At the height of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, CIA Operations Officer Valerie Plame was outed as a covert operative by conservative news pundit Robert Novak. The federal investigation into this violation of national security eventually implicated the upper echelons of the White House, resulting in convictions for and lawsuits against several top Bush administration officials. Plame’s memoir of this betrayal’s personal and international consequences was titled Fair Game. Plame currently serves as a consultant to the Santa Fe Institute, a scientific, nonprofit research institute. In Burned, Plame’s second in a series of spy novels co-written with Sarah Lovett, a Parisian explosion sets the stage for an international manhunt and possible all-out war. 

In conversation with the inimitable Edward G. Rendell.