News & Politics > Q & A

American Hero: An Interview with Joseph Wilson
By Lorna Tychostup

In 1990 Joseph Wilson was the chargé d’affaires in Baghdad; as such he was the last American diplomat to meet with Saddam Hussein before the first Gulf War. At that time, he sheltered 100 Americans to save them from becoming potential hostages. When Saddam threatened to execute anyone who did not turn over foreigners, Wilson met with reporters wearing a hangman’s noose rather than a tie. According to Wilson, the message he hoped to convey was: “If you want to execute me, I’ll bring my own f**king rope.” After Iraq he served as George H. W. Bush’s ambassador to Gabon, São Tomé, and Príncipe. He then went on to serve the Clinton administration as a policy advisor on Africa for the National Security Council. With his wealth of experience and expertise in both Baghdad and central Africa, Wilson was uniquely qualified to address intelligence matters concerning both regions.

Since the publication of Wilson's op-ed piece in the New York Times on July 6 revealing that the Bush administration’s claim that Saddam Hussein was seeking to acquire uranium from Niger was false, the former ambassador’s willingness to expose the lie at the heart of the rationale for the second Gulf War led to the White House leak that outed Wilson's wife as a CIA agent.

Wilson spoke to Lorna Tychostup by phone from Washington.

LORNA TYCHOSTUP: Who exactly sent you to Niger?

JOSEPH WILSON: OK. Well, first of all, the VP did not send me. The VP asked the question, based upon a report that crossed his desk. And the question was, “Do we have anything more on this?” That is more or less what the question was. And the question was addressed to the CIA briefer who then took it back and in staffing out the response to the VP’s question—because of course, this was a serious question—the decision was made to speak to me because I know a lot about uranium, and I know a lot about Niger, and I know an awful lot about the officials who were in office at the time that this was supposedly done.

As a consequence of that conversation, he asked me if I would be prepared and willing to go out there and fill in some of the gaps in the information they had. We then discussed what might be accomplished, what sort of value would I bring, who I might speak to, the questions that might be answered, [questions] people had to answer. I then went out and got the answers to the questions, and came back. I briefed before I left Niger; I briefed when I came back. My report basically said there is nothing to this.

LT: So you were sent by the CIA?

JW: Well, my trip was funded by the CIA. It was a government mission and I made it very clear to the CIA before I left, “I don’t do clandestine.” I cleared the trip with the State Department and with the ambassador on the ground.

LT: Did you speak with someone in Cheney’s office?

JW: No.

LT: So there was no direct contact. Did you speak with people in Rumsfeld’s office?

JW: No.

LT: Who did you submit your report to when you returned?

JW: The CIA reports officer.

LT: The report said who you spoke to in Niger?

JW: I filed the appropriate report with the CIA.

LT: By March 2003 we know that the documents are forgeries. And then you come forward in July.

JW: Well, in March, actually, the day after Dr. El Baradei [head of the International Atomic Energy Agency] spoke at the United Nations, a State Department spokesman said, “Well, we were fooled by these documents.” And somebody asked me the question on CNN and I said that I thought that if the US government looked into its files, it would realize it knew a lot more about this subject than the State Department spokesman was letting on.

LT: Then you came forward with your op-ed in the New York Times.

JW: I wrote the opinion piece in July. July 6th.

LT: Why did you wait until July?

JW: Because, one, the purpose of the whole exercise was to get the government to own up to the mistake. And two...it was apparent that the government was not owning up. In fact, when Dr. Rice appeared on “Meet the Press,” she sort of made this other material misstatement of fact when she said, “Maybe someone in the bowels of the agency knew these [documents] were forgeries, but nobody in our circle knew that this was not on. But nobody in our circle.” And that was a material misstatement of fact. Number three, it was pretty clear that the press was going to expose me as the “retired ambassador who went out to Niger.” By that time the story was spinning pretty much out of control and in order to get control of the story, I had to write it myself.

LT: So you came forward and a week later Robert Novak exposes your wife.

JW: That’s right.

LT: Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst, has said: “The primary function of the CIA is to seek the truth regarding what is going on abroad and be able to report that truth without fear or favor. The CIA at its best is the one place in Washington that a president can turn to for an unvarnished truthful answer to a delicate problem." And now in Washington, Rumsfeld created this “Office of Special Plans,” which appears to me as a separate agency almost working against the CIA and the State Department. Does this put Americans at risk?

