It's a lonely secrecy.
Fair Game is a significant movie that will probably draw small audiences.
Why? Like most Washington scandals, the Valerie Plame affair grabbed headlines
for a short while and then disappeared. This movie tries to set the record
straight on the behavior of the players before, during, and after columnist
Robert Novak revealed that Plame was a covert CIA operative. But the public
attention span is short, and this story vanished from the headlines to make way
for the daily barrage of pre and post-election Washington intrigue.
At the time
of the Novak revelation, Valerie Plame was running a high level
counter-proliferation operation in the Middle East. An agent in that position
operates at an "eyes only" level and reveals nothing about his/her job even to
close friends or family. It is a lonely secrecy.
CIA and an
incumbent president, while seemingly natural allies, are often at odds,
especially when the incumbent decides to manipulate the agency for his/her own
ends. (Recall Nixon's pressure on CIA covert operations chief Richard Helms in
the 70s.) This time around, it was decided at the vice presidential level and/or
above, that the White House would ask CIA to verify that Iraq had obtained
"yellowcake" uranium from Niger in order to build weapons of mass destruction.
CIA turned to Valerie Plame.
Under cover
of working for a venture capital firm in Georgetown, Plame spent much of her
time on assignment in Kuala Lumpur, Baghdad, Dubai, and Cairo. Her serial
absences damaged her marriage to foreign service officer Joe Wilson. When, in
response to President Bush's insistence on the existence of WMD, Joe Wilson
wrote a tough op-ed piece in the Times denying Iraq's receipt of 500 tons of
yellowcake, the "Office of the vice-president" triggered the destruction of the
career of Valerie Plame. She was running nine teams in the field with 15 agents
in Baghdad alone. You may recall that the administration that first called Plame
important soon switched to labeling her "a secretary" to diminish her
credibility.
The
revelation of Plame's identity endangered every operative and his/her family who
had been connected to her in any way. The "Office of the Vice-President" - call
it Libby, Rove, or Cheney - your choice - violated the rules of its own game in
order to add credibility to the invasion of Iraq even after their own
professionals were convinced that Iraq's WMD program had been destroyed in the
early '90s.
Sean Penn is
terrific as the smart, irascible Joe Wilson - the husband who finally tires of
the secrecy of his wife's life and her betrayal by the administration. Naomi
Watts is steady and understated as Valerie Plame, and lest you think she's too
young and pretty for an agent at this level, take a look at Plame herself and
recognize that her own good looks were a strong part of her cover. Pretty
Washington wives like this, after all, are supposed to be dumb blondes.
Copyright (c) Illusion