Valerie Plame case The Valerie Plame case: My wife, the CIA agent, by Joe Wilson

Valerie Plame broke cover this week to give her side of a story that has engulfed the White House in scandal and led to the conviction of the Vice President's chief of staff for perjury. Here her husband, Joe Wilson, whose opposition to the Iraq war is thought to have provoked her 'outing', talks to Andrew Buncombe about their ordeal

Published: 18 March 2007

The removal men have been and gone, and the elegant house in Georgetown's Charleston Terrace, with its huge door knocker in the shape of a lion's head, stands empty. Its new occupants, a woman from Oman and her husband who works for the World Bank, are getting ready to move in.

For the best part of 10 years the house, with its expansive views of the Washington Monument, was home to former ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife Valerie Plame. They signed their names to its deeds in May 1998 and moved in shortly afterwards. But two weeks ago the couple, who for almost four intense years have been at the centre of one of Washington's most closely followed stories, closed that heavy-set door one final time and headed west. Their destination was New Mexico and what they hope will be a new chapter in their lives.

"Santa Fe. We thought it would it would be a nice place to raise our kids," Mr Wilson, 57, tells The Independent on Sunday, referring to the couple's seven-year-old twins, Trevor and Samantha. "We are from the west. We have been going back and forth for a number of years. Santa Fe appeals to us. It's an international city, there's an opera. And Valerie has been going to [the US nuclear laboratory at] Los Alamos for years as part of her activities."

Put most simply, the reason they no longer have a reason to be in Washington is that Mr Wilson's wife no longer has a job here. In the summer of 2003, a conservative newspaper columnist revealed that, according to White House sources, Mr Wilson's wife was a covert CIA operative, working on weapons of mass destruction. Her outing set off a series of events that this month resulted in the conviction for perjury of Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

But her outing - widely believed to have been carried out by the highest levels of the Bush administration in an act of revenge against Mr Wilson after he showed President Bush's claims about Iraq's nuclear ambitions to be false - had more straightforward ramifications. As Ms Plame herself told a congressional committee last week during a rare public appearance, with her cover blown she was out of a job. "My name and identity were carelessly and recklessly abused by senior officials in the White House and State Department," she said. "I could no longer perform the work for which I had been highly trained."

Her appearance before a House committee was noteworthy less for what she said but because she was saying anything at all. For the past four years in which she and Mr Wilson have watched as federal investigators examined who was involved in the leaking of her identity, Ms Plame has kept largely quiet. While Mr Wilson has railed against the actions of the Bush administration, she has borne in mind her training as a covert operative and allowed her husband to take the spotlight.

That is not to say she has kept out of sight. Indeed, since 2003 Ms Plame, 43, and Mr Wilson have become something of a fixture on Washington's liberal cocktail circuit. They have attended parties, gone to openings and accepted invitations to all manner of events, especially those organised by Democrats. Recently they had dinner with leading Democratic presidential hopeful Senator Hillary Clinton. Last year, they even took up an invitation from ABC News to attend the White House Correspondents Association (WHCA) dinner, also attended by George and Laura Bush.

It is just that, at these events, the striking Ms Plame was careful not to stir controversy and said very little. Her behaviour at a small, invitation-only party held in the spring of 2004 to launch her husband's book The Politics of Truth was typical of the way Ms Plame behaved. The event was held in the Washington home of a former US ambassador to Portugal. Throughout the evening, at which the IoS was among the guests, Ms Plame remained in the background, content to talk quietly with friends. When her husband made a short speech in which he thanked her, she remained standing with her circle, unwilling to become the focus of people's attention.

Likewise, a report in The Washington Post about an October 2003 party at the home of former NBC White House correspondent Campbell Brown noted that Mr Wilson openly voiced his criticisms of the administration. "The buzz, though," said the Post, "focused on a shy and attractive blonde who sat nibbling finger sandwiches and discreetly introduced herself only as 'Valerie'."

