The Story (35 page)

Now in a new incarnation as “special counsel,” Fitzgerald was conducting a potentially more explosive leak inquiry into who had divulged the name and occupation of Valerie Plame, a CIA officer whose husband, former US ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, had infuriated White House officials by publicly accusing the administration of lying us into the Iraq War.

I feared that I might become ensnared in this investigation, too. I had spoken to many officials about Wilson's charges, and also about his marriage to the CIA official. It was a crime to disclose the identity of a covert agent. I feared that Fitzgerald might learn that I was one of the reporters who had been told about where Ms. Plame Wilson worked. He might want to know who had told me.

While I was determined not to disclose my confidential sources, I knew that I could never afford on my own—financially or professionally—to wage protracted legal battles to protect the confidentiality of my sources. I was stuck.

In July 2004, two months earlier, I had visited George Freeman, the
Times
lawyer, at our New York headquarters. Solidly built, in his fifties, with tortoise-rimmed glasses and a neatly clipped mustache, George was cheerful as usual. In his twenty-three years at the paper, he and his team had fended off an average of fifteen major cases a year: libel charges, government subpoenas for our telephone and email records in leak investigations, demands for our testimony before grand juries, and cooperation with government inquiries. George was a much-admired, popular advocate for the paper and its reporters.

What seemed to be the problem? Was it our phone records case?

No, I replied. I was worried about the government's criminal inquiry into who had compromised Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA agent. Special Counsel Fitzgerald had sent subpoenas to four journalists: Bob Woodward and Walter Pincus of the
Washington Post
, Tim Russert of NBC, and Matt Cooper of
Time
magazine. Judge Thomas F. Hogan in Washington had already found
Time
and Matthew Cooper in contempt for refusing to identify their sources. He had ordered
Time
to pay $1,000 a day and Matt to be jailed until his sources were identified. The sanctions were suspended pending their appeal.

“What's that got to do with you?”

“I think I'm going to get a subpoena, too.”

Suddenly I had George's undivided attention. “What makes you think that?” he asked me, closing his office door.

I told him that I had known for months that Valerie Plame Wilson was a CIA employee who worked on WMD. I had also been told that she had helped arrange her husband's trip to Africa to investigate whether Iraq had tried to buy uranium for its nuclear weapons program. And I was aware of the claim that White House officials had deliberately blown Plame's cover to punish her husband, former ambassador Wilson, for having challenged the administration's justification for the Iraq War.

George looked baffled. To a New York lawyer, the political firestorm in Washington over the leak of Plame's name sounded like a political game.

Describing the situation succinctly wasn't easy. The administration, I told George, had based its prewar claim that Saddam possessed WMD
partly on intelligence assertions that Iraq had tried to buy yellowcake (uranium ore) from Africa for its nuclear weapons program. Some of the documents about such an alleged sale had turned out to be forged, but a year before the war, in February 2002, Vice President Cheney had asked the CIA about the accuracy of another intelligence report indicating that Iraq was secretly trying to buy yellowcake from Niger.

The CIA then asked Plame's husband, a former ambassador to Gabon, to check it out. Wilson went to Niger in February 2002 and concluded that the tip was not accurate. But Iraq's alleged search for uranium, based on other sources, including British intelligence, was included in the intelligence community's secret National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002. Meanwhile, the CIA never told the White House that Wilson had been sent on such a trip.

The NIE's finding that Iraq was “vigorously trying to procure uranium ore and yellowcake” from an African country helped persuade some in Congress to support military action against Iraq. President Bush also mentioned the allegation in his 2003 State of the Union speech. Wilson was dismayed. He thought the allegation was false, and that Bush and his advisers must have known that. In July 2003 Wilson wrote an op-ed for the
Times
disclosing that he had investigated the tip in Niger and had concluded that no such attempt had occurred. He accused the White House of having twisted intelligence about the uranium purchase to help sell the war—an explosive charge.

