Domestic Affairs
Photo courtesy of Carroll & Graf and Joe Wilson
Wilson on Meet the Press
What does Joe Wilson do on a soggy Monday morning, three weeks after moving to Santa Fe with his wife and two kids? What everyone who’s new to any town does: He runs errands. Wilson’s to-do list today includes a few of the usual start-up tasks—arranging insurance and a parking space for his new office, chasing down flight information for his trip to Cleveland tomorrow—and, oh yeah, sitting for a live satellite interview with the Arabic TV network Al Jazeera on the anniversary of the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad. He’s invited me to “schlep around” with him as he goes about his business.
We meet at his office on the second floor of a historic building downtown (the precise location of which he’d like to keep private). In real-estate lingo, the office—with a sloping wooden portal, overlooking a leafy courtyard—has “lots of potential,” but right now, on day two of his official occupancy, the 12-by-20 cubby looks more like a ransacked dorm room than the new HQ of a former U.S. ambassador to Gabon, best-selling author, and husband of America’s most famous outed spy, Valerie Plame Wilson.
For starters, there’s no furniture, just brown wall-to-wall carpeting strewn with a computer, printer, telephone, and an unruly mess of wires. A hard drive blinks reassuringly, keeper of the sort of confidential information you’d have if you were in the midst of mounting a civil case against the likes of Vice President Dick Cheney and Bush adviser Karl Rove. A couple more computers will be delivered tomorrow.
The rental furniture, says Wilson, who’s leaning against the windowsill in blue jeans and shiny leather boots, is coming on Wednesday. When it’s fully outfitted, the office will accommodate Wilson, his wife, and his business partner, a guy in a trench coat whom Wilson introduces as Howard. Howard, who’s waiting outside on the porch when I arrive (“Looking for Joe?” he asks, nodding in the direction of the open door), moved up from Florida nine months ago. Master Planning Associates, as Wilson explains somewhat cryptically, “puts together private and public partnerships, which are related to resource management, particularly in the area of water metering and monitoring.”
Right now, though, the place has an air of rainy-day aimlessness about it, as though, given its state of gloomy disarray, you might as well take the rest of the day off, or at least try to knock out a few chores. First up is the mail. There’s a stack of it, rubber-banded together, waiting for us when we climb into Wilson’s blue pick-up. I think we’re aiming for the post office, but he makes a wrong turn and suddenly we’re driving past St. Francis Cathedral. “Oops,” he says, good-naturedly. “I guess we’ll take a tour of downtown.” (Even worldly diplomats who’ve negotiated the complex geopolitical backstreets of Africa and Iraq—and faced off with Saddam Hussein—get lost when they first get to town!)
Then it’s time to go “up the hill” to his home, an expansive pueblo-style adobe on a paved, gated street in the foothills. (Exact coordinates: also a secret.) “Why don’t I let you out right here,” Wilson tells me as we pull through a tunnel of moss-rock retaining walls to the entrance. “Just let yourself in and I’ll park the truck. Valerie’s inside.” It’s raining, and he’s being polite, but when I get to the door I hesitate. It seems like a bad idea to barge in on a former badass CIA agent who’s spent the past three and a half years at the center of a messy political maelstrom and has come to Santa Fe looking for a little peace and quiet.
Plenty of front-page ink has been spilled on the “Plamegate” controversy since it broke in 2003. The abridged version goes like this: In February 2002, Joe Wilson traveled to Niger at the CIA’s request to investigate reports that the country had sold yellowcake uranium, used in the manufacture of nuclear weapons, to Iraq. Following his eight-day trip, Wilson—who’d spent nearly 15 years in Africa as a foreign service officer in the State Department, two of those in Niger, before retiring from government work in 1998—briefed the CIA that he’d found no evidence to support the allegations. Fast-forward to July 2003: Frustrated with the White House’s continued use—or, as he saw it, misuse—of weapons of mass destruction as justification for war, Wilson published an op-ed in The New York Times called “What I Didn’t Find in Africa.” Eight days later, political columnist Robert Novak, in a story in The Washington Post, identified Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA covert-operations officer. A federal grand jury investigation ensued, and in October 2005, Vice President Dick Cheney’s then chief of staff Lewis “Scooter” Libby was indicted for lying about his role in the leak of Plame’s identity.
The Wilsons arrived in Santa Fe this spring, not quite two weeks after Libby was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice. They’d been planning to leave D.C. since early 2006, when Valerie left her post at the CIA; the timing with the verdict was coincidental. “We weren’t leaving to get away; we were leaving because Valerie no longer had a job there,” says Wilson. “We always understood that after Valerie retired we would move elsewhere; we just didn’t know her departure would come as early as it did.”
