The betrayal of a diplomat

No administration in history ever has approached its reelection campaign with so many insider accounts of its most sensitive deliberations freely circulating through the country’s bookstores and libraries.

To the expanding shelf of books that propose descriptions of how President Bush and his advisors did or did not meet the threat posed by Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda and of how and why they marshaled the march to war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, we now can add former ambassador Joseph Wilson’s “The Politics of Truth,” which goes on sale today.

This is a fascinating if somewhat awkward book, whose character is fairly summarized by not one but two subtitles: “Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity” and “A Diplomat’s Memoir.” You don’t have to know much about marketing books to figure out who insisted on that first one.

In any event, it’s a blunt-force reminder of Wilson’s reluctant relevance to the current moment. The whole affair actually turns on 16 words spoken by Bush during his State of the Union address on Jan. 28, 2003. At the time, the administration’s principal justification for a preemptive invasion of Iraq was the allegation that Hussein either possessed or was on the verge of acquiring weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear devices.

That night, Bush flatly declared: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

It wasn’t true. A month later, when the administration submitted the supporting documents to the International Atomic Energy Agency, it concluded they were “not authentic.” Within 24 hours, the State Department alleged that it had been taken in by forged intelligence claiming that Iraq had attempted to purchase 40 tons of cake uranium from the African country of Niger, where it is mined.

For its part, the White House continued to insist not only that Hussein might already have the bomb, but also that the president had relayed the fraudulent allegation about the Nigerien purchase in good faith.

Wilson, however, knew that for nearly a year the administration had had not one but three reports debunking claims of the uranium transfer, which first had surfaced in an Italian magazine. Wilson, a then-retired diplomat with long experience in Niger, had been asked by the CIA to go to that country to investigate the claims. He easily discredited them, partly because the sums generated by such a sale would have been easily traced in desperately poor Niger, partly because the country’s uranium mines are operated with a consortium of foreign partners and managed by a French firm. All would have had to have been in on the deal. Wilson’s conclusions were seconded in subsequent investigative reports by Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick, the U.S. ambassador to Niger, and Marine Corps. Gen. Carlton Fulford.

Beginning in March 2003, Wilson -- who himself favored threatening Hussein with “credible force,” if he indeed had weapons of mass destruction -- repeatedly urged the White House, the State Department and the staffs of the Senate and House intelligence committees to come clean about the African allegation. Finally, on July 6, he laid the whole story out in an Op-Ed piece for the New York Times, which the paper titled “What I Didn’t Find in Africa.”

The roof fell in, which rather touchingly seems to have taken Wilson by surprise. He was denounced as a partisan Democrat, when actually he comes from a very Republican San Francisco family and voted for then-President George Bush -- whom he still very much admires -- over Bill Clinton in 1992. He was dismissed as a diplomatic nonentity, a failure, though he had risen through the foreign service to ambassadorial rank and had adroitly, even heroically, served as the acting U.S. ambassador in Baghdad in the tense period between Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait and the outbreak of the Persian Gulf War.

Worse was to follow. Eight days after his essay appeared in the New York Times, conservative columnist Robert Novak wrote that Wilson’s “wife, Valerie Plame, is a [CIA] operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson’s wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report.”

Plame is, in fact, a covert CIA agent who had long worked undercover as an international energy executive. Publishing the identity of an undercover intelligence agent is a crime, and a Justice Department-appointed special prosecutor is investigating the identities of Novak’s sources, which he has steadfastly refused to disclose.

Wilson had been warned by NBC’s Andrea Mitchell that administration sources had tried to peddle the story about Plame to her. Informed by a mutual acquaintance that Novak too was in possession of the information about his wife, Wilson had tried to persuade him not to publish it, which ended her career as a covert agent.

For his part, Wilson argues that he was maligned and his wife professionally ruined as a warning to others in the intelligence community who might have been tempted to make public the administration’s selective use and misuse of their work, as it hammered together the case for war in Iraq.

“The Politics of Truth” makes the case for Wilson’s own credibility on these matters in ways the author probably never intended. For one thing, this really is two books -- or more precisely, the manuscript of one book bracketed front and rear by something closer to an extended magazine article. It begins with a dramatic recapitulation of the Novak incident, clearly intended as a kind of foreshadowing. It then breaks off into an extended memoir of Wilson’s family history and his long and quite interesting diplomatic career. Nothing here is reminiscent of Isaiah Berlin’s famous narrative dispatches to London from wartime Washington or of George Kennan’s legendarily astringent insights. But, as diplomatic prose goes, Wilson writes a good, clear, thorough dispatch.

His account of his service in Baghdad and of his fierce, face-to-face encounters with Hussein and his foreign minister, Tarik Aziz, are frankly gripping. Wilson’s conduct of that mission was deemed heroic by then-President George Bush, whose warmly congratulatory letter the author still hangs on his office wall. His work was similarly regarded by then Secretary of State James A. Baker III and national security advisor Brent Scowcroft.

Moreover, Wilson is nobody’s fool when it comes to dealing with Hussein. He strongly supported the Persian Gulf War and, up until recently, argued that if evidence of Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction were found, the dictator -- whom Wilson flatly labels “a sociopath” -- had to be confronted with force.

Wilson’s point, which is repeated at rather too much length in too many fashions in the book’s concluding section, is that the administration distorted and lied concerning our intelligence on these issues and then behaved abominably toward his family and others when it was discovered.

The author’s rage over this alleged bad conduct -- indecency, really -- is what animates “The Politics of Truth.” He is, at the end of the day, a patriot and a public servant, and he is furious over what he feels is a betrayal of those things. Fair play, trust and good manners matter in the world in which he chose to live his life.

This is dissent then not from the radical fringe but from the heart of the establishment.