On July 11, 2003, after a bitter internal battle, the CIA and the White House retracted “sixteen words” that Bush uttered in his State of the Union about the attempted uranium purchases.
¹
The statement also asserted that no one at the White House had been aware of Wilson's trip or his conclusions.

The debate probably would have ended there, I told George, if
Chicago Sun-Times
columnist Robert Novak, a well-informed right-winger atypically opposed to the Iraq War, had not written a column a few days later about Wilson's trip. Quoting two “senior Administration sources,” Novak wrote that Wilson's wife, “Valerie Plame,” was an “Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction” who had “suggested” sending her husband to Niger.

The CIA spokesperson had confirmed Novak's story. Later the agency informed the Justice Department that Plame's cover had been blown. The agency routinely made such referrals when leaks of secret intelligence information appeared in the press. Barely a quarter of them were investigated by the FBI, and prosecutions were rare. But given the firestorm over whether America had gone to war under doctored intelligence, the Justice Department quickly launched a criminal investigation. The FBI was exploring not only who had blown Plame's cover but also whether doing so constituted a violation of the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which bars the outing of covert agents.

To avoid the perception that the inquiry would be influenced by the White House, Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself from the investigation, and in December 2003 Deputy Attorney General James Comey appointed Fitzgerald—whom he called his “friend and former colleague,” and an “absolutely apolitical career prosecutor” with “impeccable judgment”—as special counsel. Bush ordered his staff to cooperate fully with the leak inquiry and promised that if the leaker was employed by his administration, he would be fired. Fitzgerald cast a wide net, interviewing dozens of officials and subpoenaing journalists.

George Freeman asked me whom I had talked to about Wilson and his wife, Plame. “Just about everyone,” I told him. Initially, it had struck me as juicy gossip, a conversation opener, and possibly even a good story, since one official I interviewed described Wilson's trip as a boondoggle that his wife at the CIA had helped arrange. I hadn't been asked to investigate the tip further, I told George. But among the senior officials with whom I had spoken was I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Cheney's chief of staff. I didn't elaborate further, but I was worried about our discussion of the still-secret portions of the 2002 NIE on Iraqi WMD. I told George that I could not answer questions from a grand jury about my discussions of top-secret information without violating a pledge I had given Libby, who had given me sensitive information in confidence.

While most reporters, including me, do not like offering pledges of confidentiality, there is no way around them if the public is to learn how policies are developed and what the government wants (and, more often,
does not want) Americans to know. The penalties for disclosing classified information are harsh. Many officials I interviewed took periodic polygraph tests that asked whether they had recently had unauthorized conversations with journalists. Preserving such contacts depends on awkward negotiations over how a source is to be identified, what can and cannot be published, and the development of trust, usually over years. Reporters who burned sources did not last long in national security reporting. Word got out; officials avoided them.

George asked me who at the paper knew about my conversations about Wilson and Plame.

“Only Jill Abramson,” I replied, the Washington bureau chief at the time. I recalled my rushed meeting with Jill on a Friday afternoon a year earlier in July. She had seemed preoccupied, I remembered. Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd had recently been fired. Without warning, I had stepped into her office in July 2003 to tell her that Joe Wilson's wife worked at the CIA and had apparently helped send her husband on the trip to Africa before the war to investigate the uranium charge. If true, I said, the CIA was possibly guilty of nepotism and of covering up intelligence that disputed its prewar WMD claims. If the source was wrong, and Wilson's wife hadn't sent her husband to Africa, the White House might be trying to smear them. Either way, I told Abramson, the tip needed pursuing.

Had anyone followed up on the story? George asked.

Not to my knowledge. In fact, no one in the Washington bureau wrote about it until after Novak published his column outing Plame. I told George I was angry that the
Times
had been scooped on the tip I had passed along.

Had I written anything about any aspect of the allegation?

“No,” I replied.

