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 got a taste of desert travel after arriving by plane at the Derkou airfield. A delegation of Nigeriens, including the senior government authority, met us at the airport and loaded us into the ubiquitous Land Rovers. Off we set across the sand, no roads in evidence. The Land Rovers fanned out, and the only rule of the road was that no vehicle could move ahead of the government official’s car in which Ambassador James was riding. Several times we edged up to the lead car, only to have our driver back off. Driving flat-out, we topped sand dunes at full speed and slid down the other side until we finally entered a date palm-filled village, in the middle of which was a freshwater spring feeding small truck gardens and providing the water supply of Bilma.

  Susan and I also enjoyed canoeing on the Niger River, putting in about twenty miles north of the capital and taking the whole day to float downstream, while birdwatching in one of the best birding areas in West Africa and coming upon villages along the river that had virtually no contact with the outside world, far away from roads and outside influences. For these villagers, the river was almost the only source of life and sustenance. Our passage would bring the whole village to the banks to watch the white strangers paddle by, a sight they rarely experienced.

  Two years later, our tour was up and Susan and I returned home for vacation. From Niger, we wanted to continue our ’round the world odyssey, and so I bid on several openings in India, another developing nation, but one with a much different culture and society. Madras, Bombay, Delhi, and Calcutta were on our list, but almost as soon as I sent it off to Washington I was contacted by an ever-helpful career development officer—not my buddy Jesse Clear this time, but someone I had never met. He offered me a position in Lome, Togo, as administrative officer. His note to me said: “This is a challenging position that will be career enhancing and professionally rewarding.” It was only later that I learned this was code for “We can’t find anyone else to take the job.”

  Lome is about eight hundred miles south of Niamey along the Atlantic coast. While it would take a very long time to see the whole world if I was going to move only eight hundred miles every two years, I jumped at the offer. The Togolese are a gregarious and hard working people, as Susan and I had discovered in a brief trip there the previous spring. Lome, with its palm trees and ocean views, was completely unlike Niger, and the house to which we would be assigned was one block from the beach. The position was a promotion and signaled my arrival as a manager in the Bureau of African Affairs.

  Considerably smaller than Niger, Togo is bordered by Ghana and Benin. There were plenty of excursions to make, and every morning I went body-surfing in the Atlantic Ocean. We also bought a small sailboat that we kept at the lake outside town for weekend jaunts. Susan worked as a teacher in the local American school, and I served as a member of its school board. I was, in my official post, responsible for the administration of an American community that comprised more than a hundred Peace Corps volunteers and a large USAID population, in addition to our small diplomatic contingent. As the second posting in my diplomatic career, I really enjoyed our pleasant routine that included trips to the interior and the neighboring countries, along with an active social life. I even bought a surfboard to sample the waves in nearby Benin.

  Chapter Three

  Back to Africa with Twins

  NOW THAT WE SEEMED TO BE LAUNCHED ON OUR NEW LIFE and career, Susan and I took the next step and decided to start a family. Within just a few months of our arrival in Togo, Susan became pregnant. She grew, and grew, and grew over the next several months. Each time she visited the overworked German doctor at the local hospital—the only medical service available—he seemed not to recognize her, and though this was a distinct possibility given his heavy workload, she was certainly one of the few European-looking blondes in this African setting. He would give her a cursory examination, pronounce her healthy, and inevitably ask her if she was three months more pregnant than she was, because she was so large in the belly. We took that as a sign that the baby was going to be a big one. At seven months, she returned to her parents’ house in Tarzana, California, to wait for the baby to arrive. Although she had grown so big, the pregnancy had otherwise been uneventful.

  My first surprise came when she telephoned and, through a typically bad connection, yelled that we were having twins. She had been to the doctor we’d lined up in California, and in the course of his routine examination he had announced that he felt two heads. She called to urge me to return home sooner than planned because twins typically come early.

  I flew to Paris on an overnight flight and then on to Los Angeles, arriving about twenty hours later. I hadn’t slept at all on the plane, but when I got to my in-laws’ there was no time for a nap, as the family had planned a dinner out and a Woody Allen movie. About halfway through the movie, Susan turned to me and announced, “My water has broken.” She was about to go into labor. From the theater we drove straight to the hospital in Van Nuys, where, after twelve hours of Lamaze breathing with a sleep-deprived and utterly untrained husband, she gave up on the idea of a natural childbirth and had an epidural. Unfortunately, the drug went up her spine instead of down, so she still felt the pain but was unable to push from the diaphragm down. The delivering doctor finally used some forceps and pulled the first baby out. When he turned her around I was face to face with the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, my daughter, Sabrina. Five minutes later, my son, Joe, appeared, butt-first in all his glory, crying lustily to announce his arrival. Both kids were in perfect condition, and all of us were ready for some sound sleep.

  Our second surprise came when Susan just didn’t recuperate after her difficult labor. Each day, the obstetrician would come by, give her a cursory examination, and leave. But she had fevers and was retaining water, so much so that she had regained most of her pregnancy weight in the week she remained in the hospital. After three days, we began to worry; after five, we were truly alarmed and couldn’t understand why she was not recovering. Finally, when a week had gone by, the doctor who had delivered the babies threw up his hands, said he had no idea what was wrong, and had her taken by ambulance to the UCLA Medical Center. I followed in my car about forty-five minutes later, after dropping Joe and Sabrina off with their grandparents.

