PEMBROKE — Valerie Plame Wilson, the Central Intelligence Agency operative whose cover was blown when she was named by a columnist in July 2003, told her story to about 700 people at The University of North Carolina at Pembroke on Thursday as part of the school’s Distinguished Speaker Series.

She said she felt the story was important to tell “to make sure this doesn’t happen again; that a CIA agent isn’t betrayed by their country again.”

Wilson was outed as a CIA operative in a Richard Novak column in July 2003 after her husband, Joe Wilson, an American diplomat, wrote an op-ed piece for The New York Times called “What I Did Not Find,” about his belief that the Bush administration falsified evidence to “manipulate this country into going to war.”

The evidence — yellow-cake uranium shipped from Niger to Iraq — was later proved false, and weapons of mass destruction were never found in Iraq.

Wilson told her story chronologically, beginning at her time at “the farm,” a CIA training facility where she was “the best in my class with an AK-47.”

The harsh training conditions at the facility gave way to the CIA office, where she learned about recruiting assets, clandestine photography, and communication methods.

“We have to figure out what (an asset’s) motives are. Why do they want to betray their own country for the United States?”

Wilson became involved in the CIA’s counter-proliferation division in the 1990s, when the United States began to view nuclear and biological weapons as a real threat. After successful operations in curbing the nuclear capabilities of countries like Libya, she was assigned to head counter-proliferation operations in Iraq, where the United States was essentially blind, she said.

During that time, her husband was asked to use his connections in Africa investigate a report the Bush White House had heard: that yellow-cake uranium had been shipped from Niger to Iraq.

On his trip he determined the report was false — the same conclusion as a four-star Army general and an ambassador to the region.

A year later, George W. Bush mentioned the exchange of materials in his State of the Union address, and then Secretary of State Colin Powell used the evidence to make a case to the United Nations for the Iraq war.

“What I heard Secretary Powell say did not match the intelligence we had,” Wilson said. “I felt absolutely, frankly, sick to my stomach.”

She said the action also disturbed her husband, who began investigating the evidence further, and eventually wrote the op-ed for The New York Times.

Shortly thereafter, Novak leaked her name.

“The S.O.B. did it,” she quoted her husband as saying when he read Novak’s column.

Wilson said her first thoughts were about her 3-year-old twins, her network of assets, and her career — which effectively ended.

“I could count on the fingers on one hand who knew what I actually did (for a living),” she said. She said that when she was revealed, friends started seeing the clues. “So that’s why you drive the way you do,” one friend said.

“This was a years-long character assassination campaign,” she said. Later she added, “This was the Bush administration sending a message to Joe Wilson to shut up.”

During the question-answer period, a man asked what happened to the operatives she worked with overseas. She said she couldn’t say specifically, but “the consequences are grave. That’s why I believe what happened was truly traitorous.”

Later a teenage girl asked Wilson if she thought the Bush administration knew about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks before they happened.

Wilson dismissed the idea.

“I have a lot of reason to say mean things about that administration, but that goes too far,” she said.

Wilson resigned from the CIA in 2006, and started writing a book. Her CIA secrecy agreement complicated the project to the point that she was not allowed to acknowledge agency affiliation earlier than January 2002, “thus making a memoir a bit difficult,” she said.

Difficulties with the CIA’s publication review board led her publisher, Simon & Schuster, to publish the book with redacted areas included, and hire an investigative journalist to write an afterward to fill holes in the story.

Now Wilson’s story is being made into a movie starring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts.

She ended by encouraging young people to consider careers in public service.

“Our democracy is only as strong as we make it,” she said. “We’re living in a time of unprecedented distrust of our government after eight years of a government that manipulated public opinion.

“I encourage you to think about public service. For me, it felt good to serve something larger than myself. I’m not suggesting everyone run out and join the CIA, but there are ways to give back.”