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

by Joseph Wilson

  Since its founding, it had become a rallying point for Americans concerned that the public’s voice had been lost in the debates on key issues facing our country. Moveon.org had been a key sponsor of Al Gore’s foreign policy and security speeches in 2002, and was active in mobilizing grassroots support against the precipitous war track the administration had put the country on. It had been active in the debate before the war and in the early days of the presidential campaign for 2004, sponsoring an Internet primary among its members.

  The final letter that participants were invited to sign opposing the $87 billion appropriation bill reads as follows:

  AN OPEN LETTER FROM THE AMERICAN PEOPLE TO PRESIDENT BUSH AND MEMBERS OF CONGRESS:

  End the Quagmire in Iraq: Change Course—Change the Team

  The invasion and occupation of Iraq—in defiance of our international allies—has led our country into a quagmire.

  From the outset, we have been deceived and manipulated:• The president and his defense team warned of Iraq’s massive arsenals of weapons of mass destruction. There were no such arsenals of weapons of mass destruction.

  • We were told that Saddam Hussein would give such weapons to al Qaeda terrorists. There is no evidence of any significant link between Hussein and al Qaeda.

  • We were told that getting rid of Hussein was in response to the 9/11 attacks. Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11 attacks.

  • We were assured that American soldiers would be greeted with flowers and democracy would blossom in Iraq and throughout the Middle East. Nothing could be further from the truth.

  • We were told that the war would strike a blow against terrorism. In fact the U.S. occupation is spawning new terrorists, galvanized by our presence and moving freely into this lawless, broken country.

  • The U.S. occupation has left American soldiers unprepared and vulnerable, the country degenerating into chaos and the Iraqi people embittered and hostile. Now, the president is asking Congress for a staggering $87 billion blank check to fund more of the same.

  We say not so fast—not without changing course and changing the team that failed our soldiers and led us into a quagmire. We call on Congress to condition any additional funding for U.S. policy in Iraq on:1. The dismissal of the Bush administration team responsible for the quagmire in Iraq—starting with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld; and

  2. Ending the U.S. military occupation of Iraq by immediately transferring full authority of the United Nations for the transition of the country to a truly representative government.

  Our campaign against the $87 billion would not ultimately block the passage of the appropriations bill, but it would prove to be successful in many other ways. President Bush’s speech to the nation requesting the funds shocked many Americans, for whom the enormous cost of the war now became a reality. Efforts in Congress to question the administration on the reconstruction effort revealed that there had been no plan for how to deal with the aftermath of the war in Iraq. The criticisms were pointed and vocal.

  Americans were becoming alert to the enormous difficulties of the occupation, and their support for the administration was declining. It was now apparent that this was not the cakewalk we were promised and that the “liberated” Iraqis were not cheering from the rooftops, but rather shooting at American GIs from them.

  Chapter Nineteen

  A Criminal Investigation

  I PURSUED THE CALL for the resignation of most of the senior officials at the Defense Department in an interview the evening of September 24, with Lou Dobbs on CNN. Lou had been a supporter of the war and such a vocal critic of what he considered France’s intransigence at the U.N. that I had earlier made a joke about offering to send him a French Hermes tie for Christmas. He now gave me full rein to make my points, as controversial as they were, and did not challenge them in any way. I was struck by a real change in Lou’s attitude, which I attributed to the scorn of someone whose trust has been betrayed. Lou, it seemed to me, was increasingly disillusioned with the Bush administration.

  The Win Without War campaign was the ideal platform from which to focus on the failure of Secretary Rumsfeld and his senior advisers. He and his team had failed the troops, failed the president, and failed the American people, pure and simple.

  With respect to the troops, I charged that he had neglected the lessons of other deployments of American forces in foreign lands, including Bosnia, on which I had worked during my tenure with the European Command. Rumsfeld had been intent on proving that American forces could move farther and faster and take territory with fewer troops because of our awesome firepower and our ability to attack simultaneously from the air and sea as well on land. The qualitative edge of our “joint” fighting was well known, and it had been demonstrated in Afghanistan and Iraq. However, Rumsfeld ignored the other equally important lesson—to hold territory and occupy it, you need more troops and heavier equipment; otherwise you lose more of that most precious resource, the American sons and daughters called upon to fight the war.

  In any war, casualties are a regrettable by-product, but a key element of modern American warfare has always been force protection. That essential element was rejected by the Rumsfeld team, and as a consequence, American soldiers have been dying at a steady rate since the end of “major combat operations” was announced by President Bush with his inglorious landing on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003. As of the end of February 2004, 549 American soldiers have died and more than 3,500 have been injured needlessly. As surely as Rumsfeld had failed the troops through last summer, when we first called for his resignation, his continuing failure has been demonstrable and unpardonable, yet he and his minions are still in office.

