Outed CIA agent gets rich book deal

Valerie Plame, the former CIA operative outed by White House officials, has signed a lucrative book deal.

Terms of the deal with Crown Publishing Group have not been released, but sources said the deal was in the low seven figures, according to the Associated Press.

The publisher said Plame would tell of "being a high-ranking woman in the male-dominated intelligence community." The book is tentatively titled Fair Game.

"She will tell her whole story, absolutely," Crown's publisher and senior vice-president, Steve Ross, said Friday. "This book will be the first time the public will get to hear about her work and the surprising role she had in intelligence gathering in the lead-up to the war in Iraq."

Plame's unmasking led to a federal investigation and the indictment of a top vice presidential aide.

In 2003, Plame's husband, former U.S. diplomat Joseph Wilson, accused the Bush administration of distorting intelligence about Iraq's links with terrorism and weapons of mass destruction to justify going to war.

He had investigated a White House claim that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy uranium in Niger and found it to be false.

Syndicated columnist and CNN host Robert Novak named Plame in a column on July 14, 2003, eight days after Wilson's opinion piece was published in The New York Times.

The leak ended her career as a CIA agent and a federal investigation showed the leak had come directly from White House officials.

White House adviser Karl Rove was reported to have said that Plame was "fair game" after Wilson's article was published.

Lewis Libby, Vice-President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, will stand trial next year on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice for lying to the FBI and a federal grand jury about how he learned Plame's identity.

Libby's impending trial could limit what Plame reveals in her book or delay its publishing.

CIA rules on what agents can do after they leave the agency also could have an impact. The CIA reviews the manuscripts of former agents and could censor sensitive passages.

But Ross said the CIA would be wary of restrictions on the memoir of such a public figure. It "would be a potential public relations land mine if the CIA was seen as trying to block" too much of her book, he said.

Several publishers were vying for the memoir, which Plame will write herself.

Wilson himself wrote a book, The Politics of Truth, published by Carroll & Graf in 2004.