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Other people within the intelligence and diplomatic communities had serious doubts about the justification for war, right?

Oh absolutely, sure.

Why do you think they either failed to come forward or didn't receive the attention you did?

Certainly they're coming forward now, but I think in the past people felt intimidated. I think it's very clear that one of the reasons why they came after Valerie, came after me so hard, including going after my family, was to send a signal to the rest of the foreign policy and intelligence community that if you do to us what Wilson just did to us, we will do to you what we just did to his family. And I think that had a very chilling effect.

What are you and your wife doing now?

We live in Sante Fe, N.M. We're raising our kids. My wife has a book coming out at the end of October [Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House], we're speaking and we expect to be active in all the various campaigns. I've pledged to both the Senate and the House side that I will be as available as I possibily can be to support Democratic candidates in these races. This is not because I'm as much a rabid Democrat [so much] as it is absolute disgust at the way the Republican Party has treated this country.

A judge ruled last month that your wife couldn't divulge the dates she worked for the CIA. Will that have any effect on the book's release?

The book will be released on the date that it was supposed to be released. It's just some of the contents of the book will have to be changed so as to protect that particular part of it.

[The court case] really had less to do with the book and more to do with whether or not she was going to be treated as a non-citizen by the government for which she worked for 20 years.

It was in my book [The Politics of Truth: A Diplomat's Memoir: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity], the length of her service. It has been widely reported. She did not leak her name to the press, the U.S. government did. And they can't have it both ways. If they can't protect her identity, then they can't presume to tell her what she can and cannot say about the dates of her service. We're not talking about classified information here. We're talking about information that's readily available and has been reported on repeatedly, including in my book, which was approved by the CIA.

So it's really a matter of giving her identity back rather than preventing the publication of her book.

Is there a movie coming out?

I don't know. It's out of my hands. A studio has expressed interest, but my looking at this is that it's a miracle that movies ever get made. It's a long and involved process, so I don't know where or if or how that will happen. It's a good story. It's a story that probably should be told. Whether it gets told or not in the movie format, I'm not sure yet.

What's the status of the civil suit?

Everybody understood at the very beginning that we would have to go at a minimum up to the Court of Appeals and quite possibly the Supreme Court because there are constitutional issues involved here. I think it's a question of the extent to which the U.S. government or U.S. government officials can claim that they are actually acting in their official capacity when they betrayed the national security of the country.

So they've got good lawyers; our appeal is being written now, and will be submitted to the Court of Appeals, I don't know, sometime within the next several weeks. People can go to our Web site, www.wilsonsupport.org for updates.

Do you think Bush had any advance knowledge of the leak?

I have no idea. I do think that there was evidence introduced in the Libby trial that indicated that other senior officials not only had advance knowledge of the leak, but were also intimately involved in directing what should and should not be said. And that includes Dick Cheney.

Do you think Karl Rove's career has suffered or will suffer because of this?