Valerie Plame's 'Blowback' has a Plame-like star

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http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2013/09/30/valerie-plame-blowback-interview/2879487/

Valerie Plame's 'Blowback' has a Plame-like star

Jocelyn McClurg, USA TODAY 4:38 p.m. EDT September 30, 2013

Former CIA operative Valerie Plame draws on her own covert experiences for the thriller 'Blowback.'

Valerie Plame has written a spy thriller with a plot that sounds familiar.

Valerie Plame, whose cover as a CIA agent was famously blown during the Bush administration (a story she recounted in her best-selling 2007 memoir, Fair Game), has now written a thriller called Blowback (co-written with Sarah Lovett, Blue Rider Press), starring fictional CIA spy Vanessa Pierson. Pierson is tracking Bhoot, a rogue nuclear arms dealer working with Iran, while dodging bullets and juggling a forbidden affair with a fellow ops officer. She and Lovett are at work on a second Pierson thriller. Plame, 50, spoke with USA TODAY's Jocelyn McClurg from Santa Fe, where she now lives.

Q: Let's start by talking about Iran. One of the projects you worked on at the CIA was ensuring Iran did not get nuclear weapons?

A: I developed expertise in nuclear counter-proliferation, and of course one of the countries included under that rubric was Iran, as well as other rogue states. I found a tremendous amount of satisfaction in that work. It was an inspiration for the opening plot of Blowback to again keep people mindful of the nuclear threat. We're inundated with bad news all the time, but I always hold if we don't get that issue right, then none of the other ones matter.

<snip>

Q: Why did you decide to make Iran's nuclear program one of the major plot points in your novel?

A: I really believe the nexus of terrorism and nuclear weapons is the world's most ominous threat. I think what makes a thriller compelling is that at its heart it has to have a moral component or moral dilemma, and so we tried to weave that all into the first plot.

<snip>

Q: People are going to want to know how autobiographical your book is, starting with the fact that your heroine, Vanessa Pierson, has your initials. She's in trouble a lot with her bosses. Tell me about the intersection between Valerie and Vanessa.

<snip>

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1. Our Spy - Up close with Valerie Plame and her new novel

This is from the Santa Fe Reporter, where Valerie Plame lives - hence "Our Spy".

http://www.sfreporter.com/santafe/article-7733-our-spy.html

Our Spy
Up close with Valerie Plame and her new novel

By Joey Peters
10.01.2013

Valerie Plame gets annoyed when she sees female characters in books and film come across like “girls as props.”

Now, Santa Fe’s most famous spy aims to offer a stronger, more real woman in her own spy series, which is centered around a 29-year-old secret operative named Vanessa Pierson.

<snip>

SFR: You and your husband recently wrote an op-ed in the Guardian bemoaning how private intelligence contractors owe their loyalty to the people who write their paycheck rather than their country.

VP: That’s one problem, not the only problem. It’s estimated that 60 percent of our intelligence budget is spent on contractors. The American public has been told that contractors are more efficient, more cost effective. And it really is a political ideology that the private sector is better. And in some cases that’s maybe true, but certainly not in intelligence work. And it is so out of control now, and they’re not cost effective. The Project for Oversight in Government did a great study on this, and guess what? It costs a third more. And so the government is blindly continuing to contract out, contract out, without really taking a look at not only the bottom line, but what are the other eroding effects of contracting?

<snip>

SFR: What are your thoughts on the leaks of Edward Snowden?

VP: For too long, the media was much too focused on Edward Snowden because he was sort of the shiny object that they were chasing after. The issue is much more profound and broader and deeper. It’s the issue of security versus privacy. When you talk to the person on the street, they kind of shrug, because we have been inured to our privacy being sort of dissolved before our eyes. Well, they’re missing the point. The problem becomes that when the government amasses this huge amount of metadata—and we’re just beginning to understand from Snowden what it entails—that power of information is astounding. And it only takes a couple overzealous prosecutors. It really goes against the 4th Amendment and what we Americans like to think of as our open and accountable government that we hope for, strive for. I think it’s bad news, it’s really bad news.

<snip>

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2. Amazon.com synopsis and audible sample

http://www.amazon.com/Blowback-A-Vanessa-Pierson-Novel/dp/0399158200/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1380725422&sr=8-1&keywords=valerie+plame

Blowback (A Vanessa Pierson Novel)
by Valerie Plame (Author) , Sarah Lovett (Author)

Introducing an exhilarating new espionage thriller by former CIA ops officer Valerie Plame and thriller writer Sarah Lovett.

Covert CIA ops officer Vanessa Pierson is finally close to capturing the world’s most dangerous international nuclear arms dealer: Bhoot, alias the ghost. One of her assets has information about Bhoot’s upcoming visit to a secret underground nuclear weapons facility in Iran—in only a few days. But just as Pierson’s informant is about to give her the location, they’re ambushed by an expert sniper. Pierson narrowly escapes. Her asset: dead.

Desperate to capture Bhoot and the sniper before they inflict more damage, Pierson enlists all of the Agency’s resources to find them. But with each day, the pressure of the manhunt mounts, causing her to push her forbidden romance with a fellow ops officer to its limit when she asks him to do the impossible. Despite the risks, she refuses to halt her pursuit of the terrorists, and she puts her cover and her career—and her life—at risk.

With rapid-cut shifts from European capitals to Washington to the Near East, and with insider detail that only a former spy could provide, Blowback marks the explosive beginning of the hunt for Bhoot, the villain whom Vanessa Pierson devotes her life to capturing, dead or alive.

They have a 3 minute sample from the audible version: http://samples.audible.com/bk/peng/002208/bk_peng_002208_sample.mp3

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3. Valerie Plame on female spies in movies and TV

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/reliable-source/wp/2013/09/25/valerie-plame-on-female-spies-in-movies-and-tv/

Valerie Plame on female spies in movies and TV
By The Reliable Source, Published: September 25 at 12:55 pm

Our colleague David Beard asked Valerie Plame — now promoting her new espionage novel, “Blowback” — for her thoughts on the portrayal of various lady spies in popular culture. She’s skeptical of Claire Danes’s brilliant-but-skittish loner Carrie Mathison on “Homeland”: “If you’re going to be in human intelligence, having a high EQ is kind of essential.” But overall, she gets a higher grade for realism, than, say, Jennifer Garner in “Alias.”

<snip photo gallery of 10 spy characters with her comments>