They debated for a year between Santa Fe and Ojai, California (Wilson graduated from nearby UC Santa Barbara in 1971). Last fall, while they were in town at a fundraiser for the Albuquerque-based Military Religious Freedom Foundation, they decided on Santa Fe. “What we really loved about it was the people,” recalls Wilson. “Everyone was extraordinarily warm and welcoming.” Speaking of which, inside the Wilson residence, the former CIA agent herself is padding around in her socks, blue jeans, a cable-knit cardigan, and a big smile. With well-coiffed blonde hair and an athlete’s fat-free build, Valerie, 43, seems as harmless as a tennis mom from the local club. As though to prove it, she fixes me some tea.
We talk about their twins (seven-year-olds), her parents (in from Florida for a visit), her canales (running like fire hoses), and her general state of mind when it comes to Washington politics (frustrated and fatigued), but none of it on the record. Because she’s busy building their civil case and negotiating with the CIA over facts in her forthcoming book from Simon & Schuster, tentatively titled Fair Game, Valerie Plame Wilson has been advised by her swarm of lawyers not to comment for this or any story. Joe Wilson, however, has given the matter plenty of thought—his 2004 memoir The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies That Put the White House on Trial and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity is 518 pages long—and he’s more than happy to talk. Relaxing into an upholstered chair in his neo-classical living room (“We didn’t realize the styles would be so different,” he says. “I think we’ll have to buy some Southwestern furniture”), Wilson seems relieved to be here. At 57, he has a longish sweep of gray-brown hair and the salt-and-peppery beginnings of a beard. Like the pick-up truck, his whiskers are new since moving to town—a source of pride, and so Santa Fe—and, not that you can tell, he just got his hair cut for the first time in a couple of months.
New Mexico may be a fresh start for the Wilsons, but they still have plenty of old business to wrap up. First there’s the civil suit they’ve brought against Cheney, Rove, Libby, and former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who—along with the Justice Department on behalf of the United States—have filed a motion to dismiss the suit. Oral arguments were set to begin in May. In the meantime, the Wilsons are working with lawyers to bolster their case and trying to drum up the $2 million in legal fees they’ll need if it goes to trial. “Our goal is to get the truth out,” says Wilson. “We want to hold to account administration officials who used their position of public trust to abuse power and to engage in a personal and political vendetta—and deter future generations of public servants from engaging in similar abuses of power.”
Then there’s the laborious process of getting a real-life spy memoir past the CIA for publication. The agency received Valerie’s manuscript for review in September; at issue are some of the details—namely, the length of her tenure at the CIA. Says Wilson: “The agency wants to believe that if Valerie doesn’t acknowledge she worked for them before 2002, nobody will believe she worked for them before 2002. There’s no rationale behind it. Their vetting process is extraordinarily sloppy. We may have to litigate.” Add to that Wilson’s own frenetic speaking and book-promotion schedule and their consulting role on the forthcoming Warner Bros. screenplay based on their lives, and it’s obvious that dropping out in Santa Fe isn’t in the cards right now.
Fortunately, the Wilsons are accustomed to hard work and public service. Raised in California, Arizona, and Europe, Joe Wilson had mayors and congressmen for uncles, and his father was a World War II marine pilot. Vietnam protests on the UCSB campus in the late sixties taught him an indelible lesson—one that would prompt him to speak out in the aftermath of his 2002 Niger mission. “I believed then and now that one of the tenets of good citizenship is to hold your government to account,” he says. “And while you can’t always guarantee that the government won’t lie to you, you should do everything you can to make it more difficult for them to do so.”
After college and a brief stint as a carpenter, Wilson spent two decades as a Foreign Service officer, bouncing between two-year tours in Niger, South Africa, Burundi, Congo, and Gabon. In 1988, he was appointed deputy ambassador to Iraq, and on August 2, 1990, just two days after Ambassador April Glaspie returned to Washington, leaving Wilson in charge, Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait. “My senior staff and I met in the embassy, and we concluded that chances were very good some of us in the room were not going to survive,” he recalls.
