White House Smeared My Wife

Wilson says his wife was smeared because of his Iraq stance

Not long ago, Wilson was contributing to Republican causes and leading the life of a circumspect public servant. Only in 2003, after traveling to Africa at the behest of Vice President Dick Cheney to investigate reports that Saddam was buying uranium for nuclear weapons, did the former ambassador begin to speak out. The weapons rumors, he found, were baseless. This week, CIA Director George Tenet and former U.S. weapons inspector David Kay reiterated the same thing.

But President Bush in his State of the Union address last year rallied support for a war in Iraq by insisting that Saddam was building weapons of mass destruction and referring to the findings of an "unnamed envoy" -- who turned out to be Wilson -- as evidence.

Wilson published an opinion piece in The New York Times debunking the president's assertion and days later, unnamed staff members in the Bush administration told a columnist that the former ambassador's wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA agent.

Through 25 years in public service, Wilson, a California native who once worked as a carpenter in Sequim, has long considered himself a moderate. He contributed to the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2000, and the first President Bush described him as "a true American hero."