In the midst of the Ukraine-Trump-whistleblower-impeachment scandal, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, a central figure in an earlier such disputation, died last week in New Mexico. He was 69.
Wilson was a career foreign service officer whose personal flamboyance and healthy ego helped and hindered his diplomacy. In the words of the New York Times, he was a “big personality whom some found prickly and difficult,” but this worked to his advantage at times. In 1990, as deputy chief of mission in Baghdad during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, he was the last American official to speak face-to-face with Saddam Hussein, telling him in plain language to withdraw his troops. When Hussein threatened diplomats with death if they harbored foreign nationals in their embassies, Wilson defied him and sheltered and evacuated hundreds of Americans, and others, stranded in Baghdad.
To President George H.W. Bush, this made Wilson a “true American hero,” and, in 1992, Bush appointed him ambassador to Gabon and São Tomé and Principe. Wilson went on to serve as Bill Clinton’s senior Africa adviser on the National Security Council before retiring in 1998. That same year, he married his third wife, an undercover CIA officer named Valerie Plame.
Wilson founded and ran an international business and development company specializing in Africa and might well have spent the balance of his working life in the nation’s capital as a consultant. But after 9/11, the chance confluence of his wife Plame and his old adversary Hussein altered Wilson’s trajectory, transforming him overnight from an indistinguishable ex-diplomat-turned-consultant into a political celebrity.
In the immediate aftermath of the October 2001 American invasion of Afghanistan and the dawn of its concomitant war on terror, the administration of President George W. Bush turned its attention to Hussein’s support for regional terrorism and, in particular, credible allegations of Iraq’s replenished stockpile of “weapons of mass destruction.” The fact that Hussein was resistant to international inspection only deepened suspicion that the weapons existed, and “regime change” was imperative.
In February 2002, the CIA dispatched Wilson to the West African republic of Niger to investigate claims that Hussein had purchased enriched uranium. Wilson concluded that no such transaction had taken place. Yet in his 2003 State of the Union address, Bush asserted that “the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” After the successful invasion of Iraq, and Hussein’s overthrow, Wilson published an op-ed in the New York Times in which he claimed that “if [my] 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.”
This is not the place to recount the extended dispute between the Bush White House and its critics, in Congress and in the press, about whether the administration’s rationale for the Iraq invasion consisted of “false pretenses.” But in the aftermath of solving one puzzle arising from Wilson’s op-ed — why was he, of all people, dispatched by the CIA to Niger? — Plame’s identity as an undercover officer was revealed by columnist Robert Novak. This, in turn, led to broader accusations of unlawful White House vengeance against the Wilsons and charges of myriad crimes, including but not limited to treason, and the inevitable appointment of a special prosecutor and congressional demands for impeachment.
In the end, sad to say, few reputations emerged unscathed. The particulars of Wilson’s Times piece were largely discredited; the special prosecutor knew who had unmasked Plame but tried and convicted an innocent bystander. The press quickly chose sides and stuck to its stories despite the evidence. For their part, Plame and Wilson were the subjects of a glamorous photo shoot in Vanity Fair and a friendly 2010 movie where Wilson was played by Sean Penn. His 2004 bestseller was entitled The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity: A Diplomat’s Memoir.
Philip Terzian, a former writer and editor at The Weekly Standard, is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
