Do you believe Karl Rove's and [Cheney chief of staff] Scooter Libby's denials that they were behind the leaks?

I don't know what to believe.

Are you considering filing a civil suit against the administration?

We have an attorney who is looking at that, but we haven't had a chance to sit down and discuss it yet.

You've suggested there's been an attempt by the administration and the Republican Party to smear you -- to paint you as a hardcore partisan out to undermine the administration. Is that an accurate characterization?

At first I thought what they did to me and my wife was clearly a signal to discourage others from coming forward -- if you come forward like Wilson has, this is what we'll do to you. Since then, there have been a number of press reports to suggest this was pure revenge on the part of the White House -- which is not what one hopes that the public officials who are supposed to be stewards of the nation's security would be engaging in.

Now with respect to [Republican National Committee chairman Ed] Gillespie, I only met him once, when he came off a TV set after saying I was a Gore campaign contributor. And I asked him if he knew that I had also contributed to the Bush-Cheney campaign. And he acknowledged that yes, he did know, because of course it's public information. So I find his selective use of the facts to be disingenuous at best.

I am not a rabid partisan. I'm proud of the service to my country. I pledged 27 years ago when I first went overseas to defend the Constitution of the United States. I've done so throughout my career. I found these charges to be without foundation -- and frankly selectively pointing out that I've contributed to the Gore campaign without mentioning my Bush contribution to be duplicitous.

Why did you contribute to both campaigns?

Well, I take great pride in being an American, and I don't believe either party has a monopoly on wisdom. It did seem to me that when Mr. Bush was running as a compassionate conservative, he was going to be the better of the two candidates. I thought it was important that we have the two best candidates. I contributed to the Bush campaign before they went to South Carolina and engaged in their smear tactics against Mr. McCain and his wife and children. And ultimately, as I look back on [my Bush contribution], I made a mistake.

You had a lot of respect for the first President Bush, and he reportedly thought well of you. Have you heard from anyone in his administration about the exposure of your wife and the attacks on you? After all, the first President Bush declared it was treasonous to reveal the identity of an undercover agent.

I cherish my time as the first President Bush's charge' [d'affaires] in Baghdad as well as his ambassador to Gabon. They are highlights of my professional career. I have tremendous admiration for the team that put together the Desert Storm operation and I was proud to be in charge of the embassy in Baghdad and to contribute to that effort. Now in this current imbroglio, I have heard from people across the country and from across the political divide. I've heard from many Republicans, including deeply conservative ones, and their outrage and indignation over what's been done to my family has been heartfelt. What Mr. Gillespie did to me is not reflected in what I've heard from other Republicans. Any conversations I've had with senior members of either party, those are private and will remain private.

Are you concerned about any further reprisals? This is a pretty vindictive administration.

(Laughs) I don't know how to answer that. I think the administration would be well advised to deal with the issues on the table. The uncontested facts are that the 16 words in the president's State of the Union speech should never have been in his address. So the administration would be well advised to quit throwing dust in people's eyes and trying to make this a Wilson-Bush shootout or a Wilson-Cheney shootout. This is a problem between the president and his advisors, with respect to those 16 words in the State of the Union address. And it's a problem between the leaker of my wife's identity and the Department of Justice.

Do you think one of the key subtexts in your story is the growing friction between the CIA and the White House over the politicization of intelligence?

I don't think that's a subtext, it's more of a consequence. I think what has happened as a consequence of what was done to my wife is that people in the CIA have felt there's been breach of trust. The agency's case officers feel that way -- and without your case officers, you're nothing. So there is a legitimate concern that the feelings of the CIA troops be considered in all of this.

Do you approve of the way George Tenet has handled your wife's case?

It's not up to me to approve -- what I can tell you is that my wife is a star at what she does and that her community has embraced her, and that's all to the good.

Was Tenet pretty much compelled by his rank and file to take the steps he did and refer the leak case to the Justice Department?

No, not at all. George Tenet is very highly regarded by his troops. That is undeniable. No one questions how good he is at defending his troops and looking after the morale of the agency.

