The Story (33 page)

So what had changed between March and May of 2004? After months of criticism of my reporting and that of others at the
Times
, why had Keller—and, by implication, Arthur, since such an institutional statement would have required his approval—decided that an editor's note was needed? And why the sudden rush?

I had urged Keller to examine more closely what the paper had published. I had sent him and Abramson copies of memos and emails I hoped would shake their conviction that my reporting had been unduly credulous and reflected a prowar bias. I included an example of a headline, crafted by editors, that had contradicted my story. The headline, “U.S. Experts Find Radioactive Material in Iraq,” ran over the article, which asserted, at its top, that the discovery was “very unlikely to be related to weaponry.” I attached copies of unanswered emails to foreign editor Roger Cohen and a memo I wrote to several editors, before the invasion, suggesting stories that had questioned the rush to war and the administration's competence.

I included a memo I sent two senior editors on January 28, 2003, listing ideas I hoped to pursue alone or with other reporters. First was the interview with Hans Blix, the UN's Iraqi WMD inspections chief. Another concerned the Bush administration's “Lack of Day-After Planning” in the run-up to the invasion. A third challenged the oft-repeated assertion that international inspections could not be prolonged because soldiers who had already been deployed to the region could not be kept there “for weeks and months on end.” Keeping them there would be expensive, I wrote, and there would be some degradation of capability over time. But military sources had assured me that the US forces could remain deployed “thru next September without a significant loss in war-fighting capability.” I proposed a more detailed look at the antiwar movement at home. A Michigan paper had reported that “42 cities across the nation” had already approved resolutions opposing the war—impressive, I thought, and undercovered by the
Times
.

I also suggested a deeper look at Condi Rice's dysfunctional decision-making at the NSC. “People leave principals' meetings unsure of what has been decided,” I quoted a senior source as having remarked about the White House's Cabinet-level meetings. They seemed to resolve few disputes, especially those between Rumsfeld's Pentagon and Powell's State Department—America's “Sunnis and the Shiites,” as Charles Duelfer had called their notorious rivalry. “So everyone goes off and does his own thing,” I wrote in my memo. Could this continue “if the nation is at war?”

I proposed exploring the apparent policy contradiction between administration officials who, on the one hand, wanted to transform Iraq into a pro-Western democracy, and, on the other, claimed to be “instinctively resistant to nation building.” How would the president resolve this inconsistency?

While I interviewed Blix with UN bureau chief Julia Preston days after sending the memo, neither Abramson nor any other editor had asked me to pursue my other suggestions. Occasionally I would see stories by
Times
reporters on similar themes. But I had no idea whether my memo had helped trigger them.

Recalling Keller's original draft of the editor's note, I felt less distressed than I had anticipated when I read the note in New Orleans, until I called Safire. He was furious. Had I not noticed that I had written, or coauthored, four of the seven “problematic” stories that had accompanied the paper's online version of the note?
⁴
“You've been trashed, kiddo.”

“You should have seen the original version,” I replied. Besides, my battle over the note had not been totally in vain. Keller had told me before the note ran that once the issue was behind us, the paper would explore in depth the Iraq War intelligence, policy, and operational failures that so preoccupied me. He had finally decided to assemble a team of reporters to investigate the alleged WMD intelligence lapses and the poorly managed postwar occupation, the type of inquiry at which the
Times
excelled. I would be part of that team, he assured me. Excited about the prospect of revisiting issues and experts I had written about before the war, I agreed to go to Washington as soon as possible to start reporting on the sudden end of the Pentagon's relationship with Ahmad Chalabi.

Launching such an investigative series meant that I would be able to figure out whether the paper and I had been misled and to interview officials who were normally off-limits, given the paper's preoccupation with turf, particularly at the Washington bureau.

Keller had insisted since September 2003 that I clear each trip to DC in advance with him. The desk in the Washington bureau that I once regularly occupied had been given to another reporter. I felt increasingly like a nonperson during my visits.

Safire knew that Keller had quietly urged me that fall to avoid Iraq War topics, especially WMD, until criticism of me in the blogosphere had subsided. Why, he asked me, would Keller suddenly launch such a controversial series now? And why would he risk more criticism by including me on such a reporting team? Washington bureau reporters came by each day to chat with him. Safire spoke often with Phil Taubman, the new Washington bureau chief, who had been a friend of mine since our reporting days in Washington and a champion of investigative reporting. But neither Phil nor any of his reporters had mentioned such an ambitious project, Safire told me.

That was odd, I agreed.

It didn't take long for media critics to pounce on Keller's editor's note as “too little, too late.” Why had the
Times
's “mini culpa” not appeared on the front page? demanded Jack Shafer. Writing for
Slate
, Shafer had been complaining about my WMD reporting for almost a year.

Okrent, the paper's public editor, weighed in on the
Times
's Iraq War reporting on Sunday, June 30, four days after the editor's note. Okrent, who had taken the ombudsman's job only five months earlier, was still learning how the
Times
operated. Three days before his column was published, we discussed my work for an hour over coffee. Because he seemed to have his mind made up, I declined to discuss in any detail how my stories had been written or the identity of my sources.
⁵

Okrent's 1,850-word essay in the Sunday paper reflected Keller's apology. He, too, concluded that the paper's “flawed journalism” had been
“not individual, but institutional.” While he cited two of my articles about defectors' claims in his list of “flawed” stories—my prewar article based on Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri's allegations and the postwar story based on the claims of Fadil Abbas al-Husayni, the Iraqi military intelligence officer—Okrent concluded that critics' effort to pin the paper's “failure” on me was “inaccurate and unfair.” He blamed unnamed editors for questionable story assignments, placement, length, headlines, and the lack of follow-up.
⁶

Okrent's note helped explain why Keller had seemed so determined to publish an editor's note quickly. Okrent disclosed that he had told Keller on May 18 that he would be writing about the paper's failure to revisit its Iraq intelligence coverage. Keller had replied that an independent inquiry was already under way. Their discussion took place three days before Keller and Abramson showed me their first draft of the editor's note.

