From Act II, Chapter 2
. . . And it was clear, suddenly, that there actually was one man, at this grand Floridian fest of futility, who was oddly pertinent to everything that had unfolded.
The fat man by the ficus. he was standing, inconspicuously, in the lobby on the first day of the conference. His name is Alan Foley, and he's now associate director for national security at the Argonne National laboratory, a Chicago-area backwater of DOE.
Foley was once at the center of the action, head of WMD analysis for CIA, and generally considered the missing man in one of the great controversies of this period: the inclusion of the sixteen words about Saddam Hussein seeking to buy Niger's uranium in Bush's 2003 State of the Union speech.
It's one of a nest of linked controversies surrounding prewar intelligence that, together, have greatly damaged America's standing as an honest broker on the world stage.
Foley all but vanished since he left CIA in late 2003. But his improbable presence here, a man from the past discussing the future, hints at a tragic irony underfoot and fast emerging: that America's misbegotten WMD case for war in Iraq has undermined its moral standing on a mission it now so desperately needs to lead--this one against a real threat: nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists.
Foley was never interviewed on the record at any length in the aftermath of the sixteen-words scandal, though many have tried. . . .
Alan Foley was the head of WMD analysis at CIA during the first term of the Bush presidency. The Way of the World features his first substantive on-the-record interview about his role in the sixteen-word scandal on Nigerien uranium from Bush's 2003 State of the Union address. Foley's account fills in key details of the Bush administration's bad-faith attempt to use shaky intelligence on WMD to sell the war in Iraq.
