Former CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson will speak at 7:30 p.m. today at the Givens Performing Arts Center.

Her appearance is part of the Distinguished Speaker Series at The University of North Carolina at Pembroke. Admission is $10 for the general public and $5 for UNCP students, staff and faculty. To purchase tickets, call the box office at (910) 521-6361.

A former CIA covert operations officer, Wilson found herself in a political firestorm when senior White House and State Department officials revealed her secret status to several national journalists — including a syndicated newspaper columnist who published her name in 2003.

Wilson will discuss what she views as an unprecedented breech of public trust by the Bush administration in its efforts to silence a critic.

Vice President Dick Cheney is widely believed to have orchestrated the leak of Wilson’s status as retribution for a newspaper column written by her husband, Joseph Wilson, in which he debunked one of the key stated reasons for the Bush administration’s war in Iraq.