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

by Joseph Wilson

  Bir’s point, however, was that our hard-line position was complicating Turkey’s relations with a country that it did not believe posed a significant threat to it. Left unsaid were revenues lost to Turkey because of the sanctions, as well as Turkish concerns that our protection of the Kurds would lead to a resurgence of Kurdish independence ambitions that might spread to Turkey’s own Kurdish population and further fuel the terrorism that had afflicted southern Turkey for years.

  Throughout the two years I was at European Command, our relations with the Turkish military needed constant attention. Jim Jamerson was on the phone several times a week with the U.S. ambassador to Turkey, Marc Grossman, working on the most trivial details. American complaints of Turkish interference with operations in Incirlik never ceased. For all that, however, Provide Comfort, which was later renamed Operation Northern Watch, continued to function up to the second Gulf War in 2003, interdicting Iraqi use of its own airspace and regularly destroying antiaircraft batteries when their crews made the mistake of turning on their radar.

  Shortly thereafter, in January 1996, Jim and I made our first voyage to Africa together. This was Jim’s first time south of the Sahara desert. One of our stops was Luanda, Angola. The United States was still trying to broker a peace agreement in the continuing Angolan civil war and had begun working with the United Nations and its representative in Luanda, former Malian Foreign Minister Alioune Blondin Beye. We went to Luanda to support a renewed effort at confidence building between the government and the rebel movement, UNITA. Madeleine Albright, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and J. Brian Atwood, the USAID director, had already been there to work on diplomatic and assistance-related issues. Our task was to meet with the Angolan military and defense establishment. Accompanying us on the trip was the State Department’s deputy assistant secretary of state for Africa, Ambassador Bill Twaddell, an old friend who had served in several African posts, including Mozambique, Mauritania, and Liberia.

  As soon as we arrived, we also met with the U.S. ambassador to Angola, Don Steinberg, who had spent several tours in Africa before his assignment in Angola, and with President Clinton’s special envoy to the Angolan peace process, wizened veteran diplomat Ambassador Paul Hare. Hare, white-haired, wrinkled, and always in threadbare clothes with a cigarette dangling from his lips, was the perfect choice to be the itinerant ambassador to the process. He was utterly without pretension and displayed both the patience needed to deal with the recalcitrant parties and a mastery of understatement when negotiating with the huge egos of the protagonists. Paul had been a close adviser to Chester Crocker in the eighties and had gone on to serve as ambassador to Zambia. While in Zambia, he had been one of Crocker’s emissaries to the Angolans at the same time our embassy was working on the issue from Brazzaville, Congo, in 1987. We also crossed paths later when he was serving as a deputy assistant secretary for the Middle East and I was in Baghdad.

  Twaddell, Hare, Steinberg, and I were able to give General Jamerson a thorough and candid briefing on the state of the ongoing hostilities, a decade after I had first become involved in the negotiations to get South Africa and Cuba out of the middle of the war. In short, in Luanda Jamerson was surrounded by experienced people who had devoted large chunks of their careers to representing American interests in Africa and, more specifically, to the resolution of the intractable Angolan war. Despite all of our efforts over three decades, the war just would not be over until the death of Jonas Savimbi, as he was never going to make peace with the Angolan government. However attractive the rest of the terms offered to him, unless he was going to be president of the country, he would not be satisfied. Whatever peace deal was negotiated, he was sure to break it, sure to find another sponsor who’d trade diamonds for guns.

  Our 1996 stop in Luanda coincided with a delicate moment in the negotiations. The Angolans had tiptoed up to a rapprochement in the early nineties, culminating in a 1992 election that included candidates from Savimbi’s UNITA movement. Immediately after the elections, however, in which UNITA fared poorly, violence broke out again and Savimbi fled back to the bush, from which he relaunched the civil war. After protracted negotiations, a tentative agreement had been reached to try again to integrate UNITA into the political process. Several senior officials from the movement’s political arm took up residence in Luanda in late 1995, even as the war continued to rage in the countryside. They were very nervous about their security, and their concerns were probably justified.

