immigrants.
Speaker 3 (31:26):
Now I'm running for Congress because we're running backwards on
national security, healthcare, and women's rights.
Speaker 4 (31:37):
Yeah yeah, yeah, and which of course I learned of
the farm right who didn't learn that I did? They
did about forty takes before they got one. That was
you know, So I spent one all day doing jay terms,
but no, I ran for Congress with an open heart right.
I wanted to serve my country again, and I thought,
I can do this job. I can do this and
do this well. But I am so happy now not
(32:01):
to be in Congress because it is utterly dysfunctional. There's
always been bad, but it's just gotten worse. And so
now I still do a lot of speaking, I do
a lot of writing, and I do mentor a lot
of young people. You can imagine, probably like yourselves, get
a lot of people. Oh, my nephew was thinking about
(32:23):
joining the CIA, can you talk to him? And I'm
sorry to say that the last one I spoke to,
a really bright, wonderful young man who just would have
been amazing. For the first time, I had to say,
don't do it, not now, And it kills me because
we need that fresh blood smart and why given what
(32:48):
has just happened through DOGE and how humiliating the whole experiences,
who wants to join.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
Well, and they're firing young people that you go through
the trending, you go through all of the polygrass background
check security, you go through all the training, you move
to Washington, you're spending money, and then they fire you
like two years in like it's.
Speaker 4 (33:08):
No, then not only fire you, but they send your
name with your last initial in open channels from the
agency to the White House. OPM, Yeah, OPM whatever.
Speaker 2 (33:21):
You're also involved with nuclear proliferation stuff, right. One of
the concerns is with this administration I think based off
of a huge conspiracy or conspiracy theories certainly behind this.
With NATO falling apart, in our alliances falling apart, what
is to keep some of our allies from saying if
we don't have the nuclear umbrella Poland or Ukraine which
(33:43):
gave up its nuclear weapons right because it got a
guarantee from US in the Russians that they would have
their territorial integrity, or Saudi Arabia, why would you not
want nuclear weapons?
Speaker 4 (33:53):
Yeah? All the guardrails are gone. The New Start Treaty
is set to expire next year, which will not be revalidated. Yeah,
we are entering a new arms race. I was on
the board and continue to support the Plowshares Fund. They
do great work in that space, but a lot of
the money has just drained out of the whole arms
(34:14):
control field, very little money. The sole authority for your
listeners is the protocol, whereby only one human being. The
president of the United States has the authority to launch
offensive nuclear weapons or defensive sorry both. And this comes
(34:37):
out of the Cold War when we were afraid of
a bolt out of the blue from the Soviet Union.
You don't want to convene a committee as missiles are incoming.
I get that, but that was really in fact overplayed anyway,
So right now we have a whether Biden, who no
doubt was compromised by his age, or are current president
(35:01):
who no doubt is compromised by his volatility. I don't
like and it's so antithetical to democracy to have just
one person make this a horrific decision of whether to
launch a nuclear weapon potentially to kill millions. So I
was working quite a bit on that. Some legislation has
(35:23):
been put forward, but right now things are in such chaos.
It's just poo flinging chaos monkeys everywhere that you know
you can you cannot really have sober reasonable debate on this,
and I don't think there should be much of a
debate because on it's just madness.
Speaker 2 (35:43):
The guy listening to Laura Lumer has his finger on
the button. People need to think about that.
Speaker 4 (35:47):
Imagine this young woman who's an influencer, comes in and
starts saying who the President needs to fire?
Speaker 1 (35:56):
This I mean thirty one year old conspiracy theory woman
who said that nine to eleven was an inside job.
She comes into the White House and says, fire these people,
to include the head of the National Security Agency, and
people like radcliffeo runs a CIA, and Gaber who runs
a DNI, and Walls who runs an air security agency.
Just take it and allow their own people to be fired.
They're totally neutered. They have no authority over their own organizations.
(36:19):
How can they lead their people when these crazies can
come in and there's nothing they can do. They can't
protect their own people.
Speaker 4 (36:25):
I know, I think where it leaves us, it's obvious
we are extremely vulnerable. We have pissed off pretty much
everyone other than Putin, and he'll just take advantage of us.
Speaker 2 (36:38):
You run a spy cruise, so if people want to
an ostrich hole to stick their head into, just.
