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Just Out: "After Fair Game: The Story Valerie Plame Couldn't Tell":
When former CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson got the redacted manuscript of her draft memoir back from the CIA Publications Review Board (PRB) earlier this year, her book publisher realized it had a problem. "We were looking at a manuscript where 20 percent of the author's story was deemed classified by her former employer [even though] much of the information was probably in the public domain," explains an editor at the publishing house, Simon & Schuster. "So the challenge was, if Valerie can't tell her own story because she is bound by her agreement, then how is this story going to be told, inside her own book, given the confines presented by the Agency and her confidentiality agreement?"
The publisher's solution was to hire a reporter to write an 80-page "afterword" for the book (which was published in October under the title Fair Game: My Life As a Spy, My Betrayal By the White House), based on interviews and any information that could be found in the public domain. Which is how, in May, I ended up with a draft of Plame's memoir, with all of the CIA's blacked-out redactions, and about six weeks to learn as much as I could, write and deliver essentially a biography of the famous former spy.
There was just one person I could not contact for the project: Valerie Plame Wilson, who had signed an agreement with the CIA that she would submit to their censorship for the rest of her days. It was a firewall that everyone involved with the book project took extremely seriously—making for a somewhat paradoxical situation: publishers, editors and writers, plus armies of lawyers and a literary agent, all sweating to make sure they were abiding by the rules of government censorship. ...