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

Age You World

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

Men Life Your

In the CIA, they recruit you to be an officer, an ops officer, in part due to how well you cope with stress and how well you adapt to new situations.

Valerie Plame

Art You Wit

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

Women Pet Men

Even those that hate Hillary admit she is a work horse and not a show horse. She gets down into the nuts and bolts and figures out, 'What's the policy, what's the substance?'

Valerie Plame

Work Those Tan

Over the years, from serving in the CIA to sitting on non-profit boards, I have observed first-hand what the addition of even one woman to a meeting or to a decision-making body can do. Put simply, in very many instances, group dynamics improve markedly.

Valerie Plame

Years Year Woman

I really believe the nexus of terrorism and nuclear weapons is the world's most ominous threat.

Valerie Plame

World Weapons Weapon

Leaks are always bad news.

Valerie Plame

Ways Way News

I think it's the height of patriotism to continue to exercise your right as a citizen and to hold your government to account. Isn't that what the very essence of democracy is about?

Valerie Plame

Patriotism Men Government

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

Good Courage Car

Certainly, if we had not invaded Iraq on intelligence that was clearly manipulated and cherry picked, we would be in a different position today.

Valerie Plame

Intelligence Would Today

The truth is, as long as nuclear weapons exist, we are not safe.

Valerie Plame

Truth Weapons Weapon

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

Truth Love Young

Privatization is more efficient and effective in some cases, but not in intelligence.

Valerie Plame

Intelligence Tell T

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

Men Marriage Age

She was very kind to us when Joe and I went through the darkest days of the leak of my name in 2003. And, of course, Joe worked in the Clinton White House.

Valerie Plame

Work Worked White House

Joe and I are still very aware of the fact that we live in a country where he criticised the government and lived another day. That trumps all. To paraphrase Churchill, democracy is the worst form of government apart from all the other forms of government. You constantly have to fight for it; you have to keep your government honest.

Valerie Plame

War Men Government

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

Intelligence Ways Way

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

Women Men Experience

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

Work Men Working

The great thing about fiction is you can fix things and make things better.

Valerie Plame

Great You Things

We need the best and the brightest to go into public service.

Valerie Plame

I know having a Jason Bourne all alone in a field firing at bad guys is much more dramatic, but it's not real.

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

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

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

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 do not subscribe to the 'Trump is crazy like a fox' thing. I think that's being too generous.

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 go to my kids' sports games and don't have to carry the enormous burden of secrecy with me every day. However, adrenaline still courses through my body whenever I go through passport control to another country.

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

A chief of station is the head of all intelligence operations in any given country.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The fundamental problem is not that Trump has access to the nuclear launch codes, but that they exist at all.

Valerie Plame

To my knowledge, no one has died from a cyberattack... but there is a gray area between peace and war.

Valerie Plame