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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1d1oRn6sd_4K-XBBqa-38SArlB7Q3isgd-CXbghgSG0s/edit
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/27/us/joseph-wilson-who-challenged-iraq-war-narrative-dies-at-69.html
Joseph Wilson, Who Challenged Iraq War Narrative, Dies at 69
He
contradicted a statement in President George W. Bush’s State of the
Union address. A week later, his wife at the time, Valerie Plame, was
outed as a C.I.A. agent.
Image
By Neil Genzlinger and
Joseph
C. Wilson, the long-serving American diplomat who undercut President
George W. Bush’s claim in 2003 that Iraq had been trying to build
nuclear weapons, leading to the unmasking of his wife at the time,
Valerie Plame, as a C.I.A. agent, died on Friday at his home in Santa
Fe, N.M. He was 69.
Ms. Plame said the cause was organ failure.
Mr.
Wilson’s decision to challenge Mr. Bush’s argument that Saddam Hussein,
the Iraqi dictator, was secretly reconstituting his nuclear program,
changed both the narrative and the politics of the war. It forced the
White House to concede, grudgingly, that Mr. Bush had built the case for
the invasion of Iraq on a faulty intelligence report — one that critics
said was cherry-picked to provide an urgent rationale for a war that
quickly turned into a morass.
Mr.
Wilson’s action ultimately created a rift between the White House and
the Central Intelligence Agency and led to inquiries about whether
intelligence had been politicized, a debate that racks Washington to
this day. And the unmasking of Ms. Plame — who worked in the C.I.A. unit
responsible for determining whether nations were building weapons of
mass destruction — led to investigations and ultimately a trial for Vice
President Dick Cheney’s top national security aide.
A
big personality whom some found prickly and difficult, Mr. Wilson
served in numerous posts, many in Africa, in a 23-year diplomatic career
that began in 1976. One posting was to Niger, and in 2002, by then a
private citizen, he was asked by the C.I.A. to return to that country to
try to verify reports that Niger had sold uranium yellowcake to Iraq in
the 1990s. The material is essentially raw uranium that can be turned
into nuclear fuel with considerable processing.
At
the time, the Bush administration was building to a crisis point with
Iraq, and the key issue was whether Mr. Hussein had resumed his quest
for nuclear weapons.
It was a
legitimate question. After Mr. Hussein was defeated in the Gulf War in
1991, international inspectors found, and dismantled, what appeared to
be an advanced program to develop nuclear weapons that Western
intelligence agencies had missed.
Image
But
Mr. Wilson concluded from his trip that the reports of a Niger-Iraq
deal were false. Nevertheless, in his State of the Union address in
January 2003, President Bush declared that “the British government has
learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of
uranium from Africa.” He ordered an invasion of Iraq seven weeks later.
Soon
after, the intelligence behind Mr. Bush’s “16 words” from the State of
the Union speech was under attack. American military teams could find no
evidence of an active nuclear program in Iraq.
Mr.
Wilson felt that the record needed to be corrected. In an Op-Ed article
in The New York Times on July 6, 2003, titled “What I Didn’t Find in
Africa,” he argued that the intelligence had most likely been twisted to
create a rationale for the invasion.
“If
my information was deemed inaccurate, I understand (though I would be
very interested to know why),” he wrote. “If, however, the information
was ignored because it did not fit certain preconceptions about Iraq,
then a legitimate argument can be made that we went to war under false
pretenses.”
That challenge did not sit
well with Mr. Bush or Mr. Cheney, who ripped the article out of the
paper and began annotating it with questions, some of them wondering why
a civilian had been sent by the C.I.A. to figure out what had happened.
“Or did his wife send him on a junket?’’ Mr. Cheney wrote.
The
White House story about how the language got into the speech — and why
“British intelligence” was cited — began to shatter. The day after the
Op-Ed article was published, Ari Fleischer, the White House press
secretary, was challenged by a Times reporter about how the 16 words had
gotten into the speech.
“So it was wrong?’’ he was asked.
“That’s what we’ve acknowledged,’’ Mr. Fleischer said.
Only
the White House had never acknowledged it, and his admission engulfed
the Bush White House in a tide of criticism and led to years of
investigations.
Image
A
week after the Op-Ed was published, Robert Novak, a syndicated
columnist with conservative leanings and Republican connections, wrote a
column identifying Ms. Plame as a C.I.A. operative — a startling
breach, since she had been under cover for much of her career.
