The Story (28 page)

Gerald wrote a wrenching book about his experience as an African American at the
Times.
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After thirty years at the paper, he was given only hours to leave. Gerald's wife, Robin Stone, a former
Times
reporter, called Arthur's dismissal of him “swift, and brutal, and ugly.” He would die of cancer, still heartbroken, less than three years later, at age fifty-six. His memoir was published posthumously.

Shortly after he was diagnosed, we had lunch together at an Italian restaurant near the paper. Gerald never hinted that he was ill. But he told
me that his ordeal's most painful moment had been in the theater when none of his friends or colleagues defended him. “Not one,” he said. I looked down at my pasta. My cowardice had broken a bond between us.

The revolt transformed the paper. Having gauged as weakness Arthur's capitulation to the board, which had insisted that Howell and Gerald be fired, some reporters and editors were triumphant; others were simply relieved. Reporters in Washington boasted of having deposed the “Taliban.”
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Bill Safire, the paper's conservative columnist and my longtime mentor and friend, was glum. From then on, he told me, the staff would have a de facto veto over an executive editor's decisions. Arthur would ignore them at his peril.

I came back from Iraq with a list of story ideas to pursue or share: the impact of the looting and theft of weapons from the Karbalā' complex, where MET Alpha had spent time, and from other Iraqi arsenals; the army's faulty body armor; the growing tension between the returned Iraqi exiles and L. Paul Bremer, America's “viceroy” in Baghdad; the transformation of the liberation of Iraq into a despised occupation; the growing corruption among Iraqi officials but also Americans. But of greatest concern to me was what looked increasingly like a colossal intelligence failure with respect to Saddam's WMD arsenals and the army's hunt for them. Before the first Gulf War, the CIA had severely underestimated Saddam's WMD capabilities. Had intelligence analysts grossly exaggerated them this time?

I sent the list to Roger Cohen, the foreign editor, and to Jill Abramson, the Washington bureau chief. I heard nothing. When I went to the bureau, Jill did not mention the list, but she asked me to help examine intelligence and policy failures in Iraq. I began writing an account of my three-month embed with the 75th XTF and the hunt for WMD, which, as of June 2003, was fruitless.

Still uncertain whether WMD would be found in Iraq, I had raised the possibility that the hunt would come up empty with senior editors, and publicly, as early as May in a commencement speech I gave at Barnard College during my brief break from Iraq. My alma mater was honoring
me with a medal of distinction, and I spoke about Iraq. I had “very mixed feelings about this war,” I told the graduates. Mostly, I had questions, chief among them whether the war was “justified.” Yes, Saddam was a “monster.” Deposing him had been “a good thing for Iraq.” But the Bush administration's mishandling of postwar security had “puzzled and depressed” me, I told them. Iraqis had expected us, the “American invaders, to protect them after the war.” But “we have failed to do that.” Everyone knew by now that Americans could blow things up. But did we have “staying power” or a clear vision of how Iraqis or Afghans could “build a better future”? Would the weapons hunters find the “WMD programs that were cited repeatedly as the major justification for the invasion? . . . Were the concerns about nuclear and anthrax clouds over our cities exaggerations? Were they justified by what we knew then, as opposed to now? Was the intelligence that produced them politically distorted? Were those who wanted to go to war deceiving themselves about Saddam's capabilities? Was the war really necessary, not just for Iraq, but for American national security?”

I was at my desk early on July 19 when a news alert flashed across my computer screen. A British scientist involved in a scandal over whether the British government had “sexed up” prewar intelligence on Iraq's WMD to strengthen the case for war had been found dead near his home in Oxford-shire. It was being called a suicide.

I prayed that the scientist was not shy, self-effacing David Kelly. But it was.

Bill Keller, recently appointed executive editor, asked me to his office for our first meeting since his promotion to discuss Kelly. When he saw how upset I was, he said that he was sorry about David's death. But this was not a condolence call. What did I know about the scientist's state of mind? he asked.

