Wilson, I have the White House on the line. The line went dead. Wilson then phoned Sandra Charles, the N. Wilson marched over to the foreign ministry at a. They proceeded to have a forceful exchange, which resulted in the restoration of the direct-dial phone capability that had been cut at the American Embassy in Baghdad.
It was something of a stretch; just a few navy ships happened to be in the Persian Gulf. That was a pretty smart way to handle the situation. Thus began several months of negotiations with Iraqi officials—and, once on August 6, , with Saddam himself. It was the last time the Iraqi president would talk to a U. Surrounded by his coterie of advisers he stared at Wilson, who stared back, typically finding a humorous angle in the standoff. Hussein started to laugh.
His political instincts kicked in and stopped him. Saddam wanted the U. Many more meetings with the Iraqis, concerning the treatment of the thousands of Americans trapped in Iraq and Kuwait, were to follow. A handwritten note from George H. It was tense. You never knew where you were with the Iraqis. When he returned to America his face was in the news, but he was rarely quoted, and he did not give interviews.
About 30 hours before the bombs started to fall on Baghdad, Wilson and the first President Bush took a stroll through the Rose Garden, during which Wilson was impressed by the kinds of questions Bush asked. From there he went to Stuttgart and thence to the N. In April that country had suffered a military coup and the assassination of President Ibrahim Bare Mainassara. Wilson says he advised Major Daouda Mallam Wankie, the alleged leader of the coup, to help return the country to democratic rule.
Wilson is someone who likes to be useful—and he enjoyed it when he was asked, after his retirement from government service, to brief the C. He categorically denies that his wife had anything to do with the request other than her role as messenger. I went through what I knew about the personalities. She thought she had debunked it—and, oh, by the way, a four-star Marine Corps general had been down there as well—Carlton Fulford.
And he had left satisfied there was nothing to report. Owens-Kirkpatrick could not be reached for comment. Wilson was not told precisely how much uranium the document specified, but, he says, a quantity of any consequence is not something that can be easily hidden and then whisked into the Sahara Desert.
Uranium in Niger comes from two mines. The managing partner of both mines is the French nuclear company Cogema. Wilson looked at the Niger ministries that would have had to be involved in the sale, had it been done by the book—in which case the documents would have borne the signatures of the minister of mines and energy, the minister of foreign affairs, the prime minister, and quite possibly the president.
It would also have been posted in the Niger equivalent of the Federal Register. He concluded that it would have been very difficult to do so without alerting the other consortium members, since there are up-front costs associated with mining extra products, and, again, the production schedules would have had to be shifted. After Wilson returned to America, a C. Tenet confirmed the trip was made on the C.
By this point members of the intelligence community were complaining behind the scenes about pressure from the administration to find evidence of links between Saddam and international terrorism, and also between Saddam and weapons of mass destruction.
There was also increased reliance on intelligence provided by Ahmad Chalabi, the charismatic head of the opposition Iraqi National Congress, from Iraqi defectors. They gave a grisly picture of secret nuclear facilities, terrorist training camps, and chemical- and biological-weapons factories spread throughout Iraq, which the C.
The C. Cheney and the Pentagon, on the other hand, stood firmly behind him. Cheney and his chief of staff, Lewis Libby, visited the C. Foley could not be reached for comment. In October additional documents relating to an alleged uranium sale in Niger surfaced in Italy, according to the Hersh article, where they were obtained by a journalist, Elisabetta Burba, at Panorama magazine.
Burba took them to the American Embassy and made her own fact-finding trip to Niger, where she concluded the documents were not reliable. She did not even bother to write a story. Yet the documents apparently were given credence by the administration.
Bellamy declined to comment. On the weekend of March 8, a U. Over breakfast the next morning with Kristof and his wife, Wilson told about his trip to Niger and said Kristof could write about it, but not name him. At this point what he wanted, Wilson says, was for the government to correct the record. One of them, he says, told him to write the story. While he was working, he says, he received a call from Richard Leiby, a reporter at The Washington Post, about his role in the Gulf War.
Wilson told him about the Times article he was writing, and the Post, in an attempt to keep up, ran a story about Wilson on July 6. Only Robert Novak, in a separate segment, said that it was a nonstory. Wilson says he was prepared for the personal attacks that followed the publication of the story in The New York Times.
He tried to help us feel better and keep our spirits up. I really was most appreciative of him. At this point, Wilson says, he and his wife thought the leak could be contained if no one picked it up. When the Novak story ran, identifying not the C. Novak declined to comment. He says your wife is fair game. I gotta go. Timothy M. But to go to Niger is not exactly a benefit. In the last week of September, Novak modified his story. Wilson was an analyst, not a spy, not a covert operative, and not in charge of undercover operatives.
It did not, in his mind —or in the opinion of his wife—excuse what had happened. Plame herself thought instantly that the leak was illegal. Even members of her family did not know what she did. None of the six would come forward. With the announcement of the Justice Department investigation, the hotline from the White House to the press seemed abruptly to end, but the smearing of Joe Wilson did not, Wilson feels. A self-proclaimed lifelong nonpartisan, he says he has been forced into the Democratic corner by critics who refuse to give him the benefit of the doubt.
In late September he was sitting in the greenroom, waiting to appear on a CNBC show, when a friend called and told him that Ed Gillespie was on another program dismissing him as a partisan left-winger. To some conservative pundits, it seemed incredible that Wilson could have caused such mayhem on his own without the help of some left-wing umbrella group. The e-mailer wrote:. In fact, they merely make him more determined.
But then someone informed him that Novak had written about him finding a literary agent, implying Wilson was doing just that. Flog that sucker.
Plame seems to be dealing with the situation with characteristic equanimity. Eight days after Wilson published his op-ed, columnist Robert Novak identified Plame as an "agency operative on weapons of mass destruction," and cited two senior administration officials in his piece " Mission to Niger.
He was sentenced to 30 months in prison in for lying to the FBI and obstructing justice in the investigation into the leak of Plame's identity. Libby's sentence was commuted by Bush and he was pardoned by President Donald Trump in April of last year. Plame, who relocated to New Mexico after leaving the CIA in , moved to Santa Fe the day after Libby was convicted for his role in outing her, she said in her campaign announcement.
Along with Wilson, the couple supported Hillary Clinton during the primary, and was one of her early supporters in Over the past decade she's written a best-selling memoir, which was adapted into a major Hollywood film, and has made multiple public appearances to speak about issues of nuclear proliferation and women's role in intelligence. She recently worked for the Santa Fe Institute as director of community outreach.
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