Revealing
a C.I.A. agent’s identity can be a crime, and an investigation into the
leak led to charges against Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby
Jr. But Mr. Libby was not charged with leaking the information — it had
come from a top State Department official who acknowledged that he was
the source — but with lying to the F.B.I. about his conversations with
reporters.
After a long trial that
involved testimony from a parade of administration officials, news
editors and reporters, Mr. Libby was convicted. President Bush later
commuted his 30-month prison sentence. Mr. Cheney, however, did not
believe that commutation was enough. He insisted on a full pardon. The
split on the issue contributed to a breach between the president and his
vice president, and Mr. Cheney was increasingly marginalized in the
administration’s second term.
Last year, President Trump issued Mr. Libby a full pardon.
Mr.
Wilson and Ms. Plame did not flee the spotlight once they had been
thrust into it. They posed for photographs in a convertible parked near
the White House. Their story was told in a 2010 movie, “Fair Game,’’ in
which Mr. Wilson was played by Sean Penn and Ms. Plame by Naomi Watts.
For Mr. Wilson, the decision to write the Op-Ed article was a matter of patriotic duty.
“The
path to writing the op-ed piece had been straightforward in my own
mind,” he wrote in a 2004 memoir, “The Politics of Truth: Inside the
Lies That Put the White House on Trial and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA
Identity.” “My government had refused to address the fundamental
question of how the lie regarding Saddam’s supposed attempt to purchase
African uranium had found its way into the State of the Union address.
“Time
after time during the previous four months,” he continued, “from March
to July, administration spokespeople had sloughed off the reality that
the president of the United States had sent our country to war in order
to defend us against the threat of the ‘mushroom cloud,’ when they knew,
as did I, that at least one of the two ‘facts’ underpinning the case
was not a fact at all.”
Image
In
a telephone interview on Friday, Ms. Plame, whose marriage to Mr.
Wilson ended in divorce this year, said he had never regretted the
decision.
“He
did it because he felt it was his responsibility as a citizen,” she
said. “It was not done out of partisan motivation, despite how it was
spun.”
“He had the heart of a lion,” she added. “He’s an American hero.”
Joseph
Charles Wilson IV was born on Nov. 6, 1949, in Bridgeport, Conn., to
Joseph Wilson III and Phyllis (Finnell) Wilson. Both parents were
journalists, and young Joe had a colorful upbringing because of it.
“I
had spent my high school years in Europe following my parents in their
quixotic quest to be expatriate journalists and authors,” he wrote in
his memoir. “We had first traveled to Europe in 1959, driving around in
an old Citroen taxi that was low-slung like the gangster cars in old
movies.”
That background was a
foundation for his diplomatic career, but his first job on graduating
from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1971 was as a
carpenter. Within a few years, though, he had taken the Foreign Service
exam, and in 1976 he received his first posting, to Niamey, the capital
of Niger.
He was there for two years.
Then came assignments in Togo, South Africa, Burundi and elsewhere,
including Iraq. There, from 1988 to 1991, a tense period that included
Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, he was deputy chief of mission, the
No. 2 job in an embassy. He left in early 1991, just before the United
States and its allies launched the military action known as Operation
Desert Storm to force Iraq out of Kuwait.
In
1992, President George H.W. Bush named Mr. Wilson ambassador to two
African countries, Gabon and the island nation of Sao Tome and Principe,
a post he held for three years. He finished his government service as
senior director for African affairs for President Bill Clinton’s
National Security Council. He then started a consulting business.
Image
Mr.
Wilson’s first marriage, to Susan Otchis, ended in divorce, as did a
second marriage, to Jacqueline Giorgi. He married Ms. Plame in 1998.
He
is survived by a brother, William; two children from his first
marriage, Joseph and Sabrina Ames; two children from his marriage to Ms.
Plame, Trevor and Samantha Wilson; and five grandchildren.
In his memoir, Ambassador Wilson found a positive side to his and Ms. Plame’s experience.
“I
come away from the fight I’ve had with my government full of hope for
our future,” he wrote. “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.”
David
E. Sanger is a national security correspondent. In a 36-year reporting
career for The Times, he has been on three teams that have won Pulitzer
Prizes, most recently in 2017 for international reporting. His newest
book is “The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage and Fear in the Cyber Age.” @SangerNYT • Facebook
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