ENVOY RILED BUSH WHITE HOUSE.
Joseph C. Wilson, a former diplomat who incurred the wrath of the administration of George W. Bush for undermining a key tenet of the rationale for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and who saw his then-wife, Valerie Plame, exposed as a clandestine CIA officer in an apparent act of retaliation, died Sept. 27 at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was 69.
He died of organ failure, Plame said. She and Wilson were divorced in 2017.
Wilson, who had negotiated face-to-face with Saddam before the first Iraq War in the early 1990s, was retired from the State Department when he was sent by the CIA on a fact-finding mission in 2002 to determine whether Iraq had purchased uranium in Niger.
After eight days in Niger Wilson concluded there was no evidence that Iraq had obtained uranium and therefore wouldn’t be able to make weapons of mass destruction.
During the State of the Union address in January 2003, Bush said the opposite and under that pretext, U.S. military forces invaded Iraq two months later.
In July 2003, Wilson wrote an op-ed column for the New York Times, What I Didn’t Find in Africa.
He found himself in the crosshairs of the Bush White House, which sought to discredit Wilson. Within days, syndicated columnist Robert M. Novak wrote, “Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction.”
With her cover blown, Plame was forced to resign from the CIA. Over the next few years, she and Wilson often appeared in public to describe how they had been betrayed by what they considered an act of political retaliation by the Bush administration.
In 2006, Wilson and Plame filed suit against Vice President Richard Cheney and Cheney’s onetime chief of staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby and presidential adviser Karl Rove, among others, charging that they had illegally disclosed Plame’s identity to Novak. The suit was dismissed, but in 2007 Libby was convicted of perjury, obstruction of justice and other charges. Bush commuted Libby’s prison sentence, and President Trump pardoned him in 2018.
Wilson worked as a consultant on African business ventures and frequently appeared as a speaker. He and Plame moved to New Mexico, where both continued to live after their divorce. She is currently a Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives.
The Washington Post