JW: The problem with all these little special agencies or special little groups within agencies is what Seymour Hersh called “the stovepiping of intelligence” in his article [The New Yorker, week of October 27], which I commend to you. What he means by that is that you don’t do the appropriate vetting of the bits of information. And in the intelligence world, thousands of bits of information come to the attention of the US government every day. And we have a huge analytical operation that exists for the purpose of deciding what is fact and what is fiction. And when you get up these little operations that are “policy shops” rather than “analytical shops,” they’re moving intelligence directly up to the most senior policy makers in the country. Then you run the risk that senior policy decision-makers are making decisions based on bad information. Now the extent to which the Niger-uranium case affected the decision...on the extent to which Saddam may or may not have been reconstituting his nuclear weapons, that was bad information. And as a consequence, a bad decision was made. And in the consequence of the war with Iraq, the results are very clear. We now have over 300 dead, and 130,000 kids in harm’s way and lord who knows how many Iraqis are dead. Issues as sensitive as war and peace, we, the American people and our Congress, have a right to expect the debate on those decisions will be based upon a set of commonly accepted facts. Not on information that is just pulled from air because it supports a political decision or political position.

LT: The Niger documents were found to be forgeries, and yet they were central in the administration’s claims for war.

JW: Dr. Rice has, of course, said it was just one small part of it. But in actual fact, the two principal pillars on which the nuclear weapons justification was made were uranium from Niger, the fissile material—and if you remember the president referred specifically that if [Saddam Hussein] got fissile material he’d be able to make a bomb within a year. Well, enriched uranium is not fissile material, but it is the raw material from which fissile material would be drawn. The other pillar, of course, were these aluminum tubes, which as it turns out, happen to perfectly match the specifications for certain artillery rockets.

LT: The October 2002 National Intelligence Assessment [NIA] report talks about the fissile material. It also says, “Without getting such material from abroad, Iraq probably would not be able to make a weapon until 2007 to 2009, owing to inexperience in building and operating centrifuge facilities to produce highly enriched uranium and challenges in procuring the necessary equipment and expertise.” In addition, it says, “Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or CBW [Chemical/Biological Weapons] against the US, fearing that exposure of Iraqi involvement would provide Washington a stronger case for going to war.”

JW: Was that in the NIA?

LT: Yes.

JW: That’s great. I think that is absolutely true. That is the conclusion I would have drawn.

LT: It also says, “Iraq would probably attempt clandestine attacks against the US Homeland if Baghdad feared an attack that threatened the survival of the regime were imminent or unavoidable, or possibly for revenge.” And if Saddam were “sufficiently desperate, he might decide that only an organization such as al-Qaeda—with worldwide reach and extensive terrorist infrastructure, and already engaged in a life-or-death struggle against the US—could perpetrate the type of terrorist attack that he would hope to conduct.” In other words Saddam would attach himself to an organization like this. Are we now more at risk?

JW: Of course we are. We are more at risk in three different ways. One, we’ve got 130,000 more Americans on the front lines so they are at risk every day. Two, we have literally exploded the potential pool from which terrorists can be drawn.

LT: What does that mean?

JW: Fundamentally, it means that when the president talked about al-Qaeda and the terrorist with international reach, he talked in terms of tens of thousands. Now, if you extrapolate that for every terrorist you have a sort of a network, and you end up with a say network of ten, fifty, or a hundred, or whatever number you wanted to use, and say you have a hundred thousand, and for each terrorist drawn from a community of say a hundred people, you multiply a hundred thousand by a hundred, and that gets you roughly to the pool of terrorist sympathizers and supporters existing in the Muslim world. What’s a hundred times a hundred thousand? Ten million. Now after Shock and Awe, the humiliation of a major Arab capital as viewed on TV through the eyes of Aljazeera—which is considerably different than the eyes of CNN and Walt Rogers—races up the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys. Shock and Awe as viewed by Muslims has essentially made a much larger group of Muslims, which number a total of 1.2 billion, into potential sympathizers or supporters of international terrorism.

LT: So we are definitely more at risk now.

JW: Oh definitely. And the third reason is, a lot of our first responders are over there instead of over here. Every time there is a call-up of a guard or reserve unit.

