The Politics of Truth_Inside the Lies That Put the White House on Trial and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity

by Joseph Wilson

  I also mentioned in my briefing that, while I was satisfied personally that there was nothing to support allegations either that Iraq had tried to obtain or had succeeded in purchasing uranium from Niger, if there was interest in investigating the matter further, my suggestion was simple: approach the French uranium company, COGEMA, that had direct responsibility for the mining operation, since it would have had to have been party to any irregular increase in production, or to a transaction with a customer outside the consortium.

  I met with Ambassador Owens-Kirkpatrick before leaving the country and shared with her what I had learned. She offered again that my conclusions mirrored hers, as well as those of General Fulford.

  Within an hour of my return to Washington in early March 2002, a CIA reports officer, at my request, arrived at my home. Over Chinese takeout, I gave him the same details of my trip and conclusions that I had provided to Owens-Kirkpatrick in Niamey before my departure. These included the account of the meeting between my Nigerien contact and the Iraqi official on the margins of the OAU meeting, as well as my observations about where our government might inquire further if it was not persuaded by my report or those of the ambassador and the general whose inquiries had preceded mine. He left, and I went back to my life as a business consultant, with no further official contact with the CIA for the next year and a half.

  Chapter Two

  Getting Started in a Diplomatic Career

  IN MY FAMILY, THERE IS A LONG TRADITION of politics and service to country. The history of San Francisco—its drydocks and shipbuilding industry, its banking sector, its politics, as well as its social life, including the Bohemian Club and the San Francisco Yacht Club—is replete with the names Rolph, Moore, and Finnell: relatives all, and not a Democrat among them.

  My mother’s uncle, James (“Sunny Jim”) Rolph, served as mayor of San Francisco from 1912 to 1931, the city’s longest-serving mayor, and subsequently as governor of California until his death in office in 1934. He was also a delegate to the Republican National Conventions in 1920 and 1932. His brother Thomas was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from California’s 4th congressional district during World War II. Politics was a staple around the table of our proud Republican family. We still talk about the time a couple of uncles, brothers of Sunny Jim, motored down to Phoenix, Arizona, in the early fifties to pay a call on my mother’s sister and her new husband. At one point during their stay, the uncles took their new brother-in-law aside and confided that they rather liked that new, young congressman, Barry Goldwater, “but isn’t he a bit liberal?”

  Both of my grandfathers had fought in World War I and served again in World War II, and, until his death, we called my father’s father “Colonel.” Not Granddad or Poppy, but Colonel. My brother and I still refer to him that way fifty years after his death. He was a recipient of the British Flying Cross and the French Croix de Guerre for his exploits in World War I. My father was a Marine pilot in World War II and was among the last pilots to take off from the deck of the aircraft carrier Franklin just before it was hit by two bombs dropped from a Japanese dive-bomber, one of which exploded amid planes waiting to take off. The resulting damage included the deaths of more than seven hundred American servicemen. Had a plane in the slot to take off not stalled and been pushed to the side, my dad would have still been on the carrier when it was hit. He did not talk much about the war, but he never forgot how lucky he was to have survived—not to mention that my younger brother and I would never have been born.

  But the Vietnam War was different, or so it seemed to many of us who came of age in the late 1960s. My college years were tumultuous. Antiwar demonstrations at the University of California at Santa Barbara, from which I would be graduated in 1971, convulsed the campus for several years, and included the burning of the Bank of America building, the death of a student, and several periods of dusk-to-dawn curfews. When in 1967 Muhammad Ali declared that he had nothing against the Vietcong, it made sense to me and my friends even as it sent chills down the spines of our parents. We did not trust the government to tell us the truth, and the credibility gap, epitomizing the gulf between official pronouncements versus truth on the ground in Vietnam, pitted parents against kids in my family just as it did in many other households around the country.

  I was born in 1949 and found myself with a low number after the draft lottery began in 1969. With my family background, military service, even war itself, was not something I shied away from. But the fact that I had a student deferment from the draft that would last only until graduation, and was staring Vietnam in the face, was sobering.

  A couple of friends and I celebrated our bad luck the day after the lottery draw by planning a hike up one of Santa Barbara’s creeks into the coastal mountain range that formed the backdrop to the town, with majestic views of the Pacific Ocean and the Channel Islands some twenty miles offshore. Since we had heard that when we got to “Nam” we would only be able to get beer in cans, we bought a case of bottled beer to haul up with us. Arriving at the trail-head, we pulled the case out of the back of the car to load into our backpacks. The cardboard bottom fell out of the case and the beer bottles shattered, leaving us staring down at a foamy mess. We were certain it was an ominous sign foretelling our future career as GIs in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

  Unexpectedly, the Nixon administration decided that it did not want our class in the military after all and suspended the draft in June 1971. The suspension lasted through March 1972, the period that covered our period of eligibility, so on April 1, 1972, I was no longer subject to the draft.