  Every president has his own way of assimilating information. Ronald Reagan used to like his briefings on foreign leaders in videotape form so he could watch them like a television program. Bill Clinton was wont to engage in late-night bull sessions and was an inveterate reader of the editorial pages. On FOX, President Bush told Brit Hume that he relies on his advisers for news and information. We should not begrudge him that, though I admit unease at his lack of greater curiosity about current events. As citizens we do have every right, however, to insist that our president get the best information possible and, hence, that he hire and retain the best advisers available.

  Tragically, Donald Rumsfeld and his team have consistently provided the worst advice and counsel imaginable, ranging from the secretary’s own gratuitous and divisive comments pitting Old Europe against New Europe, to a reconstruction that was so ill-conceived and badly executed that it has jeopardized the president’s ostensible vision of a democratic Iraq serving as a beacon for the rest of the Middle East. Rumsfeld and company have failed—and continue to fail—the president as Iraq slides inexorably into civil unrest, while we scramble out of the country as quickly as we can so the president’s reelection campaign can trumpet the transfer of sovereignty on schedule.

  But if the sovereignty we hand over is so fragile that unrest becomes full-blown civil war and interethnic violence rages, we will forever be blamed for having wreaked such havoc on the erstwhile caliphate of the Islamic world. And in that world, where the memory of the expulsion of the Moors from Spain in 1492 is still vivid, “forever” is a long time. It has been more than a distraction from the legitimate war against international terrorists; it has led to the creation of a second front abroad where previously there had been only one—Afghanistan. Over 130,000 American troops are in danger at any one time in Iraq, and with the rotation of troops in the spring and summer of 2004, fully 40 percent of them are either National Guard or Reserve forces. At a time when we must be vigilant against the possiblity of further attacks on our own soil, every call-up of National Guard or Reservists means that more of our first responders are over there instead of over here, where they should form our first line of homeland security. Rumsfeld and his ilk have failed the country.

  In a subsequent appearance on CNN with Paula Zahn, I mentioned t
o Torie Clark, Rumsfeld’s former press secretary, that I was on the warpath against her former boss, and she allowed that she did not think he was losing any sleep over my charges. In fact, it was really Congress, holding the government purse strings, whose attention the Win Without War campaign was trying to attract; but the administration had not shown any particular willingness to listen to our elected representatives any more than it listened to critics like me. In fact, many in Congress, Republicans included, balked at the portion of the money given outright for Iraqi reconstruction, instead of as a loan that might someday be repaid to the United States. The idea of American taxpayers underwriting Iraq’s reconstruction while other countries were still being paid interest on loans to Saddam’s regime grated, and President Bush was obliged to call James Baker back into service to travel to foreign capitals to lean on leaders to forgive debt owed by Iraq.

  My involvement in the campaign to hold up the funding until some accountability could be guaranteed would end abruptly the following weekend. On late Friday afternoon, September 26, I received a call from an ABC producer covering the Justice Department. He told me that ABC had one source telling them that a criminal referral had just arrived at Justice from the CIA concerning the leak of Valerie’s name. He was looking for a second source before broadcasting the news and wondered if I had heard anything about it.

  I had not, and told him so.

  The referral was not, however, a surprise. As soon as the leak occurred, the CIA began its own internal investigation as we now know from the Agency’s letter to Congressman Conyers. Despite the presence of political partisans at Justice, Valerie and I always believed that career prosecutors in the department would seriously pursue the perpetrators of the leak. An officer had been exposed, an act that threatened many intelligence professionals; justice would be served, we believed and hoped.

  By Saturday morning, MSNBC had gone public with the news, scooping ABC. The leaking of the referral to the press and its subsequent confirmation, by first Justice and then the White House, meant that the government had effectively confirmed Valerie’s status as alleged by Novak. There was no longer any need to speak of her employment in the hypothetical.

  The following day, Sunday, September 28, the Washington Post carried a lengthy article by Mike Allen and Dana Priest quoting a “senior administration official” who “said that before Novak’s column ran, two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and disclosed the identity and occupation of Wilson’s wife.” The article continued: “They [the leakers] alleged that Wilson, who was not a CIA employee, was selected for the Niger mission partly because his wife had recommended him.”

  It was a stunning piece of reporting, especially considering that it featured the words of one administration official reproaching two of his or her colleagues on the record. As Allen and Priest put it, “It is rare for one Bush administration official to turn on another. Asked about the motive for describing the leaks, the senior official said the leaks were ‘wrong and a huge miscalculation, because they were irrelevant and did nothing to diminish Wilson’s credibility.’ ” Much as I was pleased to learn that there was at least one Bush official who believed the conduct of his colleagues was “wrong,” I was disappointed to read that he or she evidently judged it so not because it was a betrayal of national security but because it was beside the point and had done nothing to damage my credibility. Would the leak have been okay if it had really impeached my character and sent me skittering into some dungeon reserved for critics of the Bush administration?