I was pleased that one of Okrent's main complaints was the lack of follow-up on controversial stories. But he repeated Keller's assertion that our stories were wrong because we had fallen for “misinformation, disinformation, and suspect analysis.” While I couldn't rule out the possibility that some intelligence analysts had altered their conclusions under White House pressure, or told their bosses what they thought they wanted to hear, two major studies after the invasion discounted the existence of such political pressure and endorsed a less conspiratorial conclusion. The reports about the WMD intelligence debacle by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Robb-Silberman commission found that the analysts were wrong, but not because they wanted to go to war. Some did; some didn't. Rather, the studies concluded, the analysts had erred because of sloppy tradecraft, bureaucratic rivalries, failures of communication, and because they feared the consequences of underestimating a WMD or terrorist threat in the wake of 9/11, as many had done so often before the September attacks. State Department intelligence chief Carl Ford argued that such 9/11 fears had been reinforced by the intelligence community's underestimation of Saddam's nuclear weapons program before the 1991 Gulf War.
⁷

After the editor's note and Okrent's column were published, I contemplated the damage. Though Keller's note had not named me, and Okrent had explicitly concluded that it was inaccurate and unfair to blame me alone for the paper's alleged “failings,” their essays scarred my reputation. In attempting to restore the newspaper's editorial integrity, they had taken my twenty-seven-year prize-filled career, as Bill Safire had complained, and trashed it. I was not a perfect reporter. I had broken quite a few rules in my thirty years of journalism and committed my share of journalistic sins. As a foreign correspondent, I had occasionally drunk too many martinis in too many hotel rooms on the road after eighteen-hour-long reporting days. I had yelled at colleagues who I thought had failed to carry their weight on a story or endangered our sources. I was perpetually late filing expense accounts. I had sharp elbows. I resisted being cut out of stories. I failed to appreciate the importance of building a network of friends inside the
Times
. While I had a few close pals at the paper, I tended to regard time spent at the coffee cart with colleagues as goofing off since I was not reporting. But I had never lacked skepticism. Nor had I twisted or ignored facts to achieve a political outcome. Yet that was the crime of which I was accused.

In accusing me, however, Keller, Abramson, and Okrent were accusing the
Times
as well. Nor did their notes quell the growing media fury over the paper's prewar coverage of what was becoming a disastrous war. Suggesting that reporters and the paper had been insufficiently skeptical incited the paper's critics. From then on, such critics would point to the notes as proof that the
Times
and “mainstream media” could not be trusted.

Howell, who feared the impact of Keller's note on the institution he had led, attempted damage control. In an interview with the
Los Angeles Times
, he denied that our Iraq stories had been rushed into the paper to get scoops. “In 25 years on the
Times
and in 21 months as executive editor,” Howell wrote, “I never put anything into the paper before I thought it was ready.” Any of the “30 or so people who sat in our front-page meetings during the run-up to the Iraq invasion and the first phase of the war can attest to the seriousness with which everyone took the story.” Neither Keller nor Okrent had contacted him about how such controversial stories had been handled, he told me.
⁸

The editor's note and Okrent's essays refocused attention on Ahmad Chalabi, who had become a target of the war's critics. A man on a mission, Chalabi made it his business to be well informed, and to share what he had learned, or suspected, with journalists. Talking to him was essential. But his allegations had to be double- and triple-checked.

When Chalabi sat behind Laura Bush at the president's State of the Union address in January 2004, few would have predicted that four months later, an American-assisted Iraqi police raid would descend on his Baghdad HQ, or that the administration would soon sever the $340,000-a-month payment to his INC opposition group. The raid on his well-fortified compound was preceded by even more stunning news: Chalabi, according to
Newsweek
, was alleged to have given Iran information about top-secret American surveillance of Iran's communications. Rich Bonin, a
60 Minutes
reporter and producer, asserted that Chalabi and a top aide had informed senior Iranian intelligence officials in March that US intelligence had broken Tehran's encryption code and was monitoring its diplomatic cables.
⁹
Chalabi took to the Sunday talk shows to deny the charge: George Tenet was trying to smear him to shift blame from the CIA's faulty prewar intelligence, he said.

Long before this, pressure had been building on Keller and Abramson to distance themselves and the
Times
from Chalabi. The American press had published 108 articles based on information that Chalabi's INC had provided. (I had written one of them.) In our meeting before the editor's note was published, Keller kept returning to Chalabi. Hadn't I relied excessively on him?

No, I hadn't, I insisted. Chalabi had provided information or quotes for two of the stories I had written before the war about Iraq's WMD capabilities and only three of some twenty-four stories I wrote during my embed with the 75th XTF in the spring of 2003. Only one of those three concerned the hunt for WMD.

Yes, the 75th XTF's MET Alpha unit I had spent the most time monitoring had worked closely with Chalabi for part of its mission in Iraq. So,
too, had a team of DIA analysts working out of the INC's headquarters at the Hunting Club. One of them was an agent whom I had come to trust. Code-named “Jim Preston,” he had recently returned to Washington from Baghdad.

I did not know whether the reports of Chalabi's extensive lies and double-dealing were true, I had told Keller and Abramson. Like so many of the charges and countercharges swirling around the Iraq War mess, this one would remain murky. Military and intelligence analysts would remain divided over Chalabi. MET Alpha's soldiers and other DIA analysts who had worked with his group most closely, including “Jim Preston,” had praised some of Chalabi's information. Richard Myers, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had told Congress that information provided by Chalabi's group had “saved American lives.”