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 was astounded by the spokesman’s comment. Within days after it made the news, I was on the set at CNN, waiting to do an interview, when David Ensor, a CNN national security reporter, happened by. He was looking at the story with an eye out for the perpetrators of the forgeries and asked me what I knew about the Niger uranium business. I told him that as far as I knew, the State Department spokesman had not spoken accurately.

  I could have told him a lot more. I knew that in addition to my report, there were reports in the government files from our ambassador and from a Marine Corps general. I knew that at the State Department African Bureau, nobody in the management chain of command had ever believed there was anything to the story that a spokesman was now claiming they “fell for.” I knew that even if the Nigerien military dictator, Mainassara Bare, assassinated in April 1999, had wanted to sell uranium to Iraq, the system did not lend itself to such circumvention. From the sixteen words on down, in short, the whole administration line was bogus, and I certainly wasn’t the only one who knew it. As I sat there in the green room, I concluded that the U.S. government had to be held to account. It was unacceptable to lie about such an important issue.

  I told Ensor that I would be helpful in his efforts to ferret out the truth, and offered to answer a question or two on the air and to provide leads to him. While I was not willing at that stage to disclose my own involvement, it was not a difficult decision to make, to point others in the right direction. The essential information—the forged documents—was already in the public domain; the State Department spokesman had purposely deceived the public in his response, or else he himself had been deceived. Whichever the case, in my mind it was essential that the record be corrected.

  When I went on the air, the CNN newscaster, prompted by Ensor, asked me about the “We fell for it” line. I replied that if the U.S. government checked its files, it would, I believed, discover that it knew more about the case than the spokesman was letting on. I then added that either the spokesman was being disingenuous, or he was ill-informed. That statement apparently won me the attention of U.S. government officials. From a respected reporter close to the subsequent inquiry into the later disclosure of Valerie’s status, I learned that a meeting right around the time of this particular CNN appearance led to the decision to produce a “workup” on me for the Office of the Vice President. It was not made clear to me whether Dick Cheney himself attended this meeting, although I was told that senior members of his staff and quite possibly other senior Republicans, including former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, were present and that Gingrich actively participated in a strategy session, the objective of which was to figure out how to discredit me.

  I clearly remember a quite different White House response in January 1991, when I arrived home after the evacuation of the American embassy in Baghdad. To be greeted as a “true American hero” by President George H. W. Bush for the part I played throughout Operation Desert Shield, gratifying as it was, was not so heartening as the president’s profound concern over the endangerment of thousands of Americans, coalition forces, and Iraqis in the imminent Desert Storm. Bush and I had spent twenty minutes together talking quietly about the upcoming conflict. The president’s questions reflected his sense of awesome responsibility for the agonizing decisions he had been called upon to make. Indeed, all of our political leadership had grappled fully with the implications of going to war in the Gulf.

  All the senators and representatives, Republicans and Democrats alike, who met with me in the days following my return from Baghdad explained to me, in excruciating detail, the extent to which they had plumbed the depths of their consciences before voting on the use-of-force authorization. I myself had fully supported the case for war. But it did not matter to me how our leaders voted regarding the use of force; what did matter was that they took the time to reflect on the enormity of their decision.

  Reflection, conscience, concern, full consideration of the consequences—these qualities did not characterize the debate prior to the second Gulf War. All were superseded—and the congressional leaders of both parties were overwhelmed—by the superheated rhetoric of the administration and the neoconservatives that backed them up with their ubiquitous presence in the media and think-tanks. The looming midterm elections affected crucial decisions, as the administration made it clear that it would attack opponents for supposedly being soft on terrorism. There were some exceptions, notably Robert Byrd, who, after railing against the administration for its policy of preemption and its rush to invade Iraq, chastised his congressional colleagues for having abdicated their Constitutional responsibilities to declare war.

  Senator Joe Biden and his Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff, headed by the very able Anthony Blinken, tried to constrain the White House by revising the language of the congressional resolution to authorize the use of force against Iraq, but that effort was short-circuited when the Democratic leadership essentially caved in. The combination of threats of defeat at the polls with presidential promises that the congressional resolution would provide him the ammunition he needed to negotiate a strong U.N. resolution on disarmament proved to be too much for careerist politicians.

  The Democrats were extraordinarily conflicted about Iraq. It is important to remember the context of the moment. Americans were still reeling from the effects of 9/11. As the administration liked to repeat at every opportunity, our view of the world had changed as a consequence of the terror attacks. In 1998, Congress had passed the Iraq Liberation Act, which gave the policy to oust Saddam the force of law, while the United Nations had proven to be ineffective in its enforcement of existing resolutions. All along, Saddam had remained as intransigent as ever, and he continued to be so, even though he had been effectively contained and weakened by twelve years of sanctions, American military enforcement of no-fly zones, and swift counterattacks on air defense sites whenever the Iraqis turned their radar on our jets.

