In 2003, senior White House officials outed me as a covert CIA officer. They leaked my identity after my then-husband, U.S. Ambassador Joe Wilson, wrote an op-ed stating that the Bush administration had lied about the threat posed by Iraq ahead of its decision to invade the country.
I have spent a lot of time in the decades since processing the trauma of that experience. It endangered my assets, ended my covert career, and unsettled my family. Even events that happened much later took me back to that time, such as then-President Donald Trump’s 2018 pardon of Scooter Libby, former Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, who was convicted of perjury and lying to the FBI during its investigation into the leak. In those years, I was called a liar, a traitor, and—in the words of one Republican congressman—a “glorified secretary.”
Yet when I read journalist Liza Mundy’s new book, The Sisterhood: The Secret History of the, uncomfortable memories came up that I had not grappled with since my time as a spy. The book touched me in ways I did not expect. I realized that I had mostly repressed the toll inflicted on me and my female colleagues from the many years of working in a man’s world.