Speaker 4 (36:45):
Broth on fire, why not go on a cruise. Let
me tell you a little bit about it. I've been
running for the last couple of years hosting spy slizes
and nukes conferences in Santa Fe and it was hugely popular,
so we decided year to do a Mediterranean cruise. It's
August thirtieth to September seventh. It's an amazing itinerary from
(37:08):
Malta to Naples, ephesis Rome. It's on the Celebrity line
and it's their newest ship, and I have to say
our lineup is just amazing. I have John Amendez, former
head of Disguise. She and her husband Tony wrote the
book that Argo was based on Michael Morrell former director
(37:32):
Mark Polymaropolis. So I guess you've had on your podcast too,
Raleigh Flynn, Doug Wise. The Days at Sea will do
a couple hours of programming in the morning, but when
we're in ports, say Malta, we'll have excursions around built
around espionage and what happened there. So if your listeners
(37:53):
are interested, go to Spiesliesanukes dot com and all the
information on the cruise is there.
Speaker 2 (38:00):
I did a cool operation in Malta once, I can't
talk about it.
Speaker 1 (38:03):
He's trying to get on. He's trying to get on
the cruise. Don't fall for it. Well, listen, we don't
want to take up too much to your time.
Speaker 2 (38:10):
Valerie.
Speaker 1 (38:10):
We as former professionals who worked in the same place
as you. Feel terrible that you got dragged into this
public mosh pit, and we're also very pleased that you've
been able to come out of it and have such
a successful professional career afterward.
Speaker 4 (38:24):
Yeah, well, such a pleasure. You guys run a great podcast,
and I'm delighted to be one of your guests today.
Speaker 1 (38:36):
Really short
Speaker 3 (38:39):
Shout sight
I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'sha. I was a
CIA officer stationed around the world in high threat posts
in Europe, Russia, and in Asia.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East
and in war zones. We sometimes created conspiracies to deceive
our adversaries.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
Now we're going to use our expertise to deconstruct conspiracy
theories large and small.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Could they be true? Or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 1 (00:26):
This is mission implausible.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
I had to do a little research for the Introduction's
holy shit, where do I? How do I introduce you?
But let me, let me, let me try. So today
we're really pleased and proud to introduce our agency colleague.
We're all formers, and we'd like to welcome Valerie Plane
to the show today. So, Valerie is a former CIA officer.
(00:52):
Unlike John or I, who were under official cover is diplomats,
Valerie was a non official cover officer. So as a
business person who doesn't get diplomatic community, if she gets
into trouble, I'm like John or Iwould. But there's so
much more to Valerie. She's You're the author of two
really fine spine novels, you've dabbled in politics, You've had
(01:14):
a Hollywood movie Fair Game with Sean Penn and Naomi Watts.
Speaker 3 (01:20):
I want you to head up operations. It's his top priority.
Speaker 4 (01:23):
You're in business with a terror organization. Who if you
get out of this car? I can't protect you. You
have no idea what we can and cannot do.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
You are the center of a huge political scandal and
a victim of an actual conspiracy theory by the government.
You're also a mom and an activist for countering nuclear proliferation.
And maybe my most maybe the most impressive thing is
I'm actually a fan of the music group the Decembrists,
and they have a song Valerie Plane.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
Oh Valerie play.
Speaker 4 (01:57):
That really is your name. I would shout the same.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
The world.
Speaker 4 (02:04):
Dear battery play. So they made a wreck cover the
rest of you when I'll get the world.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
Valerie. Welcome to the show. It's really good to have you.
Speaker 4 (02:18):
Yeah, it's been a journey.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
As I say, you've lived in interesting times whatever that
needs right.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
Problem is, you probably didn't intend to live in interesting times, right.
You normally would have worked at CIA, had a career,
retired and quietly.
Speaker 4 (02:30):
There, which my career goal was to be chief of
station somewhere, which is like you run your own private fiefdom.
And I thought that was the be all and the
end all, and I but I miss my career. I
love what I did. I was proud to deserve my
country and it ended before I was ready.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
So the political scandal that you were the victim of
was huge, Bick twenty three some odd years ago. It
was a government conspiracy and you got and with the
victim of it. Could you take us through real quick
what happened and then what it's like to be like
a real victim of a conspiracy.
Speaker 4 (03:08):
So I'll recap for your listeners to refresh your memory.
In July two thousand and three, we had invaded Iraq,
and we invaded in March. By July, no WMD had
been found, even though the Bush administration had promised, and
that was what they predicated the whole war on. We
don't want to see the smoking gun in the shape
(03:30):
of a mushroom cloud, if you recall from then National
Security Advisor Condoise Rice and my husband at the time,
Ambassador Joe Wilson, wrote an op ed piece in The
New York Times entitled What I Did not find in Africa,
and in it he went after the central premise that
the Bush administration had given the American public for launching
(03:54):
a war of choice into a rock, which was Saddam
Museana's nuclear weapons. He went right after the Bush administration,
although in today's terms is probably relatively mild, but he
had said that the intelligence had been cherry picked, that
the intelligence was fit around the policy, and so forth.
