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

by Joseph Wilson

  Finally, the lesson of all the deployments we undertook was that peacekeeping is a beneficial activity, not just for civilian populations but also for American forces. The alternative is war and the death and destruction that all too often victimize civilian communities. The cost in human suffering and economic deprivation can be devastating, the scars long-lasting. It should not be such a difficult decision to engage in conflict-resolution activities, so long as we work to minimize the risk to our troops and are also able to involve forces from other countries.

  The shared vision of George Joulwan and Jim Jamerson succeeded in realigning the European Command to a direction relevant to the threats and opportunities we faced in the aftermath of the Cold War. The command acquired a new flexibility and assumed a new dimension that included engagement and nontraditional military activities. The mid-1990s were a defining moment for the command, and it was a thrill to be part of it. It meant traveling from Estonia in the north to South Africa in the south, to Israel and Turkey in the east and Ireland in the west, and to most countries in between, as Jim and I spent close to 70 percent of our time on the road. We became dear friends, sharing an airplane, hotels, and many cigars at the end of our long days. We came to spend even weekends together playing golf. There could have been no better way to learn about the philosophy and practice of military leadership and no more cherished friend to learn from.

  Chapter Twelve

  Coming Home for Good

  IN JUNE OF 1997, I arrived back in Washington to take my new job directing the African Affairs desk at the National Security Council. It would be my first assignment in the city since 1978. I had spent only three years of the previous twenty-one in the nation’s capital, and eighteen months of that had been in training or on my 1985 Congressional Fellowship. I was not an expert in the bureaucratic politics that dominate Washington policy making, nor was I politically well connected at the working level despite knowing Vice President Al Gore, one of my sponsors during the fellowship. I had only once met the national security adviser, Sandy Berger, and that was when he interviewed me for the post, and I had not yet met Bill Clinton. (While I generally voted for the Democratic candidate for president, President Bush had received my vote in the 1992 election that brought Clinton into office. Not surprisingly, my votes generally reflected the political agenda most important to me: foreign policy and national security.)

  I was introduced to President Clinton when I was called in to the Oval Office to participate in a meeting in advance of a visit by the president of Mali, Alpha Oumar Konare. Sandy Berger, who clearly did not know my career well, did the honors, referring to me as the former ambassador to Ghana rather than Gabon. It did not matter, as I knew he had a lot on his mind, but as he was fumbling my career history, Gore strode in, listened for the briefest of instants, and interrupted, saying to the president: “But the most important job Joe ever had was on my staff in the Senate.” That settled it for Clinton; he smiled and welcomed me. Once again, Al Gore had reached out to me and shown a personal touch.

  Bill Clinton was an imposing figure who had clearly grown into the office and into his international responsibilities. He was legendary for his ability to do several things at once, keeping different thoughts and issues at the forefront of his mind simultaneously. While I was briefing him for his meeting with the president of Mali—hardly the center of Washington’s foreign policy universe—I stood in front of his desk while he was seated behind it. As I looked down at him, describing Mali, President Konare, and the points my office wanted Clinton to make in their meeting, Clinton was working a crossword puzzle. It was disconcerting and added to my own nervousness at being in his presence—you never get over the butterflies the first time in the Oval Office with a president you have just met. The power of the office and, by extension, of the person occupying it is intimidating.

  But when his African guest entered, Clinton was brilliant. He demonstrated an understanding of Mali and a keen interest in his visitor and the issues being raised; it was a virtuoso performance. I decided then and there to take up crossword puzzles!

  My move back to Washington coincided with the return to D.C. of a woman named Valerie Plame. I had first met her several months earlier at a reception in Washington I was attending with General Jim Jamerson at the residence of the Turkish ambassador. We were there to accept an award from the American Turkish Council, on behalf of the American troops of the European Command who were working in close collaboration with their Turkish counterparts in Iraq and Bosnia. I had been circulating, talking to friends from the State Department, when I looked up and saw across the room this willowy blonde, resembling a young Grace Kelly. She looked at me, and I immediately thought that I knew her from somewhere, so I smiled. She smiled broadly back and began to move toward me. At that instant, my world went into slow motion as I watched her approach. Suddenly I saw nobody else in a throng that must have numbered two hundred people, and I heard nothing as a silence seemed to fall over the room.

  It was only when she was practically right next to me, and held out her hand to shake mine, that I realized we had never met. But by then it was too late: I was hopelessly smitten. The French call it a coup de foudre (a thunderclap); we call it love at first sight. I turned away from the friends who were watching my behavior with amusement and made Valerie the sole object of my attention. We spent the rest of the evening at the reception in conversation, and later over coffee, getting to know each other. She described herself as an energy executive living in Brussels, and I told her about my background. She later told me that she had called a lawyer friend the next day and asked her to run a Lexis-Nexis™ computer search on me, since my stories were so unbelievable that she wanted to verify I really was who I claimed to be. After all, how many times does a complete stranger regale you with stories about shaking hands with Saddam Hussein? It was a line she had not heard before. As she put it later, “A lady cannot be too careful.”