  After the failed elections in 1992, several UNITA officials had been killed in government attacks inside the capital. When we met with them, their only concern was for their personal safety; political agendas were secondary. Over the next two years, so much progress would be made in Luanda that those concerns would fade and be replaced by discussions about how to manage a filibuster and, as a member of the minority, how to block the majority from imposing its will on the whole country. But in our meetings on this first trip with Jamerson, we spent most of our time listening to pleas for bodyguards and for concrete assurances from the government that they would not kill those few UNITA politicos who had been designated by Savimbi to live among the enemy.

  Jamerson was a quick study and had mastered the issues before confronting the foreign generals. His meetings with them were extraordinarily positive. This was no small feat, since the Angolan senior military suffered from an excess of hubris gained not from battlefield prowess but rather, like Savimbi, from its involvement in the illicit diamond trade. Profits from this activity had both enriched and corrupted them to the point that any cessation of the war might well dry up this lucrative revenue stream and would therefore be opposed. War had become good business for those who were waging it—on both sides.

  On the return flight north, we stopped in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, to refuel, and took the occasion to meet with one of our most senior ambassadors, Lannon Walker, who was a legend in our little world. Brilliant, articulate, and headstrong, his swashbuckling style was a throwback to a different era, and he often landed in trouble with a State Department that had become more and more bureaucratic over the course of his many years of service.

  That did not lead to any change in his style, however, as he assumed that he could prevail in any altercation with the bureaucracy—and he generally did. A colleague had once affectionately described Lannon as a snake-oil salesman, able to sell ice boxes to Eskimos. He spoke as much with his hands as with his mouth, gesturing repeatedly to punctuate the complex pictures he would draw with his words. He was seductively engaging and as meticulous about his personal appearance as he was flamboyant, sporting an Errol Flynn mustache. With his French artist wife, he cut quite a figure, so Bill Twaddell and I thought it was a good idea to brief Jamerson on the personage he was about to meet.

  Lannon lived up to our billing of him, wooing Jim with his tales and his analysis of the situation in Cote d’Ivoire. In less than half an hour, he had pitched several training and equipment programs he wanted EUCOM to undertake immediately. It was a vintage performance; by the time we got back on our airplane, less than two hours later, Jim’s head was swimming. But he was laughing heartily. He turned to Bill and me and said simply: “You fellas sure had him pegged.” It was the big breakthrough. Jim had spent a week in sub-Saharan Africa, had met some of the Foreign Service’s most distinguished Africanists, and now had conveyed with a brief remark that since there was much to be done by the command in Africa, he was willing to trust those of us who had spent so much of our careers on the continent.

  It was a timely recognition of the importance of the continent to the command. We deployed troops there several times in the next two years on training exercises, to evacuate foreigners from Sierra Leone and the Central African Republic, and to protect our embassy in Liberia. The command developed new ways of working with African national militaries, as well as encouraging them to work together in a set of newly conceived training events.

  Traditionally, the joint training of American an
d African troops was conducted bilaterally. It was generally successful but was limited to just the two countries. On one occasion, Jim and I were visiting our troops on maneuvers with Malian forces. A U.S. Army master sergeant told us that coming to Mali was the highlight of his outfit’s training because of the chance they had to live and work for a while in such a hospitable country. He mentioned, however, they had also enjoyed a real professional benefit. “We deployed last year to Haiti,” he told Jamerson, “and one day on patrol we came around a corner and ran into these troops from Mali who we recognized immediately from our having trained together the previous spring. That relationship carried over to the deployment, and we found that we were able to integrate seamlessly because of that earlier training together. Too bad we couldn’t do that with every military we had to coordinate with there.”

