My take is, privacy is precious. I think privacy is the last true luxury. To be able to live your life as you choose without having everyone comment on it or know about.
Valerie Plame
I am angry when I hear things like Cheney whispering into Bush’s ear on the way to Obama’s inauguration to ask him to pardon ‘Scooter’ Libby and not to ‘leave a soldier on the battlefield’. What kind of metaphor is that for his petty partisan views, when you have men and women giving the ultimate sacrifice? I have nothing but contempt.
Valerie Plame
To my knowledge, no one has died from a cyberattack… but there is a gray area between peace and war.
Valerie Plame
One characteristic that I hope I never relinquish is an intense curiosity about the world around me.
Valerie Plame
Looking back at my career, I wish I knew then what I know now… that gender bias is built into the system, and it’s unconscious in many ways. I wish I had the maturity and courage to have pushed back more. I was always trying to be a ‘good girl’ and play by the rules.
Valerie Plame
Joe was being called a liar and a traitor; I’m being accused of nepotism, of being a glorified secretary. The stresses that that places on an individual and, of course, a marriage were tremendous. It was – there were some dark days.
Valerie Plame
I really believe the nexus of terrorism and nuclear weapons is the world’s most ominous threat.
Valerie Plame
North Korea is the errant teenage child, aren’t they? Or toddler – they’re holding their breath until they get their way.
Valerie Plame
My CIA colleagues were smart, dedicated, funny, and creative. Yes, there was sometimes stifling bureaucracy, boredom, colleagues who never should have been there, and later, deeply disturbing stories of the CIA’s involvement in torture. Still, I got to do work I thought was incredibly important and, many times, had fun doing it.
Valerie Plame
The truth is, as long as nuclear weapons exist, we are not safe.
Valerie Plame
Privatization is more efficient and effective in some cases, but not in intelligence.
Valerie Plame
These are issues we’ve been grappling with since the Constitution was written: how you hold your government to account for its words and deeds. It’s all about power and the abuse of power.
Valerie Plame
Hollywood does tend to portray CIA officers as totally the honey trap. Looks matter as they do in any profession. But the most important thing for me when I was working was blending into my environment.
Valerie Plame
Of course the job has a lot of glamour. But it really is about being smarter than your average bear. Your mind is your best weapon. It’s great when you’re a good shot with an AK-47, but it’s about being clever.
Valerie Plame
I don’t care if you are for having Mexico pay for the border wall, or you want to repeal and replace Obamacare, or if you want women to have complete access to reproductive rights – I don’t care. The fact is, if you don’t get the nuclear issue right, none of the other ones matter.
Valerie Plame
We don’t have to sit by while Trump uses his enormous global platform to undermine our national security. We would love to be able to actually force Twitter’s hand to live up to its rules, explicitly forbidding hate speech and encouraging violence.
Valerie Plame
So many times, genuine health workers and genuine NGO folks are really just trying to help other humans in whatever capacity they can. But they are perceived as being CIA, and therefore, it blocks their effectiveness.
Valerie Plame
We need the best and the brightest to go into public service.
Valerie Plame
When an issue is so fraught with partisanship, a special counsel provides some modicum of transparency and accountability rather the the veil of politics.
Valerie Plame
The great thing about fiction is you can fix things and make things better.
Valerie Plame
I do not subscribe to the ‘Trump is crazy like a fox’ thing. I think that’s being too generous.
Valerie Plame
There is definitely a sense that when you, as a CIA ops officer… are handling assets, they are delivering to you their trust and their well-being. And you feel very protective of them, even if they’re not very nice people.
Valerie Plame
It’s lonely. That’s why, in many ways, the CIA is the world’s biggest dating agency, I think. I imagine it’s much like two actors that get married because they understand that universe. You know, I’m pretty sure the agency’s divorce rate is rather high.
Valerie Plame
I love my career. I thought, if I was lucky, I would retire as a senior intelligence officer, still working on the issues of counterproliferation. But that didn’t happen, so – new chapter.
