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

by Joseph Wilson

  Then there were others who were trying to characterize me as a Democratic activist or a publicity seeker. On television, Novak referred to me as a Clinton appointee when, in fact, I had been a career foreign service officer occupying a position on the National Security Council staff in the Clinton administration. It was not in and of itself a political position, and there were many career diplomats and military officers in similar jobs. He neglected to mention that my one political appointment, as ambassador, had been made by George H. W. Bush. Novak also overlooked the fact that he had once favorably described my service in Baghdad in a column, and, oddly, had quoted it in his July 14 piece that outed Valerie.

  Robert Novak was truly without shame.

  On September 30, while waiting in the CNBC green room to appear on Capital Report, I received a call from a friend alerting me that he had just seen the Republican National Committee chairman, Ed Gillespie, on CNN saying that I had contributed money to the Gore and Kerry campaigns. I wondered if there was something wrong or unpatriotic about my having done that. The point he was trying to make, I suppose, was that it was justifiable for a Republican administration to expose the identity of an undercover CIA officer, if she happened to have a husband who had contributed to Democratic campaigns. But what Gillespie failed to mention was that I had also contributed to the 2000 campaign of George W. Bush and to Orange County Republican Ed Royce several times.

  As my friend and I were talking, Gillespie walked into the CNBC green room. I removed my cell phone earpiece and asked him if he was aware of my contributions to Republicans. He admitted that he did know of them. “They are part of the public record,” he said. So he knew but had decided not to disclose all the information he had about them. I went on Capital Report a few minutes later and corrected the record, saying it was clear that the administration had mobilized party apparatchiks to attack me, falsely, on partisan grounds.

  When Gillespie was later asked by Vanity Fair about his selective use of my campaign donation history, he disputed my account that he had done so, claiming he “referred to Wilson’s contributions to Bush on the air.” But not until I challenged him on it. The transcript of his interview with Judy Woodruff on CNN is clear:

  Gillespie: “So I think that there’s a lot more to play in here. There is a lot of politics. The fact is that Ambassador Wilson is not only a, you know—a former foreign service officer, former ambassador, he is himself a partisan Democrat who is a contributor and supporter of Senator Kerry’s presidential campaign.”

  Later,

  Gillespie: “What I’ve said is that Ambassador Wilson is clearly—has a partisan history here, as someone who supports John Kerry, who was just on your air talking about the problem here. This is a guy who’s a maxed-out contributor to John Kerry. . . .”

  There had been no mention of contributions to any Republican by me. He had tried to shift attention from what the administration had done to Valerie and me, and later lied to Vanity Fair about it.

  Characterizing me as a left-wing partisan hack was ridiculous, anyway. Two of my most memorable career moments, the Angolan peace negotiations and the Gulf War, had occurred while I served in Republican administrations.

  As the attacks on me gained steam, Chester Crocker, the assistant secretary for African Affairs for the entire Reagan administration, was kind enough to allow himself to be quoted in a couple of profiles on me (which he later told me had some of his fellow Republicans looking askance at him). In a voice mail he left me after one of the profiles appeared, he laughed heartily and asked, “Since when have you become a left-wing pinko partisan?”

  In between television, radio, and newspaper interviews, photographers from Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report clamored for “photo shoots” for possible use on their covers. The Time photographer got to me early in the week and took pictures in my office for an hour one morning. When he had finished, I went back to my desk to find eighty-five missed phone calls on my cell phone alone. Meanwhile, my business voice-mail box also filled up every hour as the press became increasingly insistent. Everybody needed to talk to me immediately, and would make their pitch to our office executive assistant, sometimes sweetly, sometimes rudely, but always insistently.

