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

by Joseph Wilson

  Quite apart from the matter of her employment, the assertion that Valerie had played any substantive role in the decision to ask me to go to Niger was false on the face of it. Anyone who knows anything about the government bureaucracy knows that public servants go to great lengths to avoid nepotism or any appearance of it. Family members are expressly forbidden from accepting employment that places them in any direct professional relationship, even once or twice removed. Absurd as these lengths may seem, a supervisor literally cannot even supervise the supervisor of the supervisor of another family member without high-level approval. Valerie could not have stood in the chain of command had she tried to. Dick Cheney might be able to find a way to appoint one of his daughters to a key decision-making position in the State Department’s Middle East Bureau, as he did; but Valerie could not—and would not if she could—have had anything to do with the CIA decision to ask me to travel to Niamey.

  The publication of the article marked a turning point in our lives. There was no possibility of Valerie recovering her former life. She would never be able to regain the anonymity and secrecy that her professional life had required; she would not be able to return to her discreet work on some of the most sensitive threats to our society in the foreseeable future, and perhaps ever.

  I had many questions for Novak: What did the inclusion of Valerie’s name add to his article? So what if she worked on intelligence related to weapons of mass destruction? There was nothing nefarious about that. All this had happened because Novak chose not to heed the entreaties of government officials to whom he spoke and who, by Novak’s own admission, asked that he not publish her name or employment. While Novak has since downplayed the request of the CIA that he not publish her name, I wondered which part of ‘NO’ he didn’t understand. Murray Waas, writing in the American Prospect, has a different take:Two government officials have told the FBI that conservative columnist Robert Novak was asked specifically not to publish the name of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame in his now-famous July 14 newspaper column. The two officials told investigators they warned Novak that by naming Plame he might potentially jeopardize her ability to engage in covert work, stymie ongoing intelligence operations, and jeopardize sensitive overseas sources.

  So what if she conveyed a request to me to come to the Agency to talk about Niger? She had played absolutely no part in the decision to send me there. Should an agency of the U.S. government not ask me about the uranium business in Niger, a subject that I knew well, just because my wife happened to work in the same suite of offices?

  Lamely attempting to shirk responsibility, Novak claimed that the CIA no was “a soft no, not a hard no.” On the wings of that ludicrous defense, he soared to new heights of journalistic irresponsibility. But Novak has long since demonstrated that he is not so much a scrupulous journalist as he is a confirmed purveyor of the right-wing party line, whether it’s touting the truth or—as it all too often is, unfortunately—promoting the big lie. In this instance, in addition to buying into the big lie, Novak was slavishly doing the bidding of the cowards in the administration who had decided that the only way to discredit me was to betray national security. I will defend his First Amendment rights as a journalist, but I don’t have to like what he did. In fact, watching Valerie’s face fall as she realized that her life had been so irreparably altered, I felt that punching the man in the nose would not have been an unreasonable response.

  I decided that I would not rise to Novak’s bait or dignify his article with a published response, and that I would not speak about Valerie other than hypothetically. It was not up to me to confirm or deny her employment; it was up to the CIA. A few days later, Newsday reporter Timothy Phelps, whom I had met in Iraq twelve years earlier, informed me that he had heard from the CIA that what Novak had reported vis-à-vis Valerie’s employment was not incorrect. I declined to be drawn into a confirmation even then.

  The week was not without its drama, however. Even though I had been avoiding the press since the day after my article appeared in July, I had still been intently following the reporting about Novak’s article in the media. Too intently. I was waking up in the middle of the night and pacing the floor, as I had during that critical period in Baghdad during Desert Shield. Back then, my mind would be going a thousand miles a minute, trying to gain an edge on the thugs in the Iraqi regime; now I was trying to predict what the thugs in my own government would do, so I’d be ready to react effectively to their next move. I would get up at 3:00 A.M., after only a few hours of sleep, and review press reports from around the world. In Britain, meanwhile, Prime Minister Tony Blair was under the gun for possibly having “sexed up” the case he had made on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. In Australia, Prime Minister John Howard was subjected to similar hard questions as well; he would subsequently be censured for having deceived his parliament. Howard and British Foreign Minister Jack Straw were both obliged to tell their press that they did not know Joe Wilson.

  Four days after Novak’s article appeared, Britain was convulsed by the suicide of a former weapons inspector named David Kelly, a longtime civil servant in the ministry of defense. Kelly had been a source for the BBC’s exposé of the charge that the government had exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam. He had been under increasing pressure from the investigation and had apparently killed himself. I received several calls from friends wondering, first, whether it had in fact been a suicide; and, if not, was I watching my own security? They also wanted to know how I was bearing up under the pressure. I, too, wondered about Kelly’s death and later told a BBC producer that I hoped the inquest into his death would be credible.

