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Ambassador Joe Wilson Interview

Wilson Says President has been Badly Advised
By Jeff Gannon
Talon News
November 3, 2003

Ambassador Joe Wilson, the man at the heart of the White House/CIA leak controversy, recently sat down with Talon News for an exclusive interview to discuss his mission to Africa to investigate Iraq's desire to purchase uranium for weapons, the leak of his wife's position within the CIA, the foreign policy of President Bush and his administration, and a host of other issues.

Below is Part 3 of the exclusive Talon News interview with Ambassador Joe Wilson. Part 1 can be found by clicking here. Part 2 can be found by clicking here.

Background: In February 2002, former Ambassador Joe Wilson was sent to Niger by the CIA to investigate allegations that Iraq had tried to buy uranium. He says that he told the administration that the allegations were probably false. In the January 2003 State of the Union address, President Bush made reference to British intelligence that differed with Wilson's conclusion. The subsequent controversy over the "16 words" was the result of the former ambassador's July article in The New York Times that accused the White House of exaggerating the threat posed by Iraq. A week later, columnist Robert Novak published the name of Wilson's wife, identifying Valerie Plame as a CIA operative. Wilson accused the Bush administration of leaking his wife's name to Novak.

TN: Regarding the revelation of your wife as a CIA operative, do you think Karl Rove was behind the leak?

Wilson: Scott McClellan has admitted that Karl Rove spoke about it to the press after the leak took place. Now the only thing that we're disputing now with these guys is whether or not he used the term "fair game" or not. Now my contemporaneous notes from a journalist who called me say that that is precisely the term he used. My credibility, my batting average with this administration on truthfulness is about 3 for 3 so far.

TN: But the question again: Is Karl Rove the leaker?

Wilson: I don't know the name of the leaker. I will say this: the CIA is an executive branch agency that reports to the President of the United States. The act of leaking the name of a national security asset to the press was a political act. There is a political office that is attached to the office of the President of the United States. That office is headed by Karl Rove.

It is a useful place to start asking questions. Now, nobody has told me the name of the leaker or who authorized the leak. I did not know until I saw the Washington Post article that there were apparently two waves. There was the wave of the leak, two by six, two leakers to six journalists. And then there was a subsequent wave when Karl Rove and perhaps the communications office were pushing the story.

TN: Novak says it wasn't the White House.

Wilson: Well I don't care. Novak has changed his story so much that it's hard for me to understand what he is talking about. He also says that he isn't one of the six, but that issue is somewhere between Novak and the Washington Post and the person who leaked. I can tell you only that Novak called me before he wrote his story asking for a confirmation, and he confirmed to me after he wrote the story that there were two senior administration officials who provided the information to him. And I can tell in the week after his story appeared, I was getting calls from reputable members of the press saying that the White House was pushing the story.

TN: Including?

Wilson: Including my favorite, a respected journalist calling me up, and saying, "I just got off the phone with Karl Rove, he tells me your wife is fair game."

TN: Any names attached to these journalists?

Wilson:Well the only one that I have actually used is Andrea Mitchell and that was in the second wave. The other two, one was a producer, and I had not used his name before, and I will not use it now. The third one is a fellow who me he was going to prepare to confirm it but he then sort of went back on that, so I keep his name private as well.

TN: Is that the basis for the "frog-march" remarks?

Wilson: Well the "frog-march" remark, the basis for that of course is the telephone call saying that "your wife is fair game." Absolutely.

TN: What do you think he meant by "fair game"?

Wilson: That is was okay to go ahead and drag my wife out into the public square and administer a beating, to "slime" her as they say, or use her to in somehow discredit me.

TN: What was the "sliming" part of it?

Wilson: I don't know.

TN: The fact that she got you the job?

Wilson: I don't know.

TN: That to me is the "Washington way."

Wilson: Well that is certainly what they are trying to say, that some nepotism was involved, which of course is not the case. You will have to ask them why they decided that they would "out" the name of a national security asset.

TN: Nicholas Kristoff wrote in the New York Times recently that the CIA believes that Aldrich Ames may have betrayed your wife to the Russians prior to his arrest in 1994. That would make her not an undercover operative for the CIA in effect.