  I had gotten lucky, yet I still hadn’t, at that point, a clue about what I wanted to do with my life. Many of my peers were increasingly disillusioned with the “establishment” and had begun embarking on “counter-culture” adventures. My own was to learn the trade of carpentry. After joining the local Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, an AFL/CIO union, I learned to build houses and condominiums in Santa Barbara, and later at Lake Tahoe. This left me enough time to surf and ski, until in 1973 I broke a leg skiing and was sidelined. Being in a cast and on crutches, however, didn’t prevent me from falling in love with a young woman I had known in college and had always had my eye on, albeit from afar. Susan Otchis was an effervescent blonde from the San Fernando Valley, just north of Los Angeles. The following year, we married in a ceremony that brought together my Episcopalian family and her Jewish family to dance the hora after we’d said our vows before a Lutheran minister. It was a decidedly nondenominational affair. We started our new life together by moving out of California to experience the great Northwest. We left Santa Barbara with the intention of driving north until we came upon a town that struck our fancy.

  Sequim, Washington, then a community of fewer than three thousand people, was where we landed, about an hour and a half northwest of Seattle, on the Straits of Juan de Fuca that separate Washington from British Columbia on the Olympic peninsula. It is in what is called the banana belt because, in comparison to the rest of the area, it is dry, averaging only seventeen inches of rain a year. The massive storms that hit the Pacific Northwest from the Aleutians every winter, dropping twelve feet of rain along the West Coast forests, are blocked by the nearby Olympic Mountains, leaving Sequim—pronounced “Squim”—in the rain shadow, relatively dry. But for a restless young man from Santa Barbara, even this made for far too wet and cold a season for driving nails to be much fun. After a long winter, it was time to look for something else to do.

  I had spent my high school years in Europe following my parents in their quixotic quest to be expatriate journalists and authors. We had first traveled to Europe in 1959, driving around in an old Citroën taxi that was low-slung like the gangster cars in old movies. My parents had fallen in love with the Hemingway lifestyle, including the corridas and toreadors of Spain. We had spent the spring when I was nine following the bullfights from village to village.

  In 1963, the family returned to live in Europe. My father had a
couple of jobs bringing American products to European customers, but the enterprises didn’t work out, so my parents turned to writing. They wrote principally about cultural activities they believed would be of interest to North American readers at a time before mass travel to Europe, and sold their stories to the San Francisco Chronicle, King Features syndicate, and the International Herald Tribune. We lived in Nice, Mallorca, and Montreux, and spent all four summers of our European sojourn in Biarritz, France, where my brother and I surfed along the Atlantic beaches.

  (The first Americans to surf in France were author Peter Viertel and his wife, actress Deborah Kerr, who once loaned me a safety pin to keep my bathing trunks up after the button had come off, a kindness to an embarrassed teenager that I never forgot.)

  Given my experiences living abroad, and an interest I had developed in foreign cultures, it was natural to think about international affairs as a new career choice, even if there was no international policy being made anywhere near Sequim. From this unlikely springboard, I looked into the School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington in Seattle and met a couple of times with the dean, Brewster Denny. It was a good program, but in order to gain admission, an applicant had to demonstrate a commitment to public service. Understandably, those who were already pursuing a career in the public sector stood the best chance of admission.

  My only experience with the public sector up to that point had been collecting unemployment insurance during the winters at Lake Tahoe, and these trips to the unemployment office had been just about my only contact with public servants. That did not strike me, nor do I suspect Dean Denny, as evidence of a strong commitment to a career in public service; so, in order to bolster my application, I decided to take the Foreign Service examination. Back then, the test was offered every December and typically attracted more than 20,000 applicants for fewer than 150 jobs. I had no expectation of passing but hoped merely to do well enough to convince Dean Denny of my potential. To my surprise, I squeaked by and was invited to the next stage, the oral examination.

  On a beautiful spring day in 1975, I made my way from Sequim across the Hood Canal on the Pontoon Bridge, and the Puget Sound via ferry, to downtown Seattle. The Kingdome was in the final stages of construction and competed with the Space Needle for the attention of gawkers on the ferry. I ambled nervously through the Pike Place Market in my suit and tie, feeling completely out of place. The day before, my hair had fallen well below my collar and I had been sporting a wispy but earnest attempt at a beard. I had not worn a tie in at least four years, and my suit dated back to before I had left home for college. But all that had changed in a few short hours. Gone were the long locks and the beard. Off came the Pendleton shirt, replaced by a starched white shirt, my dad’s hand-me-down blue and gold school tie (University of California colors), and a suit that was a bit tight in the shoulders and short at the cuffs. Freshly shined loafers replaced hiking boots, and, for all the world, I looked like an aspiring young executive, or just maybe a diplomat-in-waiting.

