Regarding Wikileaks, I have profound ambivalent feelings about it. I am a firm believer in a strong intelligence service. There's a need for classified information.
— Valerie Plame
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.
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.
From a counter-intelligence viewpoint, the OPM breach is really scary - but if we continue to see the erosion of purely commercial enterprises, where people lose confidence, the economy falters.
Of course the job has a lot of glamour. But it really is about being smarter than your average bear. Your mind is your best weapon. It's great when you're a good shot with an AK-47, but it's about being clever.
I have always been appalled by the depiction of female CIA operatives.
To my knowledge, no one has died from a cyberattack... but there is a gray area between peace and war.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Our mission was to make sure that the bad guys, basically, did not get nuclear weapons.
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.
I do not subscribe to the 'Trump is crazy like a fox' thing. I think that's being too generous.
Of course, when you're a parent, that's your paramount concern, for your children, and there were some very credible and frightening threats, and the agency declined to provide any security, and it felt like a betrayal all over again. It was really painful.
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?
Privatization is more efficient and effective in some cases, but not in intelligence.
The options are war versus peace, and I am delighted that, so far, it appears that peaceful negotiation has won the day.
I think feeling bitter or angry is really useless.
I really believe the nexus of terrorism and nuclear weapons is the world's most ominous threat.
The fundamental problem is not that Trump has access to the nuclear launch codes, but that they exist at all.
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.
There is not adequate whistleblower protection.
Of course we wish that more people involved in the leak of my true CIA identity had been prosecuted, but the system worked.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Leaks are always bad news.
I've moved on to Plan B now, writing novels.
There's a huge impact on national security and intelligence. The new normal is going to be more and more of these hacks, whether it's Target or Home Depot or the Office of Personnel Management or Jennifer Lawrence's nude photos.
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.
I believe in much more diplomacy, not less.
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.
I've been working with Global Zero. They are a great organization leading the resistance against nuclear war and the elimination of nuclear weapons.
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.
When an issue is so fraught with partisanship, a special counsel provides some modicum of transparency and accountability rather the the veil of politics.
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.
I certainly didn't reach out to my old assets and ask 'em how they're doing, although I would have liked to.
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.
The great thing about fiction is you can fix things and make things better.
