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

by Joseph Wilson

  One of the most controversial issues that we grappled with during my tenure concerned Lebanon. The Iraqis saw Beirut and the ongoing Lebanese civil war as a way to avenge what they considered the Syrian betrayal of Iraq and the Arab cause when Syria refused to support Iraq in the war with Iran. The Syrians were in the process of seizing control of Lebanon and imposing military force on the feuding Lebanese factions that had been at each other’s throats more or less since the mid-1970s. Getting back at Syria through the medium of Lebanon offered the Iraqis a way to avenge this insult.

  Iraq quite openly tried to ship surface-to-surface missiles from Baghdad to Beirut through the Jordanian port of Aqabah in the spring of 1989. The U.S. reacted aggressively to this transaction, committed to dissuading the Iraqis from adding yet more fuel to the fire in Beirut. Surface-to-surface missiles in an urban environment would mean a major escalation of the violence. April Glaspie met with senior Iraqi officials daily as we applied diplomatic pressure to thwart their efforts to arm the Lebanese Maronite Christian prime minister, General Michel Aoun, in his losing struggle against Syria. The U.S. even mobilized a ship to patrol the Mediterranean, to intercept and turn back any missile shipments before they arrived at Lebanese ports. One of the ironies of Iraq’s position, as April frequently pointed out to Tariq Aziz, was that General Aoun was a friend of Israel. Thus, the Iraqi support for him put them in tacit alliance with Israel, still their sworn enemy. For the Iraqis, of course, it had nothing to do with Israel, or Aoun’s position in Lebanon; it had everything to do with giving Syrian President Hafez al-Assad a bloody nose and using Beirut as the cudgel with which to bash him. For the Iraqis, the road from Baghdad to Damascus went through Beirut.

  Saddam’s weapons programs kept a permanent hold on our attention in the embassy as we aggressively strove to learn everything we could about his attempts to procure weapons of mass destruction. We also closely followed his research and development of missile technology and other exotic weaponry. One such exotic weapon program was the so-called long gun, an artillery piece developed by a shady Canadian engineer named Gerard Bull, who was later assassinated in Brussels. The cannon was supposed to be able to project shells much farther than conventional artillery pieces, possibly reaching as far as Israel. At the embassy we worried that if Bull’s long-range weapon were ever to really work, it would put Israel under threat of chemical attack, since we knew that Iraq had earlier been able to put chemical weapons into artillery shells. It was never clear whether the concept was even viable, and the cannon itself was so unwieldy that it could easily have been destroyed by an air attack. Bull’s death brought development of the program to a halt. We suspected that Israeli intelligence had been responsible for the assassination, not because of his work on the artillery piece but for other activities involving Iraq’s ballistic missile program.

  While we tried, with our limited diplomatic and intelligence assets, we were hard pressed to keep close tabs on such developments in unconventional armaments. Our actual diplomatic contacts with Iraqis were very formal and highly restricted. There were established channels and procedures, all of which involved going through the foreign ministry with little opportunity for any deviation. Virtually all of our contacts with the Iraqi government passed through the undersecretary at the ministry in charge of relations with the U.S., Ambassador Nizar Hamdun. After first ascertaining the nature of our business, Hamdum would then play the role of traffic cop, directing us to the appropriate office within the foreign ministry or setting up meetings at another ministry. Substantive discussions outside this tightly controlled access were rare. Occasionally we might have formal meetings with ministers such as Saddam’s son-in-law, the infamous Hussein Kamel, Minister of Industry and Military Industrialization, who seven years later would defect to Jordan and tell U.N. officials about the Iraqi nuclear program. (Kamel subsequently returned to Iraq, only to be killed a day later, allegedly by Saddam’s son Uday in a shootout.) These meetings were perfunctory and never offered anything in the way of detailed substance. We met more regularly with the minister of commerce or minister of agriculture, usually in connection with some specific program we were working on. For example, there were American companies whose bids we were supporting, or there might be issues relating to the Commodity Credit program—but even these encounters were infrequent.

