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

by Joseph Wilson

  Later in the meeting, Colin Powell cautioned that a withdrawal of U.S. involvement “would unleash Sharon.” He warned: “The consequences could be dire . . . especially for the Palestinians.”

  O’Neill remembers that “Bush shrugged,” then said, “Maybe that’s the best way to get things back in balance.” As “Powell seemed startled,” Bush concluded the discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with the observation, “Sometimes a show of strength by one side can really clarify things.”

  Condoleezza Rice, chairing the NSC meeting, announced that the next topic would be “How Iraq is destabilizing the region, Mr. President.” The new administration’s agenda for the region was thus prefigured from the start. And so President Bush gave Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, head of Israel’s Likud party, free rein to act without even the modicum of restraint that had been observed by no less a hard-liner than fellow Likud Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose government cosigned the Wye River Memorandum with Arafat in 1998.

  By uncritically favoring Likud, President Bush has done our Israeli friends and allies no favors. Are U.S. interests—or those of Israel—truly served by the forging of an alliance among the Likud party, American neoconservatives, and right-wing American evangelicals, the latter of whom see Israel as a means to their ultimate end: a fervently sought rapture? Our legitimate and unquestioned commitment is not to any one political party in Israel, but to Israel’s national security and territorial integrity. I believe that our war on Iraq coupled with Likud’s questionable policies undermines both.

  In recent months I have tried to piece together the truth about the attacks on myself and the disclosure of Valerie’s employment by carefully studying all the coverage and by speaking confidentially with members of the press who have been following the story. A number of them have been candid with me in our private conversations but unwilling to speak publicly with the same candor. When I have asked why the reporting on the story has not been more aggressive, I have received responses that are very disturbing. A reporter told me that one of the six newspeople who had received the leak stated flatly that the pressure he had come under from the administration in the past several months to remain silent made him fear that if he did his job and reported on the leak story, he would “end up in Guantanamo”—a dark metaphor for the career isolation he would suffer at the hands of the administration. Another confided that she had heard from reporters that “with kids in private school and a mortgage on the house,” they were unwilling to cross the administration.

  In the halcyon days of an aggressive investigative press corps, journalists saw it as their job “to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted,” as the great Chicago journalist Finley Peter Dunne put it early in the twentieth century. What does it say for the health of our democracy—or our media—when fear of the administration’s reaction preempts the search for truth? Mark Fineman, the late Los Angeles Times foreign correspondent who did a profile on me in Baghdad in 1990, used to call his passion for the truth the search for the “dirtball” stories—the stories that lay in the soft underbelly of the public pronouncements, the stories behind the story. Clearly, many stories lie behind the story of the attacks on my family, but they have prompted very little “dirtball” reporting. I am disappointed by the reluctance of the press to make waves and get to the very bottom of the real story.

  From everything I have heard, the truth may be found at the nexus between policy and politics in the White House. Whoever made the decision to disclose Valerie’s undercover status occupies a position where he—and I believe it is a “he” because Robert Novak’s own statements employ the male pronoun exclusively—has access to the most sensitive secrets in our government, and a political agenda to advance or defend. In gumshoe parlance, he’s got the means and he’s got the motive. Only a few administration officials meet both of these criteria, and they are clustered in the upper reaches of the National Security Council, the Office of the Vice President, and the Office of the President.

  After my appearance on CNN in early March 2003, when I first asserted that the U.S. government knew more about the Niger uranium matter than it was letting on, I am told by a source close to the House Judiciary Committee that the Office of the Vice President—either the vice president himself or, more likely, his chief of staff, Lewis (“Scooter”) Libby—chaired a meeting at which a decision was made to do a “workup” on me. As I understand it, this meant they were going to take a close look at who I was and what my agenda might be.

  The meeting did not include discussion of how the president or his senior staff might address the indisputable, if inconvenient, fact that the allegation I had made was true. In other words, from the very beginning, the strategy of the White House was to confront the issue as a “Wilson” problem rather than as an issue of the lie that was in the State of the Union address. That time frame, from my CNN appearance in early March, after the administration claimed they “fell for” the forged documents, to the first week in July, makes sense, as it allows time for all the necessary sleuthing to have been done on us, including the discovery of Valerie’s name and employment.

  The immediate effect of the workup, I am told by a member of the press, citing White House sources, was a long harangue against the two of us within the White House walls. Over a period of several months, Libby evidently seized opportunities to rail openly against me as an “asshole playboy” who went on a boondoggle “arranged by his CIA wife”—and was a Democratic Gore supporter to boot.

  So what if I’d contributed to the Gore campaign? I had also contributed to the Bush campaign. So what if I’d sat on a Gore foreign policy committee? I had had no political role whatsoever in the campaign. Moreover, my trip to Niger was taken more than two years after the Gore-Bush election, and I had not even been involved in any partisan activities during the campaign. And it was not until the spring of 2003, several months after the president’s State of the Union address, that I contributed to the Kerry campaign and began to work with his foreign policy committee.