I had come prepared. I showed him printed copies of the most recent emails David had sent me, the last written hours before his death. He was under enormous stress because the British government had identified him as the source of a charge by a BBC reporter that Prime Minister Tony Blair
had “sexed up” the prewar WMD intelligence assessment, I told Keller. David told me he had spoken to the BBC reporter but claimed not to have been the original source of his story. He had been misquoted, he insisted. “I would never have used the phrase ‘sexed up' to a reporter,” he joked. In response to an email I had sent him, David then replied that “many dark actors” were “playing games”—a reference, I surmised, to jealous officials within Britain's Ministry of Defense and the intelligence agencies with which he had often fought over interpretations of intelligence. He would wait “until the end of the week” before judging how his appearance before the committee had gone, he wrote.

David was clearly worried about facing further scrutiny over his interactions with reporters, but he had not seemed unduly depressed. He had often told me how eager he was to return to Baghdad and participate in the US Iraq Survey Group's inquiry into the missing Iraqi WMD. He wanted to interview the Iraqi WMD scientists with whom he had once sparred, several of whom were then imprisoned at Camp Cropper, not far from where the 75th XTF weapons hunters and I had been based.

No one knew Iraq's biowarfare scientists better than Kelly, I told Keller. Having long argued that those Iraqis were key to figuring out what had happened to the missing chemical and biological stocks, he hoped that the scientists he had known for so long would open up to someone they considered their peer.

I recalled our first meeting in 1998, when Bill Broad and I were researching our account of UNSCOM's seven-year hunt for Iraq's hidden biological program. David, a Welsh microbiologist who was one of the world's top bioweapons experts, was one of the four UN weapons inspectors—the “gang of four,” they had christened themselves—whose detective work had forced Iraq to acknowledge that it lied after the 1991 Gulf War about not having germ weapons.
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In 1995 their persistence forced Baghdad to admit that, since 1974, Iraq had explored at least a dozen pathogens as potential weapons. David's area of expertise was biological research and development, an inherently “dual-use” endeavor that made understanding intentions vital. “If David Kelly were a tax inspector,” wrote Tom Mangold, the author of a fine early account of the Soviet biowarfare program, “he would recoup Britain's entire national debt.”
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David and I shared another interest: the former Soviet Union's secret germ weapons program. In 1989 he had toured Soviet biolabs and facilities and had been one of the first two British scientists to debrief Vladimir Pasechnik, then the most senior Soviet biowarrior ever to defect from Moscow's top-secret program. His assertions that the Soviet Union had developed long-range missiles to deliver germs, and a genetically modified version of plague that was impervious to some vaccines and antibiotics, had astonished and alarmed Western intelligence officials. Though his CIA counterparts had long argued that the Soviets had no sophisticated bioweapons program and had initially doubted Pasechnik's claims, David's work helped persuade them that Moscow was hiding what turned out to be the world's largest, most ambitious germ weapons effort, a blatant violation of the 1975 biological weapons treaty.

David was also concerned about a possible connection between former Soviet germ warriors and Iraq. After Pasechnik's revelations in 1989, both Britain's MI6 and the CIA had attempted to monitor the movement of Soviet microbiologists and Moscow's bioexchanges with Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Libya, and other countries of concern. He had tracked such movement ever since 1991, when he told me that MI6 had spotted at least one scientist in Baghdad.

David was among my first calls after a scientist who had attended a World Health Organization conference in Lyon, France, in August 2002 told me that Iraq might have obtained a virulent strain of smallpox from a Russian scientist who had worked in a Moscow lab in the Soviet era and was thought to have visited Iraq in 1990. Another scientist identified that Russian as Nelja N. Maltseva, a virologist who spent over three decades at the Research Institute for Viral Preparations in Moscow before her death in 2000. Because her institute had once housed what Russia claimed as its entire national collection of some 120 strains of smallpox, British and US intelligence officials were concerned that she might have given or sold the Iraqis a version of the virus that could be resistant to vaccines or transmitted easily as a bioweapon.