  Social contacts with Iraqis were also very limited. Rarely were they permitted to visit us in our houses. A very few—only six—whom we referred to as the “tame Iraqis,” freely circulated in the broader international community. But it was difficult, if not virtually impossible, to discuss issues with them and to hear something other than the government-approved line.

  Because contact with Iraqis, official and otherwise, was so restricted, about the only way to learn what was going on in Iraqi government circles was to be active on the diplomatic cocktail party circuit and attend the various embassy celebrations. There were close to a hundred embassies in Baghdad, so there were almost a hundred different Independence Days celebrated, just as we would invite the diplomatic corps to celebrate the Fourth of July with us. Most of these embassies also had military attachés in the country, as Iraq had just fought a major war deploying significant military power, much of which had been purchased from these same foreign countries. That meant at least another hundred military celebrations similar to our own Veterans Day observances.

  On about two hundred days of the year, then, a foreign diplomat could expect to be invited out to some pomp and circumstance commemorations of a nation’s hard-won freedom or to honor its exalted—and often all-powerful—military. Circulating among the diplomatic corps, our own embassy officers made it their business to chat up their counterparts and try to learn which ones were speaking with the Iraqis and about what subjects. Gossip was the stock in trade, and it was a commodity freely traded at these functions.

  The Soviets had a close relationship with the Iraqis, built on their role as principal arms supplier of the Iraqi armed forces, and thus enjoyed more frequent contact with the Iraqi government than any other delegation. Their deputy chief of mission, my counterpart, was Alexander “Sasha” Kalugin, the son of the renowned KGB officer and later Soviet critic Oleg Kalugin. The Egyptian Embassy, too, had frequent dealings with the government, and with 4,000,000 Egyptians living in Iraq, they could not help but have a finger on the pulse of Iraqi life, given the myriad needs and complaints of their expatriate community.

  But the best source of information and analysis, across the range of issues, was undoubtedly the Turkish Embassy. Several hundred years of Ottoman domination had created deep historical and trade ties between the two countries. The Turkish Embassy had some of the best and most effective diplomats I had ever met anywhere. Their ambassador, Sonmez Cocsal, would later go on to serve as chief of the Turkish Intelligence Service and as ambassador to France. He was a meticulous man who took copious notes on every meeting, every exchange, and every observation. When we would sit down and discuss a subject, he would inevitably bring out his little bound notepad, both to consult as he was sharing his information and jot down what we were telling him. I believe that when he writes his diplomatic memoirs, they will be the definitive history of the period leading up to the first Gulf War.

  His deputy, Ahmed Okcun, was equally capable, if a much different personality. In contrast to his discreet superior, Ahmed, who had already served in Baghdad for several years, was a flamboyant playboy, given to hosting elaborate theme parties and conducting trysts with some of the most desirable women in town. He was, nonetheless, one of the most astute analysts of Iraq and its politics. Ahmad’s store of useful information was supplemented by his many contacts among Turkish traders who moved back and forth between the two countries, and with the Turkmen population in northern Iraq that was in continual conflict with Saddam’s regime, and often with the Kurds who shared the same region.

  We also had a number of reliable contacts among the Kurds. One of our key employees at the embassy was a Ku
rd, and although his clan had long ago been co-opted by the regime, he kept us apprised of the despicable acts that Saddam was committing against the Kurdish population. This included the forced removal of Kurds from traditional villages into settlements in new government housing projects, where they could be more easily controlled. This man was also an active trader in his spare time and kept our embassy staff supplied with a steady supply of Kurdish rugs and kilims. We could not travel to Kurdish territory as easily or as frequently as we would have liked because of government-imposed travel restrictions. Still, in my second year in Iraq I was able to go as far north and east as the Iranian border—to Rania, Rowanduz, and Dahuk, returning through Irbil, all Kurdish towns. Despite the regime’s heavy-handed oppression, life in these towns was busy, the markets full of goods, and the streets bustling with activity.

