We asked Vicky to our house, where she joined Valerie’s dearest friend and godmother to our children, Janet Angstat, and the whole family for dinner in our home. The next day, I sat for an interview with Vicky that lasted the whole afternoon. We had agreed that Valerie would not be interviewed for the piece, but that she would not discourage her friends or family from speaking to Vicky if they were comfortable doing so. One pleasantly warm and sunny October day, a crew came down to do the requisite photo shoot for the piece. On the spur of the moment, Valerie, who is such an important part of my life and so central to this story, agreed to be photographed with me, so long as she could not be readily identified. She had already been described as the beautiful blonde that she is, and her cover had long since been blown, so the only concern remaining was whether strangers would be able to use a photo to recognize her in public. With proper precautions taken, I saw no reason to deprive ourselves of the pleasure of being photographed together as the happily married couple that we are. She is my wife and the mother of two of my children. I am proud to be her husband, and I love to have her on my arm.
The resulting photos and article were terrific. I was not portrayed as a saint, far from it, but as what I am: a loyal citizen with experience in my field, who had served my country with distinction in Republican as well as Democratic administrations. Some journalists and people on the right wing were critical, asserting that the picture of Valerie, in which she was not recognizable, violated my statement on Meet the Press and that, in fact, by allowing herself to be photographed, she had blown her own cover. It was laughable to suggest that the clandestine nature of her work had ever translated into invisibility and showed the extent to which the ideologues simply did not understand the concept of “cover.” Cover is living a lie, yet living it openly, in public.
I welcomed the reaction to the Vanity Fair piece. The rants against us from the radical Right generated interest in the article, and soon we had notes from around the country, most of them from people who normally don’t even read Vanity Fair. The critics, including Rush Limbaugh before he checked himself into drug rehab, sputtered about the pictures without bothering to read the article. Had they bothered to do so, they might not have been so vocal about publicizing it.
Though I had never met John Kerry, I was asked by a couple of friends if I would be interested in being part of his foreign policy committee in spring 2003, as they began setting up Kerry’s presidential campaign. During the first several months of a campaign, such committees are little more than talking shops, as the campaign then has only one goal: raising money. I had great respect for the senior adviser and chair of the committee, Rand Beers. He and I had been at the NSC together. A former Marine, a career public servant, and a distinguished professional in the counterterrorism business, he had resigned in March, five days before the invasion of Iraq, as special assistant to President Bush for combating terrorism. Although he was loathe to tell reporters that his resignation was tied directly to administration policies, he did say this to the Washington Post in June: “The administration wasn’t matching its deeds to its words in the war on terrorism. They’re making us less secure, not more secure. As an insider, I saw the things that weren’t being done. And the longer I sat and watched, the more concerned I became, until I got up and walked out.” In short, he was no partisan actor, but a thoughtful and committed expert on issues of national security.
I was soon invited to play a more visible role by publicly endorsing and campaigning for Kerry; I was delighted and proud to do both. It is not often that one is asked for an endorsement, and I was proud to offer it. I agreed to travel to Iowa, New Hampshire, and wherever else the campaign wanted to send me, to speak on the senator’s behalf. In addition to his sterling record of leadership on issues of importance to me, he and I had a common experience: we had both spoken the truth to a hostile administration, and had suffered its wrath as a consequence. I had done so after my professional career in the Foreign Service had come to a close; Kerry, on the other hand, had confronted the Nixon administration at the beginning of his career when, recently returned from two highly decorated tours in Vietnam, he challenged the U.S. Senate on the validity of that war.
“How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” he said to them, and thus earned himself a place on the notorious Nixon “enemies list.” My own experience had toughened me, and I was certain it had done the same for him. If leadership is a product of adversity, and puts “calcium in the spine,” as the current President Bush is wont to say, then Kerry’s experience in Vietnam had enhanced his own ability to lead America. He has often said that every single day after Vietnam has been a gift, something I have also felt since I left Baghdad in 1991.
Participation in the selection of our nation’s leaders, in the celebration of our democracy, is a privilege that I was excited to be a part of. In Iowa, I met voters who were sincerely pondering the country’s future, and in New Hampshire I participated in a talk-radio program and loved the give-and-take with callers and the conservative host. That is what the democratic process is all about: not the impugning of the character of those who might not agree with you, but a real discussion of the issues among citizens. I also spoke at a number of fund-raisers in New York, Boston, and Washington. I could feel the emotion and the energy in the audiences, all eager to replace the current president.
December 2003 marked the beginning of what I came to call Vindication Month.
On December 24, Walter Pincus, the ever-capable and thorough Washington Post reporter, wrote: “The President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board has concluded that the White House made a questionable claim in January’s State of the Union address about Saddam Hussein’s efforts to obtain nuclear materials because of its desperation to show that Hussein had an active program to develop nuclear weapons, according to a well-placed source familiar with the board’s findings.”
