The Story (41 page)

I knew what was at stake. Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation was presumably focused on the narrow issue of whether White House officials had deliberately leaked classified information about Valerie Plame to columnist Robert Novak and other journalists in the summer of 2003 to punish Joe Wilson for challenging Bush's case for war. But bloggers and many in the mainstream media insisted that the inquiry was really about whether Wilson was right to charge that the Bush administration had “twisted” intelligence about Iraqi WMD to “lie” the country into war.

Much had been established by the time I appeared before the grand jury. Contrary to what Wilson claimed, neither Cheney nor anyone else at the White House had sent him to Africa or been briefed about his conclusions. The CIA had sent him without White House knowledge. And contrary to another initial claim, Valerie Plame had been involved in her husband's selection, as the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded in its 2004 report.
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Wilson had returned from Niger with what the CIA interpreted to be a mixed message. On the one hand, it was “highly doubtful” a sale had occurred, he told CIA officials who informally debriefed him over Chinese takeout at his home. On the other hand, a former prime minister of Niger told him that Iraq had tried to acquire some uranium in the late nineties. Wilson had publicly shared the first part of his findings, which he and others cited as evidence that Bush lied about the WMD intelligence. But he did not write about or publicly disclose the former Niger official's view that Iraq had tried to buy uranium, which Bush supporters then stressed. The CIA analysts concluded—wrongly, it turned out—that Wilson's findings supported Britain's claim that Iraq was still trying to acquire uranium for a weapons program. The agency's interpretation was cited as support for the now-infamous “sixteen words” President Bush spoke in his 2003 State of the Union address: “The British government has learned Saddam Hussein has recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

By the summer of 2004, the White House was trying to defuse the
growing public furor over Wilson's charges by retracting that sixteen-word claim. Condi Rice said that it should not have been included in the speech because the evidence supporting it did not rise “to the level of certainty” required for a presidential speech. But rather than quell criticism, the retraction, which David Sanger and I wrote about, had inflamed it further.
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While the Senate committee disputed several of Wilson's assertions, it concluded that the intelligence community should not have included the uranium hunting claim in its NIE on Iraq's unconventional weapons. That claim, among so many others, the senators concluded, misrepresented and overstated what the intelligence community thought it knew about Iraqi WMD. The report did not blame the White House or assert that officials had “lied.” The fault lay mainly with the CIA and its deplorable “tradecraft,” its “group think,” and other serious shortcomings the senators identified.

The sixteen words were part of this story—as were uranium in Niger, Iraqi WMD prewar intelligence, and Joe Wilson and the outing of his wife, Valerie Plame, in Robert Novak's column in mid-July 2003, eight days after her husband had accused the administration of twisting intelligence. I knew the grand jury might ask me about any or all of it.

I told my legal team in the fall of 2005 that I knew about Plame's job at the CIA before Novak “outed” her. While I couldn't recall who first told me, I remembered discussing her on several occasions—with those whom I talked to routinely. Libby was not among them. In my notebooks, Plame's name appeared in several places, but not as part of an interview—not even with Libby. I was fairly certain that Libby and I had talked in passing about her, based on my notes, but that he was focused on the situation in Iraq, the disputed WMD evidence, and what he called Wilson's “reckless” charges.

On September 30 I testified that I had not known Libby before the summer of 2003 and that we met on July 8, two days after the
Times
published Wilson's charge of intelligence manipulation. During our two-hour breakfast meeting at the St. Regis in Washington, Libby summarized the findings in the CIA's NIE, which I then believed were classified as secret.

When I reviewed my notes of our conversation, I told the grand jury, I found a reference in parentheses: “(wife works at WINPAC)”—the CIA's
Weapons, Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control Center. Based on where she worked, I assumed that she was an analyst, not a secret operator. I explained that I usually used parentheses when I was being told something I wanted to ask about, or to note something that I already knew but wanted to explore further. I thought I had heard about Plame's job at the CIA before that meeting with Libby, I told the jurors, but couldn't remember where or when. My recollection, I added, was “almost totally” note driven.