(04:15):
And in retaliation, a week later, conservative calumnist Robert Novak
wrote a column and in it he named me Valerie
plain talking about Joe Wilson and what he had said
in his op ed. And by the way, his wife,
Valerie Plame, works at the CIA. So I knew immediately
(04:37):
when Joe tossed the paper to me that morning, at
five point thirty in the morning, that everything rushes through
your head where your life is completely different than what
it had been five seconds before. I knew the assets
with whom I had worked were in jeopardy people even
that I knew, in an innocuous fashion overseas, they too
(05:01):
could come under suspicion. I knew that my covert career
was finished. Because this column was syndicated appeared everywhere it
was my true name, and of course I was worried
about my three year old twins who were asleep in
the room next door. Because not everyone thinks highly or
(05:23):
kindly of the CIA. So that launched this huge political
scandal that actually went on for years. What happened was
the agency referred it the leak of my name to
the Justice Department, and they started digging. I mean, I
never wanted to be a public person. Obviously, I worked
(05:43):
for the CIA. I was perfectly happy with my kudos
coming from my covert colleagues. And our lives were turned
upside down. It was really a dark time. I was
called a glorified secretary because I guess because I'm a
girl that was by a member of Congress. We were
accused and called traders and liars because this really went
(06:05):
against what the Bush administration had laid out as the
reasoning behind the invasion. It ended up, or at least
that chapter of it ended, in two thousand and seven,
when the Special Prosecutor Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald indicted and
then convicted the Vice President Chenese chief of staff Scooter
(06:28):
Libby on lying and.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
At sat of Justice perjury.
Speaker 4 (06:33):
Auction of Justice exactly perjury. I like lying because it's
just so much clear what's happened. But and I ultimately
resigned from the agency because I felt I had the
best job in operations. I didn't want to stay too
much had happened. The agency did not treat me particularly
well in the aftermath. I was totally radioactive. They didn't
(06:57):
know what to do with me. We moved from Washington,
d See where all this happened, to where we're in
New Mexico now. Joe Wilson has gone sadly, and then
I just began the next part and I, you know,
just how to figure it out. And I've done a
(07:17):
lot of interesting things. You play the hand you're dealt.
It's not what I wanted. I loved my career. I
felt working on weapons of mass destruction, in particular the
nuclear threat was meaningful and it was satisfying. But that's
not what I got to do.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
I recall those times really well, and I didn't work
on Iraq or WMD. I was working on Russia things
and stuff at the time, and I think probably people
today have forgotten the intensity of it. So the administration
again went, like you said, went to war for war
of choice to get rid of Saddam Hussein, and it
wasn't going well, and so I think they wanted to
(07:54):
create a narrative of success. The president wasn'ting to run
for presidency again, and so anybody who against them to
try to say that things weren't going well like they
do today, and politics can get quite ugly, and public
servants usually are stay out of the political line, and
you got pulled into it. Scooter Libby was eventually convicted,
(08:16):
Bush commuted his sentence. Trump eventually pardoned him.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
But there's a lot of.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
People here, Novak, Carl Rove, Scooter Libby, Richard Armitage, Dick
Cheney who were involved in going after Did any of
them ever apologize, that's my question.
Speaker 4 (08:30):
No, with the exception of Dick Armitage, who did not
call me up personally. But I saw in some interview
he's hemmed in had and acknowledge that's probably he shouldn't
have done that, which, of course not. He'd been around
Washington more than a minute and knew. I mean, he
was just all of them were banning about my name
(08:51):
and whether a person to be a covert or overt
status with the CIA. You don't share that like candy
with journalists, which Dick Armitage did. And typically I'm not
a conspiracy minded person, but it really does apply in
this case. The special Prosecutor Fitzgerald really wanted to go
after and he tried to get convictions on Karl Rove
(09:14):
and many others. There were many in the White House
that were determined to make Joe Wilson and Valerie Plain
look like, oh they're you know, they're just ridiculous. There's
the shiny object look over here, anything to distract from
the real disaster of what was going on in a rock.