Valerie Plame
When I was outed on July 14th, 2003, I was, until that moment, covert. That means no one outside of a very small circle knew where I really worked.
Valerie Plame
Our mission was to make sure that the bad guys, basically, did not get nuclear weapons.
Valerie Plame
Our mission was to make sure that the bad guys, basically, did not get nuclear weapons.
Valerie Plame
I certainly didn’t reach out to my old assets and ask ’em how they’re doing, although I would have liked to.
Valerie Plame
Our critics would love nothing more for us to go away and just be quiet. And we won’t give them that satisfaction. We have young children that, one day, when they understand more of what’s happened and what’s transpired, we wanna be able to say to them, you know, we did our best. And we told the truth.
Valerie Plame
How lucky are we to have Naomi Watts and Sean Penn playing us? We’ve seen the final cut now a couple times, and the scenes with the marriage fraying at the edges are still very difficult to watch. However, our hope was that no matter your political persuasion, you’re taken with the idea that it’s important to hold power in check.
Valerie Plame
The intelligence community really is a vast bureaucratic entity, and it has been politicized in ways that are not effective for the gathering of intelligence and giving it to senior policymakers.
Valerie Plame
When you work for the C.I.A. or as a diplomat, or serve in the military, you’re not serving as a Democrat or a Republican; you serve as an American, whatever your personal moral compass or political views might be. So that would describe me.
Valerie Plame
Of course we wish that more people involved in the leak of my true CIA identity had been prosecuted, but the system worked.
Valerie Plame
Americans want to believe that we are a nation of laws, and no one is above them, including the president. Mr. Trump’s and his associates’ actions during his campaign and during his brief time in office are extremely troubling.
Valerie Plame
If Russia did interfere in our election – and, by most accounts, they did – then it is imperative for the health of our democracy to have a thorough and unbiased investigation into the matter.
Valerie Plame
There is not adequate whistleblower protection.
Valerie Plame
When President Ronald Reagan negotiated some significant arms reduction deals with the then-Soviet Union, he was considered a real hero, someone who was advocating for peace.
Valerie Plame
I’ve been working with Global Zero. They are a great organization leading the resistance against nuclear war and the elimination of nuclear weapons.
Valerie Plame
Whatever you think of Trump, I think most people would agree he is impulsive, and we certainly have an impulsive leader in North Korea in Kim Jong-un. That’s an unholy combination.
Valerie Plame
The fundamental problem is not that Trump has access to the nuclear launch codes, but that they exist at all.
Valerie Plame
I believe in much more diplomacy, not less.
Valerie Plame
I have always been appalled by the depiction of female CIA operatives.
Valerie Plame
I find it really hard to relate to the Bond women or Angelina Jolie in ‘Salt.’ And of course it’s informed by my experiences and the people I’ve met along the way and the places I’ve been.
Valerie Plame
I think feeling bitter or angry is really useless.
Valerie Plame
There’s a huge impact on national security and intelligence. The new normal is going to be more and more of these hacks, whether it’s Target or Home Depot or the Office of Personnel Management or Jennifer Lawrence’s nude photos.
Valerie Plame
The options are war versus peace, and I am delighted that, so far, it appears that peaceful negotiation has won the day.
Valerie Plame
From a counter-intelligence viewpoint, the OPM breach is really scary – but if we continue to see the erosion of purely commercial enterprises, where people lose confidence, the economy falters.
Valerie Plame
I’ve moved on to Plan B now, writing novels.
Valerie Plame
I would never jeopardize classified information. I served my country well and loyally, and I had to sue the C.I.A. on First Amendment grounds.
Valerie Plame
Leaks are always bad news.
Valerie Plame
I can tell you, all the intelligence services in the world were running my name through their databases to see did anyone by this name come in the country? When? Do we know anything about it? Where did she stay? Who did she see?
Valerie Plame
I think, honestly, my largest concern, there are a lot of unbalanced people out there, and all of a sudden, I’m the CIA poster girl, and our home in Washington, the front door was about 20 feet from the street. I went to the agency at a certain point and asked for security on a residence.
Valerie Plame