Information security

The Story Behind the Accidental Photo of a Spy

In the fall of 2003, photographer David Burnett pitched a portrait shoot of career diplomat Joseph Wilson to U.S. News & World Report. That July, the New York Times had published an op-ed by Wilson that had significantly dented George W. Bush’s key argument for invading Iraq: that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy uranium from the west African nation of Niger to fuel his nuclear weapons program.

Wilson had written that some of this intelligence “was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat,” an assertion that embarrassed the White House. It quickly retracted the claim that Bush had made in his State of the Union address earlier that year.

Shortly afterward, Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a Central Intelligence Agency “operative on weapons of mass destruction.” The columnist Robert Novak, citing that two Bush administration officials had leaked Plame’s identity to him, wrote that Plame had suggested sending her husband to Africa. In an interview with TIME then, Wilson said that was “bullsh-t” and “a smear job.”