So it was a there was a conspiracy, and I'm
(09:36):
I can only imagine that Fitzgerald wanted I don't know
ninety percent that he would be able to convict and
because Scooter Libby took the fall for all of them,
he couldn't quite gather what he needed to make that happen.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
It's a long story, but I actually know Pat fitzghieald
one of the most guys with the highest integrity and
a really guy. He was voted one of the most
eligible bachelors in the US when I knew he wasn't
married yet, and he applied to get a rescue kitten,
and they turned him down because he was honest, and
he said, I work fifteen hours a day and I
(10:13):
sleep three times a week in my office. But so
on this show, we talk a lot about deconstructing and
debunking conspiracy theories, most of which are not true or
only have a German truth. But this is really different.
This isn't just a conspiracy that I'd like to drill
down with more against you, or that wasn't so much
against you. It was against your husband and you were
(10:35):
collateral damage. But there was other conspiracies involved in this.
And I just like to make a couple of statements
and hey, have you maybe run with it. The first
is that right after nine to eleven, within week, Vice
President Cheney was talking about going after a Rock, and
they had several different narratives. One of the narratives was
that Rock and al Qaeda were you know, technical term,
(10:58):
in cohoots with each other. The right and the CIA
and the intelligence community basically said there is no evidence
for this at all. But then they had the fallback
was he's getting weapons of mass destruction. But Cheney was
saying they have weapons before we'd even tried to investigate
it really right. And so one of the ways that
(11:19):
he claimed that they did was that they were getting
uranium yellow cake out of I think it was the
Zier And that's where your husband basically throw the bullshit
flag and said, I went and I investigated, they're not
getting it. And so he basically said, you're wrong, and
they came up with this office, the Office of Special
Plans under Doug Fight. There was all these neocons, Wolfowitz
(11:41):
and Richard Pearl and then this guy Machalabi who was
in a rocky and basically it was a conspiracy. They
created their own intelligence unit not to find out what happened.
They already knew what they wanted to say. They were
just looking for any evidence they could cherry pick to find.
So I was wondering if you could just talk about
(12:02):
how you view the conspiracies that brought us into this
horrific war that costs thousands of American lives and hundreds
of thousands of Iraqi lives and cost me several years
of my life in Iraq later.
Speaker 4 (12:15):
Sure, let's start at the beginning. Nine to eleven happens,
and we know within a matter of a week ten
days Cheney is at Camp David, and he's unfolding a
map of Iraq, saying, there's not that many targets in Afghanistan,
but in Iraq. Now you know there's something there. And
(12:35):
we know that the neocons would have been in the
wilderness for some years had prepared what is it called
Blueprint for American Century, Proposal for American Century. They had
put this together their dog, this manifesto in nineteen ninety eight,
and it called for a horrific sort of attack or
(12:55):
some sort of precipitating event, to thereby launch American might
and military power in ways to remake the world in
the ways they thought it should be. And lo and behold,
nine to eleven happens. So now the neocons are in power,
and they only have to take that proposal off the shelf,
(13:16):
blow off the dust, and get to work. I get asked,
why do we go to war with the rock. I
think it is best explained as a waterfall of events,
cascading events. You have neocons in power, you have a
president who's not terribly comfortable in the whole foreign realm
of his presidency, having just been to China when his
(13:37):
dad was ambassador there. He's relying very heavily upon a
vice president who really wanted to see the so called
unitary executive theory that is bolstering the executive power. And
of course he came up with this one percent doctrine.
If there's even a one percent chance that there's some
(13:57):
sort of harm to come to the United States, we're
gonna So all these things come together, we pivot from Afghanistan.
We could have a whole show on what that caused,
but we don't have time. So we quickly begin beating
the war drums for a rock and why they wanted
to remake the Middle East in a much more pliable
(14:20):
way for American and Israeli ambitions. And you spoke about Cheney,
so talk about a conspiracy. Another word for it is
circular reporting. He would leak something to whether it's Judith Miller,
who had great real estate on the front of the
New York Times, or any of these others. Cheney would
(14:41):
then go and meet the press and go just in
Sunday's paper, they talk about whatever. A lot of it
was these aluminum tubes, which he claimed were being used
as centrifuges to build up a rocks presumed nuclear program,
and the agency did get sucked in. As you know,
it was highly, highly unusual for anyone from any administration
(15:05):
to cross the Potomac River and come to CIA headquarters
and all of a sudden, all of a sudden, you've
got Scooter Libby and his little minions showing up a
lot more talking to analysts. Now, I do understand their
heightened concern. Of course, we all were after nine to
eleven the world had changed drastically and we didn't know
(15:28):
what the hell was going on. Frankly, but they also
were looking back to the early nineties. If you recall,
Saddam Hussein's son in law had defected, went to Jordan.
