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.

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