Another Theory on the Plame/Crown Fallout

By Neal 

In Monday’s item on the CIA’s efforts to block publication of Valerie Plame‘s memoir, we suggested that the reason Plame’s deal with her original publisher fell through was that Crown grew nervous about how much she’d be allowed to tell. But a reader who’s had some experience publishing books about the intelligence community suggests that’s not quite right. For one thing, he says, the CIA doesn’t even weigh in on those sorts of issues until its Publication Review Board actually has a manuscript to evaluate.

Instead, this observer points to remarks by Crown publisher Steve Ross in a story filed just after the deal was announced as a possible explanation for why Plame eventually took the book to Simon & Schuster. When Ross told Hillel Italie “Plame could be subject to CIA censorship, but… restrictions ‘would be a potential public relations land mine if the CIA was seen as trying to block’ too much of her book,” our source suggests, an author like Plame, if she still took her professional obligations to the Agency (and, by extension, the nation) seriously, might well have viewed his comments as intemperate and needlessly provocative. This theory, I’d add, jibes with my own interpretation of the memoirs of Plame’s husband, Joseph Wilson, which I viewed not as an attempt to revenge himself upon the Bush administration officials who blew Plame’s cover just to discredit his debunking of the Iraqi WMD myth, but as a sincere account of his complete background of service to the American government, as apolitical as it could be under the conditions Bush’s cronies created. It would certainly make sense if Plame felt much the same way…