  When I got to UCLA I met Dr. Amy Rosenman, who told me that my wife was suffering from clostridia and had only about a one-in-twenty chance of survival. Clostridia is gas gangrene. It is not an exotic disease. In Susan’s case, it had begun during the birth of the twins. It is caused by infection of a cut and was among the most common causes of death during the Civil War. Doctors have known about it for well over a century. Dr. Rosenman diagnosed it in ten minutes, while the physicians attending Susan for a week at the other hospital had completely missed the signs, despite the fact that the person suffering with it gives off an unmistakable odor. Their failure to diagnose and treat her correctly was absolutely incredible and unconscionable.

  Shortly after I arrived, Susan was taken in to surgery. According to Dr. Rosenman, her only chance for survival lay in their ability to cut out the infection, which by this time was spreading. I remembered a Peace Corps volunteer in Togo who had contracted gas gangrene after a traffic accident. Over several days, multiple amputations up her leg were performed, trying to keep the clostridia from spreading, but it was too late, and she had died a horribly painful death.

  I called my old college roommate and one of my dearest friends, Bob Moore, an attorney in Beverly Hills. He came immediately, and we sat together in an empty room waiting for news. John Wayne was in the same section of the hospital, dying of cancer just a few doors down. He heard about what we were going through and had the nurse bring us a bottle of wine with his best wishes. We sipped and waited for almost four hours. Finally a nurse came in and told us that Susan had survived the surgery and that they were going to send her to the hospital in Long Beach, some thirty miles south, by helicopter. The hospital there had the only hyperbaric chamber in the area, and she would be admi
nistered several sessions a day in a super-oxygenated environment to keep the gas gangrene, which thrives in low-oxygen environments, from growing.

  But what she also said was that Susan had only a 10 percent chance of survival. At that news, Bob became faint and lay down on a bed nearby. I told the nurse, “Those odds are twice as good as what I heard just a few hours ago.” The nurse looked puzzled, so I added that the last person to talk to me before the surgery had offered that she had a one-in-twenty chance of survival: 5 percent.

  The nurse took me by the arm and said, gently, “Five percent or ten percent, you need to understand that it is highly unlikely that your wife is going to survive. In fact, she will probably not live through the transfer to Long Beach. We are doing our best, but she is dying. The gas gangrene spread so far into her tissue, and we had to cut so much out, that it would be a miracle for her to survive. And if on the off-chance she does live, she will probably never walk again.”

  Bob and I watched from the parking lot as the helicopter lifted off from the roof of the hospital, lights flashing in the dark night, a sky full of stars as a backdrop. It swooped south, and we followed in Bob’s car, not knowing if Susan would be alive or dead by the time we arrived at the next hospital.

  Long Beach is about a half hour south of West Los Angeles, where UCLA is located. The freeways were not congested, and we made good time as the helicopter disappeared in the distance. There was not much to say, and we sat silently with our thoughts. I prayed for Susan, for her survival and for her recovery.

  By the time we got to the correct wing of the hospital, she was on the gurney ready to enter the hyperbaric chamber for her first session. She was ghostly pale, and all the water weight of the previous week had drained off in the surgery, leaving her now looking skeletal. She was awake and in obvious pain. She could barely talk, but all she wanted to know was how the kids were doing and when she could see them. I promised they would come soon, and then she was wheeled into the cylinder.

  Over the next several days, Susan had several more surgeries as the vestiges of the gas gangrene were cleaned out of her tissue and excessive bleeding was staunched. At one point, when I learned that she was going to be operated on for the fourth or fifth time, I went to the chapel and prayed that she not be allowed to suffer any more. The memories of the Peace Corps volunteer and her multiple amputations haunted me. How many times does one have to be carved into before enough is enough?

  Susan’s parents took wonderful care of Joe and Sabrina and brought them to the hospital every day to see their mom. They were as strong and supportive as any two people could possibly be, and an inspiration, even as they feared they might lose their daughter. Weak though she was, Susan cherished every second with her beautiful, healthy babies. Her determination to live, her courage in the face of such long odds, came from her maternal love for her new children. She simply was not going to leave them.

  After five days of treatments in the hyperbaric chamber, she seemed to stabilize and turn the corner. She was going to live. Amy Rosenman and her timely intervention had saved her. As incompetent as the doctors were who failed to see the most obvious signs of infection, Amy’s quick thinking and swift action kept Susan from dying. Moreover, deft cutting with the scalpel had spared the nerves in her leg so she did not become paralyzed and would walk again. In fact, she would do better than just walk, taking up tennis and hiking as she resumed a normal life.

  Susan remained in the hospital for over a month, and then in convalescence for several more. It was not until December, seven months after the birth of our twins, that she had her final major surgery. By then we had moved back to Washington, D.C., and were trying to cope with all the issues that a young couple with two small children has to deal with. I was going to work by bus and Metro at 6:30 every morning and returning no earlier than 7:30 every night. We had no extra money, so Susan had no help with the kids. It was a very difficult time for her.

