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

by Joseph Wilson

  His acknowledgement of cabinet officers like Secretary of Transportation Rodney Slater and Secretary of Labor Alexis Herman, and the numerous other African Americans with him, enabled the president to make the point that no matter how humble our origins—and no origin could be more humble than that of a slave in America 150 years ago—we could still aspire to, and achieve, positions of great political importance. The president then exhorted the Senegalese and all Africans to take pride in the accomplishments of their cousins despite the humble beginnings that their ancestors experienced in America.

  The big news in the American press out of Senegal, however, was not the president’s eloquence at Goree Island; instead, it was his response to the latest development in the legal cases that continued to preoccupy the press in America. The Paula Jones harassment suit had been thrown out of court on April 1, and somebody from the press contingent accompanying us had espied the president celebrating, playing some bongo drums—or so they reported. While the reporting did nothing to dampen enthusiasm in Senegal for the president’s stop, it clearly detracted from the message we were trying to convey to our fellow citizens back home.

  At one point on Goree Island, President Diouf, whom I had known for several years, turned to his wife and asked if she had been introduced to me. She had and told him so, but he continued: “It is thanks to Ambassador Wilson that the president of the United States came to Africa, and, in particular, that President Clinton is here in Senegal with us.” I listened to his compliment and thought to myself that it couldn’t get much better than this, when a highly respected African head of state gives you the credit for bringing the president of the United States to his continent and his country. For me, there could have been no better ending to the president’s African trip on which my team and I had worked so hard. We returned to Washington, D.C., that night exhausted—and exhilarated.

  The next day, Valerie and I were married at the District Building, Washington’s City Hall, with her parents as our witnesses. Paralyzed face and all, it had been a hell of a couple of weeks.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Private Citizen

  PRIVATE CITIZEN: THAT WAS MY NEW TITLE, a status I hadn’t experienced during twenty-three years as an officer in the

  United States diplomatic corps. Getting married to Valerie hadn’t been the only change in my life. I had risen about as high as I could in the Foreign Service and decided it was time to retire and try something else in life while I was still young enough to make the transition. I spent the period from July 1998 until early 2002 relishing my new life outside of officialdom. I opened a “boutique” consulting business to help American and international companies invest in Africa. Risk assessment, project development, and strategic management in foreign environments were my focus, as I wanted to take the lessons of my foreign service years and put them to use managing businesses in an international setting. With Africa still in everyone’s thoughts after President Clinton’s trip, and with the subsequent passage of the African Trade Bill, there was much to do. My list of clients was small, as I did not want to overextend myself while learning the ropes, but my geographical reach extended into Africa, Western Europe, and Turkey. The breadth of companies and sectors was already fascinating for me. I had become involved in gold mining in West Africa—including in Niger, which was just opening up some fields—as well as telecommunications and the petroleum sector. Oil from Africa was emerging as an alternative to oil from the Persian Gulf, with new discoveries in Angola and Equatorial Guinea fueling a surge in interest.

  In May 1998, one month after Valerie and I were married, we moved into a new home. We had been looking at houses since our return from Europe the previous summer, taking every Sunday and as many Saturday afternoons as I could get away from the NSC to look at neighborhoods and houses for sale. We knew that we wanted to live in Washington itself and to have a view, if possible. There are not many areas within the district that fit that bill, but after months of searching, in February we found a house under construction that matched our criteria. To get inside, we had to inch our way carefully down an unpaved muddy drive and clamber up a half-built stairway that opened onto the kitchen. I pulled Valerie up, and we looked out through the floor-to-ceiling windows at a view of the Potomac River, the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial, and the skyline of Rosslyn, Virginia, across the river. It was perfect, and I wanted to make an offer on the spot. Valerie, ever the prudent one, was concerned about the cost, so we hesitated for a couple of weeks, until my brother, Will, a real estate broker visiting from San Clemente, California, showed her how it would actually cost us less per month after taxes than renting our apartment in the Watergate.

  Before we found our perfect home, there had been just two issues to resolve. The first involved our life together. As Valerie put it, she hadn’t wanted to push me into getting married if I wasn’t ready, but she did want me to understand that if she was going to make such a large investment with me, she was damn well going to sign on the dotted line as Valerie Wilson, or not at all. That was an easy one. There had never been a question in my mind of whether we were going to marry, just when. We had known from the beginning that we were meant for each other. The purchase of the house gave us a reason to do it sooner rather than later. We had married on April 3, the day after my return from the president’s trip to Africa, and a month later we signed the final sales document for our new home. It had been quite a year since we returned from Europe, and it didn’t look likely to slacken off.

  The other question we discussed before getting married was about children. Valerie and I had also discussed this before we married. She wanted a child, but because I already had two grown children—my twins, Sabrina and Joe, who were now in college—she was uncertain about my willingness to do it all over again. Would I be amenable to one more? she asked. H’mm, the choice seemed to be between long, kid-free vacations at ski resorts or on Caribbean beaches, and the full-time job of parenthood. Looking at my soon-to-be-wife, though, I found it hard to refuse her anything. She was the most loving and positive and best-organized person I had ever known, and was destined to make as wonderful a mother as a wife. I figured that one new addition would not substantially change our lives. One kid, one backpack, one stroller—it ought to be a piece of cake.