We debriefed him and were like, oh my god, we
had no idea rock had been so far advanced in
their nuclear programs. Stupidly, the son in law, red Effects,
(15:49):
goes back and he shop by Sudamasain. But that's an aside.
So there was a heightened sense of we really don't
know what's going on. So when I show up on
the IRAQ D desk and there's clearly the whole machinery
of state is looking to focus on a rock, what
we had was nothing because saddamusin had kicked out the
(16:13):
UN Weapons Inspectors in nineteen ninety eight. We didn't have
a station there, we didn't have an embassy, so we
had to start at zero in building up assets and
starting combing the world to see what did we know
about saddamis aid. Now, when Joe Wilson went to Niger
to investigate these reports of five hundred tons of yellow
(16:35):
cake uranium that allegedly had been shipped from Nize to
a Raq If that had proven to be true, that
would have been significant because clearly Saddam Ussein was seeking
to reconstitute his nuclear program. But Joe went to Nizer
determined this is all totally bogus. And he wasn't the
only one. There were a lot of other The ambassador
(16:56):
there forced our general all things like, this is totally bogus.
Not but boy, the administration latched on to that, and
in fact, the infamous now sixteen words that appeared in
George Bush's stated the Union Address of January two thousand
and three, before we went to war, references significant quantities
(17:17):
of uranium.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
The British government has learned the Saddam Hussein recently sought
significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
Speaker 4 (17:26):
So all this is this pot is stirring. The pot
is stirring, and we go to war and by the
time Joe Wilson writes his outbed piece, we hadn't found
any WMD, not nothing. The only thing that was happening
was the Bagdad Museum, which held countless precious ancient artifacts,
(17:46):
was being looted, and the insurgency was ramping up. And
I think the reason it all blew up then. I
don't know, this is just my speculation, but at that
particular moment in time, the Bush administration was feeling a
little bit anxious about all their things that they had
said we were going to find. We hadn't found anything.
(18:10):
And here comes along this ambassador. He had been in
a rock during the First Golf War, had dealt with Sudama,
Zane Tarika's Ease and the rest of the gang. And
he's like, no, this is you know, you're it's not
the best idea we had. And furthermore, your intelligence is
totally cooked. And it just hit at a moment in
(18:30):
time that Rove Cheney the rest of them were feeling
a little apprehensive, and so they went into overdrive. I
don't think this is all planned out. It's not, but
they quickly had to turn it and make it seem
that Joe Wilson and Valerie Plane were ridiculous. They were traders,
(18:50):
they were liars. She works with the CIA, so you
can't trust her all this, and it just went off
from there.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
That's possible a second, we'll be right back.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
When your husband puts the up edd the New York
Times at a time where they are politically feeling vulnerable
because their policy is not going so well and there's
concern that maybe there isn't weapons of mass destruction, which
was the reason for going to war. Your name is leaked.
It's becomes a big sort of issue. People are already saying, hey,
that's wrong. But then what they did, I think go
(19:33):
back after you too. Valerie clearly sent her husband. She
worked for the CIA, and so the CIA, through Valerie
sent her husband in Nigier to embarrass the administration.
Speaker 4 (19:45):
Yeah. I you know, my mother has gone now, but
she was around then, and bless her heart, she's like,
why would they say that that's not true? You know?
I know, Mom. A year before Joe Writer's up ed piece,
it was when he had gone to Niger and investigated this.
It's not as though we had some sort of crystal
(20:08):
ball to understand that we were going to go to
war for sure, and how can we best discredit the
Bush administration? Joe and I were both although we were
socially liberal, and it doesn't matter how we voted. The
fact is, you serve as as you well know, when
you're overseas, you serve as an American. You don't serve
(20:29):
as a Republican or a Democrat. Joe had served in
senior positions under both type of administrations, and it was
clearly just such a smear job in their attempt to
detract or redirect the attention of the media and the
(20:49):
failure of the policy.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
A number of people were involved, so there was a conspiracy.
They said around and said, okay, we've got to make
him look bad, and then somehow your name come up
as well. Right they did. They said, they smeared you both,
because we talk a lot about conspiracies, but we don't
often talk about people who are the victims of it,
who suffer from It's the human cost of this.
Speaker 4 (21:10):
My bit best to saying falling down Alice's rabbit hole,
where white is black and black as white. The people
that they're talking about, Joe Wilson and Valerie playing in
the media on the radio, TV, the newspapers. They have
nothing to do with us in our character is so
distorting and disabled and destabilizing, particularly given my career which
(21:35):
was covert until that moment. And yeah, it was really dark.