  A year later, at the end of 1980, I was asked to move to the American Embassy in South Africa to take over the general services operation after a major scandal involving my predecessor had been uncovered. He had been discovered stealing property on a massive scale, buying a farm and then leasing it back to the embassy, effectively having the U.S. government buy it for him. His corruption had been widespread, and he had engaged in a number of other fraudulent activities. Where there was a dollar to be skimmed from the operation, this guy had found a way to do it.

  We jumped at the chance to move. It would put us in a position where Susan could have help with the kids and where we might be able to save some money—an impossibility in Washington—and, for me, the job promised to be very interesting. South Africa was still in the clutches of apartheid, the odious system that institutionalized racism against the black majority and was maintained by a minority numbering less than 25 percent of the population.

  Susan was now well enough to travel and no longer needed medical attention. The operations were behind her, and she was as fully recovered as she would ever be. We arrived in Pretoria in January 1981, only days before the inauguration of Ronald Reagan. In an interview before the ceremony, President-Elect Reagan had been asked about America’s relations with South Africa’s white government. He responded that South Africa had been allied with the United States in all the wars we had fought in the twentieth century and that its repository of mineral stocks was important to the U.S. Not surprisingly, the South African government took his answer to mean that there would now be less pressure on them to change their system under the new American administration.

  In June 1981, when a senior American delegation visited the region, led by William Clark, a California associate of Reagan’s and newly confirmed as deputy secretary of state, the South Africans tried to press their luck and secure an official shift in American policy. The regime’s aggressive approach was exposed the first evening at dinner in Cape Town. Roelof (Pik) Botha, the foreign minister, and Magnus Malan, the defense minister, managed to cull Clark from his herd of advisers, ostensibly to give him a tour of the historic “Castle” where we were gathered. After several minutes, the embassy’s political counselor, Dennis Keogh, and I set out to find the missing trio.

  (Dennis was one of my first mentors and one of the finest Foreign Service officers of his generation. His career was cut short when he was killed three years later in a terrorist attack in Namibia. He taught me the value of proactive diplomacy and steady commitment to goals. He was also the father of twins, and with his wife, Sue, provided us with much needed support and advice.)

  We stumbled upon Clark in one of the antechambers, backed into a corner with Botha and Malan verbally pummeling him from both sides. The oral mugging was designed to take advantage of Clark’s inexperience and lock the U.S. into the pro-South African policy they had inferred from Reagan’s interview. However, they badly overplayed their hand with the genial Clark, who was deeply offended by the actions of his hosts. Once extricated from their clutches, he retreated to the company of his delegation, which included Chester Crocker, the very capable assistant secretary of state for Africa and architect of the policy approach that came to be known as “constructive engagement.”

  Incredibly, the following day the South Africans renewed their efforts. They commandeered Clark’s motorcade and whisked him out to the military airport to take him up to a South African military base in Namibia. If they succeeded, the impression left in Africa would be that the U.S. supported the South African government in the region’s wars, and Crocker’s policy would be stillborn. Dennis and I raced to the airport, panicked that Clark might have succumbed to the South Africans’ entreaties. We found him resolutely refusing to make the trip, even after he was told that all the arrangements had been put in place, including a military band to receive him. “But the band is already up there in place,” Botha said lamely.

  Our next year in South Africa—1981—afforded us the opportunity to travel extensively, from the Cape to the northern scrub veldt pr
airies, from the jagged Drakensburg Mountains to the southern beaches on the Indian Ocean. South African society was just beginning to come to grips with the profound issues of racist governance and to accept the fact that change was coming. Crocker’s constructive engagement, while derided in many liberal circles for being too modest in its approach, was predicated on the principle that evolutionary political change could yield a better outcome than revolution, with all the violence and upheaval it would entail. In order to successfully influence constructive change, Crocker preached how crucial it was that diplomatic contact be maintained and mediation efforts be kept robust.

  In my next two postings, I would have to defend the policy of constructive engagement in two of the African nations most vehemently opposed to the South African apartheid regime—Burundi and Congo—not easy when it was routinely mischaracterized as a compact with the hated racist Boers. The policy was ultimately successful, particularly after it was supplemented by economic sanctions passed by a Democratically controlled Congress over a presidential veto in 1985. The lesson was that, often, diplomacy is the art of occupying space and time while the facts on the ground evolve in a direction that will permit antagonists to find the necessary compromises without resorting to violence. In South Africa, the emergence of new leadership, as F. W. De Klerk took over as prime minister and, most importantly, Nelson Mandela’s enlightened leadership after his release from his Robben Island jail cell, provided the keys to unlock the process. Patience and a willingness to use all of the tools we had available—from diplomatic pressure to economic sanctions—yielded peaceful transitions in both South Africa and Namibia.

  Early in 1982, the American ambassador to Burundi, Frances Cook, was evacuated to South Africa for her own safety after a report had reached the American government that a “female ambassador” was the target of a Libyan assassination plot. Frances, an imposing and high-profile personality, was the only diplomat fitting that description in the region at the time.