The Wilsons' strategy has not been without its slips. For the January 2004 edition of Vanity Fair, for example, the couple posed for a now notorious photograph in Mr Wilson's open-top Jaguar, he with one arm hanging casually over the door and she wearing a head-scarf and dark-glasses. "The pictures should not be able to identify her, or are not supposed to," Mr Wilson later said. "She's still not going to answer any questions and there will not be any pictures that compromise her."

But given that Mr Wilson had until that point insisted his wife would rather "break her arm" than be photographed, even some of the couple's supporters began to wonder whether he had grown a little too fond of the attention he was getting.

Certainly, Mr Wilson has never shied away from publicity. He has appeared on television, given speeches and lectures, and is now co-operating with producers at Warner Bros on a film about the couple's lives. He has given his support to various Democratic candidates, including Senator John Kerry in his 2004 presidential campaign.

But the former Californian "surf dude", who as a US diplomat in Iraq once faced down Saddam Hussein, insists he is driven by principle rather than ego. "There are lots of good old sayings," he says, speaking by phone from Utah at the weekend. "Americans stand up and fight for our liberties against those that try to usurp our [rights]."

Ms Plame's preference for keeping a lower profile is apparently genuine. Friends of the couple say that she has always been a pleasant, easy-going woman whose prime concern has been the welfare of her children. They insist that when she told them she was an energy consultant for Brewster, Jennings and Associates (a fictitious front company invented by the CIA), they had no reason not to believe her. No one thought for a moment she was a spy.

"They are our dearest friends ... She is a nice, nice woman. As normal and as natural as possible," says David Tillotson, a neighbour of the Wilsons in Charleston Terrace. "We had no idea [of her real profession]. They have two seven-year-old twins. I have a lap pool ... with a wooden door to the outside, and very often during the summer they would come over and go swimming. Very often [it would be just] Valerie and the children. They would come and swim and we would sit and talk."

And when the news of Ms Plame's identity became public, the Tillotsons' relationship with the Wilsons changed very little. At the same time, Ms Plame talked very little about her "other" life. "Valerie is a very private person. She does not go in for that," says Mr Tillotson, a lawyer. "We know her at a different level."

Mr Wilson first met Ms Plame in 1997 at a party at the home of Turkey's ambassador to the US. In his memoir, he says when he saw her he was immediately smitten. "I looked up and saw across the room this willowy blonde, resembling a young Grace Kelly," he writes. It was on their third or fourth date during a "heavy make-out" session that she revealed to Mr Wilson, who as a former diplomat had classified clearance, the truth about herself.

That truth involved joining the CIA when she was just 22 and fresh out of college in Pennsylvania, a tough initiation at "the Farm", the agency's training facility at Camp Peary, Virginia, and then assignments in Athens and London, where she had posed as a student at the London School of Economics (LSE). Like Mr Wilson she had also been previously married, he twice. When they met, she was based in Brussels but that same year she moved back to Washington, reportedly because the CIA believed her name had been on a list handed to the Russians by the double agency Aldrich Ames in 1994 and that she may have been compromised.

The future for the Wilsons is somewhat unclear. The former diplomat has previously worked as a consultant to US businesses looking to invest in challenging overseas environments, and he says he has a number of projects that he intends to follow. For her part, Ms Plame is still awaiting clearance from the CIA for the publication of her own memoir, entitled Fair Game, a title based on President Bush's special adviser Karl Rove's description of her to a television journalist. The book reportedly earned her an advance of $2.5m. Then there is the little matter of who will play her in the movie.

In the meantime, the couple are busy setting up home in a three-bedroom adobe-style home complete with guest quarters. According to a report in the Albuquerque Journal, the property is set among piñon and aspen trees and has a patio that looks out over the nearby Jerez Mountains. Intriguingly, the property comes with 11 fireplaces. But, best of all given Ms Plame's previous life, the front door of their new home is fitted with a postigo, a small wooden shutter that allows the occupant to look and see just who is knocking.