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 was the only guest and sat down to an intimate meal with my host, his two sons, and four bodyguards, whom I guess were there to ensure that I would not attack their boss and also to report back to Iraqi intelligence on the evening’s conversation. The dinner itself was a classic Arab meal that went on, course after course, for several hours. In the Arab world, social intercourse takes place prior to and during the meal. Guests generally leave right after rising from the table, so dinners tend to involve a lot of time in the dining room itself.

  We stood up from the table shortly after eleven, and I left soon thereafter. We had talked about a wide range of international and domestic issues, including alliances in the Arab world, Arab relations with the West, and Arab-Israeli affairs. But we did not broach the subject of Kuwait, even though the August 1 meeting between the Kuwaiti and Iraqi delegations had ended in disarray in Jeddah and Saddam’s team had returned to Iraq. The subject was just too sensitive.

  I finally got to bed that night about 12:30, pleased to have had an interesting evening with an Iraqi, however weird the scene had been. It had been only the second time I had been invited into an Iraqi home in the two years I had been in the country.

  At about 2:30 in the morning, the telephone rang. Naked in the sweltering night and sound asleep until an instant before, I jumped out of bed to answer the shrill ring on the other side of the room. On the way, I tripped over our wire-haired fox terrier sleeping at the foot of the bed, whose yelps added to the sudden clamor in the room. I picked up the phone and heard the voice of one of the embassy’s Marine security guards: “Sir, I have the White House on the line,” he said. My head cleared as I thought, “My God, the president of the United States is calling.”

  I snapped to attention as I suppose any patriotic American would do with his president on the line and saluted, stark naked, while the dog was still barking behind me. Then the line went dead. Once I had gathered my wits about me, I realized, of course, that it probably hadn’t been the president himself calling me, so I phoned back to the National Security Council and spoke with Sandy Charles, the deputy responsible for Iraq and the Gulf. My decision to not call the president back directly was well founded. The caller had in fact been Sandy, trying to get through from Washington, D.C., to alert me that Iraqi troops were moving into Kuwait, and that our ambassador in Kuwait City, Nathaniel Howell, had reported gunfire outside his embassy compound. The embassy had been surrounded by Iraqi troops, and Iraqi tanks and infantry were quickly overrunning the light Kuwaiti defense forces.

  I got off the phone with Sandy and called Nat Howell directly down in Kuwait. He had just begun to brief me on the situation there when the line went dead again. Despite several efforts to reestablish contact with Nat, I could not get another international line, leading me to conclude that the Iraqis had cut direct international service. They had done the same thing throughout the Iran-Iraq war, forcing international calls through their operators to ensure maximum surveillance. Stories abounded of Iraqi intelligence officials breaking in to telephone conversations to exhort the participants to speak more slowly, or in the case of a Japanese diplomat to speak a language that those who were listening could understand.

  Now thoroughly awake, I took a shower, dressed, and drove to the office about twenty minutes away. My house was located across the river from the embassy, and the drive, as the sky was just beginning to lighten, took me down one of Baghdad’s main boulevards, past a large park and parade ground with the two huge crossed swords in hands that local legend suggested were molded from Saddam’s own. I crossed the river at the July 14 Bridge. To the right was the street leading to Ambassador Glaspie’s house and to the home of my host from the previous evening. I turned left and drove through the residential area leading to the embassy, a block from the Tigris River. As I walked into the reception area, the Marine standing guard gave me the customary salute reserved for the head of the embassy, and let me in. Little did I know at the time that I was about to embark on the most intense period of my life, marked by twenty-hour days, seven-day work weeks, and sleep limited to short, fitful naps during the few hours when both Iraq and Washington were asleep. Desert Shield had now kicked off, and I was in for the ride of my life.

  I had not yet received any instructions from Washington, but I knew that I wanted to take some initiative and confront the Iraqis on the invasion. I immediately paid a call on Tariq Aziz, the foreign minister, meeting him about 8:30 in the morning. I was careful to use language in keeping with what the U.S. government had been saying for several weeks. “What you have done is inconsistent with commitments that President Saddam made to Ambassador Glaspie,” I said. “Inconsistent with the Charter of the United Nations, inconsistent with the Arab League Charter, and inconsistent with the draft Iraqi Constitution, all of which outlaw invasions of neighboring countries to resolve border disputes,” I continued. For perhaps the only time since I had known him, Aziz was flustered and seemed confused, as if he was improvising.

  In his reply, he lamely argued that Saddam had promised only that Iraq would not take military action so long as there was a negotiating process ongoing, and that since the negotiations in Jeddah had failed, Iraq was within its rights to exercise its military option. I angrily responded to Tariq that he knew better than me, from the many failed negotiating sessions with Iran over the past two years, that a single failed negotiating session did not add up to a failed process.

  After several diplomatic thrusts and parries, it was clear that I wasn’t going to succeed in securing an immediate Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait. So I turned to the issue of communications with Washington, and with Kuwait, pointing out to Aziz that with Iraqi troops surrounding our embassy in Kuwait City, and with the U.S. Navy patrolling the Persian Gulf, it behooved us both to ensure that we had done everything in our power to minimize the potential for an accidental confrontation between our forces. One of the obvious ways to do that, I argued, was to enable our respective embassies, and our respective capitals, to have direct contact.