  I finally prioritized the return of phone calls to exclude the foreign press, on the grounds that this was an American issue and American issues are fought out at home, not from overseas. I would return phone calls from the press working on deadline, then friends, then others as time allowed. I tried to accommodate as many requests as I could, so as not to show any favoritism. The administration’s disastrous foreign policy was an important issue; because of the attacks on my family, the megaphone had been passed to me, and I was determined to make my views heard—views that were far better informed than those of Novak or Gillespie.

  It is axiomatic in Washington that you do not get out of one of these maelstroms without running the gauntlet posed by the heavyweights of the news shows, Ted Koppel at Nightline, Tim Russert at Meet the Press, and Bob Schieffer at Face the Nation. Nightline was first up.

  Ted called the morning of Wednesday, October 1, and asked me to appear that same evening. I had known him from the first Gulf War, when he came to Baghdad and reported from the suite of executive offices at the embassy. We had occasionally spoken over the years since, and in January I had appeared on the Nightline town hall debate “Why War Now.” I accepted his latest invitation. The interview consisted of Ted asking questions like a prosecutor cross-examining a witness. In a dry but determined manner, he prodded, pushed, and drew me out on a whole host of subjects related to my trip to Niger and to Valerie’s situation. It was as serious and thoughtful as any interview I had yet participated in.

  Tim Russert and Bob Schieffer each asked me to come on their shows the following Sunday, October 5. Meet the Press was taped early Sunday morning. I arrived and was on the set with Tim before Novak, who was scheduled to follow me on the show, arrived. Tim handed me Time magazine. There I was, in the center of the cover, arms folded, with Ashcroft, Rove, Bush, and Tenet in a circle around me. Tim looked at my left wrist and commented that the African bracelet I have worn for many years to remind me of a continent I love looked like a handcuff. He showed me how the bracelet was right next to Rove’s tie and wondered if that was to remind the readers of my “frog-march in handcuffs” comment that had caused such a stir. The picture was like a Rorschach inkblot, Tim said.

  Tim was as tough an interviewer as Ted Koppel, but, unlike Ted, he did not follow up many of his questions or probe further. He asked me about some of the peripheral stories being peddled by, among others, Novak, such as a book deal or personal political ambitions, which gave me an opportunity to address them. The latest line of attack was that I was a self-serving partisan and a potential office-seeker doing all this to plug a book.

  As to the book, I had been talking to a publisher since mid-August at the suggestion of a radio talk-show host from California, Jon Elliot, and his friend, New York book publicist Barbara Monteiro, both of whom thought that I had a good story to tell. Several years earlier, I sat for an oral history for the State Department, and so already had pages of personal stories from my whole career. But I had never contemplated turning them into a book. Jon and Barbara insisted, and Barbara arranged for Philip Turner, then executive editor for Carroll & Graf Publishers, an imprint of the Avalon Publishing Group, to give me a call in early July. After some prodding from Philip, I produced a brief outline; to my surprise, he soon told me that Avalon wanted to “bid on the rights.” I was happy to sell it for a modest advance, around $10,000, and a commitment to publication in the spring of 2004.

  To work out the details, I turned to my neighbor Chris Wolf, who serves as Valerie’s and my lawyer, and he recommended his cousin Audrey Wolf, a literary agent. I trusted Chris, so I called her, and though we had never met, I asked her to deal with the details and the contract. I knew nothing of the economics of book deals; but when she told me that my new not
oriety would make for a larger advance if she let several publishers bid on it, I declined, because I had already made a gentleman’s agreement with Philip. Next, Philip pushed me to let his colleagues market the international rights to the book at the annual Frankfurt Book Fair, which was coming up soon.

  Wanting to avoid the appearance that I was trying to cash in on my notoriety, I refused and asked that he not even publicize our agreement for several weeks, until I had begun to fade from the headlines. There would be time, I argued, and if the story was a good one, foreign publishers would still want to acquire the rights, and American readers and people around the world would still want to read it. Philip and his colleagues were prepared to accept my decision.