  I was horrified that I could actually harbor suspicions—ones that were also being expressed by others—that a democratic government might actually do bodily harm to a political opponent. I laughed it off for my friends and pointed out that my golf handicap had gone down two strokes in the two and a half weeks of my enforced vacation. And I rationalized that in situations like the one in which I now found myself, it was important to be either so visible that your adversaries would be among the first to be blamed should anything out of the ordinary happen to you, or so invisible that nobody really knew who you were.

  That same week, on Thursday, July 17, David Corn called to alert me that what Novak had done, or at least what the person who had leaked Valerie’s name to him had done, was possibly a crime, in that it might represent a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982. Corn then published a detailed explanation of the law to ensure that other journalists, as well as regular readers of The Nation, understood all the legalities involved.

  Toward the end of that week, network producers and television correspondents were calling with rapidly mounting frequency. We had clearly entered a new phase. The questions were no longer about whether or not Valerie was CIA; rather, they sought to uncover some supposedly as-yet-unexplained link between the two of us and the trip to Niger.

  Over the weekend, the calls became more insistent and more pointed. And the sources being cited by the reporters were consistently “White House officials or senior White House officials,” so I could only conclude that the decision to push the story had been made at a high level in the administration. At that point, I knew that I would have to address the issue more publicly.

  NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, who had been guest-hosting Meet the Press when I’d been on the show two weeks earlier, reached me at home on the Sunday night after Novak’s article appeared to ask for my reaction to “what White House sources were telling her about the real story being not the sixteen words but Wilson and his wife.” I agreed to do an interview with her the following day in my office. Although I had planned not to appear on any television shows prior to Thursday, July 24, when I was scheduled to do The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, I felt I had no choice but to try to stop the White House from continuing to push this canard.

  The principal question remained unanswered: Who had so badly served the president? Who Val
erie was and what she did, or who I was and what I did, were merely the administration’s means of obfuscating the real issue and confusing the public. The White House was trying to fling dust into the eyes of the press and public while descending into what a Republican staffer on the Hill later called a “slime-and-defend” mode.

  On Monday morning, July 21, I sat down with Andrea and answered her questions. I was scrupulous in speaking about Valerie only hypothetically; I was careful to qualify my statements and to use the subjunctive: “If she were as Novak alleged, then....” In response to Andrea’s questions regarding statements made by White House officials about Valerie’s professional life and its connection to me, I noted that the sources of the original leaks from the administration to Novak might have violated the law.

  When the interview aired on the Monday evening news, NBC had systematically edited out every one of my qualifiers regarding Valerie’s status, no doubt because of time constraints. They thus substantively changed the tenor of the interview and gave CIA lawyers cause to briefly consider whether or not I myself might have been in violation of the same law as the senior administration officials who had originally leaked the information about Valerie to Novak. I later called Andrea to request a copy of the full interview, so as to be able to defend myself, but NBC policy disallows providing transcripts of interviews in their unedited versions. I asked Andrea therefore to make sure that the full interview was preserved on tape in the event legal questions arose in the future. She agreed to do so.

  That afternoon I received the call from Chris Matthews tersely informing me that Karl Rove had entered the fray with the comment that my wife was “fair game.” To make a political point, to defend a political agenda, to blur the truth that one of the president’s own staffers had scripted a lie into the president’s mouth, one of the administration’s most senior officials found it perfectly acceptable to push a story that exposed a national security asset. It was appalling.

  The next morning I appeared on the Today show. Katie Couric was the interviewer. Unfortunately, I was on remote location, in Washington—my one chance to sit face-to-face with “America’s sweetheart,” and all I could see was the unblinking eye of the camera in front of me. At least the spot was televised live, so the hypotheticals that I used to qualify what I said about Valerie were not edited out. Again I made the point that the leak might well have been a violation of the law.

  Although I received hundreds of phone calls from the national and international press in subsequent days, not once did I again hear a reporter cite White House sources in relation to that particular story. In the weeks ahead, the attacks from the White House reverted to more typical forms of character assassination.

  At the same time that the White House was attempting to make me the subject of the news story, it still had to fend off the increasingly pointed interrogations as to who was responsible for the offending sixteen words. Although CIA director George Tenet had said—or had had to say—that the fault lay with him, it soon became clear that the problem had originated elsewhere. Attention shifted to the National Security Council, and it moved sequentially up the chain of command to Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, who was one of those responsible for vetting Bush’s State of the Union address. On July 22, Hadley acknowledged that he should have deleted the reference to Iraq’s attempts to buy uranium, because months earlier, in two memos and a phone call from Tenet himself, the CIA had warned him that the claim was weak. All three of those warnings had been issued before the president’s Cincinnati speech in early October. Hadley claimed that he had evidently failed to recall them three months later, in January. “The high standards the president set were not met,” Hadley admitted.

