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

by Joseph Wilson

  By now, the Iraqis had cut off all water and electricity to our embassy compound in Kuwait. Our diplomats and their American citizen charges were reduced to the most spartan living conditions—rationing water and subsisting on canned tuna, while enduring 120-degree temperatures every day without air conditioning or even fans. They rose to the occasion, planting “freedom” gardens, digging a well, and never missing an opportunity to defy their Iraqi tormentors just the other side of the fence. They were not going to cower in the face of the Iraqis’ threatening behavior any more than we were going to in Baghdad.

  Chapter Seven

  A Noose for a Necktie

  AT THE AMBASSADOR’S RESIDENCE IN BAGHDAD, about a ten-minute drive from the embassy compound, a loose structure and organization emerged from within the community of forty American men now ensconced there. We called them our guests, to distinguish them from the hostages Saddam was holding and from our Kuwait diplomatic colleagues. Since these men were not diplomats, they were subject to being seized by the Iraqis and so for the most part were restricted to the residence except when traveling to the embassy in a diplomatic vehicle. The guests designated liaison officers with the embassy and with the ever-inquisitive press. They assigned tasks to each other to ensure that the facilities were properly maintained, and worked well together to keep spirits up through planned activities at the residence, such as movie nights and periodic barbeques to which embassy staff was invited.

  I encouraged them to be as self-sufficient as possible, though we remained attentive to potential problems. As could be expected, there were some medical issues, particularly since a large segment of this population was older. A couple of men were taking antidepressant medication, and when it ran out, we were faced with some problems. But in general, morale and behavior were very good.

  With every new arrival of the press, whose ranks turned over about every ten days, we would receive videotapes of movies and football games that were immediately sent to the residence. We also benefited from a steady supply of cigars. In fact, before Dan Rather left, he came to see me and asked what shortages we might be experiencing as a consequence of the sanctions. I polled our embassy officials and learned that the only thing we thought we might run out of was cigars. Every new group of journalists from then until my departure in January brought a box of cigars to us. I had never smoked such quality, then or since.

  Inevitably, some of our guests went stir-crazy and were imprudent. Some left the compound and were picked up by the Iraqis; others plotted their escape across the desert into Jordan. I tried to discourage such dangerous actions, but I could not and would not stand in the way of those who were determined to try to escape. We arranged for our embassy in Jordan to send us maps of the border region and some compasses to help those determined to leave to find their way. We also stationed an embassy team on the Jordanian side of the border, with the permission of the Jordanian government, to receive them if they managed to make their way across the lightly guarded frontier.

  One particular band of escapees bribed taxi drivers to drive them to within several miles of the border and then struck out on foot across the desert in the middle of the night. To our delight, we learned the next day that they had executed their plan perfectly and made it out. Over the next several weeks, a couple of other groups also escaped in the same way.

  The sixty-three of our diplomatic colleagues from Kuwait, who were reassigned by the State Department to “temporary duty” (TDY) in Baghdad for the duration of their enforced stay, lived at the Marine House and in other embassy houses and apartments on the same side of the river as the embassy. The TDY’ers benefited from their status as diplomats and could move freely about the city, though they still could not leave the country.

  My own schedule remained chaotic. I continued to reside in my own home, twenty minutes across the river from the embassy compound and ten from the ambassador’s residence. I stayed there expressly so that there would be one officer on the same side of the river as the government ministries in case the bridges across the river were closed for whatever reason. For the few hours a day when I was not at work or at meetings, it was important to me to be in familiar surroundings with my music, my books, and my artwork.

  I used the ambassador’s fully armored car, even when the air conditioning failed, which it did often, and the hermetically sealed interior became as hot as the desert outside. My driver was an intensely loyal and brave Egyptian named Said, who remained with me day and night, refusing to be relieved so long as I was awake. He moved in with me and slept little more than I did over the next five months. Day or night, the car was ready for whatever foray I might have to make. We always traveled with the American flag flying from the bumper. It was one way of showing that we were not afraid. In fact, I knew that if something was going to happen to me, it would be only on the orders of the government and that I would not be in any position to resist or even defend myself. Throughout the crisis, ordinary Iraqis remained friendly and hospitable, often waving as my car passed.

  Three shifts a day manned the task force at the State Department in Washington, D.C., rotating at eight in the morning, four in the afternoon, and midnight Washington time—or three in the afternoon, eleven at night, and seven in the morning Baghdad time. The senior officer of each shift of the task force expected to be briefed by me when he came on, meaning that most days I was in my office at the embassy by 6:30 A.M. and did not leave for home until after 11:30 at night. After the morning briefing with Washington, the embassy military attaché would brief me on American troop movements into the Gulf and the state of military planning. This was followed by a general staff meeting in Baghdad, at which we reviewed the status of all of our programs and prepared for the daily off-the-record press briefing.

