At the news that Joe Wilson died, I was concerned that Valerie Plame would falter in her New Mexico Congressional campaign, then read here that he was now her ex husband.
I identify with Valerie Plame in two weird ways. One, she's the woman I would have been if I hadn’t been so screwed up, a sentiment I have often now in my seventies. The second connection I have with Plame is I was once almost recruited into the CIA but was rejected bk of what happened to me at the hands of a pedophile priest. Ah what a small world.
My generation of women was not encouraged to go onto higher education unless we were really exceptional or really rich with unusually progressive parents. To me, planning for college in the 1960s would have kept me outside of the popular crowd in high school, to which I didn't belong anyway. Still I know that if I been born twenty, even ten years later, I’d have studied the sciences or planned for college and become a lawyer, even an astronaut.
Instead I became a journalist for NASA with the title “Public Information Specialist” working with astronauts in the late 1970s working at LBJ Space Center in Houston. That's where my identification with Valerie Plame comes in.
Because at one point the CIA recruited me, then rejected me.
I was rejected from the CIA because of my sexual problems.
More than a decade later I realized being molested by a priest at age five was the root of those sexual problems. But in 1980, I had not made that connection.
Honest. In about 1980 I was talking to guys in the CIA about working for them, then Their Behavioral Profilers identified that I had a sexual problem that would make me “unreliable. ” I knew something weird had happened when I was around age five with Father Horne but did not remember enough details to realize it was a cause of my weird sexuality. I thought I just had more sex than most people because I had some special spiritual sex thing that I shared with men and all those women who hated me for it were secretly jealous of me for all the guys I’d been with.
Sigh. It's hard to admit I was so screwed up, but I made it to seventy one and could have twenty-thirty more years now to make up for it. Slowly.
The CIA guys said, their rejecting me for sexual problems had nothing to do with how I act on one date or another. They identified an issue, a sexual problem that showed a psychiatric incident in childhood perhaps, something that created a compulsion. I don't remember all the words they said to me, I just remember how disappointed I was and how confused. Because at that point I had not connected being molested at age five by Father Horne-y with how really confused I was about sex and how much that sexual compulsion affected my life.
I remember the incident dimly now. It was when I was 31 at the oldest, 1979 or so working in the Newsroom at NASA Houston (713 483 5111 call them and confirm it). I was amazingly hot in those days, looked a lot like Valerie Plame, still have the same hair as her only now it's white, and I'm shorter, and I liked the extra power and sex looking good got me.
Valerie Plame for Congress
I'm running for Congress because we're going backwards on national security, health care, and women's rights. We need to turn our country around. https://val...
Had that same sassy attitude and I worked out and jogged and pretended I was training with the astronauts, so at that time I could tuck a blouse in a size six skirt and look good. The men who were “recruiting” me for CIA were with a public relations firm in downtown Houston, a sub contractor to Hill and Knowlton and I've since seen the name of that PR firm a few times in stories that concerned intelligence ops in D.C., but I cannot for the life of me remember its name.
I thought I was going on to a new exciting career, or maybe occasional assignments. I thought I was about to become part of the Intelligence Community that today is being hounded by Trump so for the first time in my life I'm glad I wasn’t.
Instead I was confronted for one of the first times with the reality of my skewed sexuality, that everyone in the world did not want to live the promiscuous life I was living; indeed, if I met someone today who lives like I lived then, I’d know they must have been been molested as a child.
Life goes on.
Links in this story:
https://www.post-gazette.com/news/obituaries/2019/09/28/Joe-Wilson-Skeptic-on-Iraq-War-intelligence-ex-husband-of-Valerie-Plame/stories/201909290125
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICW-dGD1M18
-Kay Ebeling
(First posted today at City of Angels 25 (
http://cityofangels25.blogspot.com)