  I asked Aziz to restore the direct-line communications capability from the embassy, though I had little expectation that he would accede to my demand. After all, the embassy had been forced to forgo direct communications throughout the Iran-Iraq war, and there seemed little chance that the Iraqis would now respond favorably to this demand. Much to my surprise, however, within about three hours I was able to pick up my telephone and call anybody in the world without going through Iraqi operators. The entire embassy compound was hooked up, including the Cultural Center, which was across the blocked-off street, outside the embassy walls. Later in the crisis, we converted the Cultural Center to a press filing office, enabling the American press covering the story to file their stories electronically rather than having to dictate them across insecure lines.

  One appreciates the minor victories when one achieves them, and this success did give me some satisfaction. We immediately established an open line to the operations center at the State Department, manned at our end by embassy officers twenty-four hours a day. It became our primary means of communication with Washington.

  Within hours after the invasion, President Bush issued an executive order that stopped all commercial trade with Iraq and imposed sanctions on essentially all transactions between Iraq and the United States. Ironically, this included telecommunications, so that despite our having been reconnected by the Iraqis, our own telephone service providers would disconnect us about every eight hours. I imagined that with every shift change at the telephone company, a new foreman would realize that there was an active link to Iraq and, having been briefed on the executive order, would cut us off.

  We assumed that as the U.S. government we were automatically exempt from the order, but nonetheless, like clockwork our line would go down every eight hours. It was nerve-racking, to say the least, as we were organizing evacuations of families out of Iraq, which required much rapid coordination. We would have to send a flurry of cables to Washington from our communica
tions center, alerting them to the problem, and after a couple of hours, the line would be reestablished. This continued for several days until the appropriate paperwork by the Treasury Department was generated to grant us a waiver from the executive order, permitting us to keep the line open without interruptions.

  It struck me during those first days—as serious issues occupying myself and my colleagues began to mount, with the number and frequency of telephone calls to and from Washington also increasing—that to control the management of our part of the crisis, we were going to have to be aggressive in our approach. It would be better to risk doing something wrong than to hold back and do nothing. There is always a tendency in these situations for Washington, with its massive bureaucracy, to think that it knows best and to try to micromanage from afar. This approach inevitably results in every conceivably concerned government office demanding that the embassy respond to its set of requirements. It is typical behavior of managers to want to cover their bureaucratic behinds and avoid the criticism that they failed to do enough. But it’s also the tendency of strong-willed people—and the senior ranks of government are full of these types—to assume that they have a monopoly on wisdom and to try to impose that wisdom, in the form of tasks, on an embassy.

  We correctly identified security as our highest priority in those first few days. After all, we reasoned, there would be a real threat to Americans in Iraq if the United States reacted vigorously to the invasion. Accordingly, I ordered an extensive review by embassy employees of all our routines and practices, and then took action on their recommendations, reporting to Washington what we had done. In that way, we were able to make it clear that we were not waiting around for instructions but were taking necessary action promptly.

  We painted the windows of the embassy white to make it more difficult for potential snipers to see us. We burned almost all of our classified files within the first few days. We moved people from their homes to locations closer to the embassy compound in order to be better prepared in the event we had to evacuate quickly. We drew up extensive evacuation plans, including automobile assignments, and designated embassy officials we deemed nonessential to our operations in this crisis situation. I knew that as we went forward the numbers of our staff would need to be reduced, and I wanted to know who was really necessary, and who we could manage without.

  On the diplomatic front, I learned that a number of Americans had been caught up in the invasion and were detained by Iraqi forces. One of them was a twelve-year-old California girl who had been flying from San Francisco to spend the month of August with one of her parents in India. She was traveling alone, and her plane, unfortunately, had landed at the Kuwait City airport just as Iraqi troops had taken control of it. Like the other passengers, she had been taken into custody. She was the only child, and we were very worried about what might become of her in the hands of the Iraqi army.

  I made several passionate demands to Nizar Hamdun that she be released to our custody, stressing that she was just a child and would not have the coping skills of an adult. I added that the Iraqis would not want the added burden of her security and therefore should turn her over to the embassy. Nizar agreed, and within a short period of time she was in our hands, our first liberated hostage. We kept her busy with the Marines, shredding documents in the morning and swimming at the Marine House in the afternoon. She turned out to be very self-confident and assertive and appeared to be having the time of her life. To her, it was a great big adventure. While she was not shy about making her needs known, she was a real trouper and pitched in wherever she could.

  We documented everything we did from day one in comprehensive reports sent to Washington. The tone we consciously tried to strike was one of efficiency and confidence. We understood that if we didn’t control the action in Baghdad, it would be controlled for us from Washington.

  Apparently we were successful. According to John Kelly, one of the first National Security Council (NSC) meetings after the invasion of Kuwait was chaired by President Bush. The president was brainstorming with his cabinet-level national security team, and suggestions were being thrown about, when Kelly leaned forward to the president and said, “Mr. President, you will see from the executive summary here, a number of things being suggested, Joe Wilson has already done.” According to Kelly, the fact that we had already acted in ways consistent with the collective thinking at the highest levels of our government gave the embassy great credibility in Washington.

