Sunday, May 23, 2010

Fair Game




I hadn't planned on seeing 'Fair Game' until reading Naomi Wolf's write-up at The Times. Wolf is at Cannes with her boyfriend Avram Ludwig, a co-producer for the film. Here's an excerpt:

Ms Plame Wilson, in particular, fascinates me; she is the silent and silenced woman, for many reasons. During the scandal of her exposure she could not talk about her life, her career, the incredible fact that for years she had been posing as a bland businesswoman as a cover, while actually travelling the world in highly dangerous situations as a CIA spy. So she appeared again and again, in her cool blonde beauty, impeccably dressed, beside her outspoken husband, but she could not speak for herself. When she actually published a memoir, Fair Game (titled, like the film, in reference to Bush's quote that she was "fair game" in the attack on Wilson), it was redacted so forcefully by "the agency" -- there are pages that are almost completely one big blackout of text. Her lovely face was on the cover -- but her voice was strangled and interrupted. Even now she cannot speak; her life as a spy is still classified, classified for ever unless the CIA makes special exceptions for her. This leads us to the bombshell in the movie -- a bombshell that, once again, Plame may not speak about.

Liman's film, which is based on a screenplay compiled from the testimony of many sources, contains a real bombshell: it shows Plame as not just a garden-variety operative -- let alone the lowly "glorified secretary" that the Cheney team tried in their infinite sexism to paint her as being -- but rather that she was at the forefront of a highly successful undercover programme of nuclear nonproliferation. She and her colleagues are portrayed as working, at great personal danger, with allies in Iraq. The film shows them extracting parts by stealth from nuclear devices, shipping them surreptitiously to the US to be tampered with, and then, again at great personal risk, reinstalling the now-nonfunctioning pieces. If this is true, it means that Cheney and his team did not only wipe out one CIA agent in their reprisals against a truth-telling citizen; they also sacrificed deliberately a highly successful counterproliferation programme that had kept the Western world safe from nuclear attack for a decade and a half.

If this is true, it is important news. One can't say if it is true because the sources, many of them CIA operatives, spoke to the film-makers off the record. Plame can't confirm or deny it because her role is still classified. Doug and his team aren't journalists.

Wolf finishes with:

I hope that film can add its unique qualities to the journalistic record on this set of events, so that Americans can truly understand one of the most important, dramatic and personally intense intersections of principle and personalities in their own recent history -- a history that is not behind us but that still comes home to us, wounded or maddened or accompanied by officials bearing a wrapped flag to loved ones, week after week after week.

I enjoyed the piece. A compelling read. Looking forward to the movie.


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