We had the entire machinery of the state and which
is significant behind the notion that they needed to crush us.
So Joe in his nature, he's he's He was not
a typical diplomat, right. He was rather belligerent and a
(21:58):
flamboyant character, and he went out and he was very public,
and I was just cringey. I was really in shock.
I didn't know quite what to do. And furthermore, I
was still working for the agency, so I couldn't go
on meet the press and talk about it, and the
agency was not giving me any guidance. I literally have
(22:19):
in the entire time from two thousand and three until
I stepped away in two thousand and seven, the total
amount of time I had with any senior headquarters officer
was ten minutes with Jim Patt. And if you know Jim,
he spoke nine of those minutes. And you know, look,
I'm a big girl. I don't need someone to hold
(22:42):
my hand. But you would think that there were some
equities that we needed to mutually protect. Yes, there were
death threats. I will tell you. I want to say
in two thousand and four is everything the political environments
heating up along with the presidential election and my address
in Washington, d C. They found targeting papers in someone
(23:06):
an American Al Qaeda person, right, Remember that was a
thing for a while. And I went to CIA security
and I said, look, my security is one thing, but
I've got small children at home, and I requested, just
through that period to have some extra security. The other ones,
by the way, other ones that were targeted in that
(23:29):
particular batch of intelligence were George Tenant, John Ashcroft. They
all enjoyed twenty four to seven security protection. Anyway, the
security people thought about it and then said, no, we're not, No,
we're not. You know how the agency likes to say, oh,
we're all a family, we're all in it together. Well,
(23:51):
and that was not my experience. I was very much alone.
And it was a thing that went on and onth Miller,
the New York Times reporter, she was tossed in jail
for a couple months because she refused to give up
her sources, as though she's in some priestly class. I
literally they write whole courses around that First Amendment question
(24:16):
and so forth. So I have a certain bias for
sure on that. Living through that changed us. It was,
and of course you become more cynical. You don't read
the media as you did before. In the personal toll
was profound, and I would say the most for me,
(24:38):
but just on the personal side of things. And I know,
of course thousands of US servicemen and women lost their
lives in Afghanistan, and I rock, so I'm not comparing
it to that, but I had small children. I will
never get back those years of dealing with the crazy shit.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
Be back in a room.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
I'm really surprised at the fact that the agency, for
their own purposes, wouldn't want to engage with you more
to protect it. But can you give us a little
bit more background about yourself, how you got to the CIA,
and what you did in the CIA that you can
talk about before your whole life change and became public.
Speaker 4 (25:27):
I was recruited very young. My dad was a career
Air Force, who was a colonel fought More War two.
My brother was a marine in Vietnam. He was wounded there.
So I was drawn to this idea of public service.
And when I got in it was very clear the
(25:47):
Soviets were the bad guys, and you know, the United
States are the good guys. And I thought it was
a lot more interesting than what most of my friends
were doing. To be honest, you go through the training
and turned out I was at it, and I liked it,
and I liked the people with whom I was working.
So I did my different tours abroad, primarily in Europe.
(26:10):
Then I really began to focus on what had been
stood up in the mid nineties, the kind of proliferation division.
It came along, frankly, just in the nick of time,
because the agency had been really at loose ends. The
budgets were going down, remember there was the piece dividend.
We're like, oh, let we won, let's all just go home.
(26:31):
The wall came down. But within a few years it
was clear that the interception of terrorism in WMD was
a real national security problem. So I was delighted to
be able to work on that as I could. So
I really I love what I did, and that's that
(26:51):
was as as my father said, why are they not
telling their truth? I was working on what the agency,
or more importantly, what the minister duration said was their priority,
what they cared about fail.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
What's your sense now, twenty five years later when you
look at like conspiracy theories that are completely without merit,
like the twenty twenty election was stolen, right? Or yeah, yeah,
we were conspiracy theories not only rife, but their Laura
Lumer goes in with the conspiracy theory right and gets
(27:26):
the head of the NSA fired, right, and.
Speaker 4 (27:29):
Some crazy shit there. I think that's the technical term.
I think that we are living in a time where
critical thought is no longer understood or applied. Of course,
we're deeply polarized as a nation. Everyone's in their own foxhole,
and it's an echo chamber of what you want to
(27:51):
hear because it's very satisfying to have your world views validated.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
Let me gently push back on that just a little bit,
and that we're all in our own foxholes, right, we
all watch what happened on January sixth. It was not
a parade of love. It was a violent incident. There's
no evidence that twenty twenty election was stolen, right, But
there is a set of fis and it's really one
side more than the other.