  Also of interest to the U.S. Embassy were the relations among the great Kurdish clans. Kurdish alliances were famously short-lived. On any given day, one Kurdish group might be in cahoots with the Iranians and on another tied to Saddam. But that could easily change, and frequently did as fortunes waxed and waned. The overriding loyalty of any Kurd was to his clan’s survival. For so many centuries a persecuted minority surrounded by enemies—the Turks to the north, the Arabs to the south and west, and the Persians in the east—they had learned how to maneuver to make the best of whatever situation they found themselves in. And when they were not fighting their external enemies, the inevitable clan rivalries meant that they were called upon to fight one another.

  Despite all of America’s efforts, and those of our Arab allies, to wrap a commercial trade and investment cocoon around Saddam that would moderate his behavior, we did not succeed. As early as April 1990, less than two years after the end of the conflict with Iran, Saddam was preparing to go to war again.

  At the end of the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam had not demobilized. Instead, he had maintained his huge military machine. Nearly 20 percent of the population either was still bearing arms, or had died or been injured fighting the Iranians. All of this was at enormous cost to the Iraqi economy, already laboring under the burden of close to $70 billion in external debt, plus whatever the government owed to domestic suppliers. At the same time, Saddam was bent on convincing his citizens that the Iran-Iraq war had been a victory; a massive importation of consumer goods masqueraded as a war dividend. It was a classic guns-and-butter budget. But having already mortgaged his country’s future waging the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam needed debt relief from his neighbors in order to be able to afford both his large standing army and the ambitious domestic expenditures he was undertaking. In short, he was desperate for a source of revenue, and Kuwait—small, rich, and despised—lay there on his southern border, ripe for the taking.

  Kuwait had financed much of Saddam’s war effort with substantial loans in the late 1980s. But it had balked at converting the loans to grants and was unwilling to extend more credit to Iraq. Kuwait was also suspected by Saddam of regularly exceeding its OPEC oil quota, thereby driving oil prices down and preventing Iraq from maximizing income on its own oil exports. Iraq also accused Kuwait of stealing Iraqi oil, by using sophisticated slant-drilling techniques to tap into an Iraqi oil field, Rumaillah, just north of the border between the two countries.

  Iraq had issues of strategic concern with Kuwait as well. The government wanted to execute a land swap with Kuwait in order to better defend its one remaining port city with access to the Persian Gulf. The historic port of Basra, legendary home of Sinbad the Sailor, is located in the delta where the Shatt al Arab River flows into the Persian Gulf. However, in order to function in the modern world of deep-draft ships, constant dredging operations were required to keep the passage open. During the Iran-Iraq war, when the same waterway was also a matter of contention, the channel had become hopelessly mired in silt. Moreover, unexploded artillery shells, many chemical-laden, were sitting on the bottom of the river, adding considerable risk to any dredging project.

  Iraq’s solution had been to build a new port farther west, at Um Qasr, along the narrow part of the Iraqi territory that actually bordered the Gulf. Across a narrow strait from the port were two islands, Bubiyan and Warbah, which belonged to Kuwait. These were largely uninhabited, save for an Iraqi garrison established with Kuwaiti permission to provide security for the port access. Iraq wanted to make the arrangement permanent and had offered some territory along its land border with Kuwait as compensation, but the Kuwaitis had balked at the deal.

  On April 2, 1990, in an extremely inflammatory speech, Saddam suddenly announced that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and threatened to “set fire to half of Israel.” At the same time, he had put troops on spring maneuvers down in the south of the country, and the word coming back to us was that his soldiers had been told that Israel was the enemy they were training against. We were alarmed by Saddam’s rhetoric and determined to calm the situation before it escalated out of control. While we were concerned about the tensions in Iraq’s relations with Kuwait, we did not suspect that the southern military exercises were, in fact, a first signal of Iraq’s intention to invade that country. We were more worried that Saddam’s hard line toward Israel would further inflame Arab passions and contribute to making any lasting settlement between Israel and the Palestinians that much more difficult to achieve.

