Posted on November 12, 2010

Copyright © 2010 by Richard Warren Field, author of The Swords of Faith

After I completed a post for my Books-Into-Movies blog (that blog has since been discontinued - the full text of that post is available here) for Fair Game the book into “Fair Game” the movie, I decided to offer my own personal opinions on these events, as another voice discussing this matter and the issues it raises in the public square.

A few preliminary comments:

• First, my personal thanks to Ms. Valerie Plame Wilson for her service to this country. She did important, meaningful work for all of us, and she deserves no less than the heartfelt gratitude of all her fellow citizens.

• Second—full disclosure—I come to this matter as someone generally supportive of the George W. Bush presidency, particularly supportive of what he did to protect this country after the Nine-Eleven attacks (see my essays “The Iraq War: A Wrong Decision or a Difficult But Worthy Mission?” and “The George W. Bush Presidency.”) I still believe the decision he made to move into Iraq was the correct decision.

• Third, it is clear to me from Fair Game that Ms. Wilson and her husband were never political supporters of President George W. Bush. This is not to imply that Ms. Wilson was anything but completely professional in the performance of her difficult work. But we live at a time of political polarization. People like me who like to search for common ground are increasingly scarce, and always run the risk of incurring the ire of both ends of the polarization. So I think it is fair to note Ms. Wilson’s leanings against President Bush as we look at this matter, leanings evidenced by:

  • Her indication that the Supreme Court decision on the 2000 election was “partisan.” (It can be more reasonably argued that the Democratic majority Florida Supreme Court justices were the “partisans.” They invented new law, delaying the Florida certification process, leaving the United States Supreme Court little or no time to order a recount (if they wanted to) before the legally mandated date for the Electoral College to be convened. Another full disclosure—I voted for a third party candidate in 2000, so was not in favor of either candidate. I was also on radio talk shows discussing these events, as I had done extensive research for my 1997 novel The Election concerning the Electoral College.)

  • Her statement that she “winced” as she listened to President Bush defend tax cuts at the time of deficits during his 2003 State of the Union Address, the same address arguing for war in Iraq.

The disclosure of Valerie Plame Wilson’s employment with the CIA was reprehensible. It should never have happened, and she should never have been subjected to all the adversity this caused for her and her family. As she and her husband have correctly stated, worse culprits in this matter have walked away, with no apparent adversity. But the path to this reprehensible event, I believe, based on an objective assessment of the information presented, and on a recollection of the Nine-Eleven attacks and aftermath, lead me to a more nuanced, more complex impression than the book and movie would have us believe. It appears to me that mistakes are shared on this, rather than all the blame attributed to a demonized Bush White House.

I have identified what I believe were five mistakes leading to this situation, in chronological order:

I.                    Mistakes in the Handling of the CIA by Two Presidencies 

II.                 Failure to Get Joe Wilson to Sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement for his 2002 Trip to Niger 

III.               Decision by Joe Wilson to Write About his Personal Conclusions in a New York Times Op-Ed Piece 

IV.              Overreaction by the Bush Administration to the Op-Ed Piece, Including the Leak of Valerie Plame Wilson’s Name 

V.                 Politicization of the Leak Investigation, Focusing the Investigation on White House Officials Instead of the True Leaker, Richard Armitage

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Mistakes in the Handling of the CIA by Two Presidencies. The “peace dividend,” becoming the single superpower, the “new world order”—we all heard these ideas and wondered what prosperity and possibility would be available to us free-world Americans and our friends, and even our former enemies, now that the Cold War was over. Why would we need a CIA if we had no Russians to spy on? Shouldn’t we cut those budgets, and save that money for more constructive pursuits? Those ideas, and actual bi-partisan cooperation after 1994, led to budget surpluses. But as the book Fair Game points out, this led to a huge devaluation of the CIA by President Clinton. In hindsight, the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center should have been a warning that we needed to look elsewhere for threats, for evils on the horizon. The CIA should have geared up for getting assets in place to monitor these new threats, with the same vigor we showed during the Cold War. But we wanted to spend that “peace dividend.” After over forty years of Cold War tension, we believed we deserved it. And affable, charming President Bill Clinton was not a man who was going to disappoint us by appearing to conjure up new threats.

