Reply #5: from a good profile piece in VF [View All]

[SoCalDem]

http://www.jimgilliam.com/2004/01/vanity_fairs_profile_on_joseph_wilson_and_valerie_plame.php




He had met Plame in February 1997 at a reception at the Washington home of the Turkish ambassador. He says that when his eyes fell on her from across the room he thought he knew her. He realized as he drew near that he did not-and that it was love at first sight. From that moment on, he says, "she did not let anyone into the conversation, and I did not let anyone into the conversation."

At the time, Wilson was based in Stuttgart, serving as the political adviser to George Joulwan, the U.S. general in charge of the European command; Plame was based in Brussels. Meeting in Paris, London, and Brussels, they got very serious very quickly. On the third or fourth date, he says, they were in the middle of a "heavy make-out" session when she said she had something to tell him. She was very conflicted and very nervous, thinking of everything that had gone into getting her to that point, such as money and training.

She was, she explained, undercover in the C.I.A. "It did nothing to dampen my ardor," he says. "My only question was: Is your name really Valerie?"

It was. Valerie P., as she was known to her classmates at the Farm, in Camp Peary, Virginia, the C.I.A.'s training facility, where former C.I.A. agent Jim Marcinkowski noticed-as he later told Time magazine-that she showed considerable prowess wielding an AK-47 machine gun. She had chosen the C.I.A. because she was intellectually curious, had a facility for languages, and wanted to live abroad. She also came from a military family, which had imbued her with a sense of public duty. "I was in the N.S.A. for three years," says her father, retired air-force lieutenant colonel Samuel Plame. Her parents, says her close friend Janet Angstadt, are the type who are still volunteering for the Red Cross and Meals on Wheels in the Philadelphia suburb where they live.

After Valerie graduated from Penn State, she moved to Washington, D.C., and married her college boyfriend Todd Sesler. She worked at a clothing store, biding her time, waiting for her acceptance from the C.I.A. She may have mentioned, says Angstadt, that she was going to interview with the C.I.A., but "nobody ever heard about it ever again."