On December 30, Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself from the investigation into the leak of Valerie’s name—an action that clearly indicated what I had been saying since July: this was a grave matter, and it should not be governed by partisan politics.
On January 8, 2004, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace released a report based on an analysis of all the evidence thus far available, and concluded that while Saddam’s WMD programs represented a long-term threat that could not be ignored, they did not pose an immediate threat to the United States, to the region, or to global security. In other words, there had been no need to rush to war; other options had been available to us. The families of the more than 540 dead and 3,000 injured, plus those of the uncounted thousands of Iraqi dead and injured, could take no comfort in the knowledge that their loved ones had been sacrificed unnecessarily.
On the same day, January 8, Colin Powell acknowledged that there was no “smoking gun” connection between Iraq and al Qaeda. The second justification for war—ties to “terrorism with a global reach,” to use the president’s own words—had now been discredited by one of the most senior officials in his own administration.
On January 11, former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, in an interview with Leslie Stahl on Sixty Minutes discussing The Price of Loyalty, revealed that the administration had begun serious planning for the overthrow of Saddam as early as the end of January 2001, a mere ten days after coming to power.
On January 12, the Washington Post ran a piece reporting on the U.S. Army War College publication of a study by Jeffrey Record, professor at the Department of Strategy and International Security in the U.S. Air Force’s Air War College, asserting that the war in Iraq had been “unnecessary.” As a result, Record wrote, the U.S. Army was at the breaking point and the war on terrorism was “strategically unfocused.”
Finally, on January 23, David Kay, on resigning his post as head of the CIA’s Iraq Survey Group, stunned the country by admitting, after nine months of searching, that Saddam Hussei
n did not have stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. The original premise for the war was apparently without foundation. While I continue to believe that we were within our rights to insist on satisfying ourselves that Saddam had been disarmed, and that we may still even find some WMD, it is now abundantly clear that we were grossly misled by our political leaders on the seriousness of the threat. It may be true that some of the intelligence was not as good as policy makers might like, but there is no doubt that the administration cherry-picked, exaggerated, and manipulated information often no more credible than gossip to fabricate a justification for war.
For all the vindication I felt in January, I was still chilled to the bone by remembering what President Bush had said in an interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer back on December 16. As Sawyer was trying to make the distinction between actual weapons and capability to produce weapons at some future date, and the threats posed by each, the president responded: “What’s the difference?”
It was clear, from this one statement, that the entire war had been a disastrous charade; that the administration, from the president on down, had systematically deceived the American people, Congress, and the world. Most of all, the president had betrayed the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines who so bravely march out when ordered into war to defend our country against imminent threats, or even from grave and gathering dangers. Iraq had posed neither. The difference, Mr. President, I thought, is that war was not the only option, or even the best one. We had gone to war over capacity, not stockpiles, not mushroom clouds, not intent, or, as John Bolton had earlier said more directly, because scientists were on Saddam’s payroll. Our troops had died—and were continuing to die—in vain. I came away from this sad revelation resolved that, unlike the other bitterly divisive war debate of my lifetime, over the war in Vietnam, we should admit this terrible fact sooner, rather than later, and thereby revise our national policies accordingly.
I realized that while the leak to Novak, and to the other reporters who chose not to use the information, was an attack on me for writing about what I didn’t find in Niger, it was really just the first salvo from an administration desperate to prevent the complete unraveling of the fabric of lies, distortions, and misinformation that it had woven and fed the world to justify its war. My initial speculation that the naming of my wife was designed to discourage others from coming forward seemed accurate; for with every new vindication, there was more evidence that the country had in fact gone to war for no legitimate reason. And for a lot of illegitimate ones.
By February 8, 2004 when the president was interviewed by Tim Russert on Meet the Press, he could no longer even pretend that the threat posed by Iraq’s weaponry was so urgent as to merit war. The rationale for the invasion of Iraq boiled down to three things: their supposed capacity to make WMD; their alleged intent to transfer them to terrorists; and Saddam’s dangerous mental state.
But there were no weapons. And in making the case that Saddam could give weapons he did not have to terrorists with whom he was not linked, the president directly contradicted both the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of October 2002 and CIA Director Tenet’s own testimony that the only time Saddam might hand off his arsenal would be as his regime was about to be overthrown, not before.
Finally, though, the most shocking part of the president’s defense of the war was the case that Saddam was a madman. Indeed, Saddam was dangerous, and perhaps mad; but was he an urgent or unique threat to our national security that could be managed only by war? We structure our armed forces to defend our country against foreign threats, not to fight madmen. In reviewing both the U.N. resolution and the congressional use-of-force resolution, there is no reference in either that cites Saddam’s mental health or his despicable comportment as justification for war. It was a terrible mistake.
