The fall guy_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

The fall guy

The investigation arose, of course, after the C.I.A. sent Joe Wilson, a former Ambassador to Gabon, on a mission to Niger, in 2002. He went to look into reports that Saddam Hussein had tried to purchase uranium yellowcake, which is used in the production of nuclear weapons, in that country. Wilson found no such attempt by any Iraqis, and said nothing publicly about his trip for more than a year. But after he heard President Bush touting the nonexistent African connection as a justification for the invasion of Iraq, including in a now notorious passage in his State of the Union address, Wilson started speaking out, first to journalists and then, on July 6, 2003, in an Op-Ed piece in the Times. In prose that could have come from a middling spy thriller-"Through the haze, I could see camel caravans crossing the Niger River"-Wilson recounted his journey and raised the question of whether the war was based on, as he delicately put it, "the selective use of intelligence."

Wilson had no more attentive reader than the Vice-President, who carefully underlined his copy of the Op-Ed and jotted a series of indignant questions for his staff in the margin. "Have they done this sort of thing before?" Cheney asked in his meticulous handwriting. "Send an Amb. to answer a question?" Most of all, the notes showed that Cheney was in no mood for innocent explanations. His last question suggested darkly, "Or did his wife send him on a junket?"

The famous Cheney snarl was practically audible. Ambassador Wilson had questioned the basis for the Iraq war, so he had to be discredited-in this case, by showing that his trip to Africa had been dreamed up by his wife, who was, indeed, a C.I.A. employee. (In fact, Valerie Wilson did not send her husband to Niger, which is not generally a sought-after destination for Washington junketeers.) Cheney's intention was to defend the war by going on the offensive against critics like Wilson, and he wasn't the only one in the Administration doing it. Gossip about the Wilsons was passed around with something close to glee. Ari Fleischer, the press secretary at the time, said that Libby told him that Valerie Wilson's status was "hush-hush." Richard Armitage, then the Deputy Secretary of State, confided to Bob Woodward in an interview in June, 2003, that Wilson's "wife works in the agency.… Everyone knows it." Woodward replied, paraphrasing Armitage, that she was "high enough up that she can say, 'Oh, yeah, hubby will go.' " (The tape was played at the trial.) Saving string for his next book, Woodward did not disclose the information at the time, but Armitage was fond enough of this conversational nugget that he repeated it to Robert Novak, the syndicated columnist. So did Karl Rove, the White House aide, who was in on the secret, too. On July 14th, Novak wrote a column about Joe Wilson's mission to Niger, which blew his wife's C.I.A. cover. Republicans tend to look askance at the disclosure of the identities of C.I.A. agents, but it was only because of pressure from congressional Democrats that Fitzgerald was appointed to look into the leak.