My piece had now run in the New York Times and I had been profiled in the Washington Post. Senators Warner and Levin were supportive of my case and complimentary about my experience, while David Broder characterized the two points I had made as important. The positions I had taken were now part of the public discussion and my credibility, though sure to be attacked, had been vouched for.
Twenty-four hours later, the White House acknowledged that the sixteen words did “not rise to the level that we would put in a presidential speech.” I honestly thought that my exposure in the matter would quickly fade, as the administration would now have to concentrate on the serious question of competence among the members of the president’s staff. I told any interested friends and all inquisitive journalists that as my charges had been satisfactorily answered, I’d have nothing more to say. I honored obligations for interviews that I had previously accepted, but I declined any others in order to allow the waters I had roiled to still. I thought that surely the focus of the debate would now shift away from me. How naïve and mistaken I was on that score!
Astonishingly, when the administration officials finally did tell the truth, they quickly regretted it and began to backtrack. Almost as soon as the White House acknowledgement was announced, Walter Pincus told me he began to receive phone calls from members of the administration trying to take it back. One official told Walter that telling the truth “was the biggest mistake the administration had made.”
On Monday evening, while the administration’s mea culpa for their error was being circulated among the press, the president and his entourage set off for a trip to Africa. However, rather than simply getting the story behind them by finding and firing the person responsible for inserting the lie into the State of the Union address, they began trying to denigrate me.
Ari Fleisher, the president’s press secretary, was planning to leave the White House after the current trip in order to set up his own communications shop to help corporations and CEOs deal with problems like the one his boss was currently experiencing. I am not sure his performance during his last week with the White House would have inspired anybody to hire him.
Within a day, Fleisher was putting a different spin on the situation and downplaying the importance of my report. At one briefing after another, he had something to say about me, and by doing so gave the journalists another news cycle to talk about the sixteen words rather than about the president’s trip. Instead of containing the burgeoning press frenzy, Fleisher kept giving the story legs, so much so that it soon overwhelmed the president’s agenda in Africa.
Fleisher stupidly attributed to me, for example, the official denials of the government of Niger. He spun: “Wouldn’t any government deny it?” While I was not accepting television interviews, I was still deluged by the print press for my reactions to whatever Fleischer had said in each morning’s press gaggle. He thus obliged me to point out to reporters that I had not spoken to the current Nigerien government, so there must be another report in U.S. hands. Of course, there were in fact two other reports: that of our ambassador to Niger, and that of a four-star Marine Corps General. Sorry, Ari.
I had been aware of both reports from the very beginning of my own involvement, of course, but had deliberately refrained from citing them in my piece, as I had wanted to limit my comments to my own personal experience.
By the third day of the president’s trip to Africa, I was dismayed by the direction the White House was taking. Had I been the chief executive of this operation, as President Bush likes to say he is, I would have been furious that a member of my staff had inserted such an obviously false claim in the most important speech I might ever make. Simply sending Chief of Staff Andrew Card back to Washington from Senegal, the first African stop, with instructions to fire the offending staffer and to escort him off the White House premises prior to the president’s return, would have stopped the story in its tracks.
Bush and the press corps could then have both focused on the purpose of the trip to Africa. Instead—and not for the first or certainly the last time—the president proved to be more loyal to his senior staff than they were to him—for, even though his administration had admitted error, his press secretary was floundering on Air Force One, lamely trying to turn the attention to me; while, back in Washington, right-wing hatchet men were being wheeled out to attack me. More ominously, plots were being hatched in the White House that would betray America’s national security.
Clifford May was first off the mark, spewing uninformed vitriol in a piece in National Review Online blindly operating on the principle that facts, those pesky facts, just do not matter. May, a former Republican National Committee staffer, is president of an organization founded two days after 9/11, whose advisory boards include such likely suspects as Newt Gingrich, James Woolsey, Richard Perle, Charles Krauthammer, and Frank Gaffney. He suggested in a ridiculously argued article that I had told the truth because I was a partisan Democrat. Indeed. And if Democrats tell the truth, then what do Republicans do? In fact, if the president’s staff had heeded my report, as well as the two others in their files, rather than the rubbish that produced the sixteen-word lie, the president would not have found it necessary to retract a portion of his speech.
No better argued was an opinion piece that appeared in the Wall Street Journal by former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, whose criticism was picked up by others. Weinberger took a sentence that I had inserted in my piece at the request of David Shipley merely to add some atmosphere—about drinking tea during my meetings in Niger—and made it the centerpiece of an attack, suggesting that supposedly I’d been excessively casual and dilatory in my approach to the mission. He charged that I’d had a less-than-stellar career, presumably because I had been ambassador only to two African countries and in charge of African affairs for President Clinton—which was to say that I’d not had an ambassadorship to a European capital like London or Bonn. Of course, Weinberger conveniently neglected to note that I had fulfilled my most recent mission for my government and brought the truth back from Niger. Moreover, he completely missed the larger point of my article, which asked how the president could be so poorly served by his staff—a staff that would allow a lie to appear in any remarks by him, but also to figure so significantly in such a crucial speech. Weinberger was not the most credible person to launch that particular counterattack, since, but for the grace of a pardon by the first President Bush, he might well have had to do jail time for how poorly he had served his president, Ronald Reagan, in the Iran-Contra affair.