  In January 2000, Valerie did the improbable, giving birth to my second set of twins, Trevor and Samantha.

  When Valerie became pregnant, all of my friends, most of them just a pregnancy away from being grandparents, feigned wanting to congratulate me, but I knew they were really saying to themselves: “Better you than me.” But they were wrong about that. Trevor and Samantha have enriched our lives enormously. Day by day they change, and every day their wonder, antics, joys, and discovery bring smiles to our faces. When the controversies surrounding my piece in the New York Times and the subsequent disclosure of Valerie’s employment broke, their innocence, their complete dependence on us—not as envoy and operative but as parents—kept it all in perspective. Our knowledge that what’s truly meaningful lies in their future, far more than in our past, has meant a lot to us. The way they keep growing, the way they wake up every morning giggling and looking for new ways to get into mischief, makes it easier to abide, or even ignore, life’s upsets.

  After childbirth, Valerie suffered a bout of postpartum depression (PPD), an insidious hormonal imbalance that is widely acknowledged in the medical community but plays no part in routine after-birth examinations. New mothers are rarely asked how they are responding emotionally to new additions to the family. So, unless they raise the issue of psychological malaise, PPD goes undiagnosed. Fortunately for us, Valerie is self-confident enough and knows herself well enough that when she was not feeling like herself, she reached out and got the help she needed rather than let the condition fester. In her case, medication rebalanced her hormones within a few months and she was soon back to being her old optimistic self.

  My older son, Joe, favors the phrase “relentlessly ch
eerful” to describe her. And it is true. She can find the good in every person and in every situation. Even in the midst of dealing with the anxieties and fears that can accompany PPD, she vowed to help others cope with its debilitating effects. She became a founding member of a Washington, D.C., foundation created to encourage the medical profession to pay attention to the condition and to help new mothers cope with it.

  My record of voting for winning candidates is embarrassingly poor, but that has never dampened my enthusiasm for participating in the election of our leaders. Having lived in dictatorships around the world, from the latter years of Franco’s Spain in the mid-1960s to Saddam’s Iraq and throughout Africa, I know from long experience that participation in our vibrant democracy is a privilege to be cherished and celebrated, not an annoyance to be ignored. The very success of the system depends on as many Americans as possible becoming engaged in the political process.

  I am happy donating money to candidates—of either party—in whom I sense the potential for good leadership, and chose to make a contribution to the Bush campaign before the 2000 South Carolina primary. John McCain—despite all of his laudable military and government service to our country, including years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam—simply did not seem to me to be the best Republican candidate. Bush’s rhetoric of compassionate conservatism appealed to me. It sounded as if he would revitalize the approach to foreign policy which I served under in the first Bush administration, and that struck me as a much more measured and prudent alternative to anything that McCain had to offer. I could live, I decided, with a second Bush administration in which the son’s principles and polices mirrored his father’s. I was also no doubt influenced by my deep respect for the father and for many of his advisers with whom I had worked a decade before.

  After Bush’s poor showing in New Hampshire, he moved on to South Carolina, where his campaign adopted some despicable tactics to defeat McCain. While Bush masqueraded as his affable self, promising to change the tone in Washington and restore honor and dignity to the White House, his underlings started spreading malicious rumors that McCain’s wife was a drug addict and that they had a black baby. In fact, his wife had reportedly become dependent on pain pills she had been taking for a medical condition many years before. And, yes, the McCains did have an adopted child. But whose business was it that Mrs. McCain had suffered health problems? And what difference did it make that a child being raised by the McCains came from a different ethnic group than their own? How scared was the Bush campaign after their drubbing in the New Hampshire primary, and how low would they stoop to smear a candidate who dared challenge what the campaign regarded as Bush’s right to the nomination? I should have learned more than I did from watching that experience, for similar tactics would later be employed to try to destroy me.

  I probably would not have voted for the Republican nominee in any case, since social issues are also important to me and my views here put me firmly in the camp of the Democratic Party. But the Bush campaign tactics in the South Carolina Republican primary represented the worst in American political discourse and should have been repudiated by the candidate. Campaigns rooted in the exploitation of people’s fears, prejudices, and hatreds prevent us from identifying and electing our most capable leaders.

  Soon after the South Carolina primary, I made a contribution to the Gore campaign and joined the foreign policy group advising him, meeting with them on a regular basis. Our role was not to stump for the candidate but to shape the positions that the vice president would articulate and to answer questions that came from the electorate or the press. Foreign policy was not a high priority—it rarely is, even in national campaigns—so we were not overworked. Anyway, Al was so steeped in national security matters, with his years as senator and vice president, that our contributions to his effort only supported what he already stood for rather than broke any new policy ground.