Speaker 4 (28:14):
Now I agree with you that said, here's what's happening.
For instance, where we are right now, we're in the
throes of the early days of the tariffs. We don't
know where this is going to go. If you read
the New York Times, of Wall Street Journal or other
mainstream lamestream media, you will see that the stock market
(28:34):
is crashing. If you go on Fox News or Newsmax
or any of the others on the right, the top
story is some blonde girl got kidnapped or something that
you know, Hunter Biden has done. And so we are
inhabiting very different universes.
Speaker 1 (28:51):
So you talked a little bit about what it was
like right then and you know, threats and dealing with
your kids. Tell us a little bit about, you know,
the rest of your lifew this impacted it and how
you've gotten past it if you.
Speaker 4 (29:02):
Have the truth is it was I wasn't shocked for
a few years, and it took me a while to
find my footing again. And it didn't really happen for
me because I was like, what am I gonna do,
send out a resume, what do I put? How do
I find another job? At the time, I was still
really young. I'm not ready to golf. So what happened
(29:27):
was in two thousand and nine I was contacted by
the producers who did an Inconvenient Truth Al Gore movie
on climate change, and they wanted to do for the
nuclear threat what they had done for climate change, and
they made a documentary count Down to Zero, and I
helped narrate it and was very much involved. Various groups
(29:50):
have been focused on acquiring weapons of mass destruction, in
particular nuclear weapons.
Speaker 3 (29:56):
All the black market seizures that I'm aware of were.
Speaker 4 (29:59):
Caught luck at a Russian naval base in the early
nineteen nineties.
Speaker 3 (30:03):
Potatoes reguarded better, and.
Speaker 4 (30:07):
That was a light bulb moment for me. I thought, oh,
I can actually still advocate for this that I used
to do covertly in a way that was more overt
and it's meaningful to me. So that started it. So
I did write my memoir Fair Game, which was a
horrible experience because I had to sue the agency they
wanted they blacked out, you know, So like I didn't
(30:30):
exist until two thousand and three when my husband's article
came out. Of course we all as signed secrecy agreements.
I would show off my right arm before I would
ever reveal classified information. But I wasn't. I was talking
about my story and it wasn't particularly flattering to the agency,
but you know, it was the truth. It was the
(30:51):
truth classified not classified, but they so they made it
very difficult. So then I wrote these two spy thrillers,
all which is, you know, you can tell a lot
more truth in fiction sometimes, So that was fun. And
then in twenty nineteen I ran for Congress in northern
New Mexico and I lost in the primary, and I'm
(31:15):
can I tell you how happy I am?
Speaker 1 (31:17):
I mean, your ad was good, though, Yeah, it was
a great It was a good ad through the car
and stuff.
Speaker 4 (31:22):
Here. I come from Ukrainian Jewish immigrants.
Speaker 3 (31:26):
Now I'm running for Congress because we're running backwards on
national security, healthcare, and women's rights.
Speaker 4 (31:37):
Yeah yeah, yeah, and which of course I learned of
the farm right who didn't learn that I did? They
did about forty takes before they got one. That was
you know, So I spent one all day doing jay terms,
but no, I ran for Congress with an open heart right.
I wanted to serve my country again, and I thought,
I can do this job. I can do this and
do this well. But I am so happy now not
(32:01):
to be in Congress because it is utterly dysfunctional. There's
always been bad, but it's just gotten worse. And so
now I still do a lot of speaking, I do
a lot of writing, and I do mentor a lot
of young people. You can imagine, probably like yourselves, get
a lot of people. Oh, my nephew was thinking about
(32:23):
joining the CIA, can you talk to him? And I'm
sorry to say that the last one I spoke to,
a really bright, wonderful young man who just would have
been amazing. For the first time, I had to say,
don't do it, not now, And it kills me because
we need that fresh blood smart and why given what
(32:48):
has just happened through DOGE and how humiliating the whole experiences,
who wants to join.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
Well, and they're firing young people that you go through
the trending, you go through all of the polygrass background
check security, you go through all the training, you move
to Washington, you're spending money, and then they fire you
like two years in like it's.
Speaker 4 (33:08):
No, then not only fire you, but they send your
name with your last initial in open channels from the
agency to the White House. OPM, Yeah, OPM whatever.
Speaker 2 (33:21):
You're also involved with nuclear proliferation stuff, right. One of
the concerns is with this administration I think based off
of a huge conspiracy or conspiracy theories certainly behind this.