  Would a staunch Republican have disregarded the facts and offered findings from Niger that were different than mine? Intelligence collection is not party-specific. Perhaps a Republican would have allowed the lie to pass without comment, but if so, that is a Republican problem. The national security question is always the same: Did we go to war under false pretenses? I am not prepared to argue that Republicans per se endorse the practice of government officials lying and distorting the facts, but it may be that Vice President Cheney and his chief of staff do.

  The man attacking my integrity and reputation—and, I believe, quite possibly the person who exposed my wife’s identity—was the same Scooter Libby who, before he came into the new administration, was one of the principal attorneys for Marc Rich, ex-fugitive. Rich is the commodities trader who was convicted of having traded petroleum with Iran in violation of sanctions imposed on that country by the United States after the seizure of the American Embassy in Tehran and the taking of more than a hundred American hostages by supporters of Ayatollah Khomeini. Libby is a consummate Republican insider who has bounced back and forth between government posts and his international law practice. He first worked on the Rich case in the mid-1980s, after a stint in the State Department. From 1989 to 1993, Libby worked for Paul Wolfowitz in the Pentagon, before returning to the task of trying to obtain a legal settlement for his fugitive client.

  In the late nineties, Libby also participated in the preparation of the Project for the New American Century’s seminal document, “Rebuilding American Defenses,” which became the neoconservative blueprint for national security policy, much of which has been implemented in the aftermath of 9/11. This ardent neoconservative is a leading participant in the network of hidden cells that funneled so much disinformation to our political decision makers outside normal channels. He is one of a handful of senior officials in the administration with both the means and the motive to conduct the covert inquiry that allowed some in the
White House to learn my wife’s name and status, and then disclose that information to the press.

  The other name that has most often been repeated to me in connection with the inquiry and disclosure into my background and Valerie’s is that of Elliott Abrams, who gained infamy in the Iran-Contra scandal during the first Bush administration. Abrams had been convicted in 1991 on two charges of lying to Congress about illegal government support of the Nicaraguan contra rebels. He was pardoned in 1992 by President George H. W. Bush. How unsurprising it would be if Abrams, an admitted perjurer and a charter member of the neoconservative movement, has engaged in unethical or criminal behavior in yet another presidential administration.

  According to my sources, between March 2003 and the appearance of my article in July, the workup on me that turned up the information on Valerie was shared with Karl Rove, who then circulated it in administration and neoconservative circles. That would explain the assertion later advanced by Clifford May, the neocon fellow traveler, who wrote that Valerie’s employment was supposedly widely known. Oh, really? I am not reassured by his statement. Indeed, if what May wrote was accurate, it is a damning admission, because it could have been widely known only by virtue of leaks among his own crowd.

  After the appearance of Novak’s article, the subsequent “pushing” of the story by the White House communications office—and by Karl Rove—guaranteed that the allegation would at some point take center stage in the press and would sweep the story behind the sixteen words into the wings. Rove’s strategy appears to have been simple—change the subject and focus attention on Valerie and me instead of the White House—but it proved to be seriously flawed. A week after Novak reported the story that the administration pushed to him, David Corn reported that a federal crime might have been committed, and I conveyed that opinion on the Today show. I am absolutely certain that Rove and company would have continued trying to convince the public that Valerie and I were motivated by partisanship and somehow responsible for the president’s error—ridiculous as that seems—had it not been for the fact that they discovered the outing was quite possibly illegal. Apparently, according to two journalist sources of mine, when Rove learned that he might have violated the law, he turned on Cheney and Libby and made it clear that he held them responsible for the problem they had created for the administration. The protracted silence on this topic from the White House masks considerable tension between the Office of the President and the Office of the Vice President.

  The rumors swirling around Rove, Libby, and Abrams were so pervasive in Washington that the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, was obliged to address them in an October 2003 briefing, saying of Rove: “The president knows he wasn’t involved. . . . It’s simply not true.” McClellan refused to be drawn into a similar direct denial of Libby’s or Abrams’s possible involvement, however. Later interpretations of the line being taken by the White House spokesman, according to members of the press who have spoken with me, indicate that the administration’s defense is extremely narrow: the leakers and pushers of the story did not know the undercover status of Valerie Plame, and therefore, though they may have disclosed her name, they did not commit a crime.

  Time will tell if that defense—which strikes me as sophistry and a legal refuge for scoundrels—holds up. Indeed, if the administration has no firm knowledge as to who might have leaked Valerie’s name, why would McClellan, and whoever drafted his talking points, address the matter so precisely and try to stay so strictly within the letter of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act? Ignorance of my wife’s undercover status may exculpate the leakers and pushers from violations under that act, but as a congressional letter of January 26 to the General Accounting Office makes clear, other laws may have been broken, including statutes relating to the handling of classified material. Even the Patriot Act may have been violated, if Sam Dash’s interpretation of that law is correct.