  The escalation of Palestinian terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians after 9/11 and the retaliatory attacks by the Israelis contributed further to the sense of a world grown much more dangerous and threatening. When Saddam, in yet another act of stupidity, aligned himself with the Palestinian intifada by offering $25,000 to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, he also gave the American war party a golden opportunity. Now, they could add his financing of Palestinian terrorism to their stock talking points.

  But in fact the view of the world as seen by the president’s closest advisers had not changed at all. For years, they had harbored an intense desire to go into Iraq and finish off Saddam. In the eighties Paul Wolfowitz had identified Saddam as the dictator every American should love to hate. Throughout the nineties, the demise of Saddam at the mighty hand of the American military became a rallying cry for the political Right.

  The history of the first Gulf War was revised and rewritten in the pages of the neoconservative flagship publication The Weekly Standard, which persistently denigrated the clear diplomatic and military victory that the international community had achieved in driving Saddam from Kuwait. But we should not forget that war’s signal accomplishments: extensive and tireless work that led to the international coalition; troops and funds assembled from scores of countries; a series of U.N. resolutions that legitimized military action under international law; the establishment of useful precedents for future engagements; and the patient and thoughtful debate in our own country over the use of force. The first Gulf War will go down in history as a model for the art of diplomacy and the practice of war in a crisis situation. The second Gulf War will not be so charitably reviewed.

  In the early months of 2003, the leaders of the political Right held the megaphone, and they were bellowing into it to push for war. By the time we invaded Iraq, a majority of Americans believed that Saddam had been responsible for the attacks on our territory and that he already possessed nuclear weapons. “We cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun—that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud,�
� the president warned us in his October 8, 2002, speech in Cincinnati, to make the case to the American people for the congressional resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq.

  The president and his senior advisers had used the “mushroom cloud” metaphor repeatedly over the months to pump up support for war. Now, with the IAEA’s revelation that no negotiation for the Iraqi purchase of uranium from Niger had ever taken place, one key element underpinning the charge against Iraq was acknowledged to have been based on a fraud. The only other piece of information that the administration had marshaled as evidence of Saddam’s nuclear intentions was a claim that aluminum tubes purchased by Iraq, but seized before they could reach their destination, were for centrifuges that could be used to enrich uranium and create fissile material. However, experts throughout the government, including at the Department of Energy, had concluded that the tubes were ill suited for that function. In fact, they matched the specifications for artillery rockets and were more likely to have been purchased for that purpose, as David Kay later concluded.

  Aluminum tubes ill suited for enriching uranium that did not exist constituted a compound lie that badly undermined the argument that Iraq had posed a grave and gathering danger to the United States. It cut to the heart of the case for war. The casual fashion in which the administration subsequently dismissed the revelation that the uranium charge was false was inexcusable.

  Somebody had allowed the president of the United States to proclaim as the truth a lie, and on an issue as momentous as our reason for going to war. To excuse the lie with “We fell for it”—which was another lie—was shameful.

  Over the next several months, as journalists tried to get to the bottom of the story with my support, the administration continued to lie. For four months, from March until July, questions were parried or dismissed. Condoleezza Rice categorically denied that she or anyone else at senior levels in the White House knew that the received intelligence did not support the charge. Later, when finally forced to admit that the CIA had transmitted two memos and placed one telephone call to the National Security Council on the subject, she argued that the uranium charge was really just a small part of the nuclear weapons program indictment. Another lie. Had the charge been true, it would really have been the smoking gun to prove that Saddam had broken out of the box of containment into which the international community had effectively put him in 1991. That is why it was absolutely vital to determine the accuracy of the allegation.

  The position of national security adviser was established after World War II to advise the president of the United States on strategic threats to the country; in other words, to keep count of nuclear weapons worldwide and to determine how to defend ourselves against any threat posed by them. In the post-Cold War period, most experts agreed that the single most serious threat we would face in the twenty-first century lay in weapons of mass destruction at the command of a rogue state or international terrorists. Accordingly, when it is suspected that a rogue state, such as Iraq, is seeking to develop a nuclear weapons program, a national security adviser of any administration and of any party would have no priority higher than that of finding the truth of the allegation. If it is found to be false, we can again breathe a bit easier and continue to maintain our vigilance. If it is found to be true, then we have reason to consider the whole range of possible actions, including war if necessary.

  In the case of Iraq, it was known that the allegation was false, but the U.S. went to war anyway, after President Bush first deceived the nation and the world. Somebody else may have inserted the words into his speech, but the president uttered them.

  Dr. Rice belatedly acknowledged that the National Security Council had been informed that the intelligence did not support the Niger-Iraq uranium charge, but that in the three months between the October speech in Cincinnati and the State of the Union address in January, “she forgot.” How does somebody whose job it is to track nuclear weapon developments, especially in rogue states, receive such critical information and then proceed to forget it? This was not a grade school homework assignment. The short answer is that they don’t forget, unless they are derelict. Regrettably, disingenuousness is another possibility. Condoleezza Rice may be many things, but she is hardly derelict.

