Valerie Plame, a former CIA operative outed by Washington Post columnist Robert Novak in 2003, has a fascinating story to tell about Washington politics and her disillusionment with it.

But she also has a story to tell about women’s empowerment and the cost of ignoring more than half the population of any given country.

“Diversity creates disruption, but it is worth the effort,” Plame told the more than 300 attendees of the Invest In Women conference, sponsored by Financial Advisor and Private Wealth magazines and held in Houston.

“In most parts of the world, women are wallpaper,” Plame said. “Only 4.2 percent of Fortune 500 companies are headed by women, and yet adding one woman to a leadership team raises the IQ of everyone on the team.”

Plame is famous for her run-in with President George W. Bush’s administration, which leaked her name to the media as a CIA operative after her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, wrote a column questioning whether the government of Iraq really had weapons of mass destruction. It was published in the New York Times.

Her job at the CIA was to recruit "assets," or foreign spies, to help the U.S. prevent terrorists and "black marketeers" from getting nuclear weapons. "You should not know my name," she told attendees. Immediately after she was outed as an agent by Novak, she feared that the network of "assets" she had recruited were in danger.

But she also faced political disillusionment in February 2003, when she sat in CIA headquarters listening to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell describe an Iraqi weapons program to the United Nations that she was sure did not exist. Powell made a "passionate" case about Iraq's WMD program but it didn't "math up" with the facts as she knew them. That's when she realized there was "truly a different agenda." If there had been WMDs in Iraq, she acknowledged she and her team would have "failed" miserably.

“I did not hear what I knew to be true and I felt sick. I realized there was a different agenda going on here” than that assigned to the CIA operations division.

“Fifteen years ago, we went to war with Iraq and I believe the implications of that will be with us for generations,” she said.  

Her work in the WMD area assumed a high degree of importance after a saren gas attack took place on a Tokyo subway in 1996. In 1998, Saddam Hussein kicked United Nations weapons inspetors out of Iraq. After that, the CIA had very little information about the extent of his WMD program.

In her view, former President George W. Bush did not have a foreign policy agenda nearly as well-defined as the senior officials surrounding him. Vice President Richard Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who had served respectively as President Gerald Ford's cheif of staff and defense secretary in the mid-1970s were far more more certain about what they sought to achieve.

This view of America's involvement in Iraq has been shared by many including President George H.W. Bush. Almost immediately after the September 11 attacks, Plame said Rumsfeld indicated that Iraq was the place America needed to "go after."

In contrast to the war in Iraq, Plame said it was easier for Americans to support the war in Afghanistan after September 11 because of the cooperation of that nation's ruling Taliban with Al Qaeda. Initially popular, the war in Iraq would eventually lose support amng the American public, when the U.S. military was unable to find any significant WMDs. In the 2016 campaign, President Donald Trump repeatedly called it one of the biggest blunders in American history and blasted former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and many of his opponents in the Republican primaries for supporting it.

But after Plame was exposed by Novak, she knew her career was over and sensed an immediately loss of privacy. Reading about her husband and herself in the newspapers, she wondered, "Who were these people?"

She admitted she felt like she fell "down Alice's rabbit hole," where "white is black and black is white." Ultimately, vice president Cheney's chief of staff Scooter Libby was convicted on four of five counts of perjury. Last month he was pardoned by President Trump.

After losing her job at the CIA, Plame wrote Fair Game: My Life As A Spy, My Betrayal By The White House. In addition to being an author, she is now an advocate for women and sits on the boards of start-up companies, urging them to bring diversity of all kinds to their organizations.

Half the population of the world cannot be ignored if countries expect progress, she said, and the same is true for businesses. She used the example of Xerox, a company that started out dominating its market, but then ran out of new ideas. Its lead slipped away, first to Japanese firms and then to others. Evenutally, the market changed and time passed Xerox by.

“It might have been different for Xerox if they had paid attention to diversity and added people to the company who did not think exactly like everyone else,” Plame said.

“Women go into a situation thinking it is important to reach a consensus” among differing views, she said. Men don’t think they need one.

The “Me Too” movement arising in response to widespread reports of sexual harassment in the media and other industries has brought more attention to women’s issues, “but it cannot stay with celebrities.” Plame related her own personal experience of being asked by her boss to turn around in front of him before being OK’d for a job.

“When I first went into the CIA, I was looking for a mentor, a woman moving up the ladder ahead of me, and I could not find one,” she said. Determined and ambitious women ahead of her remained secretaries. She told the audience, “I have learned, as you have, that change comes very slowly.”

Ironically, Plame noted that during World War II, many women "served brilliantly" in the CIA's predecessor organization, the Office of Strategic Services. Some provided valuable intelligence from behind enemy lines. But after the CIA was established in 1947, women went back to their traditonal roles as secretaries and analysts.

Now, she said, she wants to encourage women to be part of the decision-making process.