Former ambassador is striking back

WASHINGTON — What do you do if the White House gets angry at you — really, really angry?

If you're Joseph Wilson, you become a media star, and you don't get mad — you get even.

He isn't on the sides of buses or the backs of milk cartons yet, but Wilson has mushroomed into a talking head. He's opened a consulting business. He's a staple on cable TV talk shows. He's a fixture on the college lecture circuit. He's on the radio. He's quoted by pundits. He gives interviews. And he's writing a book due next spring.

A former ambassador who has been posted in the Middle East and Africa under Republican and Democratic administrations, Wilson has until recently been known as the last U.S. official to meet with Saddam Hussein. At the time he was deputy chief of the U.S. mission in Iraq and was one of the first to note that the Iraqi dictator used to try to stare foreigners down and would drop his hand during the handshake so the visitor was forced to look down and thus appear obsequious.

His current claim to fame, at age 53, is that he is the husband of the CIA operative (spy) outed by the White House. His wife, Valerie, still works for the CIA, although apparently no longer in undercover work. She is not talking.

Wilson says his wife's cover was purposefully blown (he calls the leak an act of treason against the country) to retaliate against him for going public with a report he wrote from Nigeria saying that there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein tried to buy uranium from the government in Niger. He was sent there on a fact-finding mission indirectly by Vice President Dick Cheney.

If the White House had read his report, he insists, President Bush would never have uttered the fateful 16 words in his State of the Union speech last January declaring that Iraq had tried to get nuclear materials from Africa. The administration has since admitted Bush's allegation was untrue. There is no doubt the false information in a presidential speech helped lead to the global unraveling of Bush's credibility on why the United States is now occupying Iraq.

Wilson said he's been targeted by the White House to "intimidate" others from coming forward about the administration's shaky evidence for its charge that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, sought nuclear weapons and was a serious threat to the United States.