In what would go down as the last meeting between an American diplomat and Saddam Hussein, on August 6, Wilson was summoned to the dictator’s ministry of foreign affairs, where Saddam offered what Wilson dubs “the deal”—“He’d give us all the oil we need at a good price, keep Kuwait, and not invade Saudi Arabia.” Wilson, who hadn’t slept in three days and was more “pissed off” than nervous, promptly and defiantly declined. Five months later, he and his team closed up the embassy and caught one of the last charter flights out of Baghdad. Wilson went on to become ambassador to Gabon, political adviser to the Commander in Chief of U.S. Forces in Europe, senior director of African affairs at the National Security Council, and special assistant to President Clinton before retiring from government duty.
As for Plame Wilson, we know from her testimony before the House Oversight Committee that she “traveled to foreign countries on secret missions to find vital intelligence” on weapons of mass destruction. Beyond that, the details are classified—even for her husband. “We knew going into it that there were things that she would not be able to talk about. There were certain need-to-knows,” says Wilson of their decision to marry in 1998. “I had all the confidence about her professionalism and her career choice, and knew when she was traveling and where she was going, but I didn’t know the operations she was working on.” When I press Wilson on how he imagines Hollywood will portray his spy wife, he says, “I kind of like the idea of bombs going off, houses being raided, and Valerie sneaking down a gutter out back.” Given their résumés, it seems unlikely that the couple will stay out of political service for long. As part of his ongoing lecture circuit, Wilson speaks to audiences around the country on foreign policy, truth in governance, and the war in Iraq—a topic on which he’s predictably outspoken. “More diplomacy is needed,” he insists. “We do have strategic interests in the region, and the trick is to adjust our policy so that we can continue to defend those interests and not come all the way out just because we’re tired of being there. I’ve made it very clear that if any president would ask me to serve, it’d be hard to say no. But I’m the last person in the world George Bush is going to call.”
And that may be the strangest irony of all: Wilson voted for Bush Sr. in 1992, served as his acting ambassador in Iraq, and praised the president for “putting together a diplomatic coalition that gave the whole [first Gulf War] operation legitimacy.” Though he contributed to Al Gore’s campaign in 2000 and was active in John Kerry’s 2004 presidential bid, Wilson insists that his whistle-blowing wasn’t an act of partisan sniping, but of public truth-telling in the name of national security. The Bush administration’s response, he counters, was anything but. No wonder, then, that in the run-up to the 2008 election, Wilson is sternly outspoken in his desire for political overhaul: “This is a year to throw the bums out, not a year for kumbayah,” he declares. “Realistically, there’s probably something for us to do in the campaign, although that’s not been defined in any way,” he says, adding that he’d prefer to stay out of the tussle until after the nomination, when he can help the Democratic Party shape its diplomatic strategy. In Wilson’s ongoing struggle to reconcile policy and politics, policy seems to be winning out.
“It’s our intent that what we’ve been through in the last three years not be the defining chapter of our lives,” he says. “I tell people the first line of my obit used to read ‘the last American diplomat to have confronted Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf war,’ and now it reads ‘the husband of the first agent ever to have her identity betrayed by her own government.’ We think there’s room for one or two more before we finally cash it in. It’ll probably be after the election before we can get a good handle on our post-Plamegate lives.”
More pressing, of course, are their late Plamegate lives. By the sound of it, they’re not wasting any time settling into Santa Fe. Wilson still calls his friends in Washington for his daily D.C. fix, but he’s weaned himself from the television pundits. (“I no longer feel the need to watch Tim Russert,” he says.) The family has discovered The Shed, and Wilson is in the market for a rolfer. “I’m looking forward to becoming a student of Santa Fe,” he says. “I think New Mexico is far richer and far deeper than I imagined. I don’t know what I know, but I sure know that there’s a lot that I don’t know.”
So far, Santa Fe seems to be returning the love. At the post office last week, a woman approached Wilson and told him he had her vote for president—even though he’s not running. During a recent not-so-covert mission to Home Depot to buy a grill, an employee followed him out of the store and asked if he was Joe Wilson. Wilson laughs as he remembers. “Then the guy said, ‘But what I really wanted to tell you is that your wife is a lot hotter in person than she is on TV.’” As if on cue, Valerie walks into the living room. The Al Jazeera interview has been postponed, she tells Joe, and she’s driving down the hill to pick up the kids. Do I need a ride into town?
The cocoon of calm is broken, and the Wilsons have snapped into strategic action. Outside, the rain has stopped. Valerie’s Prius glints in the sun. She’s had the car for a couple of years, and she loves it, but, she tells me, it’s just off the truck from Washington and it’s dirty. I take a closer look. By Santa Fe standards, the hybrid is immaculate. All she needs is a mud-splattered fender and a New Mexico license plate and she’ll pass for a local.
