NAOMI WOLF’S REVIEW OF THE VALERIE PLAME MOVIE….SEE NOTE
www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-5027705.html
What he had found on that trip — as he had expected — was that the claim was false: one French company had the monopoly on all yellow cake uranium, and Niger’s poor infrastructure made it impossible for the President’s claims to be true.
So Wilson did what any American patriot is supposed to do: he bore witness, publicly and with deliberation. In an op-ed essay in The New York Times titled “What I didn’t find in Africaâ€, he explained conclusively, in 1,200 words, that the US President was citing information that his State Department knew was wrong, and that Bush was either lying or being unknowingly misleading.
What followed is the subject of Fair Game.After the piece’s publication, Wilson was not lauded as a hero: he was persecuted and targeted by those at the very pinnacle of power. And the persecution did not stop with the man who spoke out. Men at the highest levels of government — certainly Karl Rove and Dick Cheney, though only their subordinate Lewis “Scooter†Libby took the ultimate blame — went beyond bringing down the whistleblower, and turned the entire weight and ammunition of government and the bully pulpit against the man’s family. They punished Joe Wilson’s outcry by “outing†his wife, Valerie Plame, who had spent years working undercover as a highly trained CIA agent. In one well-placed leak that was widely picked up, Rove, Cheney or Libby made sure that her entire career was at an end, that her colleagues overseas would be put in danger and that she could never work at her chosen profession again.
Cheney’s and Rove’s offices used various methods in their effort to smear and discredit the highly reputable (and very macho) Wilson: first they tried to sell the press the notion that the Niger trip was a junket arranged by his wife — a narrative that they clearly hoped would serve to unman him (this slur provides the undercurrent for one of the most intense scenes between Penn and Watts in the film).
When that didn’t stick — because Wilson made the good decision to fight back and do interviews — they sought to discredit him by claiming that he was fameobsessed, a publicity seeker for personal reasons. Wilson and Plame posed for a now-iconic image for Vanity Fair, in which they are seated in a convertible, the stunning blonde Plame wearing sunglasses and a scarf. This was used against the Wilsons; but if you are going to try to break through the clutter in America with an allegation that no one in power wants you to tell, is making use of glamour and one’s own newly minted celebrity not the only smart way to get one’s story heard?
A modest rebuttal in The Nation would have sunk Wilson’s message, and thanks to his relentless effort to speak and speak and speak — anywhere that would have him — most Americans actually know that the President lied to them with what have become infamous as “those 16 wordsâ€. The exposed lies used leading up to the Iraq invasion became part of American conventional wisdom too, and eventually helped the defeat of McCain and Palin. In historical terms, Wilson’s truth-telling won.
But Wilson — and Plame — lost. When they went up against the Government, not only did Plame lose her career — she now works with a think-tank, the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, a doubtless interesting job but one that leaves dormant two decades of highly honed intelligence skills — but her husband’s consulting business suffered grievously. They faced personal danger: Plame had to choose alternate routes to take her kids to school every day after the leak of her identity; at one point she found that the screws that held together the decking attached to her house — decking that was 10ft off the ground and a place where her small twins played — had been unscrewed. The couple have continued to be reviled, scolded and mocked, even as in other quarters they are applauded and recognised.
I ask Wilson, over lunch outside their Cannes hotel, where his sense of a citizen’s fight came from. “I don’t think any of usâ€, Wilson says, “understood how far they [Rove, Cheney, et al] would go. I thought the press would go look at them, not focus on us.â€
Why didn’t he back down? “It was not going to end until we beat them — it was bury or be buried. I learnt that long ago in Baghdad in the First Gulf War [when Wilson had personally confronted Saddam]. I was not going to be led to slaughter like a lamb. If you want me you’ve got to come get me and you’ll have to take me kicking and screaming all the way. I grew up surfing in California. I have been in rough seas all my life. My dad was the last pilot off the USS Franklin [in the Second World War] just before it was hit by Japanese bombers.â€
So courage runs in the family?
“Yes, and a sense of the wild. The lesson in this story is that you can fight city hall and win. Sometimes it’s tough, and it comes at some personal cost. The great aphorism of our Founding Fathers was Benjamin Franklin’s response when a woman asked him [as the Founders drafted the Constitution]: “Which will it be, Sir, a monarchy or a republic?†He replied: “A republic, Madam, if you can keep it.â€
Wilson pauses, and considers. “That says in seven words what your responsibilities are as a citizen. People talk about the Bill of Rights but it’s really a Bill of Responsibilities. The lesson from all this is for any citizen: if you want to keep your democracy, you have to fight for it.â€
I ask Plame the same question. Most people, I kept thinking as I consider these events, bail when there is a personal cost to walking the walk that principle should lead them to.
“I loved my career,†she says, “I was proud to serve my country. Joe showed me his piece before it went to print. He knew something. What were his real choices? Say nothing? I was completely supportive of what he was doing, feeling secure in my own cover. Integrity is tested — walking through fire together. Everything was tested — our marriage, our belief in each other, my pride in the CIA.†Is there something special here that she leaves as a legacy as a woman, a mother? “I have a daughter — all parents strive to be good role models. We’ve tried to explain to [the children] in a way that is appropriate for them what we did and why we did it.â€
Why did you not give up when it got tough? “Honestly, at one point we were looking at real estate in New Zealand. And we had this moment between the two of us — this is our country, too, and we are not prepared to walk away. How dare you drive us from the things we love because of this difficult time!
