Agent for Change
Valerie Plame Wilson and Life After Langley
Norah Levine
You can’t help but think about it when you first meet Valerie Plame Wilson.
This warm, funny woman—who looks more like a very pretty soccer mom than an international person of mystery—was a spy?
You keep wondering about it as she leads you briskly down the halls of the Santa Fe Institute, where she works part-time as the director of community relations. You start rationalizing as she takes you into the kitchen for some coffee. If she actually looked like a spy, she wouldn’t have been a very good one, would she? By the time you sit down to chat about how much she loves Santa Fe and all the new projects she’s involved in, you decide maybe you should give it up. Sure, she completed some impressively hardcore paramilitary training. But she really is a soccer mom now (granted, one who hangs out with people like Sean Penn and Bill Gates). And what’s a spy supposed to look like, anyway? Wilson will address that before your meeting is over.
Valerie moved to Santa Fe in 2007 with her husband, retired ambassador Joseph Wilson, and the couple’s now ten-year-old twins. The plan: to re-create their lives. “If none of this had happened, we’d probably be overseas right now, and I’d be doing my covert job,” she says, nibbling on a late-morning snack of cashews and M&M’s. “But that wasn’t in the cards.”
What changed everything, as most of the world knows, was the 2003 disclosure of her status as a covert CIA operative in a nationally syndicated newspaper column. It put the Wilsons, along with the Bush administration, at the center of one of the biggest political controversies in recent history, and it forced Valerie to resign from her CIA position in December 2006.
“Joe and I had been through so much in Washington,” Wilson says. “We looked at each other one day and said, Why are we still here? We started seriously considering where to relocate, and Santa Fe was always high on the list.”
Valerie had visited the city several times over the years, when her CIA work brought her out to Los Alamos.
“I love that even in the winter we have gorgeous blue skies and lots of sunshine,” she says. “After the many humid summers on the East Coast, I love the dryness. And there aren’t many towns of 75,000 people in America that even come close to having the level of art, culture, history, and intellectual heft that we have here.”
She hasn’t found anonymity—“It’s disconcerting to be in the produce section at Albertsons and have someone come up to you and say, ‘Are you Valerie Plame?’” she says—but she was seeking a new life, not an invisible one.
Her kids attend a local public school; her husband, as director at a company that brings electric power to conflict-ridden regions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Africa, travels quite a bit.; and Wilson’s days roll out at their typical high speed. Only now, when she’s not shuttling her children to sports practice or taking them skiing at the basin, she’s here at the Institute or juggling other high-profile projects that build on her past.
In this new life, she says, “I can use my public profile to promote things I care about.”
Finding her niche at SFI has been an important part of Wilson’s transition to life outside Langley. She officially joined the staff in March 2009, but initially discovered SFI when she and her husband attended a holiday open house there the previous year. “We walked out of the presentation, and I said two things to Joe,” she recalls. “One, I wish we were smarter. And two, it’s the first time since I left my job at the CIA, working on counterproliferation issues, that I’ve felt even the slightest twinge of ‘That’s really interesting!’”
Like novelist Cormac McCarthy, who agreed to a rare public appearance on Oprah two years ago so he could talk about his involvement with SFI, Wilson is using her celebrity status to draw attention to the sprawling compound on Hyde Park Road. “The almost universal reaction I have from friends and associates is, ‘Oh, you’re working at the Institute! That’s wonderful! . . . So what do they do?’ And that tells me that there is an opportunity to do a better job of explaining what they do, why it matters, and why people should care.”
To that end, part of Wilson’s role as communications director is “translating” complicated theoretical research into language laypeople can relate to. It’s similar to what she did in her CIA job, when she had to debrief her operational colleagues about what was happening at Los Alamos National Labs. “There’s a little bit of that here as well,” says Wilson. “Without in any way dumbing down the science, you have to be able to explain what these amazing brainiacs are working on in ways people can understand, that feels less intimidating.”
In 2009, she helped develop Voyages of Discovery: Darwin and Mendelssohn, a collaboration between Institute scientists and the Santa Fe Symphony Orchestra that played to a packed house at the Lensic Performing Arts Center. True to the SFI spirit, the event explored the similarities between creative geniuses from two very different genres, science and music. It also provided a not-necessarily-scientific audience—music lovers, for example—with a peek at what the Institute is about.. To raise awareness of SFI among political types, Wilson is planning a dinner in Washington, D.C., later this year.
“I really do believe that the work they are doing at the Santa Fe Institute will save the world,” she says. “They are asking the big questions—of poverty, of climate change, of cancer . . . I will be delighted if I can help bring this to the attention of my community.”
There's another issue Wilson is putting her name and energy behind these days, one with an even more direct connection to her foreign-affairs background: nuclear disarmament. At the time of her resignation, she was working in the counterproliferation division of the CIA’s directorate of operations.
“When I worked at the CIA, I believed that the nexus of terrorism and nuclear technology was our most dangerous [threat],” she says. “Well, I have come to believe that the only way you can prevent a [nuclear] accident from happening is to reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the world to zero.”
It’s not an easy goal, she acknowledges. “But it’s worthwhile,” she says. “And certainly here in Santa Fe, a stone’s throw away from Los Alamos, it will strike a chord.”
Wilson is a narrator and commentator in Countdown to Zero, a no-nukes documentary film from producer Lawrence Bender (An Inconvenient Truth) that makes the growing threat of nuclear annihilation all too real. It premiered at Sundance (she was there), it may show at Cannes (in which case she’ll be there), and will hit U.S. theaters later this year. Wilson spoke about the film and her support of nuclear disarmament at the invitation-only TED conference in February.