It seemed that the motive for the attacks on me was to discourage anyone else from coming forward who had a critical story to tell. Prior to my Times piece, there had been a number of news stories quoting unnamed CIA analysts who cited pressure they felt at repeated visits to the Agency from the vice president, his chief of staff, Lewis Libby, and the ubiquitous Newt Gingrich. In essence, the message was: “If you pull a ‘Wilson’ on us, we will do worse to you.” However offensive, there was a certain logic to it. If you have something to hide, one way to keep it secret is to threaten anyone who might expose it. But it was too late to silence me; I had already said all I had to say. Presumably though, they thought they could still silence others by attacking me.
On issues that entail national security, there are legitimate reasons for preserving secrecy. In my case, for example, I never mentioned my trip to Niger to anyone during the debate prior to the war, as it was a discreet mission with national security implications. Only after the documents regarding it became public and the administration began to misstate the facts of my findings in Niger did I speak out. At issue, for me, was not the purpose of the trip, or my findings; the issue was the lying on the part of the president’s staff about its knowledge of those findings.
The decision of the president’s people to come after me and make me an example arose from no concern over the emergence of secrets related to my mission—there weren’t any—but rather from the worry that the pressure th
ey had placed upon intelligence analysts, in order to manipulate data to conform their already determined political ends, would be exposed. From a journalist and a retired intelligence official, I heard of political appointees asking analysts the same question twenty, thirty times until the president’s policy makers got the response that served their need, irrespective of the truth.
And when the warmongers discovered they could not browbeat the analysts, such as in the Niger uranium claim, they simply found a way around the objections of the intelligence community by attributing the allegation to the British white paper. Everybody in the intelligence-analysis world knew that the British claim was based on the same suspect reporting that our intelligence had rejected, but no matter. Greg Thielman, the State Department analyst, called it the rumor that would not go away, however many times it was knocked down. And when they were caught in their lie, they took the narrowest of legal explanations, such as when Donald Rumsfeld said in an interview, “Technically, the president was accurate,” because he had cited the British as the source. Even though the United States spends approximately $30 billion a year on intelligence, much of it to ensure that the information provided to policy makers is as accurate as possible, our political leaders chose to reject the analysis of the intelligence community in favor of information that they knew to be untrue in order to scare the American people about the nature of the Iraqi threat.
The British, for their part, still maintain that independent intelligence sources substantiate their allegation, the details of which they claim they cannot share with us. But as the British know very well, article ten of UN Resolution 1441 calls on all member states to share information on prohibited nuclear programs with the International Atomic Energy Agency, something they have still not done in this case. So we are supposed to believe that the president’s “technically accurate” sixteen words, based upon a piece of intelligence that our $30-billion-a-year intelligence operation had no opportunity to independently verify, is acceptable. Well, it isn’t, and it isn’t acceptable to threaten career public servants who challenge inappropriate behavior. But attempting to prop up the lie suited the objective of the administration.
I later learned from reporting in the Washington Post that it was also naked revenge that motivated the White House attacks on me. Somebody in the White House was incensed that I had dared to call a lie a lie—was furious at me rather than at the person who had put the lie in the speech. Spite is not a rational act. Nothing would change what had already been said; and, in any event, the White House had already admitted its error about the sixteen words. That a public servant charged with the stewardship of our national security would use his station in government to smear a perceived adversary purely for the sake of personal revenge struck me as a particularly egregious abuse of the public trust. I wanted a more rational cause.
Eventually I came to conclude that in all likelihood a combination of motives—to intimidate the intelligence community into silence and to fulfill some twisted sense of revenge—drove the attacks on me. This Bush administration clearly operates on the principle that it is acceptable, and indeed desirable, to shift the debate from the issue to the person, to divert attention from the facts, and to confuse rather than enlighten the American people. This administration knows no such thing as a fair fight; all that counts is who wins and who loses. Kicking an adversary in the political shins, pulling partisan hair, biting contrarian ankles—these are all acceptable. It was what they did to John McCain in South Carolina, and it was what some unnamed leakers in the White House tried to do to me after my article appeared on July 6, 2003.
The attacks were not worth worrying about, and they certainly didn’t warrant my dignifying them with a response. All that week after the article appeared and the one following, I played as much golf as I possibly could, and refused requests for interviews and consciously avoided contact with the press, except to respond to the assertions coming from Ari Fleischer in Africa. On the golf course, it is considered bad form to allow a cell phone to ring. I had real reasons to observe that etiquette, apart from love of the game. The golf links provided a welcome refuge from the media feeding frenzy that was swirling around me.
Then came Bob Novak’s article exposing Valerie. Here was the real wakeup call. It showed me how far, and where, the administration was willing and ready to push their attacks.
