“Fair Game” Tells the Story of Betrayal of an Agent and the Results

Sitting around a dinner table with a group of close friends, wine flowing freely, someone throws out that Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, must be intending to use WMDs. It’s 2003, and the US is just about to launch the Shock and Awe campaign of missiles based on intelligence that proved he was a threat.

At the head of the table sits Joe Wilson, who traveled to Niger and found it totally improbable that 500 tons of yellowcake uranium could have possibly been transferred to Iraq. Yet the evidence the president and others are citing claim just the opposite! He lashes out at his friend, “You don’t know anything! You’re an idiot!” and the table is awkwardly silenced. It’s all in a new movie called “Fair Game,” where the couple, CIA agent Valerie Plame and the ambassador, Ellis are portrayed with uncanny accuracy by Naomi Watts and Sean Penn.
When Elison writes the facts about the trumped up evidence, columnist Bob Novak prints that his wife is a CIA agent…and from that moment their lives are changed forever. The friends are shocked, asking about how long she’s been an agent, whether she’s killed people, and who she told. She can’t answer anything.

The couple live lives of secrecy, she’s off on another ‘business trip’ to ‘Cleveland’ and he’s seething over the fact that the evidence he’s debunked by actually being there is being ignored. Scooter Libbey insists, on using the tiny percentage that it ‘might be true’ as evidence that Dick Cheney can trot out on CNN.

The whole story makes me seethe, that we could have invaded a country and spent that many billions and that the Iraqi scientists who we promised to help after they helped us were left in the lurch. Ellis and Plame approved of the script and claim it’s just as real as their story.