Dennis Hans: Super-spy Tom Cruise Outed Plame

A member of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s legal team confirmed that actor and covert CIA agent Tom Cruise blew the cover of undercover agency operative Valerie Plame Wilson.

“Cruise spilled the beans to the ‘senior administration official’ who revealed to Robert Novak that Plame worked for the CIA on WMD,” the attorney said. “Cruise believed it was the only way he could stop Plame from doing irreparable harm to countless post-partem mothers.”

Cruise and Plame had been friends since 1985, when she was his student at the CIA’s Officer Training School. But the friendship became strained in April 2002, when she told him she was seeing a psychiatrist and taking pills the psychiatrist had prescribed for her post-partem depression.

Cruise is a Scientologist, a religion that sees no value in psychiatry. He is convinced that a combination of Pilates and jogging can alleviate even the most severe post-partem symptoms.

“During the afternoon of April 7, 2002,” said Fitzgerald’s colleague, “Plame told Cruise that in mid-February 2002 — before she turned to psychiatry and pills — she was so depressed that she thought she would kill her husband, Joseph Wilson, a recently retired diplomat whose constant yammering only made her problem worse. To get him out of harm’s way she persuaded her bosses at the CIA’s Counterproliferation Division to pick him for the investigative mission to Niger that was already in the works. While he was gone she found help, and by the time he returned from Niger her outlook on life had brightened considerably.”

Agent Cruise’s April 7 visit to the Wilson home was part social call on old friends, part business, as the CIA had some follow-up questions for Joe about the Nigerien Minister of Mines’ alibi. As Cruise and Plame awaited Joe’s return from the golf course, she talked about her post-partem depression and recovery.

According to the special-prosecutor’s team, anyone who has read the October 2003 Washington Post profile of Plame ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A58650-2003Oct7 ) knows essentially what she told Cruise: She was so pleased with her results from the counseling and pills that she had become an advocate for psychiatrist Ralph Wittenberg and his Family Mental Health Foundation and was encouraging other mothers to try the same treatment.

The Post profile sailed under the special prosecutor’s radar until Cruise unleashed his psychiatry-and-pills rant on the Today show. One of Fitzgerald’s assistants happened to have been a CIA classmate of Plame; thus, he knew that Cruise was both a spook and a friend of Plame. He put 2 and 2 together, and before Cruise could say boo he was on the witness stand and telling the grand jury this:

“You gotta understand, man. I flipped out when this poor, misguided soul who I had mentored waxed frickin’ poetic about psychiatry and these ‘miracle’ drugs that correct a totally bogus ‘chemical imbalance,’ and that she’s turning other ‘depressed’ moms onto this so-called cure. She’s deluded, man. She won’t read the studies.”

For 15 months — April 2002 to July 2003 — Cruise employed his ample powers of persuasion to get Plame to reject psychiatry and pills. He failed.

“Cruise concluded that the only way to prevent Plame from hooking hundreds of additional moms was to turn her into a recluse by blowing her cover,” said Fitzgerald’s associate. “On July 7, 2003, with a single phone call to one of his Scientology contacts inside the Bush administration, he did just that.”

It worked. Plame became a shut-in. Once again, Cruise had accomplished an impossible mission.

But he lost a friend — the bright-eyed trainee who so admired Cruise that she folllowed in his high-risk footsteps and became a NOC. That’s an agent with “non-official cover,” meaning there’s no U.S. Embassy and diplomatic immunity to save your hide if you’re caught in the espionage act.

For 24 years, Cruise by day has been a globe-trotting movie star who deepens his NOC status by occasionally portraying secret agents on the silver screen. After all, who could imagine a real-life secret agent so audacious as to play that very character in films? His celebrity status has opened doors to the high-and-mighty throughout the world, and his magnetism and charm have allowed him to turn many a mover-and-shaker into a CIA asset.

Plame, on the other hand, has posed primarily as an “energy analyst.” But her good looks and athleticism allow her to adopt other guises, such as shortstop of an international coed baseball team starring a hard-drinking, hard-throwing Iraqi defector named “Curveball.” For a measly million dollars, Plame bought Curveball’s detailed sketches of Saddam’s mobile bioweapons labs and turned them over to Colin Powell just in time to prevent a global bio-catastrophe.

Her most dangerous assignment by far was to infiltrate the nuclear proliferation network of A.Q. Khan. Imagine Khan’s shock when he opened his copy of Vanity Fair some weeks ago, saw Plame’s gorgeous face, and realized that the woman who had been his personal yoga instructor from 1994 to 1997 wasn’t an anti-imperialist, vegetarian Peace Corps dropout named Sara Sunflower, but a sticky-fingered CIA spy who stole the secrets that led to the eventual unravelling of his ring.

Sadly, the career of America’s second greatest undercover agent is now over. We can only pray that no one will be so reckless as to out her mentor, the greatest of them all.

©2005 by Dennis Hans

Bio: Dennis Hans’s straight and bent essays have appeared in many outlets, including the New York Times and hoopshype.com. Among his prescient straight essays are “In (Partial) Praise of Robert Novak” (http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/print.html?path=HL0310/S00085.htm) and his pre-war gem, “Lying Us Into War: Exposing Bush and His ‘Techniques of Deceit’” ( http://www.democraticunderground.com/articles/03/02/12_lying.html). He can be reached at HANS_D@popmail.firn.edu

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