“The Pentagon wanted to sell this war to the American people,†she continues. Plame describes a journalistic exposé that disclosed how the Pentagon had trained retired generals to misrepresent the war in Iraq — generals who had a financial interest in the escalation of the war. There was a huge PR and money machine behind this effort, and may have behind the effort to smear the couple as well.
“We didn’t realise how big this was,†she says. “All things considered, we didn’t do too badly. They had billions at stake to set up their war, and Joe put a monkey wrench in that,†she says with quiet pride.
I look at the couple for a moment, surrounded as they are by the hype and glitz of the festival, where they are being treated, especially since the press screening that morning, not as pariahs this time around but as newly rediscovered celebrities. In the various circumstances in which I have seen them, no matter who is surrounding them, they both have something few people carry with them: a sense of themselves and one another, and a sense of peace. Maybe that is the ultimate gift of integrity.
Ms Plame Wilson, in particular, fascinates me; she is the silent and silenced woman, for many reasons. During the scandal of her exposure she could not talk about her life, her career, the incredible fact that for years she had been posing as a bland businesswoman as a cover, while actually travelling the world in highly dangerous situations as a CIA spy. So she appeared again and again, in her cool blonde beauty, impeccably dressed, beside her outspoken husband, but she could not speak for herself. When she actually published a memoir, Fair Game (titled, like the film, in reference to Bush’s quote that she was “fair game†in the attack on Wilson), it was redacted so forcefully by “the agency†— there are pages that are almost completely one big blackout of text. Her lovely face was on the cover — but her voice was strangled and interrupted. Even now she cannot speak; her life as a spy is still classified, classified for ever unless the CIA makes special exceptions for her. This leads us to the bombshell in the movie — a bombshell that, once again, Plame may not speak about.
Liman’s film, which is based on a screenplay compiled from the testimony of many sources, contains a real bombshell: it shows Plame as not just a garden-variety operative — let alone the lowly “glorified secretary†that the Cheney team tried in their infinite sexism to paint her as being — but rather that she was at the forefront of a highly successful undercover programme of nuclear nonproliferation. She and her colleagues are portrayed as working, at great personal danger, with allies in Iraq. The film shows them extracting parts by stealth from nuclear devices, shipping them surreptitiously to the US to be tampered with, and then, again at great personal risk, reinstalling the now-nonfunctioning pieces. If this is true, it means that Cheney and his team did not only wipe out one CIA agent in their reprisals against a truth-telling citizen; they also sacrificed deliberately a highly successful counterproliferation programme that had kept the Western world safe from nuclear attack for a decade and a half.
If this is true, it is important news. One can’t say if it is true because the sources, many of them CIA operatives, spoke to the film-makers off the record. Plame can’t confirm or deny it because her role is still classified. Doug and his team aren’t journalists. They are film-makers. This brings up the fascinating role that film can play in a time of government secrecy and collusion. Many barriers stop Plame from telling this story, if it is true, and there are barriers against reporters investigating it. But nothing stops Hollywood.
I cherish a number of memories of watching this film being made: it was remarkable to watch thousands of leaflets dropped on central Amman, the capital of Jordan, just as they were dropped on the hapless citizens of Baghdad, warning them of the impending bombardment: Liman raced with a camera behind his actors down one market street as production assistants showered him with leaflets on either side. In yet another neighbourhood, Liman and his team had peopled the scene on a Baghdad street with actual Iraqi refugees — of whom there are now tens of thousands, homeless and desperate, in Amman. It was memorable to sit under the tents against the heat of the day, and watch whole families — mothers and grandmothers and babies — take a break from playing themselves in a time when they had the homes that they had lost through the events depicted in the film. Some nights were magical: a dinner for some members of the cast, and us, on the green slopes outside the home of Princess Rhym and Prince Ali, two forward-thinking members of the Jordanian Royal Family who have started a film institute to train bright young people in the Middle East — young people who helped to run the local production activities for Fair Game. It was sobering to go from the heights of luxury and security — a royal palace, or in Cannes, with some of the Fair Game members as guests on Giorgio Armani’s huge olive-coloured yacht, observing influencers ranging from Paul Allen to Emily Blunt enjoying a warm Mediterranean wind — and think back to those whom Avram and I have also met, who were ravaged in the wake of these lies: the Iraqi refugees in their hundreds of thousands; veterans of these wars; the families of our own war dead.
I hope that film can add its unique qualities to the journalistic record on this set of events, so that Americans can truly understand one of the most important, dramatic and personally intense intersections of principle and personalities in their own recent history — a history that is not behind us but that still comes home to us, wounded or maddened or accompanied by officials bearing a wrapped flag to loved ones, week after week after week.
Fair Game will be released in the UK in the autumn. For daily news, reviews and interviews from Cannes go to timesonline.co.uk/cannes
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