  One particularly memorable staff meeting was interrupted almost as soon as we assembled when I was called out to speak with the task force. When I picked up the phone, the voice on the other end said flatly, “The balloon is going up.” I replied to the voice that he was going to have to be more explicit, so he added, “The Iraqis have launched a missile, and, according to our estimates, it will land in either Tel Aviv or Haifa. If that happens, we will launch a counterattack and hit Iraq with everything we have.”

  I returned to the meeting and informed the participants. After a moment of stunned silence, we shifted focus to immediate security concerns and began to plan to move everybody to the ambassador’s compound, well away from the embassy, which would be manned with only a skeleton crew in the event the Iraqis decided to retaliate against us. We sent one officer up to the roof to check wind direction, because we feared that an air attack would target suspected chemical and biological weapons sites, unleashing deadly winds that could drift toward us. We did not have gas masks or protective suits, so there was little we could have done anyway, but we were more than a bit curious.

  Just as we were about to break up to take the actions we had outlined, I was called to the phone again. This time the voice told me, “False alarm. The missile landed well within Iraqi territory. It was just a test to calibrate their navigational system.” I conveyed the reprieve to a very relieved team, who had been described by somebody arriving late to the meeting as the most ashen-faced group of people he had ever seen. I later joked that the lesson of that morning was to always bring a second pair of underwear to the office, just in case.

  At 9:30 A.M. most mornings, the embassy press attaché, Steve Thibault, would usher the international press into the office for a half hour of questions. We tried to be as candid as possible, although the briefings were off the record, as Steve reminded the press every morning when he went over the ground rules. We tried to develop a theme every day and encouraged reporting on issues that were actually worrying us. We were not above putting our best interpretation on a story, and we rarely missed an opportunity to stick it to the Iraqis or embarrass them if we could.

  One of these briefings took place on September 20, 1990. The Iraqis had circu
lated a diplomatic note to all embassies directing them to register citizens in their care with the appropriate authorities. Capital punishment was threatened for those who failed to comply, the implication being that even diplomatic personnel could be subject to this decree. However, registration could be accomplished only by personal appearance at the appropriate office, and our experience had been that Americans appearing were taken hostage. It was clearly a way for the Iraqis to replenish their stock of hostages. The choice, theoretically, was either to turn over Americans or to defy the note and risk execution.

  I thought this was a tailor-made opportunity to confront the authorities over their increasingly draconian measures. I decided to give copies of the note to the press attending the briefing that morning, and then, to underscore the threat of execution, I asked the Marine security guard to fashion a hangman’s noose for me to wear. I wanted to make the point that faced with the choice of sacrificing Americans under my protection or suffering capital punishment, my response to Saddam was “if he wants to execute me for keeping Americans from being taken hostage, I will bring my own fucking rope,” as I told the reporters that morning.

  Like all of our press briefings, this one was off the record, so news of my less-than-fashionable necktie wasn’t intended to be made public. Unfortunately, either Thibault neglected to set the ground rules that morning, or else one of the journalists decided that the story was just too good to pass up and violated the agreement. By noon, the story had been so distorted in the retelling that French news announced that the Iraqis intended to hang the American chargé d’affaires by sundown.

  Not surprisingly, the Iraqis were furious, and Tariq Aziz convoked a meeting of the entire diplomatic corps for that evening. Even though most of the hundred or so heads of embassies attended the meeting, it was essentially a showdown between Aziz and me. With what I’d done now widely known, I wasn’t going to back down, so I played my hand as aggressively as I could. We sat at opposite ends of a long table. Tariq lit a cigar. I did as well. He asserted that the diplomatic note was not intended to require compliance by embassies. I jumped in and asked, “Then why was it sent as a diplomatic note?” Such notes generally set forth government procedures on various issues and required compliance from the diplomatic corps.

  Tariq said that the Iraqis had no intention of executing diplomats. I responded, “Then why did they refer to capital punishment in the note?” The meeting broke up inconclusively. Tariq had tried to embarrass me in front of my diplomatic colleagues, but I was having none of it. My charges were my fellow citizens, not other diplomats. The next day, we received another diplomatic note from the Iraqi foreign ministry, withdrawing the previous note. Once again, we had stood up to the Iraqis and forced them to back down from a malicious demand.

  The morning press briefing would often break up with several of the journalists staying behind to ask one last question, or if they were newly arrived, to get one of my business cards. One day I asked a journalist why he needed yet another card since his news organization must have had at least ten in their offices. He replied without hesitation that the press betting was that I was not going to survive, and he thought the card might prove valuable someday. I handed him a card, after autographing it for him.

  After the press cleared out, we would work on our daily tasks, from planning evacuation flights to scheduling meetings with foreign ministry officials or other diplomats. I regularly sought out my foreign counterparts to keep them up to date on what we were doing and also to exchange information. One of my most amusing exchanges was with the Austrian ambassador. One morning, he asked if he could drop by and see me. I offered that since he was an ambassador and I a mere chargé, I would be pleased to call on him. But it was important to him that he call on me, and so he showed up within a few minutes.