  That one comment gave Jim a new insight. If training with African militaries made later deployments with them easier,then we should train more often with them, and we should encourage them to train jointly with one another, as well as with the U.S., in multilateral exercises. We called our new effort the Flintlock program and began to plan for future exercises.

  At about the same time, Washington, and especially the dynamic senior director for Africa at the National Security Council, Susan Rice, was launching what came to be called the African Crisis Response Initiative (ACRI). In the aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, the world groped for a mechanism to respond to such tragic situations before they could spin so badly out of control. Rwanda is a tiny nation in the mountains of central Africa, next door to Burundi and with the same Hutu and Tutsi ethnic mix (85 percent and 14 percent). As in Burundi, the two tribes have engaged in horrific bloodletting periodically over the years. In 1994, the increasingly beleaguered president of Rwanda, Juvenal Habyarimana, was assassinated when his airplane was shot down as it was landing at the capital’s airport. The assassination touched off a round of brutal killings that consumed 800,000 human beings, many of them women and children, within four months.

  The ACRI was designed to develop a cadre of African forces to respond more quickly to such crises, without the delay inherent in raising troops under the U.N. flag. The new Flintlock military exercise program dovetailed perfectly with what Washington was promoting in Africa and among countries like France that have historic ties on the continent. We were able to complement diplomatic efforts designed to foster support for the new program with concrete activities that benefited African militaries. We traveled throughout Africa, enlisting partners in this new initiative, and were largely successful after overcoming initial concerns about our motives.

  Jamerson and I also made several visits to New York to meet with the U.N. Peacekeeping Operation, as we sought to harmonize what the U.S. was doing with what the U.N. had already accomplished. Our objective was to shape an initiative that reflected and satisfied the U.N. and ourselves, avoiding, as much as possible, duplication and inefficiency. Above all, my colleagues and I wanted to ensure that the programs and procedures in our initiative were technically and philosophically consistent with those that the U.N. Peacekeeping Operation might apply on their entry into a crisis.

  The potential benefits of this program were clear. The U.S. military would be able to mobilize willing partners more quickly in the event of a crisis, and those forces would be better trained and more quickly able to operate together as a combined force. Pressure on the United States to provide all the troops in these dangerous situations would ease as we could enlist others to put their boots on the ground and our commitment could be limited to our areas of particular expertise: logistical support, command and control, and intelligence.

  By the time I left EUCOM in 1997, Jim had succeeded in making Africa a key priority for the command. He did so partly out of necessity, because of the frequent emergency interventions that were required, but also because he realized that the time had long since passed for the unique focus of the command to be the defense of the Fulda Gap, the land corridor that is the shortest route from East Germany to the Rhine. The Berlin Wall had fallen seven years earlier; future threats and activities would emanate from elsewhere, and the command needed to be much smarter about the rest of its theater of concern.

  When I first arrived in Stuttgart, the Africa planning office had been a small, dispirited, and demoralized graveyard for military officers. When I left, they were stars, traveling with General Jamerson every couple of months to different parts of African and coming up with innovative plans and new programs that they were able to brief directly to John Shalikashvili, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and to the secretary of defense, William Perry. When Jamerson and I were not traveling to Africa ourselves, other senior generals went, as Africa became the place everybody wanted to go. General Joe Ralston, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, put it best when he called Jim “The King of Africa.”

  Part and parcel of working with the Africans was engaging their traditional partners in Europe. At the time, France was moving to reintegrate itself into the NATO military command from which it had withdrawn some thirty years earlier when Charles de Gaulle was president. De Gaulle’s insistence on being independent of both the United States and the USSR at the height of the Cold War, while consistent with France’s explicit objective of leveraging its influence over larger powers, was seen as an act of betrayal of the Western alliance. Accordingly, when France wanted back into NATO, there was considerable suspicion about its motives and resistance to many of its demands for command roles within the military command. Jim and I felt that there were areas in which we could benefit by closer collaboration outside NATO’s area of responsibilities, so we traveled to Paris to explore new avenues of cooperation with our French counterparts.

