Valerie Plame Wilson sat and chatted with friends from her McElwain Hall days Friday in Hintz Alumni Center -- a normal Homecoming activity for most alumni.
But for Wilson, this year's Homecoming Grand Marshal, it was a victory of sorts.
After a "crazy couple of years" spent living with the aftermath of the leak of her identity as a covert Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agent to the press, Wilson said it was refreshing to feel that the controversy surrounding her name has passed.
"We feel that we've been through the fire, to be able to do things like come back to Penn State and enjoy Homecoming," she said.
Wilson received national attention in 2003 when Washington officials within the Bush administration leaked her identity as a CIA agent to the press. Her name was printed in a Washington Post column written by Robert Novak.
Wilson's husband Joe Wilson, a former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, has charged that his wife's name was leaked by the government in retaliation for a column he wrote for the New York Times called "What I Didn't Find in Africa." The piece challenged the veracity of the government's claims regarding Saddam Hussein's weapons program.
The case led to the indictment of vice-presidential aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby and the controversial jailing of New York Times reporter Judith Miller.
But Wilson is experiencing brighter times. If you're going to have a high profile, it might as well be accurate, she said -- and she believes the public is beginning to acknowledge it was manipulated into war with Iraq.
"It was a smear campaign -- it was a character assassination campaign," she said. "It's not like all of a sudden I was a celebrity for being on Jeopardy."
She has moved her husband and nine-year-old twin son and daughter from Washington, D.C. to Santa Fe, N.M. Fair Game -- a film based on her story and starring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts -- is slated for release in the coming months. But even after her sudden thrust into the spotlight, Wilson's Happy Valley ties remain strong. She studied business and German at Penn State and graduated in 1985. She still counts her "little sister" from Pi Beta Phi sorority and the students she met as a freshman in McElwain Hall as "some of my dearest friends."
"Penn State is supposed to teach you who you are, what is your moral compass, what are your strengths, what are your weaknesses," she said. "Those are such important, formative years."
Wilson went abroad after graduation and lived in Athens, Brussels and London. She was married with twin toddlers by 2003, when her career as a CIA agent effectively ended.
"It was extremely disturbing," she said. "As a CIA agent, you acknowledge you might be betrayed by a foreign country. You're not prepared that your identity might be betrayed by your own country for their own political agenda. I have nothing but contempt for the people that were involved in this."
After braving a power outage at Penn State President Graham Spanier's house caused by Thursday's inclement weather and sitting in the president's box for Saturday's Homecoming game, Wilson now finds herself hosting Spanier and his wife at her Santa Fe home. Wilson brought her children to PSU for the first time this weekend. She exposed them to college life and explained what fraternities and sororities are, she said. At Friday's ice cream social, her son Trevor had the Nittany Lion mascot sign his green arm cast, the result of an injury during a soccer match. Her family has been through a lot, she said.
"They tried to destroy us," she said. "We survived."