The gutting of CIA resources during the 1990s led to unpreparedness for the new threats, and the dramatic demonstration of our complacency arrived with four plane crashes on Nine-Eleven. We now faced a world filled with potential threats, and scrambled to gather information on them. This led to a mistrust of the CIA by the Republican executive branch charged with keeping us safe. So they had their own people dabbling directly into the CIA, plucking out raw intelligence before it had been properly analyzed. Valerie Plame Wilson describes the process needed to assess raw information to determine its reliability. Reaching straight into the information goop, and pulling morsels out, bypasses safeguards designed to prevent wrong information, or information out of context, from factoring into policy decisions.

I do not subscribe to the idea that the Bush White House was full of blood-thirsty neocons anxious to try out their theories by pushing the nation into an unnecessary war. We must be fair and recall the context. Nine-Eleven took us by surprise. Maybe it shouldn’t have, but it did. People were asking questions—How did our government fail to see this coming? President Bush determined we would not be caught unprepared again. Here was Iraq, the only country to openly and officially celebrate the Nine-Eleven carnage. Sadaam Hussein was without a doubt one of the most vicious, cruel, conscienceless leaders in the world. Evidence abounded that he was circumventing United Nations sanctions, bribing and buying his way around them, with some of our so-called allies involved. And the whole world was telling us—Sadaam Hussein still has WMD. President George W. Bush was not going to allow on his watch a terror attack on the United States that involved Sadaam Hussein, either as an active participant, or as a supplier of devastating, lethal weapons deployed against citizens of the United States.

We can imagine the White House wondering why the whole world was saying Sadaam Hussein still had WMD, but our own CIA was not confirming it. Certainly they wondered if the CIA, in its depleted condition, was behind on this issue. So they reached out for the raw information—they should have known better, but that’s what they did. It was a mistake to pluck at raw intelligence and ignore trained professional analysts with years of experience assessing information who were trying to raise red flags.

Just to emphasize the point, this issue is still murky, even today. No major cache of WMD has been found in Iraq. Evidence exists that some WMD was trucked out to Syria, and ended up in a failed terrorist attack in Jordan. Evidence also exists that Sadaam Hussein’s intention was to fool the United States and the world by dismantling his WMD programs enough to get sanctions lifted, and then start up again. The idea was to spread around components of the programs enough so separated elements of the programs looked innocent, but could be recombined when the opportunity arose. Valerie Plame Wilson herself still feared WMD would be deployed against the United States/coalition forces even after the war began. Even she was not certain about WMD in Iraq as the United States tanks rolled through Iraq. It was after nothing was found that she writes: “I began to have a sinking feeling in my stomach that Saddam had pulled off one of the greatest intelligence deceptions of all time; he had made the world believe he had significant stashes of WMD that he would use, if threatened, when in fact, he had nothing. Apparently, even his top generals believed in the WMD myth.” If this is true, it not only rates as one of the great international deceptions of recent years, but one of the biggest blunders made by a sociopathic tyrant—this led in a direct line to Sadaam Hussein’s humiliating capture, trial and execution, a just reward for a man who did his best to emulate his heroes, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. So the intelligence debate still rages on. These issues need to be left in the hands of skilled, apolitical analysts, not political operatives placing their judgments over the judgments of the professionals.

Failure to Get Joe Wilson to Sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement for his 2002 Trip to Niger. I have to say, this is the first thing that occurred to me as I read about this, and I am surprised I don’t see this mentioned in a discussion of these events. No, Joe Wilson was not a CIA employee. But when he went to Niger, he acted as a CIA operative, gathering raw intelligence for the CIA. All CIA agents sign non-disclosure agreements. When Joe Wilson completed a similar mission previously, he signed a non-disclosure agreement, and felt bound to honor it to the extent that he would not discuss the first mission even though much of the information concerning it appears to be in the public domain (as a major CIA success story).