  After having lived abroad for so many years, I had to marvel anew at what a strange town Washington, D.C., really is. The story of the unethical and perhaps illegal disclosure of Valerie’s identity had been percolating for almost exactly ten weeks—from July 14 to September 28. Yet reporting on it had been sporadic. I knew of only four mainstream publications that ran stories durning this lengthy interlude (Newsday, The Nation, Time, and the Baltimore Sun). One reporter told a friend of mine that it was “yesterday’s news.” But this new article, perhaps because of its titillating details about senior administration officials “turn[ing] on one another,” rocketed the story around the country, resulting in headlines from coast to coast. My education in the politics of truth had become a veritable seminar in the moral ambiguities of leaking. I wondered: When is a leaker a true whistleblower, risking his personal security to inform the citizenry and preserve the public’s interest? When is a leaker a mendacious opportunist, out to advance the narrow interests of himself or his boss? When does a leaker become so appalled at the self-serving actions of his colleagues that he crosses the line to shine a light on them? Is there is a reliable way to distinguish among the many varieties of that genus peculiarly indigenous to Washington, the leaker?

  The article gave me a lot to think about. Two officials calling six reporters indicated to me that there must have been a meeting to decide on the action to take, and that the information on Valerie must have been in their hands well before the appearance of my article on Sunday, July 6. I paused and considered a few questions: How did the two senior administration officials ever learn of her status? Had there been an immediate breach of security that allowed them even to learn she was an operative? Did the leakers learn of her status by someone’s deliberate action, or inadvertently? Whatever the answers to these questions, I knew for certain that the initial disclosure of her status, whether deliberate or inadvertent, was the first damaging act, before the calls to all the journalists were placed.

  Novak had already been in possession of the information on July 8 when he blurted it out to my friend, and a bare two days, from Sunday to Tuesday, just did not seem like enough time for word to have spread about Valerie’s status, for the “senior administration officials” to have that meeting, and then make all those calls to the six reporters. With my increasingly public stance against the administration’s war policy, including the articles I’d published in the San Jose Mercury News, The Nation, and the Los Angeles Times—and the statement I’d made on CNN in March, that they knew more about the Niger story than they were admitting—a plan to attack me had been formed well before this moment. It was cocked and ready to fire as soon as I crossed the trip wire and wrote about what I hadn’t found in Niger. My New York Times op-ed piece had triggered the attack, but I was not the only target of it. Now my wife was in their sights, as well. What then happened was not a case of the loose lips of an overly ardent junior defender of the administration flapping to one reporter, but an organized smear campaign directed from the highest reaches of the White House.

  A group of supposed public servants, collecting salaries paid by American taxpayers and charged with defending the national security of the country, had taken it upon itself to attack me by exposing the identity of a member of the CIA’s clandestine service, who happened to be my wife. Revenge and intimidation had been deemed more important than America’s national security for these coconspirators. And still the right wing directed their fire at me, and even at Valerie, instead of going after what were now two groups—those who were responsible for the sixteen words in the State of the Union address, and those who had leaked Valerie’s identity.

  The next several days went by in a blur. Suddenly every news organization wanted an interview with me. Camera crews were set up in my office and in the conference room nearby, and I was running from one to the other. Valerie had immediately decided in July, when her cover was irretrievably blown by Novak, that she was not going to speak to the press. She awakened daily to see her name on the front page above the fold in the nation’s newspapers, with profiles containing quotes from acquaintances and family. While she would not talk to reporters, there was no stopping enterprising journalists from finding people who knew her. When friends and neighbors would call for advice, Valerie had none. Nobody had known what she did for a living except for her family, and they were not going to say anything. Her only hope was that the kindness that she has always shown oth
ers would be reflected in what they had to say about her, and it was. Rich Leiby, the Washington Post reporter, had met her and her parents when he came to the house to interview me in July, and was able to draw on that experience to write a complimentary profile about her. Time magazine included quotes from former colleagues about her prowess with an AK-47. All in all, the image was of a head-turning blonde toting twin three-year-olds on one hip while stealing and keeping secrets for her country.

  For all the positive comments, however, Valerie’s life was turned upside down. Nobody, not even me by her side, could comprehend what it must be like for somebody who has practiced discretion and lived her cover for years—like a character in a stage play where the curtain never comes down—to suddenly find herself a household name. She likened it, aptly, to an out-of-body experience, floating above the new reality, unable to do anything but watch helplessly while people who knew nothing about her speculated about what she really did.

  One particularly obtuse Republican congressman from Georgia, Jack Kingston, suggested on CNN’s Crossfire on September 29 that Valerie might have been a “glorified secretary.” The sexist insult in that statement was not only to Valerie but also to secretaries and to women in general who may have benefited from the protection afforded by the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. But Valerie maintained her outward calm, going to work every day and trying to contribute as she always had.