  The last straw came when Dr. Rice, in a June 8 appearance on Meet the Press, told Tim Russert: “Maybe somebody in the bowels of the Agency knew something about this, but nobody in my circles.” That was a lie, and I knew it. She had to have known it as well.

  The next day, I called a former government official who knew Dr. Rice and expressed my disgust at her continuing refusal to tell the truth. He replied that the interview had not been one of her finest moments. A call to a senior official in the administration elicited the suggestion that I might have to write the story myself. I took the remark to heart and called David Shipley, the editor of the op-ed page at the New York Times. He immediately offered me fifteen hundred words to tell my story.

  Still, I hesitated, in the hope that pressure from journalists would force the hand of the administration. But two weeks after the Rice remark on Meet the Press, with my name now openly circulating among the press, it was clear that sooner or later my anonymity was going to be sacrificed on the altar of the story.

  I learned that on Sunday, June 22, the London newspaper The Independent blared a headline across the top of the front page, just below a banner advertising Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss’s new book, that read “Retired American diplomat accuses British Ministers of being liars.” I knew then that the story was spinning out of control and that I now had no choice but to write it myself.

  A Washington Post reporter named Richard Leiby had earlier written about the hostages from the first Gulf War. After that article appeared, he had contacted me to let me know that all the former hostages he had interviewed had praised the efforts of the embassy in Baghdad to care for them. “Whatever their feelings about the U.S. government, the Iraqis, or their own companies, they were uniformly complimentary about what you and your staff did to save their lives, and to a man they asked that I contact you and send you their warmest regards,” he told me.

  Now Rich wanted to profile me regarding my work during the first Gulf War. When he called, I told him that I’d welcome a profile, because an op-ed piece detailing my trip to Niger would be appearing in a Sunday edition of the New York Times. He knew about the trip, as his Post colleague Walter Pincus was one of the journalists I had spoken to on background in the months since the president’s sixteen words. I thought that a separate article in the Post would complement my own piece by helping to establish who I was and what I had accomplished in my career. When Rich learned that my piece would be published in the Times on July 6, he offered to interview me immediately so the story could run the same day as the op-ed in the Times.

  Rich came to our house the same evening and met Valerie in her guise as an energy consultant. He played with my naked twins (he also has twins) and watched my mother-in-law energetically helping us get the house ready for our annual Fourth of July party the next night. Despite the chaos, he managed to get the material he needed for the article, as well as a lot of additional material that he would later discover he could use for a piece on Valerie when her true employment became public knowledge.

  On July 6, 2003, the New York Times published “What I Didn’t Find in Africa.” The night before, at about 10:30 P.M., the piece hit the New York Times Web site. At 10:32 P.M., I received a call from a New York Post reporter looking for a quote from me. At 10:34 P.M. a producer for Meet the Press called to invite me on the show the next morning to defend my article. To sweeten the offer, she told me that I would be leading off the program and would be followed by Republican Senator John Warner and Democratic Senator Carl Levin, both of whom had just returned from Iraq. I agreed, took the phone off the hook, and went to bed.

  The path to writing the op-ed piece had been straightforward in my own mind. My government had refused to address the fundament
al question of how the lie regarding Saddam’s supposed attempt to purchase African uranium had found its way into the State of the Union address. Time after time during the previous four months, from March to July, administration spokespeople had sloughed off the reality that the president of the United States had sent our country to war in order to defend us against the threat of the “mushroom cloud” when they knew, as I did, that at least one of the two “facts” underpinning the case was not a fact at all. It was disinformation. It had never occurred to me to keep quiet about this. Until the issue was addressed seriously, I felt obliged to keep raising it. In the end, when it became clear to me that my name was about to emerge in the public domain, I had to raise it, publicly and in my own words. I realized that my credibility would be called into question, and I was steeled for that. But, whatever one might say about me—and there is a lot—the truth remained: There was never any evidence of Iraqi uranium purchases from Niger.

  Before I left for the NBC studios that Sunday morning, Valerie straightened my tie, brushed the lint off my suit, and reminded me, as only a wife could, that Meet the Press was not just the major leagues of news programs, it was the World Series. I needed to be at the top of my game.

  With resolve I arrived at the NBC green room, where I waited with Senator Warner; David Broder, the venerable Washington Post political reporter; Elisabeth Bumiller from the New York Times; and the syndicated columnist Robert Novak. As Senator Warner and I walked onto the set, we discussed the crisis in Liberia and whether we should send American forces to restore order there.

  Andrea Mitchell, sitting in for Tim Russert on that holiday weekend, opened the program with a discussion of my piece. I made two main points: first, that in a democracy the decision to send troops to war had to be based on commonly accepted facts; and second, that if the war had in fact been based on a trumped-up threat of weapons of mass destruction, should we in the future face a real WMD threat, it would be much more difficult to convince the world or even the American people of its actual seriousness.