  At the urging of the embassy, President Bush requested that a delegation of American senators, already in Egypt, detour to Baghdad to deliver a message to Saddam. The delegation was headed by Republican Bob Dole of Kansas and included other Republicans: Frank Murkowski of Alaska, Jim McClure of Idaho, and Alan Simpson of Wyoming, as well as Democratic Senator Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio.

  The senators arrived in Baghdad on April 12 and were whisked immediately by air to the northern city of Mosul, along with Ambassador Glaspie, myself, and a number of senior mission employees. We met Saddam, not at his palace but at the one luxury hotel in Mosul, recently opened for the few tourists who actually braved the oppressive political climate to visit Iraq. Mosul is the closest city to the ancient towns of Nineveh and Nimrud, dating back to the thirteenth century B.C. Archeological excavations there had, just the year before, yielded one of the greatest finds of gold jewelry ever, which had gone on display in the Baghdad Museum of National Antiquities.

  Senator Dole delivered the presidential message—which we had drafted at the embassy—conveying faithfully the tone that we wanted to strike with Saddam. Dole urged Saddam to eschew chemical and nuclear weapons programs, at the same time reassuring him that the United States remained dedicated to improving relations between our two countries.

  After Dole had spoken his piece, Saddam replied in a longwinded statement. “I didn’t really say I was going to set fire to half of Israel,” he protested. “What I said was that if Israel attacks me, then I will set fire to half of Israel.” The difference, he went to painstakingly great lengths to emphasize, was that he would take action only in response to Israeli aggression. However, if he were obliged to react, that response would come in the form of a devastating counterattack showcasing his new weaponry. Saddam also made clear his irritation at what he thought was an orchestrated American-British effort to undermine him by scaling back economic and commercial programs, and by engaging in a smear campaign against him. His complaints were a reaction to American and British criticism of his execution of an Iranian-born British journalist for espionage, a recent Voice of America editorial attacking him, and the fallout from an international banking scandal involving kickbacks and misuse of funds associated with the Agricultural Commodity Credit program.

  When Saddam had finished his remarks, he invited the other senators to comment. After Senators Murkowski and McClure had spoken, Senator Metzenbaum, an outspoken supporter of Israel, made the most incongruous statement to Saddam: “Mr. President, I can tell you are an honorable man.” I was the note taker at this meeting, and as he spoke, I remember thinking to myself that whatever beneficial impact the president’s
message and Dole’s statement may have had on Saddam, it had all just been negated by this obsequious boot-licking. To make matters worse, Alan Simpson, who is about six foot seven inches tall, leaned way far forward in a chair so low that he looked like he was on bended knee before this potentate, and averred: “Mr. President, I can see that what you have here isn’t really a policy problem; what you have is a public relations problem. You’ve got a problem with the haughty and pampered press. I know all about that, because I’ve got problems with the press back home. What you need is you need a good public relations person.”

  Saddam no doubt took away from the meeting not the admonition to stop developing weapons of mass destruction and threatening his neighbors, but rather support for his own misguided belief that he was an honorable man who didn’t really have policy problems at all, just clumsy press relations. After all, one of Israel’s champions had told him so, and another American leader had knelt before him to reassure him that he had no problems with the American government.

  I know now that Saddam’s rhetoric against Israel was largely camouflage for his real intentions. Under the cover of this rhetoric, he hoped to increase pressure on neighboring Arab nations to forgive his debt and cough up even more money for Iraq’s reconstruction effort. In an earlier meeting of the Arab Cooperation Council, in February 1990, Saddam had already warned the Gulf countries: “Let the Gulf regimes know that if they do not give this money to me, I will know how to get it.” If nations outside the region bought his line of bluster and saw Iraq as a looming military menace to Israel, Saddam might be able to wrest economic concessions from them as well, in order to ease the threat.