Wilson: I don't know where Kristoff got that. I think that there is a fair amount of material in the public record to suggest that there is a lot of concern that Mr. Ames betrayed a number of American operatives during his spying.

TN: Including you wife?

Wilson: I don't know about that. I can't tell you anything about that.

TN: But if that is in fact true, then the leak is not necessarily a leak.

Wilson: Let me put it to you this way, I don't believe that the CIA would refer this to the Justice Department frivolously, if they thought it was a frivolous matter or if it was not a leak that might be a violation of the Intelligence Agents Identification Act.

TN: There are some who are skeptical that the CIA is fully on board with our actions in Iraq.

Wilson: Well, the CIA is not a policy organization, the CIA is paid to provide the best intelligence information it can.

TN: So you don't believe the CIA has an agenda that's different from that of the from the White House?

Wilson: Well in the particular piece of this that I own, the trip to Niger, the CIA produced my report, but there were two other reports produced that said that "Gee this story of uranium going to Iraq is just bogus." Subsequent to that we now know this particular "16 words" were the subject of a number of telephone conversations and a couple of memoranda that somehow were lost in the system or forgotten about. But the two uncontested facts in this matter are the following: The 16 words in the State of the Union did not rise to inclusion in the State of the Union, that's the White House's statement. Had my report or the other two reports been accepted instead of this information that was based as we know on forgeries and even at the time didn't pass the smell test for an Italian weekly tabloid, then the President would not have found himself in this predicament. That is not a CIA betrayal of the political system, that is if anything a political betrayal of the intelligence assessment process.

And the second uncontested fact is that a national security asset's name was leaked to the American public in what may have been a crime but certainly is considered to be of sufficient concern to the CIA that they referred the matter to the Justice Department. Now in neither of those it seems to me do you have nefarious CIA involvement unless you are prepared to make the argument that the CIA would have "outed" one of its own, which seems to me to be highly, highly unlikely.

TN: From your perspective, your wife indeed was a covert operative at the time of the disclosure of her name to Robert Novak?

Wilson: It's not really from my perspective and remember this is not a crime that has been committed against my wife or against me. If there was a crime, it was committed against our country. The CIA has referred the matter to the Justice Department for further investigation, I don't believe that's a frivolous referral.

TN: If it's determined that in fact there was no leak, that no crime was committed, are you prepared to take back some of the things you've said?

Wilson: Well, actually what I have said is that I would support the investigation, and the investigation will turn up what the investigation turns up. And if there is anything to take back in all of this, it would only be the handcuffs part of the frog-marching out of the White House. Because irrespective of whether or not the Justice Department determines that there was a crime committed and there is prosecution of that crime, even in this bare-knuckles town of Washington, it is below the belt of politics to drag a family member out into the public square to administer a beating because you find yourself unable to adequately discredit her husband who is your adversary in this particular matter.

TN: So you don't blame Rove for the leak, you blame him for pushing the story and dragging your wife into the public square?

Wilson: It's not so much that I blame him, it's that my information which I have no reason to disbelieve and every reason to believe, particularly since Mr. Rove has now acknowledged through Mr. McClellan that he in fact did talk about my wife to members of the press, that the White House actually pushed this story.

TN: I don't recall him saying that.

Wilson: I think if you go back and take a look at something Mr. McClellan said last week or the week before, you'll find that. I think there was a statement that he acknowledged that he did speak about it to somebody. That's what I've seen anyway. Notwithstanding that, after all, this President set a certain standard when he was a candidate that he was going to come to Washington to restore the dignity and honor to the White House, he also said he was going to come to Washington and change the tone. Now is that what he meant, that the family members of people who point out the truth are subject to being slimes, to being dragged out into the public square, to being outed? I doubt it, frankly I think that is probably not what he had in mind but I'd certainly like to see a little more suggestion of that from him.

TN: You don't suggest the President had any involvement in this?

Wilson: On the contrary, I have said repeatedly that I don't think for a moment that the President of the United States would be doing that sort of behavior. Moreover I have also said that I don't believe that for the moment that the White House would have seen fit to do to my wife what they have done simply because I contributed $2,000 to a campaign that wasn't their own.