“It’s a project that has nothing to do with partisan politics and everything to do with a really critical issue that, frankly, has not been in vogue,” she says. “But it’s been 20 years since the Berlin Wall fell, and as a community of nations, we’ve done practically nothing to reduce our nuclear stockpile. . . . Countdown to Zero is not a feel-good film, but it’s a wake-up call about something I feel passionate about.”
On an only somewhat lighter note, Fair Game, the feature film from director Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity) about the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson, will also premiere this year, with Naomi Watts starring as Valerie and Sean Penn as Joe. The Wilsons were consultants on the project, which is based on Valerie’s 2007 memoir of the same name. “Holly-wood tells a story like no other medium can,” she says. The film’s takeaway? “That it’s important to hold your government in account for their actions. It also shows the importance of speaking truth to power—and the consequences of doing so.”
Penn, she says, agreed to star in the film only after making sure the Wilsons were happy with the script. The consummate method actor, he spent 48 hours with the family a year ago, studying Joe Wilson so he could get everything right—down to copying Wilson’s gestures and wearing his scent (which, for the record, is Christian Dior’s Eau Savage).
Valerie Plame Wilson met with Naomi Watts before the movie was filmed too. “She is an excellent actor,” Wilson says, adding that she believes Watts’s ability to project both strength and vulnerability will help her portray a female CIA operative in a realistic light.
“I have a pet peeve about how the general media tends to portray CIA operations officers—‘agents,’ as they always call them, which is the wrong terminology,” says Wilson. “They always portray their physicality, their sexuality, their way with a weapon, as being very important. But there is all this training that’s involved in becoming an operations officer. Your brain—your smarts—is your most potent weapon of all.”
She intends to set the record straight in the spy thriller she is writing in collaboration with successful Santa Fe–based author Sarah Lovett. The book, now in the proposal stage and tentatively titled Blowback, will be about a smart female CIA operations officer “who is not a cartoon character.” As Wilson wrote in a January 2010 article for the Web site The Daily Beast, “I believe that there is a clear link between how female CIA officers are portrayed in the media and the continuing, if diminishing, discrimination against women in the agency itself.”
While working undercover surely had its fantastic moments, Wilson describes life in the spotlight—even the slightly dimmer spotlight that makes its way to Santa Fe—as “surreal.” Yet she seems to have found a balance. “Living with small children helps you keep your priorities straight.”
And though she isn’t sure what the future will hold, she’s happily settled into New Mexico for the time being. “I have lived many, many places in the world, and I have never felt as at home as I do in Santa Fe,” she says. “And that’s the truth.”
So what do they do at the Santa Fe Institute?
Much to the amusement of Santa Fe Institute president Jeremy Sabloff, an online journalist recently described SFI as “the think tank where author Cormac McCarthy works, while nearby scientists think about the sustainability of time travel and other awesome stuff.”
“We should put that on a T-shirt,” Sabloff says, laughing. Those shirts would sit, presumably, in the small showcase of SFI paraphernalia for sale in the Institute’s lobby, which already includes decorative license plates that read complex and bobble-headed Murray Gell-Mann dolls. These Ph.D.s have a wry sense of humor.
The truth is, it’s tough to describe what goes on at SFI, and while “the sustainability of time travel” is a stretch, “awesome stuff” isn’t a bad place to start. Some of the brightest minds in science have worked at the Institute since it was founded, in 1984, by Los Alamos National Laboratories chemist George Cowan, Nobel Prize–winning physicist Gell-Mann, and 22 of their equally brainy colleagues. And with a constantly changing faculty comprised of experts from around the world, SFI’s list of past and current projects is incredibly diverse.
Designed as an independent, interdisciplinary research institution where scientists can explore topics of their own choosing, SFI throws scientists (and sometimes non-scientists) together, encouraging them to collaborate. It’s a free-flowing environment where big thinkers with backgrounds in anything from physics to psychology will, it’s hoped, find new ways of seeing and doing.
“Our major area is theory,” says Sabloff, a Harvard-trained archaeologist who took over the SFI helm in September. “Business people may ask, What’s the deliverable? The deliverables here are ideas. Some, but not all, of what we do is relevant to policy.”
SFI projects revolve around “complex systems”: collections of individual entities—people or insects or cells or subatomic particles—that organize themselves into groups and then, as a collective unit, begin to behave in new ways that scientists can study. While some researchers might examine the behavior of individual ants, for example, at SFI they’d take a complex-systems approach and look at how the colony behaves as a whole.
“We’re taking nonlinear thinking from the field of physics,” Sabloff says, “and applying it to other areas of science, including the social sciences, to see if we can find patterns.”
In the field of “econo-physics,” for example, in which SFI is considered a leader, equations commonly used by physicists are applied to economics, letting researchers see that even some seemingly random stock market behaviors can be predicted. Other SFI projects have led to innovative cancer-fighting drug cocktails, better methods for tracking the global migration of viruses, and insights into topics such as urban planning and global warming.
The best way to get a feel for what happens at SFI may be to check it out for yourself. The Institute offers free 15-minute tours to anyone who calls in advance for an appointment. The public is also invited to attend free Wednesday-night community lectures, held at the James A. Little Theater, in which SFI researchers speak on topics like “The Future of Terrorism” (June 16) and “Mind Bugs: The Science of Ordinary Bias” (July 14).
For more information on SFI and its events, visit santafe.edu.
