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Former Spy Raising Funds To Get Trump Off Twitter

Courtesy New Mexico PBS
Valerie Plame

LISTEN: Valerie Plame worked for years as a covert operative in the CIA, focusing on nuclear proliferation issues. That all changed in 2003 when her husband, Joseph Wilson, wrote an opinion piece questioning the intelligence the Bush Administration was using the justify a war with Iraq. An official in the Administration leaked Plame’s identity to a sympathetic columnist and she resigned from the CIA, leaving that career behind. She chronicled her life as a spy and how it ended in the book "Fair Game," which was also made into a film starring Naomi Watts and Sean Penn.

But she has continued to work on preventing the spread of nuclear weapons from her home in Santa Fe, where she and her family moved after the so-called Plame affair.  

Now she has taken on a new mission: Convincing Twitter to remove President Donald Trump from its platform. Plame says she’s concerned his Tweets could spark a nuclear war. She wants to raise a billion dollars to get a controlling share in the company. After 10 days -- as of Saturday August 26 -- her crowdsourcing campaign had raised more than $76,000.

In this interview, Plame talks about why she sees Trump's Tweets as so dangerous in this current international environment, and how they also highlight the flaws in the country's command and control system around nuclear defense.

Megan has been a journalist for 25 years and worked at business weeklies in San Antonio, New Orleans and Albuquerque. She first came to KUNM as a phone volunteer on the pledge drive in 2005. That led to volunteering on Women’s Focus, Weekend Edition and the Global Music Show. She was then hired as Morning Edition host in 2015, then the All Things Considered host in 2018. Megan was hired as News Director in 2021.
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