TN: How about the Vice President?

Wilson: As for the Vice President, I reserve comment.

TN: Earlier this month, the Washington Post ran a lengthy article on the Wilson/Plame family. The writer decribes her family and goes on to say "a few months after that July evening, her name and her occupation would be published and broadcast internationally. In the public imagination she would become Jane Bond as her husband later put it. A clandestine operative isn't supposed to be famous, but her identity was leaked to journalists by administration officials for what Joe Wilson alleged was retaliation for his criticism of the White House's Iraq policies."

If Mrs. Plame was in deep cover, why is a Washington Post writer in your home preparing an in-depth article a few months before the scandal broke?

Wilson: The article that he was preparing had nothing to do with my wife. The article that he was preparing had to do with the opinion piece that I was writing for the New York Times. In fact, the article that they were going to do was going to be a profile on me, which was the initial reason they were going to do it because they had done a profile several months earlier on the hostages we had been responsible for during Desert Shield/Desert Storm and as a consequesce of that, called me up and said, "I'd like to do a profile on you as the person who was responsible for saving those hostages."

Now the timing was such that I said that I'm about to do this article, and if you'd like to come out and do it now, I'd be delighted to do it. So he did not know when he was in the house that she was anything other, and I belive he makes that point in the article, that he knew her as anything other than the mother of twins who was also active in the post-partum depression counseling community. And by the way, early on I did not say that I thought it was retaliation, I've always said that I thought that the rational reason for doing this, despicable as it may have been, was to discourage others from coming forward. It was only after the Washington Post began to leak out stories of people saying it was for spite and pure revenge that I have taken that on board as a possible motive.

TN: That notion comes from just their writings?

Wilson: I think that's their interpretation. I've always been consistent in saying that I thought it was designed to discourage others from coming forward. Because at the end of the day, I had already said my piece, which by the way I might remind you was a very modest piece, it was entitled, "What I did not find in Africa."

TN: Do you dispute any of David Kay's findings?

Wilson: I have no reason to dispute it. I have not really any reason to look closely at it. Other people are looking closely at it. I think David Kay is doing as good a job as anyone can do. I would have loved to have had him do the job without a 130,000 Americans being in on the ground. I would have loved to have had the inspectors have as much time as they needed without two or three or four Americans being killed every day.

We're at just the beginning of this occupation phase. One of these days, we might find it turn very, very nasty. I certainly hope not, but it is a very dangerous proposition to be in there the way we are, not just for our soldiers in Iraq, but for everything that we are about, our position as leaders, the respect people used to have for our leadership, the years that we spent directing and putting in place a system that encourages international law and a peaceful resolution of disputes. A whole international legal system that underpins everything we did in the first Gulf War, for example, all of that is at risk.

TN: Let's say we have moderate success in setting up a constitutional, democratic government in Iraq and that the terrorist activities there diminish or stop. Does that change your opinion of our place in the world? Does it justify what we have done?

Wilson: My opinion of our place in the world is actually a very positive opinion. I happen to be proud of being an American citizen. I'm proud to be a patriot. I would like to see us in a postion where we do continue to influence behavior in the world in a positive way. There is nothing better than our system of governance, our respect for human rights, and our respect for the rule of law, make no mistake about it. What I worry about in Iraq, and I also believe now we are there, we have an obligation to do everything we can to see that the vision articulated by the President of the United States in his speech at the American Enterprise Institute is in fact realized.

I said as much in a speech I gave to the Rotary Club last week. Now I happen to believe that we need to try to realize the President's ambitions despite the obstacles that his administration puts in the way of success. I think that the President has been badly advised, that those who are responsible for the reconstruction have done a miserable job, that a cynic could be excused for concluding that the Balkanization of Iraq is an acceptable outcome for them, because that is where we are headed unless we really turn this around. How do we turn it around? I think we need to internationalize it as soon as possible, not because that means we give up a lot of authority and we give up a lot or responsibility and we lose control of decision making process.

TN: That seems to be the only acceptable compromise with nations like France.