With NATO falling apart, in our alliances falling apart, what
is to keep some of our allies from saying if
we don't have the nuclear umbrella Poland or Ukraine which
(33:43):
gave up its nuclear weapons right because it got a
guarantee from US in the Russians that they would have
their territorial integrity, or Saudi Arabia, why would you not
want nuclear weapons?
Speaker 4 (33:53):
Yeah? All the guardrails are gone. The New Start Treaty
is set to expire next year, which will not be revalidated. Yeah,
we are entering a new arms race. I was on
the board and continue to support the Plowshares Fund. They
do great work in that space, but a lot of
the money has just drained out of the whole arms
(34:14):
control field, very little money. The sole authority for your
listeners is the protocol, whereby only one human being. The
president of the United States has the authority to launch
offensive nuclear weapons or defensive sorry both. And this comes
(34:37):
out of the Cold War when we were afraid of
a bolt out of the blue from the Soviet Union.
You don't want to convene a committee as missiles are incoming.
I get that, but that was really in fact overplayed anyway,
So right now we have a whether Biden, who no
doubt was compromised by his age, or are current president
(35:01):
who no doubt is compromised by his volatility. I don't
like and it's so antithetical to democracy to have just
one person make this a horrific decision of whether to
launch a nuclear weapon potentially to kill millions. So I
was working quite a bit on that. Some legislation has
(35:23):
been put forward, but right now things are in such chaos.
It's just poo flinging chaos monkeys everywhere that you know
you can you cannot really have sober reasonable debate on this,
and I don't think there should be much of a
debate because on it's just madness.
Speaker 2 (35:43):
The guy listening to Laura Lumer has his finger on
the button. People need to think about that.
Speaker 4 (35:47):
Imagine this young woman who's an influencer, comes in and
starts saying who the President needs to fire?
Speaker 1 (35:56):
This I mean thirty one year old conspiracy theory woman
who said that nine to eleven was an inside job.
She comes into the White House and says, fire these people,
to include the head of the National Security Agency, and
people like radcliffeo runs a CIA, and Gaber who runs
a DNI, and Walls who runs an air security agency.
Just take it and allow their own people to be fired.
They're totally neutered. They have no authority over their own organizations.
(36:19):
How can they lead their people when these crazies can
come in and there's nothing they can do. They can't
protect their own people.
Speaker 4 (36:25):
I know, I think where it leaves us, it's obvious
we are extremely vulnerable. We have pissed off pretty much
everyone other than Putin, and he'll just take advantage of us.
Speaker 2 (36:38):
You run a spy cruise, so if people want to
an ostrich hole to stick their head into, just.
Speaker 4 (36:45):
Broth on fire, why not go on a cruise. Let
me tell you a little bit about it. I've been
running for the last couple of years hosting spy slizes
and nukes conferences in Santa Fe and it was hugely popular,
so we decided year to do a Mediterranean cruise. It's
August thirtieth to September seventh. It's an amazing itinerary from
(37:08):
Malta to Naples, ephesis Rome. It's on the Celebrity line
and it's their newest ship, and I have to say
our lineup is just amazing. I have John Amendez, former
head of Disguise. She and her husband Tony wrote the
book that Argo was based on Michael Morrell former director
(37:32):
Mark Polymaropolis. So I guess you've had on your podcast too,
Raleigh Flynn, Doug Wise. The Days at Sea will do
a couple hours of programming in the morning, but when
we're in ports, say Malta, we'll have excursions around built
around espionage and what happened there. So if your listeners
(37:53):
are interested, go to Spiesliesanukes dot com and all the
information on the cruise is there.
Speaker 2 (38:00):
I did a cool operation in Malta once, I can't
talk about it.
Speaker 1 (38:03):
He's trying to get on. He's trying to get on
the cruise. Don't fall for it. Well, listen, we don't
want to take up too much to your time.
Speaker 2 (38:10):
Valerie.
Speaker 1 (38:10):
We as former professionals who worked in the same place
as you. Feel terrible that you got dragged into this
public mosh pit, and we're also very pleased that you've
been able to come out of it and have such
a successful professional career afterward.
Speaker 4 (38:24):
Yeah, well, such a pleasure. You guys run a great podcast,
and I'm delighted to be one of your guests today.
Speaker 1 (38:36):
Really short
Speaker 3 (38:39):
Shout sight
Hosts And Creators
Adam Davidson
John Sipher
Jerry O'Shea
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
Ridiculous History
History is beautiful, brutal and, often, ridiculous. Join Ben Bowlin and Noel Brown as they dive into some of the weirdest stories from across the span of human civilization in Ridiculous History, a podcast by iHeartRadio.