University Newswire
Valerie Plame Wilson to speak at UNCP
Author and former CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson will speak in UNC Pembroke’s Givens Performing Arts Center at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, November 5.
Plame Wilson’s appearance is part of UNCP’s Distinguished Speaker Series. Admission is $10 for the general public.
A former CIA covert operations officer, Plame Wilson found herself at the heart of a political firestorm when senior White House and State Department officials revealed her secret status to several national journalists – including a syndicated newspaper columnist who published her name.
Her book “Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House” is a New York Times best seller and has been greeted with both praise and controversy. Plame Wilson will discuss what she views as an unprecedented breech of public trust by the Bush administration in its efforts to silence a critic.
Vice President Dick Cheney is widely believed to have orchestrated the leak of Plame Wilson’s status as retribution for a newspaper column written by her husband, Joseph Wilson, in which he debunked one of the key stated reasons for the Bush Administration’s war in Iraq.
Cheney’s aid Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby went to jail after being convicted of lying to federal investigators about the case.
Plame Wilson began a 20-year CIA career in 1985 as an undercover agent stationed in Virginia, London, Athens and Brussels, among other locations. In 1998, she married former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who was sent to Africa by the Bush administration to learn about the alleged purchase of material by Iraq to make a nuclear bomb.
An undercover Plame Wilson accompanied her husband on the trip. The Wilson’s report contradicted a claim made in a speech by President George W. Bush that a purchase was made by Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein for the purpose of building “weapons of mass destruction,” later abbreviated as WMDs.
When Wilson penned an op-ed piece in the New York Times contradicting the Bush statement, Cheney, Karl Rove and Libby allegedly began to get revenge on the Wilsons.
A week after Wilson’s newspaper article appeared, Washington Post columnist Robert Novak reported that Plame Wilson was a spy, ending her career. She sued Cheney, Rove and Libby for revealing her classified status.
- Tickets: $10 general public / $5 faculty and staff / Free for UNCP Students
- For tickets, call the Givens Performing Arts Center Box Office at 910.521.6361 or 800.367.0778
- Directions to Given's Performing Arts Center
- Campus Map
The 2009-10 Distinguished Speaker Series continues with basketball player Sheryl Swoopes on January 21, 2010 and actress Jodie Sweetin on March 23, 2010.
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