LT: It has been stated that your wife’s name was leaked as “an act of revenge” to punish you for suggesting this administration has stretched the evidence about Saddam Hussein’s nuclear arsenal in order to justify this war. Do you think this is true? If what you said that the press was just about to expose you anyway and you just simply came forward—

JW: There is a difference between me and my wife, of course. I was already well known to the government. If you look at [New York Times columnist] Nick Kristof’s articles, it doesn’t take any sort of inside knowledge for anybody to figure out who they were talking about. I was not hiding my name from my government. I did not particularly care to attach my name to it if I didn’t have to. And, of course, in Washington, the favorite pastime is if you want to destroy the message, then you try to destroy the credibility of the messenger. So it was important to me that the message have legs before the messenger be exposed. The fact is the story was beginning to spin out of control. It was like the 15th guy in a line receiving a message from the first guy and the message is obviously distorted by the time it gets down there. With respect to my wife, it is a much different story. There are two plausible reasons. As difficult as it is, the rational reason is that they wanted to discourage people from coming forward. And there was a lot of grumbling at the time, if you remember. A lot of anonymous analysts saying, “Well, we felt pressure because Dick Cheney was coming down to the CIA all the time.” So the message to them was, “You go public on us and we’ll do a Wilson on you.”…Typically the researchers are not real accustomed to the hurly burly rough and tumble of the political world. There is a certain reclusiveness there, so probably this was pretty off-putting. But that’s the rational reason. If you want to discourage others, if you want to protect your political agenda, then you do that.

The irrational reason, of course, is that revenge is fine. I had already said my piece, and the White House acknowledged that I was right. And so, why would a public servant, a steward of our national security, take it upon himself, out of spite, to expose a national security asset? And that is the irrational reason. And I think it is a combination of the two, frankly. It may well have just been the latter. Just out of spite. These guys are just pricks. You probably can’t use that in your...

LT: No, we’re pretty progressive. What is the effect of this now? Is there an effect in terms of people being afraid to come forward?

JW: I think there has been a chill. I’ve had a number of newspaper guys report back to me that the intimidation they are feeling from this administration is really very heavy-handed. I had one reporter who called me and said he had just gotten off of the phone with one of the six who had received the first “leak”. I said to him, “Did you talk with him about why he didn’t go public with it? After all, the story in and of itself is bogus and so whoever leaked the story to Novak leaked a lie to him. And my understanding of the press ethics is that when you are leaking a lie, then you don’t benefit from source protection.

LT: What is the lie?

JW: The lie that my wife suggested me for the job [to go to Niger] had anything to do with the decision. So I asked the reporter [this] and he said, “No, the reporter told me he is being so intimidated that he is afraid that if he says anything, he’ll end up in Guantanamo.”

LT: That seems to be a national joke at this point. That if anybody moves too much to the left or the right, they will end up in Guantanamo.

JW: Yes. If you cross the administration, you’ll end up in Guantanamo.

LT: What damage has occurred to your wife’s career at this point?

JW: It’s hard to say. In all fairness, her community has been very positive toward her and has embraced her. But you know it is a bureaucracy and bureaucracies don’t adapt very well to sudden shocks like this. So we’ll have to see in the long term. But she is very good at what she does. She is very dedicated. And she would, very clearly, like to continue in her chosen field, which is protecting the national security of our country, I might add.

LT: There have been reports that due to her “outing” people will die in some places.

JW: I think that is probably overstated but I don’t know. Obviously these guys do a damage assessment. One thing that is clear is that if there were only 250 people who read the Bob Novak article that Monday morning, you can be darn sure that every station chief, every intelligence officer in Washington fed her name into their intelligence service’s data bank and ran the [tracks] on her, and everything that she may or may not have done that they had a record of in their countries. And that potentially puts not just agents at risk, but also innocents she might have known in various capacities.

LT: What do you see as the chances of the person, or people who leaked this information to be caught and prosecuted?

JW: Well, I don’t think the president is taking this seriously. And when he sits there and says, “There are a lot of senior administration officials and there are a lot of leaks in this town and we may never find them.” I think that is being terribly nonchalant. Sam Dash wrote an article [Newsday, October 27] in which he made the point that the Patriot Act is designed precisely to go after people like this. And I have seen no indication of any invocation of the Patriot Act. And I would remind the president that there are really only a handful of senior officers who have both a national security clearance that might get them into a roomful of people, some of whom might know my wife, and who also have a political agenda. And they exist at that nexus between the very top reaches of the National Security Council and the political actors.