George smiled. “Then forget about it,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because the paper never wrote about it until after Novak outed her. And you never wrote about it at all,” he said. “Nobody is going to send you to jail for a story you never wrote.”

My subpoena arrived in August 2004, a month later. After meeting with the paper's lawyers and me, Arthur Sulzberger announced that the
Times
would fight Fitzgerald's effort to force me to testify before a grand jury about my confidential sources. Nor would I share a month of interview notes with him.

“Journalists should not have to face the prospect of imprisonment for doing nothing more than aggressively seeking to report on the government's actions,” Arthur said. “Such subpoenas make it less likely that sources will be willing to talk candidly with reporters, and ultimately it is the public that suffers.”

George Freeman and Floyd Abrams, the celebrated First Amendment lawyer who had helped represent the paper on tough cases ever since the Pentagon Papers in 1971, expected that the
Times
, too, would be subpoenaed for its records, but it never was. Fitzgerald wanted only my notes between June and July, and my appearance before the grand jury.

By October 2004, most of the other subpoenaed reporters had cut deals with Fitzgerald.
²
Floyd and I had discussed whether I, too, should find a way to cooperate. Libby, after all, had signed a blanket waiver permitting reporters with whom he had spoken to cooperate with the inquiry. But I argued that he had done so only because the president had ordered him to: his waiver was not voluntary. A forced waiver would not free me from my pledge of confidentiality. Floyd agreed. But I authorized him to talk both to Libby's lawyer, Joseph A. Tate, about whether Libby would be willing to give me a personal waiver, and also to prosecutor Fitzgerald, to see whether he would narrow his demand for my notes, as well as the topics and sources to be covered before the grand jury.

In September Floyd and I met for breakfast in New York. Floyd, who was also representing Matt Cooper of
Time
magazine, told me that he and Tate had spoken on the phone, and that Tate pressed him about what I might say in my testimony. Floyd said that Tate declined to waive the pledge of confidentiality I had given Libby, though he had permitted other reporters with whom he had spoken to testify. Tate had also signaled, Floyd
told me, that the blanket waiver that some other journalists had interpreted as permission to cooperate with the grand jury was not really voluntary.

The news from Fitzgerald was no better. He was insisting on examining my entire notebooks, not merely the notes of the discussions I had with various sources about Wilson's Africa trip. Nor was he willing to limit his questions to that topic. Finally, Floyd said, Fitzgerald was also unwilling to confine his questioning to a single source who had told me about Wilson's wife. That meant I would be unable to protect other confidential sources who had also given me sensitive information unrelated to Wilson or his wife. Fitzgerald was insisting on the right to ask me about all sources with whom I had discussed Valerie Plame. Floyd and I knew that Fitzgerald had called back Matt Cooper after his first appearance before the grand jury for additional testimony when he learned that Cooper had discussed Plame with a second official. I could not risk an open-ended prosecutorial fishing expedition into my sources.

I could not comply with the subpoena, even if it meant going to jail.

On a steamy, hot night in July 2004, days after I had told George Freeman that I feared being dragged into the Valerie Plame investigation and a month before my subpoena arrived, I was in my office, working late. The phone rang.

It was Adnan Saeed Haideri al-Haideri, the Iraqi chemical engineer who had described having worked on what he believed were sites for storing chemical and biological weapons. He sounded frantic. He told me that he was going to be arrested or deported; he wasn't sure which. I was his only “friend” in America, he pleaded. He needed my help.

I hadn't seen Haideri for over two years since I had flown to Thailand at Ahmad Chalabi's invitation to interview him about WMD. But I had never stopped looking for him.

Months earlier, a relative in Australia had given me his US cell phone number. I had left messages for him, but he had not called me back. Now, out of the blue, he had called.

One day later we were sitting together again, drinking tea, in a CIA
safe house: a nondescript, two-story row house on Crystal Ford Lane in Centreville, Virginia. Haideri said the agency was renting it for him, a claim that his lawyer later confirmed and which the CIA did not deny.