There are good reasons for non-disclosure agreements for people working in intelligence services, beyond the obvious one of keeping sensitive information secret, information we do not want our enemies to have, or to know we have. First, CIA operatives can work on very select, small pieces of a much larger puzzle. They deal with raw information that needs to be evaluated and analyzed, and placed into context, as Valerie Plame Wilson points out in her book. Second, CIA operatives are professional information gatherers and analyzers—their jobs are not elective, and should not be subject to politics. Policy-makers decide how and when information will be used. Because human beings are not robotic, one-dimensional creatures who can turn on their professional roles and turn off their personal opinions and perspectives, there will always be situations when intelligence gatherers are unhappy with the way their information is being used by policy-makers. When that occurs, there is a temptation for the intelligence gatherer to want to debate the use of the information, to put the information out to the public for discussion and consideration. If every CIA/intelligence operative could disclose inside information and initiate debate whenever that operative felt there was an issue, even an earth-shattering, vital issue, chaos would be the result. The non-disclosure agreement prevents that temptation. Congressional oversight is the appropriate mechanism for a discussion of the political ramifications of the executive branch’s handling of intelligence. It is not a perfect system, but it is certainly superior to intelligence operatives grabbing the public attention every time they have a dispute with how intelligence is used.

Yes, in both the Afterword of the book Fair Game, and the movie “Fair Game,” we get details on why Joe Wilson believed he found conclusive proof that the Niger yellowcake allegations were false. But as one person working on one part of the puzzle, he could have been duped by his sources. Or the total quantity of the yellowcake purchase could have been wrong, and other intelligence sources from other countries had better information. As a field operative, he should not have been trying to be analyst as well. I am admittedly a total outsider to these events. But as someone trying to analyze this with common sense, I would have to wonder about two trips to Niger by Joe Wilson with the same result—no evidence of attempted uranium purchase. The first visit involved A. Q. Khan, notorious nuclear proliferator. What was he doing in contact with Niger, by all accounts a destitute country with little to offer but uranium, if he was not there to try to acquire uranium? I would be asking—just how good were Joe Wilson’s sources in Niger? Wouldn’t Niger have an incentive to hide such business from the American ex-ambassador? These are analyst questions, above the level of an operative, which is all Joe Wilson was during this mission.

With a non-disclosure agreement, Joe Wilson would not have been tempted to write the op-ed piece that led to his wife’s exposure. So who dropped the ball on getting the non-disclosure agreement?

Decision by Joe Wilson to Write About his Personal Conclusions in a New York Times Op-Ed Piece. The third mistake was Joe Wilson’s decision to write and publish the op-ed piece “What I Didn’t Find in Africa.” Am I saying he didn’t have a right to publish it? Absolutely not. He had the First Amendment right to do exactly what he did. But ethically, morally, judgment-wise, I am saying I do not believe he should have put this out into the public forum. We can understand Joe Wilson’s frustrations as he watched what he felt was false information being broadcasted by the government he had served faithfully for many years. But for the reasons mentioned in the previous section, Joe Wilson should have resisted the temptation to go public with his chunk of raw intelligence, especially with American troops in harm’s way. An argument can be made that he was trying to bring out information that the administration was never going to disclose voluntarily. But I think we can be sure the debate over WMD in Iraq would have occurred whether or not he had written and published his op-ed piece. The questions about the issue began to surface and grow in intensity when American/coalition troops moving through Iraq did not find the WMD evidence so many had anticipated.

A few other additional comments on this point:

• Joe Wilson was not an intelligence operative, but as an ambassador, certainly consumed intelligence. We have to believe he would know the hazards of relying on a piece of raw intelligence to challenge a policy.

• Joe Wilson refers to “sixteen words” to justify going to war. But it wasn’t just those sixteen words. It wasn’t even just WMD. President Bush offered a number of reasons for going to war with Iraq. The focus should never have been on “sixteen words.” The fact those “sixteen words” became the focus of attention, for both sides of the issue, hurt the Wilsons as much if not more than anyone else.

• I have speculated—informed speculation, I think—that the Wilsons leaned toward the Democrats politically. Only Joe Wilson knows this, but I am left wondering if he would have written that op-ed piece if this had involved a Democratic administration. The non-disclosure agreement referred to previously would have removed this temptation. But Joe Wilson had the right to be heard, Democrat or Republican, and he exercised that right.

In the movie, Valerie Plame Wilson asks Joe Wilson if he was thinking of his family when he wrote the op-ed. I found myself saying “Good question.” Was it worth the trouble that came? Of course, he had every right to assume any consequences would come to him, and only to him alone. But he might have considered that the whole Niger trip could come under scrutiny, resulting in risks to his wife. In my opinion, if that had factored into his decision more substantially, he might have made a different decision.