LT: You are starting to be seen as an American hero. Has the smear campaign against you blown up in their faces? Are the smear tactics working?

JW: I don’t think it is working. I think it is absolutely despicable. I think the American people know it is despicable. Now, as to the question that I am an American hero or not...most people who have followed my career would think that I was a hero coming out of Baghdad the first time, when I was actually introduced by George H. W. Bush to his war cabinet as an American hero when he received me in the oval office on January 14, 1991. Now with respect to this particular incident, my writing of a really truly modest piece, which I remind you is entitled “What I Did Not Find in Africa,” I have never thought and I tell everybody whoever asks, it is a mistake to think of this as a heroic act. In fact, one of the great things about living in the USA is that you have a Constitution, the First Amendment of which guarantees the right of free speech. All I did was to exercise that right in the finest traditions of exercising my civic duty as well. I have lived in dictatorships from Franco’s Spain to Saddam’s Iraq and lord knows how many African dictatorships. I actually have friends and colleagues from a number of those countries who have dared to speak truth to power and have truly suffered as a consequence, either through being jailed or being tortured. Standing up and having some schoolyard bullies try and discredit me and subsequently out a national security asset is, in my case certainly, minor compared to what they do in other countries. In the case of my wife, it was despicable and quite possibly illegal. And the government ought to get on with the job of finding out who did it.

LT: But your experience of being in these closeted, horrible places where there is no freedom of speech— is this helping to motivate you?

JW: What is motivating me, I think, is a sense that we are in a very difficult situation. I regret that the debate was not more vigorous before we put 130,000 kids in harm’s way. But the fact that it wasn’t doesn’t mean that we should not continue to try to have a debate on the direction that this country is headed in foreign policy. I am happy to participate in that debate. And I am happy to debate policy differences with any one of these people until the cows come home. Regrettably, when it is apparent that they don’t have a lot of solid ground to stand on policy-wise, they decided they will use these smear tactics—call me a partisan hack or something. I think that just exposes the weakness of their case. But I can assure you, as a reporter pointed out the other day—who was with me in Baghdad—“Anybody who saw Joe Wilson face down Saddam Hussein in Baghdad should damn well understand that he is not going to back down in the face of a couple of punks at the White House.”

LT: Why should the average person's care about your wife being outed as a CIA agent—smear campaign directed at you for telling the truth?

JW: The average person ought to understand that exposure of national security assets renders our country less secure. And the average person ought to also understand that the person or people who decided, in this case, that their political agenda was more important than the national security of our country—and remember, my wife was involved in the weapons of mass destruction business which everybody understands to be the most significant threat which we face over the next two decades—so when a person or people decide that their political agenda is more important than the national security asset or the national security of our country, then we ought to worry, and we ought not to forget that whoever did this is still in place, they still have a national security clearance, that they still work close to the President of the United States. And if they were prepared to do it once, and they get away with it, what is to prevent them from doing it again?

Now, in the broader picture, you also have, I think, the really profound breech of trust between our clandestine intelligence service and its own government. Now, whatever one may think of the clandestine intelligence service—and obviously, people have different views of the role of the CIA or the history of the organization—it exists essentially to go out and ferret out those secrets that are necessary for us to understand as a country, what are the threats that we face.

LT: Given that you came forward, and given the repercussions and the fact that they have tried to discredit you, if you had the chance to do this over again, would you do anything differently?
JW: No.

LT: So none of this frightens you at all?

JW: Oh God, no, no, no, no.

You need to understand that four days after the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein, I sat down with my senior staff in Baghdad and we gamed out all the possible outcomes. This was about a five-hour meeting. About an hour into the meeting we all concluded that the chances were really good, based on Iraq’s government’s historic record of actions under stress, the chances were really good that some of us in that room would not survive. And we structured—and anybody who followed this will sort of understand this—we structured our approach in a way that was our last act. We structured our approach so that it would reflect on us in history. That is why people correctly accuse us of being anything but diplomatic. We had a choice of going to our slaughter like lambs or like John Wayne at the Alamo. And we opted for the John Wayne approach...the “in-your-face-approach,” we called it. Now, having all of us survived that [laughter], having come through that, it puts everything else in a lot of perspective. And this little sort of political toying around with these guys is child’s play compared to issues that we were dealing with in the first Gulf War where decisions we made impacted on whether people lived or died—including ourselves, I might add.