  However, Novak had somehow gotten wind that I had sought out an agent. Indeed, I had previously received a note from one who expressed interest in representing me, and perhaps Novak had spoken to that person. Not that any of this mattered a bit; on Saturday, October 4, Novak wrote an article that included a tidbit about me seeking an agent. Philip alerted me to it, and now that it was out in the public domain, as part of the ongoing attack on my character, I judged there was no longer any reason not to take the book proposal to Frankfurt. I told him full steam ahead. When the question came up on Meet the Press, I replied that I had every right to write a book if I wanted to—after all, this is America—and that I was considering hiring Novak as my publicist, since every time he opened his mouth about me, my value seemed to increase.

  To the question of whether I intended to exploit my notoriety to run for political office, I told Tim that we live in the District of Columbia, which has no representation, and that in any event the goodwill we had felt, from across the political spectrum, accrued naturally to my wife, who had informed me that she would rather cut off her right arm than speak to the press, and refused to be photographed. As good an elected representative as I thought she would make, it would be difficult for her to run for office if she would not talk to reporters and refused to be photographed.

  As to my own plans, I told Russert that I intended to use my fifteen minutes of notoriety to encourage people to participate in our democracy more fully. After all, one lesson I had gained from experience was that this is a great country where a citizen can speak up and make a difference. Despite the vociferousness of the attacks on me, they had been quite transparent in their political motivation and had done me minimal damage. Even the attack on my wife, though possibly criminal, was nothing compared to what I had seen happen to friends I had known in dictatorships around the world over the past two decades. I told Russert that I would work for the defeat of this administration, which had betrayed its own views as articulated by candidate Bush in the 2000 campaign. Humility, cooperation, multilateralism—all had been superseded by partisan arrogance and unilateral aggression.

  As I was leaving the set of Meet the Press, Novak was escorted up to take my place in front of the cameras. Between the two of us stood a camera, and we could walk one way or the other around it. I waited till Novak committed himself and then moved the same way to force him to shake my hand, which he did. At that moment, I was reminded of an old African saying: “When the elephants fight, the grass gets trampled.” In this fight, Novak was a rather insignificant blade of grass, willingly bent to the political agenda of others. To this day, I ask myself how his colleagues continue to tolerate him in their presence. Around Washington his critics call him Bob “NoFact” for his sloppy tabloid-gossipy articles that often stray far from the truth. Having long since prostituted himself to the Right as its uncritical shill, he offers little original insight.

  I raced to the set of Face the Nation, about fifteen minutes away, to be interviewed live by Bob Schieffer. Following me on the show was Republican Senator Chuck Hagel from Nebraska, one of the most thoughtful members of the Senate, a Vietnam veteran, and a constructive critic of the war on Iraq whose views I largely shared. Facing the nation with him was Democratic Congresswoman Jane Harman from California, ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, who left her daughter’s wedding brunch to appear on the program. I was honored that she would take time from such an important family event to address issues of such importance to me personally, and to the whole country.

  Before I went on, Senator Hagel and I shared a few minutes alone, during which he expressed his outrage at what the administration had done to Valerie. I mentioned my bewilderment that some Republicans, notably National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie, were attempting to turn a possible crime against the country into a partisan issue, suggesting that it was okay to attack a wife to get at her husband, even though if the report I brought back from Niger had been heeded, the lie would have never been in the president’s speech. Later, in his segment on the program, Senator Hagel made the point that what had happened to Valerie was not partisan and should not be treated as such.

  Bob Schieffer managed to make news that morning. He asked me about our personal security. While we had not given it much thought in the time between the appearance of the Novak column in July and the news of the criminal referral at the end of September, the increasingly white-hot glare of the press the past week had begun to worry us.

  We had assumed that on the day the Novak article appeared, every intelligence office in Washington, and probably all those around the world, were running Valerie’s name through their files and databases. Foreign intelligence services would not attack us, but they might well threaten any contacts Valerie might have made in their countries, and they would certainly be eager to unearth operations she might have been involved in.