Chapter Seventeen
A Strange Encounter with Robert Novak
LATE ON TUESDAY AFTERNOON, July 8, six days before Robert Novak’s article about Valerie and me, a friend showed up at my office with a strange and disturbing tale. He had been walking down Pennsylvania Avenue toward my office near the White House when he came upon Novak, who, my friend assumed, was en route to the George Washington University auditorium for the daily taping of CNN’s Crossfire. He asked Novak if he could walk a block or two with him, as they were headed in the same direction; Novak acquiesced. Striking up a conversation, my friend, without revealing that he knew me, asked Novak about the uranium controversy. It was a minor problem, Novak replied, and opined that the administration should have dealt with it weeks before. My friend then asked Novak what he thought about me, and Novak answered: “Wilson’s an asshole. The CIA sent him. His wife, Valerie, works for the CIA. She’s a weapons of mass destruction specialist. She sent him.” At that point, my friend and Novak went their separate ways. My friend headed straight for my office a couple of blocks away.
Once he related this unsettling story to me, I asked him to immediately write down the details of the conversation and afterwards ushered him out of my office. Next, I contacted the head of the news division at CNN, Eason Jordan, Novak’s titular boss, whom I had known for a number of years. It took several calls, but I finally tracked him down on his cell phone. I related to him the details of my friend’s encounter with Novak and pointed out that whatever my wife might or might not be, it was the height of irresponsibility for Novak to share such information with an absolute stranger on a Washington street. I asked him to speak to Novak for me, but he demurred—he said he did not know him very well—and suggested that I speak to Novak myself. I arranged for him to have Novak call me and hung up.
Novak called the next morning, but I was out, and then so was he. We did not connect until the following day, July 10. He listened quietly as I repeated to him my friend’s account of their conversation. I told him I couldn’t imagine what had possessed him to blurt out to a complete stranger what he had thought he knew about my wife.
Novak apologized, and then asked if I would confirm what he had heard from a CIA source: that my wife worked at the Agency. I told him that I didn’t answer questions about my wife. I told him that my story was not about my wife or even about me; it was about sixteen words in the State of the Union address.
I then read to him three sentences from a 1990 news story about the evacuation of Baghdad: “The chief American diplomat, Joe Wilson, shepherds his flock of some 800 known Americans like a village priest. At 4:30 Sunday morning, he was helping 55 wives and children of U. S. diplomats from Kuwait load themselves and their few remaining possessions on transport for the long haul on the desert to Jordan. He shows the stuff of heroism.” The reporters who had written this, I pointed out, were Robert Novak and Rowland Evans. I suggested to Novak that he might want to check his files before writing about me. I also offered to send him all the articles I had written in the past year on policy toward Iraq so that he could educate himself on the positions I had taken. He would learn, if he took the time, that I was hardly antiwar, just anti-dumb war. Before I hung up, Novak apologized again for having spoken about Valerie to a complete stranger.
The following Monday, July 14, 2003, I read Novak’s syndicated column in the Washington Post. The sixth paragraph of the ten-paragraph story leapt out at me: “Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson’s wife suggested sending him to Niger t
o investigate the Italian report.”
When I showed it to Valerie, she was stoic in her manner but I could see she was crestfallen. Twenty years of loyal service down the drain, and for what, she asked after she had read it. What was Novak trying to say? What did blowing her cover have to do with the story? It was nothing but a hatchet job. She immediately began to prepare a checklist of things she needed to do to minimize the fallout to projects she was working on. Ever efficient, she jotted down reminders to mask the emotions swirling through her body. Finally, as the enormity of what Novak had done now settled on her, she sat in the corner and wondered aloud if she would still have any friends left after they found out that the person they knew was not her at all but a lie that she lived very convincingly.
Amid the welter of emotions I felt that morning, I tried to understand a particular element of Novak’s story.
He cited not a CIA source, as he had indicated on the phone four days earlier, but rather two senior administration sources; I called him for a clarification. He asked if I was very displeased with the article, and I replied that I did not see what the mention of my wife had added to it but that the reason for my call was to question his sources. When we first spoke, he had cited to me a CIA source, yet his published story cited two senior administration sources. He replied: “I misspoke the first time we talked.”
A couple of days before Novak’s article was published, but after my friend’s strange encounter with him, I had received a call from Post reporter Walter Pincus, who alerted me that “they are coming after you.” Since I already knew what Novak had learned about Valerie, I was increasingly concerned over what else might be put out about her. I assumed, though, that the CIA would itself quash any article that made reference to Valerie. While not yet familiar with the specifics of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, I knew that protection of the identity of agents in our clandestine service was the highest priority, and well understood by the experienced press corps in Washington. Novak had still been trolling for sources when we spoke on the telephone, so I assumed that he did not have the confirmations he would need from the CIA to publish the story. I told Valerie, who alerted the press liaison at the CIA, and we were left with the reasonable expectation that any reference to her would be dropped, since he would have no way of confirming the information—unless, of course, he got confirmations from another part of the government, such as the White House.
The Politics of Truth_Inside the Lies That Put the White House on Trial and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity Page 35