We met a real honest-to-goodness spy this past Shabbat. “Florence” (not her real name) was in town for the bar mitzvah of her nephew. We were all making small talk – the unseasonably hot weather, how well the bar mitzvah boy read – when I asked Florence “so what do you do?”

She was quick to answer. “I work for the CIA. Well, I did. I’m retired now.”

“What do you mean, worked for the CIA? What exactly did you…” I asked.

“I was a spy,” she interrupted, matter-of-factly. “I was based in Europe and I collected information for 20 years, mostly about the Russians, but about other things as well.”

Now, meeting someone in Israel who has some connection to Israel’s spy agency, the Mossad, is not so unusual. They won’t tell you, but if you know the right questions, you can usually figure it out. But there was something somehow exotic about meeting a real American spook.

So, what were those “other things” you mentioned, I asked.

Florence then revealed that she was one of the lone dissenting voices in the CIA leading up to the war in Iraq. She argued strenuously that Saddam Hussein did not in fact have weapons of mass destruction. No one would listen. Until one day she found a friendly ear (she wouldn’t say who).

“Do you have any documentation?” the ear asked. About 2 and a half feet of it, Florence responded. She then proceeded to fax 2,600 hundred pages. Eventually she was all over the television news in the U.S. (which is why she could talk freely about her deeds and why I can blog about it here). In any case, the CIA wasn’t interested in hiding her identity anymore. “It’s way too expensive to ‘retire’ a covert spy,” she added.

Her story bears some resemblance to that of “out-ed” CIA operative Valerie Plame. I asked Florence about the movie Fair Game starring Naomi Watts and Sean Penn, which is mostly what I know about the Plame case. Florence’s face began to twitch. I don’t know if it she was making a deliberately dismissive gesture or was legitimately worked up. “That movie bears no resemblance to the truth,” she snapped.

Spoken like a true spy, even a retired one.