Chapter Twenty-One
A Long Strange Trip
AS OF THIS WRITING, in February 2004, two years have passed since I traveled to Niger. Who could have imagined that journey would lead through such a maze of intrigue, so much deceit on the part of a presidential administration, and such enormous harm to my wife? It has been an existential roller-coaster ride, and the wheels have not yet come to rest. Even so, there are lessons the experience has taught me, and some lessons that I believe the country can learn, from this tragic war of choice that should never have been undertaken, and from the unprecedented disclosure that my wife was an undercover CIA officer.
When in May 2002 I entered the debate on how the United States should confront Iraq, I did so with a mounting sense of unease about the direction in which America was being led by the Bush administration. I began to speak out because I believed that our armed forces would be exposed to unnecessary risk if the administration insisted on marching in to war with the phony coalition then being assembled. I also feared that our credibility and international reputation would suffer greatly and that our position as the global superpower would be undermined, threatening much of the good our foreign policy had achieved since World War II.
Moreover, the suspect rationales being articulated by the administration—weapons of mass destruction, ties to international terrorism with a global reach, and the possibility that Saddam might provide al Qaeda with WMD—just didn’t, in my estimation, add up to a legitimate imminent threat or even a grave and gathering danger.
For thirteen months, I never mentioned my trip to Niger in public appearances, in the newspaper commentaries I published, or even in private conversations, until the State Department spokesman claimed that the United States had been fooled by the forged documents. The findings from the Niger mission had not altered the fact that disarmament was a legitimate goal for the international community to pursue, even if force was required to achieve it. It was only when it became clear to me that the claim in the president’s State of the Union address referred to Niger, and therefore was untrue, that I had no choice but to insist that my government correct the record.
It was not an act of courage, as some have generously suggested; nor was it a partisan act, as critics have howled. It was a civic duty, pure and simple. If there ever are occasions when our government is justified in lying to its citizens, this was not one of them. Our democracy required that the administration be called to account.
I resisted going public for several months, however, in the futile hope that after it became apparent there was no truth to the Niger uranium claim, and once serious questions were raised in the media, somebody in the administration would come forward and take responsibility for the falsehood. I had no interest in attaching my name and face publicly to any such revelation; I had seen the harm done to bearers of bad tidings in Washington. Even after Condoleezza Rice falsely asserted on Meet the Press that “maybe someone knew down in the bowels of the Agency” that the evidence cited in the State of the Union address was suspect, I still hesitated to set the record straight publicly, although I was becoming more determined that the lies be corrected somehow.
A few days after Rice’s interview, the House and Senate Intelligence Committees announced that they were going to look into the prewar intelligence, including the uranium claim. I called the staffs of both committees and volunteered to brief them about my trip and findings. I ended up briefing them separately within a few days of each other in mid-June, disclosing what I knew to the appropriate oversight bodies.
A week after those briefings, I learned from a journalist that my name was soon to be made public. I finally decided to write the story myself, and called back David Shipley at the New York Times to accept his offer of space on their op-ed page.
I knew that my credibility would be challenged the moment I went public, and I made preparations to defend it. I was not going to let the rabid ankle-biters of the right deny me a voice in the debate or impugn my integrity. I had earned the right to be heard, the same right enjoyed by other responsible citizens. I spoke out confident in the belief that our democracy remains strong precisely because we have a long and proud tradi
tion of citizens challenging our government when it lies to the people.
However, for all the insults I knew I would suffer, I never expected the White House itself to do anything like what it did: come after my wife.
The disclosure of her employment was unprecedented, and the Grand Jury will decide if it was a criminal act. Whether convictions are obtained or not, it was unquestionably beneath the standards of conduct that we have every right to demand from our public servants. But in their attacks on us, the administration was firing at the wrong targets. I had not put the sixteen words in the president’s mouth; someone on his staff had, and that is where he should have been taking aim; Valerie had not done anything wrong. And when somebody leaked the fact that she was undercover, thereby putting a national security asset out of commission at a time of war, the president should have demanded swift action to remove the offender from his post. Yet, as in the case of the sixteen words, the president once again demonstrated more loyalty to his staff than they had shown to him. To this day, no one at the White House has apologized for the unwarranted attacks on Valerie and me. And to this day, the person who leaked her name evidently remains in a position where he enjoys the trust of President Bush.
In the end, of course, what has happened to Valerie and me pales in comparison with the harm done to our dead and injured troops and their families, our international standing, and our democracy. Those of us who challenged the neoconservative wave did so out of concern for these potential consequences.
The Politics of Truth_Inside the Lies That Put the White House on Trial and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity Page 42