  A historian by training, he referred to Neville Chamberlain’s infamous meeting with Hitler—also an Austrian by birth—at Munich in September 1938, and urged as strongly as possible that we remain tough and not yield to appeasement tendencies being expressed in other capitals. I was gratified by his comments, since we had been subjected to a number of slights from some of our Western colleagues for our hard-line position, and I conveyed his sentiments to Washington. Several years later, he told me that when he had been introduced to President Bush after the end of the Gulf War, the president commented to him how much he had appreciated his remarks as relayed by me.

  The British ambassador, Harold “Hooky” Walker, in particular, was critical of our aggressive approach. Our strained relations stemmed from our embassy decision early on to offer Americans safe haven to keep them out of Saddam’s clutches. British citizens were subject to the same threats as Americans, and when they saw what we had done, they demanded that their ambassador offer the same support. Unfortunately, the British embassy did not have the resources that we did, so when they finally invited their citizens to stay on their embassy compound, they had to turn to us for refrigerators, stoves, and other equipment to help furnish their improvised quarters.

  In dealing with the Iraqis, the British always believed they had the best approach, favoring a more traditional quiet diplomacy. At one point, Hooky snobbishly remarked to me that we reminded him of a bunch of cowboys sitting on the stoop of our ranch house with our rifles across our chests, waiting for the Indians to come over the horizon and attack us. Since a similar image of the Alamo had occurred to me more than once, I thanked him for the compliment. His deputy was more philosophical about our plight. In one of our exchanges, he noted, “When in our careers will we ever again be reasonably well paid to be as obnoxious as we like?” He was right; we were not going to achieve results by acting as if this was a popularity contest. I was convinced then and am convinced now that we would never have succeeded in saving Americans if we had relied on traditional diplomacy. Saddam respected only strength. Diplomatic niceties were viewed by him as signs of weakness to be pocketed, with the supplicant then walked all over. A serial violator of international law and treaties could not be coddled.

  After briefing the task force coordinator who came on duty in Washington at 8:00 A.M., or 3:00 P.M. Baghdad time, I would go home for lunch and a brief rest. On most afternoons, around five o’clock, I would attend a daily meeting of the European Union ambassadors as an observer. I would share what we were doing and invite them to support us. Since their rules required not just consultation with their own governments but also a consensus within the community, they were ill equipped to act in a timely matter. Sometimes they would follow our lead ten days later, but we could not count on their solidarity with us.

  Some European ambassadors could be infuriating. In early October, the German ambassador to Iraq hosted a reception to celebrate the momentous occasion of Germany’s reunification at the end of the Cold War. Attending the event was the erstwhile East German colleague, who’d served as ambassador to Kuwait. The East German joked with me that he was no doubt the only diplomat in the history of our profession to lose not just the country to which he had been accredited, Kuwait, but also the country from which he had been sent, East Germany. His gallows humor in the face of not just a difficult present but also an uncertain future upon his return to a newly united Germany, was impressive. After all, however well he may have performed in Kuwait, the only thing that was guaranteed when he arrived back in his country was that he would be out of a job.

  The reception was extremely well attended by Iraqi officials, and they hung on every word the representative of the reunified Germany had to say. The German ambassador, a sometimes difficult colleague, offered a longwinded toast extolling the virtues of national unity after forty-five years of separation. I thought as I listened that however splendidly the speech might play in Berlin, it was totally inappropriate in the context of the current crisis. Here Iraq claimed it was uniting with Kuwait to correct a historic error, that is, the separation of the two countries earlier in the century. I do not know if our host had any idea what effect his comments migh
t have on the Iraqis, but the effect was so predictable that he certainly should have known better. Within hours the Iraqis were citing German unification as the precedent and justification for their own actions in Kuwait.

  On another occasion, the same German ambassador invited his fellow ambassadors from Britain, France, and Japan, plus myself, to meet with him. He proudly announced that he had just arranged with the Iraqis to provide safe passage for all of our respective citizens still in Kuwait. I asked him if the safe passage was out of Iraq and to safety, and he responded that it was only to Baghdad, after which they would be taken into custody by the Iraqis and dispersed to the “strategic sites.” I gritted my teeth and coldly thanked him for his efforts, saying I would relay his offer to Washington. I was pretty damn sure, though, that there was no way President Bush was going to take any action that would add to the number of Americans being held in Iraq by Saddam. I was right. Secretary Baker sent our ambassador to Germany, the venerable Vernon Walters, to meet with the German foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, to register our disdain for the plan, which soon was abandoned.

  At seven every evening, I met with the Turkish, French, British, and Soviet deputy chiefs of mission. They were my closest colleagues and the persons best informed and most directly involved in the situation. Our meetings were informal and candid exchanges among friends. Though our approaches were dictated by our governments, we also understood that each of us was playing a different role in this drama. Ours was to be the most belligerent, the Soviets’ to be the most accommodating, the French to be both. The Turks were soft in rhetoric but firmly behind the American position.