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Letter to the editor

A literary blackout, courtesy of the CIA

By Colette Bancroft, Times Book Editor
Published November 4, 2007

Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House
By Valerie Plame Wilson
Simon & Schuster, 411 pages, $26

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After Central Intelligence Agency operative Valerie Plame Wilson's cover was blown by Robert Novak and various members of the Bush administration in 2003, her life and career were spun every which way by politicians and the media and dissected in court during the Scooter Libby trial.

Determined to reclaim her story, Wilson retired from the CIA in 2006 and wrote Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House. Like all CIA employees, she had signed a confidentiality agreement requiring her to submit anything she wrote to the agency before publication. She did so.

The CIA returned her manuscript with hundreds of redactions it said were necessary for security reasons. One of its primary concerns was that Wilson not reveal the dates of her employment with the agency before 2002, even though that information had already been widely published. She joined in 1985, right out of college.

Wilson and her publisher, Simon & Schuster, took the CIA to court, arguing the redactions were an unreasonable violation of First Amendment rights. A federal court ruled against them.

Fair Game was published in October. Simon & Schuster printed it with the redactions in place: gray bars through the offending text to demonstrate exactly where cuts were made and in what contexts. In some places, entire pages are crossed out. 

Fair Game can be a little disorienting. It's understandable why a chapter about the invasion of Iraq might have chunks excised. But at one point, a couple of solid grayed-out pages are interrupted by a few sentences describing a surreal encounter with a woman wheeling a baby carriage whose passengers are a pair of pugs dressed in Burberry raincoats. What came before and after that?

The book's afterword, by reporter Laura Rozen, fills in some of the blanks in Wilson's life from interviews and public sources. As long as Wilson doesn't write her own story, that's legal.

Colette Bancroft can be reached at (727) 893-8435 or bancroft@sptimes.com.

[Last modified November 2, 2007, 18:14:06]