Overreaction by the Bush Administration to the Op-Ed Piece, Including the Leak of Valerie Plame Wilson’s Name. The Bush Administration pounced on Joe Wilson with the “politics of personal attack,” a mistake that was not only morally and ethically wrong (and with the disclosure of Valerie Plame Wilson’s name, legally wrong), but served to accentuate those “sixteen words” more than Joe Wilson could have possibly done on his own.

I understand the zeal of it. The Bush White house no doubt felt they were in a crucial, imperative war, with troops in harm’s way, possibly still waiting for the other shoe to drop on WMD in Iraq. The President no doubt believed he was standing up to the Hitler wanna-be of his generation, saying “there will be no Munich this time.” Not standing up to Hitler in 1938 cost millions of lives. Did standing up to Sadaam Hussein in 2002 save millions of lives? We will never know—we can’t run the events both ways. But we can imagine that President Bush and his administration believed this was a righteous mission, and here comes this retired ambassador calling the President and his administration liars. They no doubt felt considerable anger over the op-ed. But their decision to come after Joe Wilson like he was the enemy, trying to demean him and his wife, was a mistake.

In hindsight, the Bush Administration should have simply stated that Joe Wilson’s op-ed was offered from his limited perspective, part of a much larger intelligence picture, much of which was still classified, much of which was still the subject of ongoing operations. They should have praised Joe Wilson for his previous service in Iraq, and complimented the sense of civic duty that prompted him to write the piece. They could then, as they thank him for his past service, explain that he was now a retired ambassador, out of the intelligence loop, who did some work for the CIA, but did not have access to the big picture. And they absolutely should never have mentioned Valerie Plame Wilson’s name, or tried to spin this as a Joe Wilson junket, an on-its-face silly allegation—who would take a no-compensation, expenses-only trip to Niger?

Politicization of the Leak Investigation, Focusing the Investigation on White House Officials Instead of the True Leaker, Richard Armitage. I found myself puzzled as I read accounts of the prosecutor’s investigation of the Valerie Plame Wilson disclosure case. Robert Novak’s column publicized her name. It was his column, on July 14, 2003, that started the hell for the Wilson family. Why wasn’t Novak the one held in contempt of court for refusing to reveal his source? We find out, almost as a footnote, that Richard Armitage, a State Department official, not directly connected with the White House, was Robert Novak’s source.

Was I missing something? Shouldn’t Armitage have been prosecuted? If he was given marching orders from higher-ups, shouldn’t he have been forced to disclose if others were complicit in this violation of federal law?

I sensed, based on a review of this information, that the objective of the prosecution was to get someone at the White House, preferably Karl Rove. It became a game of political gotcha, another sad episode of our heavily partisan, over-politicization of matters that should be beyond politics. It appears they didn’t want Armitage because he wouldn’t lead to a Karl Rove “frog-walk.” So Scooter Libby, certainly affiliated with the White House through the Vice President’s office, served the purpose. But the nutty irony of the prosecution is that Scooter Libby was charged and convicted with falsehoods during the investigation. No one was ever prosecuted or apparently ever will be prosecuted for the underlying violation of law—the disclosure of Valerie Plame Wilson’s name and employment!

A Robert Novak column in 2006 confirmed my suspicions. In that column, Novak takes Armitage to task for not owning up to the leak much sooner. But the interesting information to me was Novak’s assertion that Richard Armitage was “a foremost internal skeptic of the administration’s war policy.” With respect to the Bush administration decision to go to war in Iraq, he would have agreed with the skepticism of Valerie and Joe Wilson! But that didn’t fit the story that would make President Bush and his administration look bad, a story of Bush’s minions moving to crush the dissenters. The leak came from one of the Bush State Department’s own dissenters! Not going after Armitage proved to me that politics were involved in the prosecution of Scooter Libby, and that the objective of the prosecution was not to convict the guilty, but to uncover someone in the Bush White House who could be found guilty—of something, anything. By doing this, prosecutors cheapened the crime committed against Valerie Plame Wilson.

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After reading Fair Game, watching the movie based on it, and doing my Books-Into-Movies blog post comparing the book to the movie, I developed opinions on this matter which would not belong in a Books-Into-Movies post. I have offered my opinions here, along with extensive reasoning for those opinions. This is the work of an admitted outsider, but an outsider who hopefully brings a fresh, objective approach to the issues surrounding Valerie Plame Wilson’s story.

I invite your comments.

Richard Warren Field is the author of the novel, The Swords of Faith. For more information, go to RichardWarrenField.com.