Wilson: I actually think we will continue to shoulder the vast amount of the burden, but what is important is to have a lot of flags there, not just the U.N. flag, because there is a lot of hatred of the U.N. as the administrator of the sanctions regime for 13 years. Because at the end of the day, what you need to succeed in this. You need to pursuade Iraqis that this is not an occupation, but it is an international effort to help them in their time of need. After thirty years of tyranny, and three wars and shock and awe, the only way you are going to succeed in doing that is to a lot of faces from a lot of different countries in there with them. I also think that in the immediate term, understanding that you never get a second chance to make a first impression, doesn't mean we can't try. Now what we really need to do in the immediate term is secure public safety and secure basic human needs and secure services.

TN: You told Tim Russert on Meet the Press that you would actively work for the defeat of George W. Bush in 2004.

Wilson: I think what I said was that so long as his foreign policy was headed in the direction it is headed then I would actively work for it. It is safe to say that I will actively work on behalf of the Democratic Party's candidate.

The President is in charge of this Republican administration, and this Republican administration is dominated by a part of the Party that I don't see eye to eye with on virtually anything.

TN: And those are the neo-cons?

Wilson: The neo-conservative and the cultural conservative coalition.

TN: Which Democrat candidate do you think is the strongest?

Wilson: I happen to like John Kerry. I think he is a man of great experience. He's a veteran. He's a man who at a very young and tender age came back from Vietnam and went up and sat in front of his Senators and said this war is a mistake, and who is going to be the person who sends the last man out to die for a mistake? For somebody like me, with my past, with the accolades and laurels I can rest on writing a modest little story about what I did not find in Africa, was I thought consistent with my rights as a citizen and with my civic responsibilities. For John Kerry in his youth, to go and do that, with his entire life ahead of him rather than behind him, I felt was an act of integrity and courage. You look for those character qualities in a candidate.

TN: Why did you write the op-ed piece?

Wilson: I wrote the piece because I had given my government three and a half months to correct the record. From the time I first appeared on CNN and said that if the government looked into its files it would find it had more information on this than they are letting on. Until two weeks after Dr. Rice went on Meet the Press and said maybe somebody in the bowels of the agency knew something about this, but nobody in my circle. Both of those statements have proven to be untrue. I wrote this because the essence of democracy, the essence of the most fundamental decision that a government has to make, that is, sending its sons and daughters off to kill and die for our country is a debate that is based upon a set of commonly accepted facts.

And if those facts, are not facts at all, but bits of information that have been thrown in the mix because they happen to support a political decision that has already been taken, then I think the argument can be made legitimately that we have gone to war on false pretenses. Moreover, when you are talking about weapons of mass destruction, the threat that weapons of mass destruction in the hands of either rogue states or non-state actors is the single most significant threat that we face in the next two decades in my judgement. And it seems to me, that this is the sort of thing you don't fool around with, because at the end of the day it's the credibility of not only the president but it's the credibility of this administration and successive adminstrations the next time we have to go to the mat over weapons of mass destruction issues. It is absolutely vital we understand what it is what we are doing in this as a democracy.

TN: Don't you think the message is clear to other countries that might develop weapons of mass destruction? I speak of the other two members of the "axis of evil," North Korea and Iran. Don't you think this mission's upside benefit is showing that the United States is willing to take action to preclude them from achieving these goals?

Wilson: On the contrary, I think the lessons to both these was you should get your nuclear weapons in place quickly. First of all, I think that is one lesson, but I also think the lesson to these guys may well be that the United States is only willing to take on the weak sister. At the end of the day, Iraq posed no threat. We had destroyed its army. Its army was already weakened as a consequence of the Iran-Iraq war. We effectively destroyed it 13 years ago. What we didn't destroy, we starved with 13 years of sanctions.

What we didn't starve, we effectively contained and destroyed with our no-fly zone for 13 years. It was just a shell we were fighting. Now if you are a population of 47 million people, it seems to me you draw two conclusions: one if the Americans really will come after us, let's get our nukes in place quickly. But two, more to the point, they're just taking the low-hanging fruit, they're not willing to come and attack us, which should actually embolden them. Now I don't know which of those conclusions they drew, but those are the two options I see.

TN: Thank you, Ambassador Wilson.

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