You have an establishment résumé, you've served several administrations -- and now this administration is trying to paint you as a wild-eyed partisan and damage your reputation. Have you become disillusioned with Washington service?

No, I think the support across the political divide has been extraordinary. So far from being disillusioned, my faith in my country has been enhanced by this. Everybody understands that when you do something like this, your credibility has to be tested. And when you look at the past few weeks, you have to say that the press and everyone else has been very fair to us, with the exception of a few who are defending positions that are simply untenable. The White House strategy is clear and it's simply not fooling anybody.

The other way your Republican critics have tried to discredit you is by pointing out that you're a supporter of John Kerry. Do you still support his campaign?

Oh, absolutely. But let me say to that, I don't think for a minute that the two leakers would have outed a national security asset simply because I support a particular political campaign. So they can say that Joe Wilson supports the Kerry campaign, and that's true. But that's not the point -- it's who leaked Wilson's wife and why.

Well, their allegation of course is that when you went to Niger on your fact-finding mission, you did not have an open mind, that you went as a partisan.

Well, first of all, any contributions I made to the Kerry campaign were not made until 2003 -- my mission to Niger was in February 2002. And if you take a look at my writings in the run-up to the war, I always said that disarmament of Saddam was a legitimate national security objective, and that in order to disarm him we would have to deal from a position of strength, and that required the credible threat of force. So there's nothing in any of that that is anti-Bush.

But by the time Bush was preparing for invasion, you had decided the war was not advisable, there was no imminent threat from his WMD.

What I had decided was that the invasion-conquest-occupation scenario -- and this is a year after my trip to Niger, mind you -- was the highest risk-lowest reward of all the options that we had.

Do you think the U.S. is less safe now, post-invasion?

Yes, absolutely. For three reasons. One is that we have 133,000 more potential targets out there, a lot closer to where harm can happen, that we've created another front for terrorism that we're now in the midst of. Secondly, if we're hit again here in the U.S., with all these National Guard call-ups, we've got a lot of our first-responders over there instead of here. And thirdly, just because of the way we've prosecuted this war and how offensive it's been to the rest of the world, especially the Muslim world, we've created an exponentially larger pool from which actual terrorists might be drawn down the road. I don't think we're safer at all as a consequence of this.

The Bush administration declared war on you after you published your New York Times opinion piece in July charging they had cooked the intelligence on Iraq. Why did you risk their wrath by writing that piece?

It was pretty clear to me that unless somebody from outside wrote the story, that the government wasn't going to admit that it had information about this business that it wasn't revealing. The government sat on [International Atomic Energy Agency chief] Dr. ElBaradei's finding that [papers documenting uranium sales between Niger and Iraq] were clear forgeries. They were stonewalling the whole thing. Remember Condi Rice's ill-advised statement that maybe someone in the bowels of the agency knew they were forgeries but no one in her circle? Now we know from memoranda that the language (about the uranium sales) had been taken out of the speech four months before the State of the Union address, and gee, they just sort of forgot.

And the CIA had warned them the information was false.

Of course they had. This was a rumor that wouldn't go away, it was a piece of bullshit that couldn't be verified. It was clearly the selective use of facts to support a political decision that had already been made, rather than letting the decision flow from facts that everybody agreed on.

When a government goes to war, particularly a democracy, it is the most solemn and awesome responsibility of our leaders -- to decide to send our kids to go off and kill and die for us. And generally that debate ought to take place based upon a commonly accepted set of facts. And so the question is, were these verifiable facts that we were debating, or the selective use of data that did not accurately represent the level of the threat we faced.

Why did they cling to this one piece of information about Niger yellowcake, despite its lack of credibility?

Because without that and without the aluminum tubes, they had no nuclear threat, and the nuclear threat of course is the Holy Grail of WMD threats. And you heard it in their speeches -- "The next time we have a terrorist attack, it might be a mushroom cloud from Saddam Hussein. Are we going to wait for the next attack from Saddam Hussein to be a mushroom cloud?"

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