Valerie Plame, in spotlight again

NEW YORK — She's posed on the red carpet at Cannes in a flowing designer gown, at Deauville in a sleek black bustier and palazzo pants. She exchanges e-mails with Naomi Watts. Sean Penn hung out at her house. Not for nothing have they called Valerie Plame Wilson the Glamorous Spy.

And yet for years, she lived a life of secrecy that most of us would have trouble fathoming, unable to tell her best friends what she actually did for a living, or her own husband where she was flying off to in the middle of the night.

How do you go from one life to the other? Not very easily — still, she says, as she prepares for another round in the spotlight with the release Friday of "Fair Game," the movie based on her infamous 2003 "outing" as a CIA agent.

"I have found it a real challenge to be a public person," Plame Wilson said in an interview this week from Santa Fe, N.M., where she now lives with her husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson, and their 10-year-old twins. "I was in a world where discretion was good. All of a sudden that changed overnight. That was not easy at all."

And to those critics who claim she's thoroughly enjoyed profiting from that celebrity — red carpets, photo shoots, book and movie deals — Wilson has this to say, her voice hardening slightly: "Listen, I loved my job. If none of this had happened, I'd still be overseas working, happily, right now. But that wasn't the card I was dealt."

"This," of course, is the now well-known story of how Plame's CIA cover was blown, leaked by Bush administration officials in retribution, she and her husband claim, for her husband's public accusation that the administration was twisting intelligence to exaggerate the Iraqi nuclear threat and justify going to war.

An investigation led to the conviction of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, then Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, of perjury, obstruction and lying to the FBI. Bush later commuted Libby's 30-month prison sentence.

As for Wilson, she wrote a book about the ordeal, as did her husband. It was published — some 10 percent of it literally blacked out because of redactions demanded by the CIA — in 2007, the same year the family moved to Santa Fe to build a new life. There, Plame Wilson enjoys being a mother, does part-time work for a scientific research group, the Santa Fe Institute, and also is collaborating on a spy novel — yes, about a female covert agent.