Joseph Wilson
=============

Joseph Wilson was a former U.S. Ambassador to Niger and previously the Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. He was married to covert Central Intelligence Agency case officer Valerie Plame.

The Niger trip and the op-ed

In 2003, with the Bush administration's drafted State of the Union claiming Iraq had approached Niger to purchase yellowcake uranium, CIA Director George Tenet, per John Kiriakou, proposed sending Wilson personally to Niger to verify the claim. Wilson flew out, met with Nigerien officials, and reported back: "What, no, no Iraqis come here and ask us for yellowcake. And even if they had, we wouldn't have sold it to them." He then wrote a Washington Post / New York Times op-ed making the case publicly.

Retaliation

Per Kiriakou, Dick Cheney "was so enraged that they would call him on the carpet like this that he had the deputy secretary of state leak Valerie Plame's name to a syndicated columnist, Novak."

The yellowcake claim was reinserted into the State of the Union speech anyway, despite the CIA's repeated debunking, Kiriakou personally watched the speech with his then-girlfriend (later wife, also a senior CIA officer) and they were "like, are you kidding me, how many times do we have to debunk this story?"

See also

- Valerie Plame
- Yellowcake Niger forgery
- George Tenet

See also

- Valerie Plame
- Yellowcake Niger forgery
- George Tenet