LT: It seems to me that many people need this type of in-your-face experience at this time.

JW: Well, I wouldn’t wish that experience on anybody. But what I would wish on the American people, which is one of the things I have said and have done—I just got back from doing two university speeches yesterday—what I intend to do with my current notoriety is try to encourage people to participate more fully in their democracy—this is your country. This is not “their” country. This is your country. This is our country. When we don’t participate in the selection of our leaders we give it away to somebody who does participate.

LT: What do you tell people? It is one thing to tell people that they should participate—do you give them any specifics? It takes a lot of courage...

JW: Yes. I tell people that the lesson that should draw from my example is that if you step into the public square and raise your voice, your voice will be heard. And that this is your country and if you don’t like the direction it is going in, you damn well ought to speak out and you ought to let your congressperson and your senators know how you feel. And you ought to tell 10 of your friends to tell their congressperson and their senators how they feel, and have them tell ten of their friends, and so on and so on. People say, “Well, they’re not responsive.” It is clear to me that after every congressional break, Congress comes back to Washington in a somewhat more sullen mood about the direction that this administration is taking the country. It will have an impact. It is never too late.

LT: Seymour Hersh also wrote about the fact that around Christmas time last year, there were these CIA agents who were coming to him and kind of laughing about how they were the ones who forged the Niger documents. This was done to show how ignorant some of these folks in the administration are about the situation. They were such obvious, to even the most inexperienced eyes, forgeries. Now we are at war. What do you say to that?

JW: Well that is the sensationalist part of Hersh’s article. But what I’d say to that is that it is important to understand that in the intelligence business, thousands of bits of information come over the transom every day, most of which are bogus. The intelligence business is one in which you do not ever get what you pay for, or rarely get what you pay for. And that is why we have such a large analytical operation, to try and piece together this mosaic and ferret out fact from fiction. So the real substance of Sy’s article, as sensational as it is to speculate on who may have done this or who didn’t do it, the real substance is how the vetting system, how the analysis of information was short circuited. And how this really bad information ended up in the hands of the decision makers.

LT: That takes us back to the Office of Special Plans. This was a unit put together—from what I understand they are not seasoned analysts, I don’t know if they are analysts at all.

JW: No. They are ideologues.

LT: And they were simply looking for information that would prove their point. What would you say to that?

JW: I have made that argument, that it seems to me—at least in my case, the little piece of this that I own—that one of two things happened. Either there was a breakdown in the government system, in other words, the national security advisor [Condoleezza Rice] did indeed forget about the two memos that were in her drawer—which I find incredible since the national security advisor position was established in 1947 for the express purpose of counting nuclear weapons, for protecting the national security of the country, and the one threat to the national security of the country has always been nuclear weapons. So I find that hard to believe. But that is one possible explanation. And the other explanation, which I think is far more likely, is that the decision makers, and perhaps those who fed them information, decided they were going to use only that information which bolstered the political decisions that they had already taken, irrespective of whether that information was true or not. And I think that is clear.

LT: It has been an honor to share time with you over the phone. Thank you very much for the work you are doing. You are a source of inspiration to so many people who are somewhat confused by the horror that is happening here in our country.

JW: Well, let us hope that those people will get out and re-elect President Gore or a Democratic president.

LT: What are the chances of our having a legitimate election?

JW: Seriously. I said for the past two years that I worry, I worry…I have never worried more about our democracy than I worry about it now. And I worry about just precisely that. That, in fact, the election a year from now will be so fraudulent that we will not, in fact, participate in the selection of our own leaders.

LT: You really believe that as well?

JW: Not that I believe in it, I worry about it.

LT: It is a growing concern. The electronic voting machines, the fact that people are being thwarted from registering, their names are being taken off voting roles. Even if the people do rise up in this country and go to the voting booths in numbers never seen before, that this election would be fraudulently conducted and maybe the truth would not come out.

JW: Well, there will come a time when Americans will get angry enough that they will…you cannot keep Americans down for too long.

LT: Do you think it would take another four years of George Bush to do that?

JW: I think it will take less than a year. But I am very optimistic. I am the eternal optimist.