  I was later told by David Welch, then on staff at the NSC, that in subsequent meetings of the president and his “War Cabinet,” when people came up with ideas, President Bush would frequently ask “What does Joe Wilson think?” Of course, such presidential confidence can be a two-edged sword in Washington. In a town where reputations are made on the ownership of ideas and policies, people rarely care about what those in the field think. For someone sitting in meetings with the president to be reminded that ideas were best run by Joe Wilson first had to be somewhat galling. These folks, who were the power players in Washington, weren’t used to coming second.

  The day of the invasion, August 2, the Iraqis closed their borders and prohibited travel outside the country, both for their own citizens and for foreigners in Iraq and Kuwait. All flights in and out of the country were likewise cancelled, a situation that would persist after the imposition of United Nations sanctions on Iraq. Our efforts to organize an evacuation east across the desert to Jordan or up north through Turkey were delayed by the border closures and by the longstanding requirement that we provide three weeks’ advance notice of any travel beyond twenty-five miles from Baghdad.

  Additionally, in the midst of all the activity, with everybody’s emotions raw, one of our most popular employees died of a brain hemorrhage. He was a communications officer, responsible for transmitting and receiving classified cable traffic. A relatively young man, in his early forties, he was single and very active within our community. It was a real shock to our embassy family. Even in the best of times, the unexpected death of a friend and colleague is traumatizing. In our small community far away from home, people became very dependent upon one another. We worked together, worshiped together, and played together. Relationships were important, as the support system was so people-intensive; to lose not just a coworker but a friend reverberated through us all.

  In a time of such controlled chaos and high stress as we were living through in those first days after the invasion, his death could have really been seriously debilitating for our community. But we took comfort from one another, and everyone held together. In the midst of everything else we were working on, I contacted the lay reader of the local Church of England, the only English service in Baghdad, and asked him to celebrate a memorial service in our embassy courtyard. The vicar was on leave, and the reader was conducting services in his absence. Americans and Iraqi staff alike, we took an hour to pray, to cry, and to reminisce about our fallen friend. And then it was back to work, without the luxury of extended mourning.

  This colleague was one of only two Americans to die in Iraq during the entire period of Desert Shield. The other was a businessman who succumbed to a heart attack later in September while in Iraqi custody. As for the rest of the Americans—those who were in hiding in Kuwait, those who were taken hostage by Saddam, and those whom we housed in embassy homes to keep them out of Saddam’s clutches—all survived and returned home after several months of intensive effort on the part of the embassy.

  In the first two weeks of the crisis, I worked literally twenty to twenty-two hours a day. My wife had left in the first evacuation convoy soon after the crisis began, and for a few hours a day, I would try to get home to be alone, relax, eat, and sleep. My house was in Mansour, one of the tonier, more recently developed neighborhoods of Baghdad. It was a two-story modern plaster-and-glass building with a small swimming pool along the side of the house. The dining room could seat ten, while the living room was large and circular with floor-to-ceiling windows opening onto a
large lawn in front. My bedroom was above the dining room, down a long hall that would later serve as my pacing track as I tried to think through ways to resolve issues with the Iraqis. Even during the few hours I was away from the embassy, I would receive calls from Washington. Several times they told me that Nat Howell had just reported the massing of Iraqi troops around the American embassy compound in Kuwait City—with their formation suggesting that they were about to scale the walls and overrun the embassy. American flag flying proudly above the right front wheel of my car, I would make my way over to the foreign ministry, enter by the back door, and meet with Nizar Hamdun, tell him of Nat’s concerns, and urge him to call off the troops and to stop threatening Americans in Kuwait City.

  He would offer only to “pass my demand to higher authority”—the latter a euphemism for Saddam himself. I would return home only to be awakened a couple of hours later by Nizar, who would inform me that the “higher authority” had said not to worry, they were not going to overrun the embassy. I would relay that message back to Washington and, in another hour or so, would be awakened again with news from Washington that the Iraqi troops had backed off from the embassy compound. The same scenario played out almost nightly for several days, ensuring that neither our colleagues in Kuwait City nor those of us in Baghdad were able to enjoy even a few hours of uninterrupted sleep. I often wondered if harassment was the objective of the nightly Iraqi troop movements. I doubted that it was just routine.

  In addition to more than a hundred Americans behind the walls of our embassy compound in Kuwait, there were a couple of thousand Americans in hiding throughout Kuwait City and several hundred more who had been rounded up by the Iraqis during the invasion and taken hostage. On August 4, the Iraqis transported a number of them, mostly oilfield workers, up to Baghdad and lodged them at one of the local hotels. My consular officer and I went over to the hotel intending to meet with them, but the Iraqis refused to allow this, ostensibly because they feared that the workers, who had last been in Kuwait, might have some militarily sensitive information they could share with us. The Iraqis were calling all foreigners in their custody “guests,” even though the guests were not permitted to move around or even to meet with their embassy officials.