  In fact, senior advisers close to the president may well have been clever enough to have used others to do the actual leaking, in order to keep their fingerprints off the crime. John Hannah and David Wurmser, mid-level political appointees in the vice president’s office, have both been suggested as sources of the leaks. I don’t know either, though at the time of the leak, Wurmser, a prominent neoconservative, was working as a special assistant to John Bolton at the State Department. Mid-level officials, however, do not leak information without authority from a higher level. They would have been instruments, not the makers, of decisions.

  Whether the motivation behind the leak was to discredit me or to discourage intelligence officials from coming forward, or both, is immaterial at this stage. What matters is that, as of this writing, the senior administration officials who took it upon themselves to protect a political agenda by exposing a national security asset are still in place. They still occupy positions of trust; they continue to hold full national security clearances. The breach of trust between the administration and its clandestine service will not be healed until they are exposed and appropriately punished.

  That no real outrage has been expressed by either the president or Republicans in Congress begs the question of whether our secrets are safe in this administration’s hands. By the end of February 2004, efforts to launch congressional inquiries had been voted down in three House committees. Henry Hyde, Republican chairman of the International Relations panel, claimed, “It would be irresponsible for the committee to . . . jeopardize an ongoing criminal investigation.” On the contrary, according to congressional sources of mine, Republicans, pressured by the White House, have simply refused to exercise oversight responsibility on this national security matter.

  It’s a far cry from the days when the House Government Reform committee, chaired by Indiana congressman Dan Burton, held frequent hearings on alleged Clinton administration misdeeds. At a time when all experts on national security agree that we need to strengthen our ability to collect human intelligence, the unwillingness of some to seriously address this act of betrayal is surely damaging that effort.

  But as with all cover-ups, such as Watergate and Iran-Contra, the revelation of the whole truth in this matter will likely be a long time coming, and have repercussions none of us can anticipate.

  The impact on our family of the disclosures authorized by the administration and reported by Novak has been profound. It is impossible at this stage to know what the future holds for Valerie. The intelligence bureaucracy is not structured to manage surprises like her exposure very well, and while she is an innocent in all of this, her career has nonetheless been irreversibly damaged. Whether the bureaucracy can find some other way to take advantage of her vast talents is still an open question. If it can’t, the shame rests with the government and the loss is the country’s. Valerie is and always has been a star in her profession.

  We worry about our personal security, but there is little we can do. Still, many positive things have happened to Valerie and me as well. Americans of all political persuasions, from William Kristol to Hillary Clinton, have expressed their outrage at what has happened to us and proffered their support.

  I was honored to be asked to endorse John Kerry and happy to volunteer my time, unsalaried, to travel the country on his behalf. The campaign trips have taken me to American towns and cities I had never seen before. For somebody who has spent most of his professional career in foreign lands, among foreign peoples, in foreign cultures, it has been an exhilirating experience to learn more about my own land and the people who farm, teach, labor, build, nurse, play, age, and live in it. I have relished the opportunity to discuss with them issues that are important to me but are not often hot topics in election campaigns. My strongly held belief that we are a great and gentle people, fiercely independent but tolerant and courteous even when we disagree with each other, has been reinforced. Thus, this current government of angry and intolerant leaders seems all the more to be an aberration.

  For all the complaints we as a people may have about our system a
nd all the vitriol that passes for political discourse these days, we are still the stewards of the most cherished system of government ever known to humankind. The rights of the individual, the protection of minorities, the respect for the law of the land and the constitution, the history that defines the way we view ourselves and our world, imperfections and all—these are what make our experiment in democracy so worth defending and fighting for.

  No matter how trying some of the recent times have been for my family and me, and for the country, I come away from the fight I’ve had with my government full of hope for our future. It takes time for Americans to fully understand when they have been duped by a government they instinctively want to trust. But it is axiomatic that you cannot fool all of the people all of the time and our citizens inevitably react to the deceit. I see that happening wherever I speak around this great land nowadays.

  What I have experienced has also inspired me to encourage broader participation in our democracy. Our government reflects the interests of the voters; if you do not vote, you cannot be surprised when the actions the government takes benefit those who voted in your stead. The best way to ensure that our government more fully reflects the views of all of its citizens is through greater participation in the process of selecting our leaders. It is simply untrue that a single vote does not matter. Not only does a vote indicate far more concretely than any other mechanism the concerns of the citizen, the absence of a vote guarantees that those concerns cannot be registered, leading governments to respond to the narrow interests of its vocal supporters rather than the broader concerns of the citizenry in general.

  Nations succeed—America included, as our founding fathers understood so well in designing our institutions—when compromises are sought to accommodate as many of the diverse interests in our society as possible. Ours is a great experiment, one that is worth defending, whatever the price, from domestic subversion as much as from foreign enemies. The best defense that each of us has domestically is to be part of the political dialogue in our communities, across our states, and throughout the nation. That is the lesson Valerie and I take away from our experience as we face an uncertain but ever-hopeful future.