  The oral examination turned out to be a nightmare in every way. First of all, I had never been inside a federal building before and was completely out of my element. The head examiner was a lady named Sarah Nathness, and when she greeted me, she thrust out her hand in a way that caught me completely off guard. The world of carpentry and contracting at that time was pretty much a male preserve, and I had never encountered a female executive. Even the courtesy of handshaking was unfamiliar to me, strange as that may seem. You just don’t get much practice at it when you’re wielding a hammer all day. She introduced herself, and I responded by mispronouncing her name—three times: “How do you do, Miss Nessnath . . . Miss Nassneth . . . Miss Nethnass,” until finally stammering it out correctly.

  After that, it only got worse. The opening question was about what books I might suggest to a foreigner planning a visit to the United States. This was not long after Alistair Cooke had published America, his 1975 best-selling tribute to the finest our country has to offer, which probably would’ve been an ideal answer, but that was not the book that came to mind. Instead, I volunteered titles from sociology courses I had taken several years previously: Tally’s Corner, a book on the plight of the urban black in the ghetto; Delano, a book about the migrant farm workers of California; and one of the satires on the midwestern American character by Kurt Vonnegut thrown in for good measure. After an hour of questions that just got more and more difficult, I was banished to the outer office to await the decision of the three examiners. I was not optimistic as I sat there with the temp secretary the examiners had hired for their brief stay in Seattle. Several minutes later, Miss Nathness came out and told me I had passed. The secretary about fell off her chair. In the two weeks she had been there, she told me, she had seen only a few applicants pass, out of the dozens who had appointments.

  A security investigation, which came next, included the random questioning of friends and neighbors. One of my former roommates—he’s now a well-respected cardiologist—was enjoying a Saturday morning joint with his girlfriend when his doorbell rang. Assuming it was a buddy, and always willing to share a toke, he opened the door, only to find a man in a suit flashing a badge. Ever alert and polite, he excused himself, half-closed the door, swallowed the remainder of the joint, and then invited the security officer in to discuss his good friend, the candidate for the Foreign Service.

  As I waited to hear from the State Department, I pursued my graduate degree, moving to Cheney, Washington, on the other side of the state near Spokane. I had recently accepted a fellowship from the economics department of Eastern Washington State College, which was running a joint public affairs program with the University of Washington in Seattle. I had also opened a basement remodeling business and was settling into the graduate student life, when one day the phone rang. It was the State Department offering me a job. I had taken the Foreign Service test to get into graduate school so that I might be better qualified to join the Foreign Service, and now here they were offering me a job! I proposed postponing my entry into the service, suggesting that surely a master’s degree would only make me more valuable to my future employer. Unfortunately, the mechanism for such a postponement did not exist. If I did not accept, my name would go to the bottom of the list and there was no guarantee that they would ever make another offer. It was hard to imagine that I would ever be able to pass the written and oral exams again, so I bailed out of school and prepared to move to Washington, D.C., a city I’d been to only once, when I was nine years old.

  Several weeks later, the sale of my Chevy pickup truck and the purchase of a pinstripe suit behind me, Susan and I arrived in the nation’s capital in the midst of a snowstorm and deep freeze, conditions pretty unwelcoming to California natives.

  The matching up of employees to job openings at the State Department is always a delicate minuet, even for the new recruits. Everybody wants to go to Paris, and nobody volunteers for Niamey. Everyone wants to be the aide-de-camp to the American ambassador to France; no one wants to be the general services officer, responsible for the motor pool and plumbing problems in Niger. In the early years of a Foreign Service career, officers are generally interchangeable parts, serving in the junior consular or administrative positions where energy and stamina are at least as important as expertise. It is often trial by fire, as anybody who has served on the visa line in Manila can testify.

  My case was no different. I had no particular talent that would qualify me for a specific opening. I was not an expert in a part of the world where there was a shortage of experts, nor was I an attorney or a scientist. I was just an ex-carpenter, in the mix with all the other candidates. My only potentially distinctive value lay in my knowledge of French, which I could speak fluently as a result of my time in French schools during my family’s expatriate years.

  About halfway through my third week in Washington, D.C., the personnel office began to interview new officers. For many of the openings, especially the junior-level jobs, it is
a matter of filling vacancies with warm bodies. I was summoned to meet with my “career development officer.” Mr. Jesse Clear turned out to look a little different from the other diplomats striding the halls of the State Department, and this seemed to me a good thing. He had a sharply cut beard and worked on America’s relations with organized labor in foreign countries. I immediately felt some affinity with him, since I had recently been in the ranks of organized labor, had not long ago sported a beard, and, moreover, liked to think I was not cut from the same cloth as the others in my training class. Most of them had come from academia or buttoned-down junior management positions, not from the world of surfing, skiing, and building houses. At a time when I was feeling more than a bit lost, here was a fellow who seemed to have come from a similar background, and who looked like I had before I cleaned up for my new career.