  International terrorist organizations were a different story, however. There was a history of international terrorists attacking exposed officers. The station chiefs in Athens, Greece, and Beirut, Lebanon, after having been exposed by renegade CIA officer Philip Agee, had been assassinated; and in the U.S., there had been the instance of a terrorist sniper killing employees as they were driving into the CIA headquarters grounds at Langley, Virginia, in 1993.

  But what really made us nervous was the possibility of harm from some deranged person in the U.S. who believed that the voices in his head emanated from the transmitter the CIA had installed in his teeth the last time he visited the dentist. That was the main reason we wanted to ensure that Valerie’s face not be readily identifiable when she strode the sidewalks of Washington. On the other hand, just as other Americans are unwilling to let fears of terrorism stop them from boarding an airplane or going to a ball game, Valerie and I weren’t going to stop living our lives, including being together in public from time to time.

  Meanwhile, nobody from the White House, the Justice Department, the FBI, or even the CIA had reached out to offer us security; so, without specifying what we had done, I told Schieffer we had been obliged to take some measures ourselves.

  After the Sunday rites of passage on television, I began cutting back such appearances. I had answered all the questions that were being asked and had nothing else to offer on the subject. It did not matter, as the Right renewed its attack: I was a publicity seeker. The president lied and the White House had attacked my wife, but I was a publicity seeker. Of course, if it was publicity I was after, my campaign was a flop. Prior to Novak’s article, I was still known as the last American diplomat to have met with Saddam Hussein. Now I had become Mr. Valerie Plame. “Welcome to the Dennis Thatcher club,” a husband of a well-known woman said to me, a reference to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s spouse. I limited myself to radio interviews, one with Don Imus and the other with Diane Rehm of National Public Radio. The interview with Ms. Rehm was a full hour, so I was able to discuss in considerable detail the issues surrounding the war, as well as my wife’s case.

  The press coverage was very positive toward Valerie and me. So was the outpouring of support from across the political spectrum, from Pat Buchanan on the right to Jesse Jackson on the left. Serious people understood what had happened. It was only a small cadre of right-wing zealots and the Wh
ite House itself that continued trying to spin the story and make of it something it was not.

  I was particularly offended when President Bush, asked about the leak on October 7, claimed, “I want to know the truth.” However, eager to place the responsibility upon journalists rather than shoulder it himself, he added, “You tell me: How many sources have you had that’s leaked information, that you’ve exposed or had been exposed?” He added, “Probably none,” making it clear that his question had been only a rhetorical one. Bush capped off his comments that day with a statement that infuriated me, and many people whom I later heard from: “This is a large administration and there’s a lot of senior officials. ...I have no idea whether we’ll find out who the leaker is, partially because, in all due respect to your profession, you do a very good job of protecting the leakers.” His lack of genuine concern stunned and disappointed me.

  More than four years earlier, on April 26, 1999, the president’s father, not only a former president but also former Director of CIA, spoke at the ceremonial rededication of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, which would be known henceforth as the George Bush Center for Intelligence. Referring to those who would expose clandestine officers, he said, “I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the name of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious of traitors.” For his son to pretend he was a mere onlooker in his own administration was dishonorable.

  Chapter Twenty

  A Family Photo

  DURING THE FIRST WEEK of October, soon after news of the investigation hit the press, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card instructed two thousand White House employees to turn over any relevant documents to investigators. However, this was an absurdly broad net, as there were only a very small number of people in the administration whose responsibilities overlap the national security and the political arenas, the best pool of possible suspects in which to start looking. If the president really wanted to “come to the bottom of this,” as he claimed to reporters on October 7, he could have acted like the strong chief executive he claims to be and brought his senior people into a room and demanded that they produce the leaker. Alas, he chose another course, one that reflects poorly on him and on the institution of the presidency he represents, and which undermines his broad claim about protecting national security.