The Story (32 page)

Above and beyond all the intelligence challenges was the fact that Saddam had long been playing a double game with respect to his WMD. As Bob Woodward reported in 2006 in
State of Denial: Bush at War
, part 3, David Kay, the second chief of the weapons hunt, had informed a dispirited President Bush in January 2004 that US intelligence on WMD failed because “the Iraqis actually behaved like they had weapons.”
²⁰
Saddam did not have WMD, but he wanted his foes to believe that he did. Many of his own officers and officials thought that Iraq's ostensible arsenal of chemical and biological weapons—and one day,
insha'allah
, atomic bombs—would thwart an American invasion.

None of this was known when Michael and I disclosed Iraq's purchase of the aluminum tubes on September 8, 2002, or when we wrote our follow-up article disclosing a dispute about their purpose five days later. And most of this was still not known in May 2004 when Keller and Abramson tried to blame the paper's alleged reporting failures on me.

I was recalling Michael's fury over the media criticism of our tube story when Keller asked: Why had I not pressed harder for a more in-depth look at the tubes later in the year? Why had I not insisted on going deeper into the intelligence dispute?

“We did return to the tubes before the war,” I reminded him. In January 2003 Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the IAEA, publicly sided with the experts who claimed that the tubes were for conventional rockets, not nuclear centrifuges. Michael Gordon wrote about ElBaradei's stance.

Others had written better, more comprehensive stories about the dispute, Keller said. Jonathan Landay of the McClatchy newspaper chain, for instance, had written in greater detail about it in October. Why hadn't I?

I recalled that Landay's story was published about a month after ours. It had quoted one source by name: David Albright. At the time, no editor had mentioned it to me or Michael.

Exhausted after almost five hours of defending my reporting, I struggled for words.

“I didn't pursue it again before the war began,” I said, picking up my notes to leave, “because my father died.”

At ninety-eight, my father had outlived most of his friends and three beloved Yorkies. He had survived a series of strokes. But toward the end, he would rant in Yiddish and Russian, neither of which Denise, his fourth wife, spoke. He had never warmed to my husband, Jason—too “lefty,” too “critical” of America. And America, of course, along with Israel, could do no wrong. Only in America could the son of a pushcart owner—or a “building tradesman,” as his
Times
obit had diplomatically called my grandfather's profession—become wealthy and a legend in show business. It was useless to argue—to explain that Jason's criticism was meant to be constructive, or that Jason was no less a patriot than my father, who believed that Ronald Reagan, whom he called a “second-rate” actor, had not only been a first-rate president but the “best president
ever
.” I went alone to the funeral in Palm Springs, California.

Dad was no fan of my newspaper either: “too liberal.” Its entertainment
coverage was too “skimpy” and “lousy”—his version of the classic Yiddish joke “such bad food and such tiny portions!” Plus, the
Times
didn't pay me enough. He was right about that; though, like many women, I never complained or asked for a raise.

The
Times
had sent flowers to the synagogue—Diane Ceribelli's thoughtful touch again.

As I stood at his grave, I felt guilty about the birthdays, dinners, and family trips I had missed because of my work. Luckily, I had married the one man on the planet who seemed proud of my all-consuming passion for reporting and had never tried to change me, perhaps because he sensed he would not succeed. But that week, rather than write yet another story on the tube controversy that no editor wanted, I went home to Sag Harbor.

Controversy over the prewar WMD reporting reignited in February 2004 when the
New York Review of Books
published a lengthy attack on the press's performance in the run-up to the invasion, calling me the poster child for the media's “submissiveness” to the government line on intelligence before the war. Michael Massing's eight-thousand-word article, titled “Now They Tell Us,” lambasted the nation's major newspapers, particularly the
Times
and me, for failing to warn the country about the Bush administration's “deceptions and concealments” of critical information about Iraq prior to the war.

The article was especially problematic for me, as Jason and his former wife, Barbara, had cofounded the
Review
in 1963 during the New York press's printer's strike. Barbara had remained coeditor until she died in 2006. Jason continued to write regularly for it. So did his daughter.

When Massing called before publishing his essay and read me a long list of questions—most of them hostile about how reporters dealt with sensitive national security issues—I warned Jason that things could get “ugly.” But he urged me to talk to Massing, whose writing struck him as “fair-minded.”

The results were disastrous. By the time he called me, Massing was wedded to a view that the press had not only “failed” by not having stopped
the invasion of Iraq, but also was “complicit” in having “sold” the war to a fearful American public. He accused the press of having held back information and of succumbing to a “pack mentality.”

Robert Kaiser, the
Washington Post
's associate editor and senior correspondent, rejected Massing's charges as “laughable.” Listing several
Post
stories that challenged the administration's prewar assertions, Kaiser said that his paper had not suppressed news of bitter intelligence disputes.
²¹
Journalists may have learned slowly that the administration's WMD claims about Iraq were “almost all wrong,” in chief US inspector David Kay's memorable phrase, Kaiser wrote. “But literally no one outside Iraq knew that before the war. . . . Still today,” he wrote on March 25, 2004, “we have no smoking-gun evidence” that the administration engaged in “deliberate deception.”

Kaiser accused Massing of doing what he accused the Bush administration of: cherry-picking “examples that suit his thesis” and dismissing articles that contradict it. Moreover, he added, Massing had not acknowledged his antiwar view.

In his response, Massing avoided the issue of whether he had opposed the war. But in an essay in January 2003 in the
Nation
, a left-of-center weekly, he had criticized intellectuals who favored ousting Saddam to end his systematic human rights abuses. While they probably meant well, he allowed, invasion was unjustified. “Despite his brutal record,” Massing wrote, Saddam was not then “carrying out the type of mass slaughter he did against the Kurds in the late 1980s.” Iraq was not Rwanda in 1994, when Hutus slaughtered Tutsis, nor even Bosnia in the early and mid-1990s. Massing wrote that he would oppose war with Iraq even if the Security Council authorized such action.

