The Story (27 page)

When I returned from Iraq and entered the newsroom the next day, nobody was thinking or talking about WMD or Iraq. Gerald and Howell were in lockdown, meeting reporters and editors in small groups to discuss the collateral damage to the paper and growing complaints about their leadership.

The gravity of their situation was evident at a dramatic staff meeting at Loews Astor Plaza movie theater. Arthur Sulzberger accompanied Howell and Gerald to the theater near the
Times.
The street was jammed with
reporters from other papers and camera crews yelling questions at the trio. Paparazzi pranced in front of them. It was a zoo.

Arthur opened by pulling a toy stuffed moose out of a bag and throwing it playfully to Howell.
Times
executives used stuffed animals as props at retreats, he explained, to signal the discussion of difficult, potentially embarrassing issues. I cringed. Arthur must have learned the technique from one of those management gurus he found so persuasive. It fell flat; Howell quickly put aside the stuffed animal.

The paper had not handled the Jayson Blair affair well, Arthur began. “We didn't do this right. We regret that deeply. It sucks.”

It sucked? I glanced at Geraldine Fabrikant, a business reporter and friend who was sitting in the back of the theater with me. She had closed her eyes.

The focus on Jayson Blair and dignified expressions of regret from Howell and Gerald quickly morphed into an attack on the paper's leaders. Alex Berenson, a business reporter, asked Howell a question he said he would ask any boss in such straits: Was he going to resign?

I gasped as reporters applauded Berenson. Resentment was palpable. Staff members lined the aisles, waiting their turn to complain.

The room grew silent as Joe Sexton, one of metro editor Jon Landman's deputies, took the microphone. (Landman had flagged several concerns about Blair in the past months but had not been heeded.) Sexton lit into his bosses. Howell and Gerald governed by fear. “People feel less led than bullied,” he declared. The staff no longer felt that editorial decisions were being made fairly or “properly.” At a “deep level,” he told them, sprinkling his indictment with words the paper couldn't print, “you guys have lost the confidence of many parts of the newsroom.”

No one rose to support Howell and Gerald, including me. Did I think that some of these grievances were well founded? Yes, Howell could be cruel and mercurial. But under their leadership, the
Times
had won seven Pulitzers. And the paper seemed to function best under an autocrat. Abe Rosenthal had been equally ruthless.

Why did I remain silent? Was I disoriented by having just returned from another planet—Iraq? Surely. But witnessing the depth of my colleagues' fury, I was also wary of speaking out. I feared that they would
interpret a defense as toadying up to senior editors who had let me “run amok.” I was silent as men I respected were torn apart. But I was heartsick for them and ashamed of my own cowardice.

I turned to Geri, who also seemed shocked. “Can I go back to Iraq now?” I said.

I returned to Baghdad soon after that ugly session, but my return was not easy. Roger Cohen, the acting foreign editor, suddenly opposed the rules governing my embed. During my break in New York, he had sent me to Washington to ask the Pentagon to drop its insistence that my stories be vetted first. As I had predicted, the Pentagon spokesman refused. To allay Roger's concern, I suggested that he run a disclaimer at the bottom of my articles informing readers of the military censorship. But Roger still opposed my return.

I made my case to Gerald. I needed to go back to Iraq not only to finish my embed with the 75th XTF. I had begun hearing that the trailers that senior Bush officials had touted as proof of the existence of Saddam's illegal mobile biolabs were not WMD related at all. In February, Secretary of State Powell had emphasized the labs in his speech to the UN. If the mysterious trailers were not used to produce germ weapons, a major part of the administration's WMD indictment of Saddam and justification for its invasion would collapse. This was obviously crucial. The XTF's experts would surely know. But I needed to talk to them in person, privately, not over a satellite phone.

Gerald agreed, but he seemed distant. He had obviously been shaken by the staff revolt. I told him I suspected that Roger's sudden objection to the embed ground rules masked a broader anxiety about my reporting and the failure so far to find WMD in Iraq. I understood his frustration, I said. I, too, was surprised that the XTF had not found any weapons. My email in-box was filled with questions and complaints about the paper's WMD coverage, and several of my stories in particular. There were messages from bloggers and reporters from mainstream papers seeking comment for articles they were writing about my sourcing.