  The following night was the awards banquet, and I waited restlessly for Valerie to arrive so that I could have another chance to at least say hello and look for signs as to whether I had made a good impression. She arrived late and gravitated directly to me. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see people hovering nearby, trying to find a way to jump into our conversation and bask in her incandescent glow, but she effectively discouraged any interruption, focusing all of her attention on me. Finally, we had to split up to go to our respective tables, but not before exchanging business cards.

  As Jim Jamerson and I slipped out of the dinner a couple of hours later to return to Stuttgart, I made sure I passed by Valerie’s table to say good-bye and tell her how much I had enjoyed meeting her. Unfortunately, she was in the ladies’ room and I could not wait, so I wondered all night long on the plane to Stuttgart whether I would ever see her again.

  I need not have worried, as a couple of days later I received an E-mail addressed to “Mr. Ambassador.” My assumption when I read the note was that she was being polite to somebody she thought might be interesting as a friend or mentor, but who was of little romantic interest to her. The age difference between us was almost fourteen years, and she was an up-and-coming international executive and unmarried to boot. On the other hand, I was a soon-to-be-twice-divorced career government official on the downward slope of my career.

  Nonetheless, I invited Valerie to dinner the next time I was in Brussels and found, to my great surprise, that she was interested in me, despite my rather poor track record in the marriage department, which included not yet having brought my second marriage to an official close. “Ladies don’t date married men,” she announced firmly as I tried to hold her hand.

  By the time we each got back to Washington five months later, we were hooked on each other. My divorce, delayed because I was never in one place long enough to complete the process, was finally moving forward, and Valerie and I were becoming closer all the time.

  She had by now taken me into her confidence. It was important to her, if we we
re going to move to another stage in our relationship, that she be honest about what she did. She told me what was permissible, under the circumstances, since I had the requisite clearances. She worried about my reaction, though she had not really needed to. I had been involved with national security for a long time and I had great respect for all my colleagues working to make our world a safer place.

  When she told me about what she did, my only question was: “Is your real name Valerie? That brought a laugh and reassured her.

  Soon after our return to Washington, we decided to move in together in an apartment in the Watergate apartment building. She went to work at her headquarters and I to the ornate, Napoleon III-style Old Executive Office Building (OEOB) right next to the West Wing of the White House.

  The Office of African Affairs at the National Security Council serves as the coordinator of U.S. government policy to Africa, bringing together all the agencies with interests and programs on the continent to ensure that each one is taking positions consistent with the president’s views. The State Department has the lead on the conduct of relations with the nations of Africa, but a number of other departments are engaged as well. As can be expected, there are often differences in approach. Policies are often controversial within an administration, and program objectives in different cabinet departments may occasionally clash with one another.

  An early example occurred over Sudan. The United States had closed its embassy in Khartoum in 1996, amid fears of an attack on our personnel there and broader concerns about Sudanese support for terrorism. At that time, I was still at the European Command and watched as we positioned a ship full of Marines in the Mediterranean off the Egyptian coast as a precaution. In mid-1997, a consensus emerged at the State Department that the American Embassy should be reopened. Ambassador Thomas Pickering, State’s under secretary for political affairs, made the case that embassies are tools by which the U.S. government advances its own interests, not a political bauble to be offered or withheld depending on a foreign regime’s behavior. He believed that even if our influence was limited, we needed a presence in Khartoum to monitor events and trends in that difficult country. State’s position was that the embassies belonged to them, and therefore they could be reopened at the discretion of the secretary of state, Madeleine Albright.

  When we go to great lengths to isolate a foreign regime, we often end up isolating ourselves too. It is hard to exert influence if you are not on the scene. While I personally agreed with Tom’s point of view, the NSC was opposed. An interagency committee chaired by the NSC counterterrorism office had recommended the withdrawal, taking into account past terrorist acts launched from Sudanese territory, such as the attempted assassination of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak at a summit meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in June 1995, and the harboring of international terrorists, including one named Osama bin Laden until 1996, as well as suspected threats against American interests. Accordingly, reopening the embassy would require an affirmative decision by the same committee that had closed it.

  The dispute pitted me against Pickering, who had been the U.N. ambassador and a big supporter of mine when I had been in Baghdad and later, as well as against my former boss in Iraq, Ambassador April Glaspie, now the State Department director for East African Affairs. At the end of my second week with the NSC, the issue came to a head as State decided to circumvent the NSC, unilaterally moving to reopen the embassy.

  The decision was communicated to Congress and leaked to the press, but nobody called me. Once I had learned about it from John Prendergast, my NSC colleague responsible for East Africa, we agreed that we could not permit the reopening of the embassy until those who were responsible for tracking and thwarting terrorists had offered their recommendation. It was not so much a policy disagreement as a question of process—and, most of all, it concerned the safety of the Americans who were going to be sent back into Khartoum. We swung into action and moved the issue up to Sandy Berger. Before the weekend was over, the decision to reopen had been rolled back. Diplomats would not be sent back to Khartoum until there was a broader review, one that included security and terrorism analyses.