Two years earlier in late 2001, Massing had complained about me in two articles in the
Nation
. In October he criticized an article that Steve Engelberg and I had written soon after an anthrax-filled letter forced the evacuation of the Senate office of Majority Leader Tom Daschle. Accusing the press of “monolithic and unquestioning coverage” of the anthrax strikes, he wrote that we, and the
Times
especially, had hyped the story and tried to blame Iraq for the attack. But the front-page story that Steve and I wrote, as Massing acknowledged, reported that Iraq was only one of several
potential suspects, and that it was far too early to hold anyone responsible.
²²
A second Massing article in December essentially accused Steve, Bill, and me of hyping the attacks to sell our book
Germs
, a serious charge. Our “alarmist language” and “strong suggestion of state sponsorship” had contributed to a “sense of panic in the land.”

The powder-filled letters ultimately killed five, infected seventeen, put over ten thousand Americans on antibiotics, and closed several post offices throughout the Northeast and a Senate office building. They triggered the largest, most complex FBI investigation in US history. A
Times
/PBS documentary based on that reporting for our book,
Germs
, won an Emmy in 2002.

I wanted to write a detailed response to Massing's highly selective account of the press's prewar coverage, as Bob Kaiser had done, but I didn't. For one thing, as Jason reminded me, the
Review
gave its own writers the last word. Knowing that the social media would revel in a lengthy, angry exchange with Massing, given my husband's continuing involvement with the
Review
, I decided to complain only about being misquoted in my response to his questions. I counted on Michael Gordon, who told me he was writing a response to Massing's critique, to set the record straight and defend not just his own work but also the paper's prewar reporting, including certainly what we had written together.

Michael's letter listed
Times
stories that had challenged the administration's case for war that Massing had ignored.
²³
He went toe to toe with Massing. My concerns about Massing's rebuttal turned out to be well founded. His response to Michael's two-thousand-word letter was almost equally long.

In his response to my letter, Massing asserted that I was “simply wrong” about his misquoting me, though he offered no evidence to support that claim. He was relying on memory, as was I, but his quote of what I had supposedly said made no sense. Moreover, it was “revealing,” Massing added, that I had not contested the other “serious shortcomings” he had identified in my work.

Massing was surely aware of my awkward position. My decision not to respond, however, was a mistake.

I was at a biology conference in New Orleans on May 26, 2004, when the
Times
published its unsigned editor's note, “The
Times
and Iraq.”

Initially I was relieved. At 1,145 words, it was half as long as the draft Keller and Jill Abramson had shown me five days earlier. It ran on a Wednesday, not the Sunday paper; on A-10, not the front page. It did not name me or any other reporter. It blamed prewar coverage that was “not as rigorous as it should have been” and “insufficiently qualified” on anonymous “editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing them for more skepticism” who were “perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper.” Those unnamed editors had bannered “dire claims” about Iraq on page 1 and “buried” more skeptical stories inside the paper.

Though being accused of trying to “rush scoops into the paper” was usually not considered a transgression, the criticism seemed to be aimed at Howell Raines, who had complained often that the paper's “ingrained complacency” had resulted in a “slow response to competition.”
¹

The note also blamed a “circle of Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on ‘regime change' in Iraq,” especially Ahmad Chalabi, an “oc
casional source” since 1991. Chalabi, a “favorite” of Bush administration “hard-liners” and “a paid broker of information from Iraqi exiles,” had “taken in” administration officials and many news organizations with his “misinformation . . . in particular, this one,” the note stated.

“The
Times
and Iraq,” the note “From the Editors,” asserted that the paper had produced some good reporting that had accurately reflected “the state of our knowledge at the time.” It acknowledged the possibility that chemical or biological weapons might still be found in Iraq.
²

I thought of that session the week before. It had taken me almost five hours to persuade Keller and Abramson that their original version of the note was wrong, but a great deal was at stake. An editor's note is not just one of those standard corrections published on page 2. It is the paper's equivalent of a papal bull: an acknowledgment that something terrible has happened. Two months earlier, Keller had rejected a request for a review of the paper's Iraq War–related reporting from Daniel Okrent, the
Times
's newly minted “public editor.” Soon after becoming executive editor, Keller wrote Okrent an email that Okrent subsequently put online, saying that he had reviewed my WMD coverage and had not seen a “prima facie case for recanting or repudiating the stories.” Charges that our coverage had been “insufficiently skeptical” were “an easier claim to make in hindsight,” he wrote. Keller had called me a “smart, well-sourced, industrious and fearless reporter with a keen instinct for news, and an appetite for dauntingly hard subjects.” My early Osama bin Laden coverage was “uniquely foresighted before 9/11” and had been “at least partly responsible for one of our Pulitzers.” Like many “aggressive reporters,” I had sometimes “stepped on toes,” but that was hardly “grounds for rebuke.”

Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. defended me, too. Challenged about my Iraqi WMD reporting in March 2004 at a college newspaper convention in New York City, he said that he had known me “for decades” and that I had “fabulous sources.”
³
“Were her sources wrong? Absolutely,” he said. “Her sources were wrong. And you know something? The administration was wrong. And when you're covering it from the inside like that, you're going to get things wrong sometimes.” He blamed the Bush administration for “believing its own story line.”

While I welcomed Arthur's defense, I had not parroted the administration's line. I had struggled to verify every published tip. Still, I was pleased that Arthur was unwilling to let antiwar critics scapegoat me for the intelligence community's failure.