Having spent months visiting decaying former Soviet labs and ill-equipped, poorly heated research institutes, and having seen one of the world's most dangerous plague strains stored in a used pea can, I knew
how tempting Iraqi money would be to desperate Russian scientists. Intelligence officials were concerned that Iraq was among those rogue states trying to benefit from their financial distress.

When David confirmed that intelligence analysts in London and Washington were investigating the Maltseva report, which he stressed to me was uncorroborated, I flew to Geneva to comb through World Health Organization records of scientific exchanges. The records, plus interviews with scientists there, indicated that Dr. Maltseva had visited Iraq at least twice in the early 1970s as part of the global campaign to eradicate smallpox. But had she visited Baghdad in 1990?

By the winter of 2002, I had pieced together intriguing information about Maltseva's activities and what intelligence analysts thought they knew about them.

On a trip to Russia the previous autumn for a bioconference, I had tracked down Maltseva's daughter, a physician in Moscow. She told me that she did not believe her mother had
ever
been to Iraq. Neither did the scientist who had been her deputy in the Moscow laboratory. Neither claimed to know about a secret trip she had made in 1971 to Aralsk, a port city in the then Soviet republic of Kazakhstan. Recently declassified records, however, showed that Maltseva had traveled there as part of a covert Soviet mission to stop a smallpox outbreak that Moscow had failed to report to the WHO. The documents indicated that she had taken tissue samples of the so-called Aralsk strain back to her lab. In interviews that fall in Moscow, Russian biologists insisted that the dangerous material was later destroyed. Western experts had no evidence of that. And Russia remained secretive about the illicit Soviet biowarfare effort as well as ongoing research and development activities.

When I learned in December 2002 that the CIA was concerned enough about the possible transfer of a Soviet smallpox strain to Iraq to have briefed President Bush, I decided to write a story. The president's briefing, if not the CIA's inquiry itself, would surely leak, especially because the administration was preparing to announce the number of American soldiers who would be vaccinated against anthrax and smallpox, an officially eradicated disease. My editors agreed we could no longer wait. I
reported that the CIA was investigating whether Iraq had obtained a highly lethal smallpox strain from the old Soviet Union's germ weapons program. David Kelly agreed to be quoted on the record, as did several other sources I had interviewed on background. I quoted him as saying that UN weapons inspectors had noticed a “resurgence of interest” in smallpox vaccine in Iraq back in 1990, “but we have never known why.”

The story was long but appeared deep inside the paper, since I stated clearly that Dr. Maltseva's alleged trip in 1990 was uncorroborated and that the CIA was still investigating it.
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Many of the sources I interviewed were identified by name. And the story contained numerous caveats about what the agency knew and did not know about the allegation. So I was upset when critics of my WMD reporting began listing this story, among others, as examples of high-level White House leaks to me that I had rushed into print to scare Americans into going to war.
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Anyone who knew anything about germ weapons—or investigative reporting, for that matter—should have grasped how much time and effort this cautiously worded article about WMD-related intelligence had required. I had spent almost five months searching documents and conducting interviews in Russia, Switzerland, London, New York, and Washington to write the smallpox story.

As I sat with Keller that sultry day in July, I did not tell him how crucial a source David had been on so many other stories I had written, especially my prewar WMD stories. I said nothing because I never discussed the sources of sensitive stories with anyone, even editors, unless I was asked specifically. The focus of much of my WMD and terrorism work required the trust of people who saw classified information. Most could have been fired simply for talking to me without proper authorization. So I guarded their identities, limiting discussion of them to senior editors who asked about them and had a need to know.

Perhaps I also hesitated because I no longer felt comfortable with Keller. Unlike other senior editors, he had not been supportive initially, in public or private, when critics began attacking my reporting on Iraq and WMD. The ferocity of the blogger-led assault after the Iraq invasion had stunned me. True, Keller was a columnist and not executive editor when
Kurtz published my private email exchange with John Burns. But he had not asked me about it, either.