Some of the criticism focused on allegations that I had relied too
heavily on Ahmad Chalabi. While I dismissed this charge from incendiary bloggers, I was dismayed when Howard Kurtz, the
Washington Post
's media critic, in late May printed portions of my email exchange earlier that month with John Burns, our Baghdad bureau chief, over who would write stories about Chalabi. Kurtz suggested the emails showed that Chalabi was “using the
Times
to build a drumbeat that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction.”

This was Bart Gellman's work, I thought. Soldiers in the XTF had told me that Gellman, a
Washington Post
reporter close to Kurtz, resented the fact that I was embedded with weapons hunters. They said that Gellman and his editors had complained to the Pentagon so often about the exclusive access granted the
Times
that Defense Department officials had finally let Gellman spend a few days with the XTF in Iraq.
¹

My email exchange with Burns was hardly unusual. Reporters, not just at the
Times
, often fought over turf. A seasoned media reporter should have recognized the exchange as a classic bureaucratic spat. John had scolded me for having written a story about Chalabi without having cleared it with him. “We have a bureau here; I am in charge of that bureau until I leave,” he had written. “It was plain to all of us to whom the Chalabi story belonged.” My decision to write a story without his permission or advance knowledge was not “professional” or “collegial.”

What John had written was not correct. Due to the sensitive nature of my embed, Howell, Gerald, and I had agreed that I should report directly to New York, not his bureau. But seeking peace, I apologized. At the same time, I let John know that he would not stop me from writing about Chalabi, whom I had covered for a decade. I thought I had the editors' support. On April 10 I had cowritten a lengthy, somewhat unflattering profile of Chalabi that was published just after Saddam's regime collapsed.
²

Early in the war, American forces had flown Chalabi and dozens of his supporters into Iraq but dumped them unceremoniously at an abandoned warehouse near the southern Shiite stronghold of Nasiriya, not far from where MET Alpha was camped. Chalabi had held a rally that attracted thousands of Iraqis. But veteran reporters Michael Moss, Lowell Bergman, and I wrote that State Department officials considered Chalabi “divisive”
and had predicted that after years in exile, he would attract little popular support inside Iraq.

Chalabi's supporters in the Pentagon—deputy secretary Wolfowitz and adviser Richard Perle—called him a “courageous and charismatic proponent of democracy” whose vision for Iraq was consistent with the Bush administration's and would help “transform autocratic, tradition-bound Arab culture,” we wrote. But State Department and CIA officials dismissed him as “erratic and egomaniacal.” They regarded his desire to transform Arab political culture as “flaky” and warned that it was potentially destabilizing Iraq and also other Middle Eastern autocratic regimes that were longtime American allies.

Our article challenged the assertion that White House officials had put Chalabi's group at the center of its planning. In fact, we reported, as “plans to topple Mr. Hussein developed in Washington,” White House officials had “kept Mr. Chalabi at a distance,” inviting him to consultations with National Security Adviser Rice and Vice President Cheney, but “never allowing him to play a significant role in conceiving a new government.” We quoted an administration official who had scoffed at Chalabi's argument that the United States would need no more than thirty thousand troops to overthrow Saddam, because Chalabi would lead other exiles back into Iraq and quickly inspire an uprising by millions of Iraqis. After that, we wrote, some officials began referring to Chalabi as “Spartacus.”

My email exchange with Burns made no mention of that lengthy article. But it did explain that the army unit I was embedded with was spending time at Chalabi's headquarters to use the INC's “Intel and document network,” a reference to thousands of documents that Chalabi's men had taken from the Iraqi secret police headquarters. So of course I was talking to Chalabi, almost daily.