  Earlier, in a press briefing on July 11, Hadley’s boss, Condoleezza Rice, had skirted the issue of the sixteen words by saying: “If there were doubts about the underlying intelligence to that National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), those doubts were not communicated to the president, the vice president, or to me.” After Hadley admitted the existence of the memos and suddenly recalled the telephone call from Tenet, Rice had no choice but to own up to her own culpability in the matter. On July 30, in an interview with PBS correspondent Gwen Ifill, she grudgingly acknowledged her responsibility, but not before trying yet again to fob the blame off on Hadley, much as she had earlier tried to blame Tenet.

  “What we learned later, and I did not know at the time, and certainly did not know until just before Steve Hadley went out to say what he said last week, was that the director had also sent over to the White House a set of clearance comments that explained why he wanted this out of the speech. I can tell you, I either didn’t see the memo, or I don’t remember seeing the memo.” Gwen Ifill finally asked Rice directly: “Do you feel any personal failure or responsibility for not having seen this memo and flagged it to anybody else who was working on this speech?” Rice responded: “Well, I certainly feel personal responsibility for this entire episode. The president of the United States has every right to believe that what he is saying in his speeches is of [sic] the highest confidence of his staff.”

  It was now four months after Dr. El Baradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, had pronounced the Niger documents forgeries; three weeks after my New York Times piece made clear what I had not found in Niger; and two weeks after a senior official in the White House had blown the cover of a national security asset simply to discredit me—and the national security adviser was finally admitting the obvious: she was responsible. And the president once again demonstrated that he was more loyal to his senior staff than they had been to him: he rejected Hadley’s offer to resign. Apparently, Rice did not even offer.

  Dick Cheney, on the other hand, was characteristically unrepentant. In a speech he delivered to an amen chorus at the American Enterprise Institute on July 24, he classically demonstrated that the best defense is a good offense when he asked rhetorically: “How could any responsible leader have ignored the Iraqi threat?” It was of course the wrong question. No one doubted that Saddam had posed a threat. Rather, the question was, and had always been, whether that threat constituted such a grave and gathering danger that the conquest and occupation of Iraq was the only, or even the best, way to achieve the desired goal of disarmament.

  On the same day that Cheney spoke, I addressed a decidedly different audience. I had been invited to appear on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart shortly after the New York Times ran my article, but had pushed the date back to the twenty-fourth in order to allow myself to gain some perspective on the situation. I’d had no idea then that over the next three weeks the story would take so many strange twists and unexpected turns—more than enough to keep it red-hot.

  I traveled to New York early on July 24, as I had been invited to attend an editorial board meeting at The Nation offices that morning. David Corn, who jokingly called me an “establishment type,” had been very kind to me over the past months, since before my February article in the magazine that had addressed some of the larger agendas of the neoconservatives. He and his magazine had also earned my admiration, even though it had never before been one of my regular reads. Corn and his boss, Katrina vanden Heuvel, had been tenacious and tough, publishing probing analyses of America’s road to war in an attempt to bring some critical thinking to the decision-making process. They had appeared on every political talk show that would have them, and they were never less than fully prepared to debate any and every war promoter the other side set on them. Their intestinal fortitude in the face of volleys from the extreme Right was truly laudable. While they are far more critical of government than I am generally—being, as I am, an “establishment type”—they have been proven to be dead right about the extremist nature of this administration, and, I believe, have been properly cynical about its motives.

  I walked into the cluttered boardroom at The Nation, and as I took my seat I heard somebody say, “We should give him a standing ovation.” I was flattered to be so kindly receiv
ed. In fact, I was taken aback. For all that Valerie and I had been through in the past several weeks, this was the first indication that we actually had a following, that other people out there were watching the events unfolding between us and the administration with more than the polite interest of a parlor game. There was real passion in the room. And anger. This was more than a family affair; a national audience was tuning in as the White House tried to hurt me by destroying my wife’s career and life work.

  After lunch, I taxied up to the New York Times through the July heat and humidity to meet David Shipley, editor of the op-ed page. A tropical drizzle rendered the Manhattan skyline dull and gray. I had never before been inside the Times building, known affectionately, I think, to the staff as the mother ship. David and I introduced ourselves when I stepped off the elevator and he escorted me to his office for a cup of coffee. En route, down a long windowless corridor with offices on either side, doors sporting the names of Times writers, we ran into veteran Timesman Robert Semple. David explained that I was “the one who wrote the article on what he didn’t find in Africa,” and Semple, turning to me, said, “So you’re the one who turned our paper around.” The Times had been mired in the scandal surrounding Jayson Blair, the fraudulent journalist whose reporting had been questioned by a number of colleagues. The turmoil in the media about the Times had diminished in the past several weeks, but I had not imagined that anyone at the paper would attribute their improvement to me or to my piece. For the second time that day, I was struck by the extent of the reaction to me and the article outside the confines of Washington, D.C.