  As I came to discover, this is not unusual. A campaign is as much an extended exercise in logistics as it is a showcase for new ideas. The candidate has a basic stump speech, which varies somewhat from audience to audience, but which seeks mostly to energize supporters and attract new ones. Position papers and the occasional substantive speech are used to highlight differences with competitors and to make sweeping promises, usually without many gritty details. Broad goals rather than fine points are the norm. The policy committees, such as the one I served on, provide guidance on specific issues, but their work remains mostly in the background.

  The busiest people on any campaign, with the exception of the candidate, are the ones who move him from place to place and those who try to keep him “on message.” The latter are the gatekeepers through which new ideas and policy proposals have to pass. American campaigns emphasize the image, character, and personality of the candidate far more than they do positions or even experience. New ideas are assessed not for their policy import but for their political impact, and the candidate naturally becomes far more scripted and less spontaneous than he might otherwise have been.

  The Al Gore I accompanied to town meetings throughout Tennessee in 1985 was relaxed, humorous, and approachable, but the Al Gore in the debates and in front of the cameras during the 2000 presidential campaign came across as distant, impersonal, even arrogant to some. As a consequence, a public servant who had devoted his adult life to his country, from service in Vietnam to the vice presidency, found himself out of a job in January 2001. I have often wondered if Al wouldn’t have done better if he’d been left more to his own instincts. The one time when he seemed to actually relax, other than in his concession speech after the Supreme Court ruling that made George W. Bush president, was after his Democratic primary debate with Bill Bradley at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. In a post-debate interview, he was energized, funny, and human, a far cry from the Al Gore of the debates with Bush that were so wickedly satirized on Saturday Night Live.

  The Florida debacle and the questionable intervention of the Supreme Court left me with a bad taste, not for the incoming president but for a process that had diminished our democracy, including people gathering across from the vice president’s residence in Washington and chanting “Get out of Cheney’s house now.” An Angolan friend of mine remarked: “One candidate loses the popular vote by over 500,000 ballots, but his brother is governor of the one state where the outcome is too close to call. The effort to count the ballots is disrupted by the Washington staffs of elected representatives from the candidate’s party, and the court that ultimately adjudicates the outcome is made up largely by people appointed by the candidate’s father. Sounds a lot like an election in Africa.”

  The 2000 election was the first I had spent in the United States since 1980, and I was stunned by the personal animus I saw among partisans of both parties. In my career, I had worked with both Republicans and Democrats and found that while we often disagreed on approaches, we shared many of the same basic objectives. I liked to think that the exchange of ideas enriched the policy outcome. Foreign policy had generally operated within well-defined parameters. The international structure developed since the end of World War II had served our national interests well. We were the world’s preeminent political, economic, and military power, a position attained not simply by the growth of our military prowess but by the value of our ideas, the vitality of our culture, and the innovativeness of our economy. That success in and of itself blunted attempts to radically change direction. There was simply no reason to upset the system that had benefited us so much. Yet now there was no dialogue, just shouting, and the zealotry of ideologues. The divisions were profound and, at least in my areas of experience, unnecessary.

  In retrospect, I was naïve in thinking that a mature democracy like ours would naturally embrace the rule of law and engage in polite discourse instead of the law of tooth and claw I had seen operate abroad. In this case, the shameless lust for power, and the genuine hatred among the right wing for Bill Clinton, just overwhelmed the Democrats. I was appalled by the gutter t
actics of the out-of-state rabble that bullied public servants and intimidated them into stopping the recount of ballots in Miami-Dade County. I had railed against such conduct in flawed elections in Africa, and disliked it just as much in my own country.

  Although I had voted for the candidate who ultimately lost the election, I assumed hopefully, and naïvely again, that once in office George W. Bush and his experienced team would curb the excesses of the extremists, and that the country would be in good hands. Valerie and I even attended a swank inauguration reception on Pennsylvania Avenue where we looked down on the president’s parade route and celebrated with Bush supporters the peaceful transition of power that is the hallmark of our democracy.

  One of my professional activities during this period led to a seat on the Defense subcommittee of the board of the American Turkish Council, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the promotion of U.S.-Turkish relations. Its chairman was retired General Brent Scowcroft, one of the most honorable men I have known in public life. He served as national security adviser under the first President Bush, as he had in the administration of President Ford. Pragmatic in outlook, Brent reflects the very best of traditional Republican foreign policy values. He is a committed internationalist who understands that American strength is enhanced through global cooperation and, like most military veterans, views war as a last resort to be used only in cases of absolute necessity and when all else has failed. In his mid-seventies, the general remains energetic and vigorous. While he has earned and certainly deserves his status as an icon of the foreign policy establishment and a true elder statesman, he remains as easygoing and unpretentious as one could imagine. Indeed, Scowcroft is the perfect gentleman, ever polite and always interested in the views of others. His one extravagance is a silver Mercedes convertible. Valerie has a not-so-secret crush on him—not for his car, but for his charm.