Valerie E. Wilson, née Valerie Elise Plame, (born April 19 1963 in Anchorage, Alaska) is a former United States CIA officer who once held non-official cover (NOC) status. She was identified publicly in a syndicated newspaper column by Robert Novak on July 14, 2003 as the wife of former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV and a CIA "operative" named Valerie Plame. Her legal and preferred name, however, has been Valerie Wilson since her marriage to Ambassador Wilson in 1998. Ambassador Wilson's Op-Ed critical of the George W. Bush administration published in the New York Times ("What I Didn't Find in Africa") on July 6, 2006, Robert Novak's responses to it in his column the next week (July 14), identifying Wilson's wife Valerie Plame as a "CIA operative," and the possible sources of the leaks leading to Novak's disclosure have become subjects of much extended controversy and still-ongoing investigations resulting so far in a five-count federal criminal indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney's former Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby by the United States Department of Justice Office of Special Counsel and a civil suit filed by the Wilsons against Libby and Cheney, presidential advisor Karl Rove, and former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage.

In late 2003 the political controversy commonly referred to as the Plame affair, the "Plame scandal," "Plamegate," and/or the "CIA leak scandal" resulted in the Justice Department referring the FBI investigation to the United States Office of Special Counsel, headed by US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, who convened a grand jury to probe alleged violations of criminal statutes, including the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982.