The
Washington Post
, meanwhile, Kurtz's own paper, had published allegations about Iraqi WMD and Saddam's terrorism links with Islamic militants based on tips from Chalabi. But Kurtz used my email exchange with Burns to attack the
Times
and to suggest an ideological motivation to my stories. His story encouraged other reporters and a stampede of anti–Iraq War bloggers to repeat the charge.

Even more troubling to me was that someone at the
Times
had leaked the email exchange to a rival paper. However unpopular I may have been with my colleagues, the leak risked damaging the paper. Assistant managing editor Andrew Rosenthal, Abe's son, whom Howell and Gerald had designated to work on some of my WMD-related stories, lashed out at Kurtz, saying that it was “a pretty slippery slope” to publish competing reporters' private email and “reveal whatever confidential sources they may or may not have.” “Of course we talked to Chalabi,” he wrote Kurtz. “If you were in Iraq and weren't talking to Chalabi, I'd wonder if you were doing your job.”

Rumors of my alleged dependence on Chalabi were reinforced by Colonel McPhee's and General Petraeus's thinking in April that MET Alpha's time would be better spent working with Chalabi's INC and other Iraqi opposition groups than surveying more entries on the Pentagon's worthless suspect site list.

They made that call after Monty Gonzales tracked down Fadil Abbas al-Husayni, the Iraqi “baseball cap scientist” who turned out to be a senior military intelligence officer and a chemist who was still cooperating with the United States. Although Chalabi had nothing to do with Abbas, Gonzales's initiative in locating him had impressed his bosses and led to his reassignment.

It also seemed natural for MET Alpha to have begun working with the INC, given Chalabi's long-standing relationship with the Pentagon. Defense Intelligence Agency liaison officers were already working with the INC at the group's temporary headquarters at the Hunting Club beyond the Green Zone, a once fashionable, now run-down sports club that had been favored by Saddam's Ba'athists.

Gerald overruled Roger Cohen, instructing me to return to Iraq to finish my embed.

My bureaucratic victory proved fleeting.

On a hot and humid midnight late in May, Gonzales picked me up at the military sector of Baghdad International Airport. The Special Forces soldiers
attached to the XTF no longer considered some roads near the capital safe. But the mood around the lake at XTF headquarters was calm, almost jubilant, as the brigade prepared to return to Fort Sill. The status briefing that Colonel McPhee gave the day after my return focused on vehicle safety. Too many soldiers were being injured in vehicle accidents, he told us. We had to fasten our Humvee seat belts.

Colonel McPhee seemed pleased to see me. I was relieved to be back in Iraq. Although I had lost over twenty pounds during my first three months covering his brigade, slept little, and worked incessantly, I had found the war within the
Times
more emotionally taxing than my embed in a war zone.
³
The increasingly poisonous politics of the paper frightened me, and I had missed the soldiers' camaraderie and sense of purpose. I had also come to understand better the pressures and disappointments that the colonel had faced in a WMD hunt which was shaping up as a true “mission impossible.” Despite his frustration, McPhee promised to give me an interview about the XTF's strengths and weaknesses after the brigade returned to Fort Sill. He was understandably proud to be bringing home all his soldiers. The XTF had suffered no losses or severe casualties. He must have sensed that the task force was leaving just in time.

McPhee's calm was infectious, but days later, my own was to end. Iraq was a cauldron, but so, too, was the
Times.
One night, on a fraught call with Jim Wilkinson, chief of public affairs for Central Command in Doha, he gave me shocking news. I had called to renegotiate the terms of my embed for the umpteenth time at Roger Cohen's instructions, when Wilkinson said, “Haven't you heard the news?”

Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd had been fired.

I thought about Howell and Gerald on the long military flight home from Iraq in June 2003. At some level, I wasn't surprised. But I was depressed and heartsick for them.

Deputy investigations editor Claudia Payne, who was closer to Howell than I was, told me that she had concluded they were doomed as soon as she heard Sexton's curse-filled accusation that they had lost the newsroom's confidence. Howell would admit a decade later that he had sensed he would not last soon after the Jayson Blair exposé was published, indicting not only the reporter but also the newsroom's management. I thought, naively, that if Arthur continued to back them, they would survive.