  It was a major embarrassment for State, particularly for Tom and April, when the press wrote about the reversal of their decision by the NSC. Susan Rice, my predecessor at the NSC and soon to be the assistant secretary of state for Africa, called to praise me as a “bureaucratic Samurai.” She was at home on maternity leave and awaiting confirmation in her new post when the effort to reopen the embassy was launched. Even though she wasn’t confirmed yet, she fully supported the NSC position. There had been a deliberate effort to implement the action before she could block it.

  I was unenthusiastic about blocking State, both because I was not yet seasoned in such bureaucratic infighting involving friends and because I agreed with the premise that embassies are established and maintained in America’s own interests. But as a veteran of the State Department who knew the protagonists in this dispute very well, I was offended that anyone would try to take advantage of my rookie status at the NSC, which I judged was one of the elements in play. I was accustomed to serving at embassies where a premium was put on coordination and communication, not on circumvention. It was a rude awakening to a new corporate culture where the tactics were less collegial.

  After the dust had settled several weeks later, I called Pickering and suggested he resubmit the question to the NSC, promising to support the reopening unless there was credible intelligence that it would be too risky for our diplomats, but the State Department decided not to press the point. Susan Rice was adamantly opposed to any contact with the Sudanese and refused even to meet with Sudan’s ambassador to the United States. Now that she was in place, it would have been difficult to overcome her objections.

  The Clinton administration’s approach to Africa was one that was easy for a veteran Africanist like me to support. President Clinton and his foreign policy team worked assiduously to give African issues a higher priority in our foreign policy constellation. While administrations of both parties expressed keen interest in African affairs, Africa had always been a low appropriations priority and a political punching bag. For years, as the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Jesse Helms railed against foreign aid budgets, often comparing aid funding in Africa to “pouring money down a rat hole.” Yet without aid, these countries’ fragile economies were doomed to fail.

  In the absence of congressional support for aid, President Clinton set out to encourage the private sector to become engaged and to invest in the development of Africa as a means of stimulating growth. Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown, before his death in a tragic airplane crash in Croatia in 1996, made it clear that the United States would aggressively support American companies investing in Africa. In mid-1995, Brown had traveled to Senegal and announced that the United States would no longer concede the African market to the continent’s former colonial powers. In doing so, he inaugurated a new strategy and approach to the United States’ economic relationship with Africa, which would advance American commercial interests through an invigorated emphasis on trade and investment. Even if it worried the French, Brown’s declaration was a refreshing recommitment to Africa. No longer would the continent and its growing problems be shunted to the bottom of the deck.

  Democratic Congressmen Jim McDermott and Charlie Rangel teamed with Republican Phil Crane to introduce a bill called the African Growth and Opportunity Act, spearheaded by congressional staffer Mike Williams, a dedicated advocate of improved relations with Africa. It was designed to complement, not supplant, traditional aid programs by providing increased access to American markets for African nations willing to engage in economic and political reform. The greater the reform, the more access. At the same time, it proposed incentives to American firms to invest in African economies. It was the perfect vehicle for the administration to demonstrate that the new approach to Africa was about more than just speech making, and we jumped aboard to s
upport it fully. Not surprisingly, the probusiness tilt also attracted considerable Republican support.

  Despite Senator Helms’s contempt for them, United States Agency for International Development (USAID) programs in Africa had been useful, even if reform of many of their practices was overdue. For more than three decades, Africa had experienced a steady economic decline, mitigated in part only by the efforts of the international community, USAID, and the Peace Corps.

  For example, in 1976, when I first went to Niger, conventional wisdom had it that people living in the Sahel region of West Africa would not be able to survive to the end of the century, that they would be forced by the relentless advance of the Sahara Desert to move south into neighboring, more hospitable regions. Yet over the past twenty-five years, they have beaten the dire predictions. While not wealthy, they continue to occupy the land, and their agricultural production has grown enough to at least meet the growth in population. Programs for agricultural development, distribution systems, economic infrastructure, and health care have enabled Africa’s first post-colonial generation to defy conventional wisdom and the crude Helmsian metaphor. Much of that success was directly attributable to the efforts of AID programs and U.S. collaboration with other donor nations.

  It was in America’s strategic interest to have a strong presence in Africa. The 1996 National Security Strategy Statement clearly articulated our concerns about threats posed by failing states as breeding grounds for international terrorism. It was incumbent on us to defend ourselves against threats that might emanate from failed nation-states, and to engage with other governments to eliminate both the threats and the underlying conditions that provide the impetus for them. The same National Security Strategy Statement also addressed itself to the problems of organized crime on the continent and to the scourge of diseases like AIDS that respect no borders. HIV/AIDS had been of concern to those of us serving in Africa since the early eighties. I was then in Burundi and watched several of my Burundian friends die of the disease. Unlike in the United States, AIDS in Africa was mostly transmitted through heterosexual sex and therefore was not stigmatized as a “gay” plague, as many conservatives in the United States thought of it. The prevalence of other sexually transmitted diseases facilitated its spread throughout the continent, first among high-risk populations like prostitutes and their clients, then to the broader population. Programs to address its spread through the continent were high on our agenda, although the competition with other programs for resources was great.