  After a successful set of meetings, including a wonderful lunch at the home of the head of the French armed forces, air force General Jean-Philippe Douin, looking out on the Eiffel Tower, I was deputized to pursue discussions on how we might deepen our contacts, develop new intelligence-sharing procedures, and undertake some planning exercises together. After years in the Foreign Service, still pining for a Parisian assignment following that near-miss in 1988 when I was instead assigned to Iraq, I was delighted to finally have a chance to be in Paris for my work, even if I wasn’t actually living there. I traveled there regularly with a military team while we put mechanisms into place that would serve us well in Africa, where the French had bases and a long history of involvement. We hoped that our successful efforts together in Africa might ease the tension in other areas, such as France’s reintegration into NATO.

  Generally, professional military officers of different nationalities relate to each other very well, and it was no different with the French. They shared with the American officer corps a sense of professional fraternity that transcended political differences. They were task-oriented and operated on pragmatic principles comparable to those of U.S. officers. On the other hand, many professionals in the French ministry of foreign affairs, just as in the U.S. State Department, seemed to relish an atmosphere of intrigue, even though it bred petty jealousies and pointless rivalries. Then there was the plain speech of the military people I was working with; it differed significantly in style from the diplomatic politesse I was accustomed to hearing. Despite my own two decades in diplomacy, I found it considerably easier to deal with the French military than with the French foreign ministry. The French generals, for their part, came to have confidence in me, certainly not because I came out of the diplomatic caste but because I spoke good French and had served many years in a number of French-speaking African countries.

  The mechanisms we had jointly put into place started bearing fruit immediately, when the Zairian war broke out, bringing longtime rebel figure Laurent Kabila to power in May 1997. For thirty years, Kabila had been operating out of the hills of eastern Zaire, near Lake Tanganyika and the Burundi border. He was noted mostly for gold smuggling and other illegal activities that financed his quest to overthrow Zaire�
��s long-serving dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko. Kabila had been responsible for the kidnapping of several American primate researchers from Jane Goodall’s Tanzanian game reserve in the early seventies. Rwandan Vice President Paul Kagame, the real power in his country, now took Kabila under his wing and used him as an instrument to depose Mobuto.

  Kagame, a member of the minority Tutsi tribe, had commanded the rebel force that finally defeated the Hutu government in 1994. Since Tutsis number only 14 percent of the population to the Hutus’ 85 percent, he installed a Hutu as a figurehead president while he ran the government and the military from his vice president post. In the aftermath of the 1994 genocide, a flood of Rwandan refugees fled to neighboring Zaire, living in camps close to the Zaire-Rwanda border. There were regular cross-border shellings and attacks into Rwanda from the area near the refugee camps, and Kagame accused Mobuto of using the refugee camps to destabilize his regime.

  Jim and I met with Kagame in early 1996, after first visiting an old school building that had served as a genocide execution site, an hour outside of Rwanda’s capital, Kigali. The Rwandans had exhumed the bodies of the 25,000 people who had perished there, and we walked among the lime-covered corpses to bear witness to the carnage. The stench was only partly cut by the lime, and the violent deaths the victims had suffered were evident in the wounds we could see on the bodies—severed limbs, bullet holes in skulls. When we met after our mournful tour of the schoolyard, he made it clear to us that he would no longer tolerate the cross-border attacks from those who had earlier committed atrocities. If the U.N., under whose auspices the refugee camps existed, did not move the camps further into Zaire and away from his border, he would do so himself. Several months later, he did just that, and more, using Kabila as his instrument and supporting him with Rwandan forces and advisors, as Kabila swept across Zaire, a vast country the size of the United States east of the Mississippi. The offensive also led to the Rwandans destroying the refugee camps and driving tens of thousands of refugees deeper into the forests of eastern Zaire, to an almost-certain death.