I stressed that Libby was angry mainly about suggestions that WMD intelligence had been “massaged,” as Senator Jay Rockefeller charged. A year earlier, Rockefeller was among those warning that Saddam's WMD arsenals posed “real threats to America today, tomorrow.” By the time of my grand jury testimony in 2005, he had accused Bush of having misled him with “good p.r. work.”
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Many who initially supported the invasion were now accusing Bush of deliberately distorting the evidence. When Libby and I met in the summer of 2003, all I knew for certain—all anyone seemed to know—was that no WMD were found in Iraq, and that the intelligence concerning Iraqi WMD which I and others wrote about before the war, was wrong.

I acknowledged talking to Libby by phone on July 12. Before that, I had most certainly talked to others about Wilson's wife. There were several references to her name in my notes, none connected to a specific interview. On one page are the words “Victoria Wilson” with a box around it. I told Fitzgerald that I was not sure Libby had actually used that name. One possibility was that I deliberately mentioned the name to him first, to see whether he would correct me or confirm her identity.

I assumed this would be my only grand jury appearance, as Fitzgerald and I had agreed. But a second was required. The fault was mine. After I testified, Fitzgerald asked whether I might have met with Libby earlier, sometime in June. It was possible, I said, since much of what he told me in July sounded familiar. Ten days later, after I returned to the
Times
, I found a second notebook that contained notes of an earlier Libby meeting. I was alarmed. How could I have forgotten that earlier conversation? What else had I forgotten?

These notes indicated that Libby and I had discussed Wilson's trip to Niger on June 23, 2003, nearly three weeks before the discussion on July 8
I first testified about. My notes of that meeting also contain a reference in parentheses to Wilson's wife.
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When I discovered the other notebook, Bob Bennett informed Fitzgerald. On October 12 I testified again.

My notes indicate that in our initial June meeting, Libby and I concentrated on the WMD intelligence failures in Iraq. Wanting to draw him out, I described the chaotic WMD search I had covered. I highlighted concerns, among them the often counterproductive competition between two military units hunting for WMD stockpiles and scientists: the army's XTF in which I was embedded, and a then-secret group called Task Force 20, whose existence was unknown to the XTF's senior officers until after the war had begun. Drawn from the Delta Force and the army's elite Special Forces units, Task Force 20 was inspecting some of the same sites the XTF was covering, and searching for some of the same scientists believed to be involved in Saddam's WMD programs.
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I told Libby how the two groups, unaware of each other's movements, had once arrived at the same suspect site simultaneously, weapons drawn, and almost come to blows.

I told the grand jury that my notes of our June meeting show that Libby tried to insulate his boss from charges of intelligence manipulation. He insisted, for instance, that Cheney neither knew Joe Wilson nor that he had gone to Niger to verify the uranium hunting report. My notes, I told the grand jury, contain another reference to Wilson's wife: “(wife works in Bureau?).” While I was certain that Libby and I discussed Wilson's wife, I told jurors, I couldn't remember if that was the first time I had heard that she worked for the CIA.

Fitzgerald had repeatedly asked me before my testimony whether “Bureau” might not refer to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Yes, I said: normally it would. But since I thought that Libby and I had been discussing the CIA, I couldn't be sure.

Only later did I grasp the significance of Fitzgerald's question.

When I returned to the paper after testifying in early October 2005, I asked Claudia Payne, my editor and friend, to meet me in the
Times
's
lobby. I was uncertain how my colleagues would react to my decision to cooperate with Fitzgerald. Howie Kurtz had reported in the
Washington Post
that some reporters and bloggers were criticizing me for leaving jail and testifying.
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Arianna Huffington accused me of “grandstanding.” “Effectively discredited” because of my WMD stories, Kurtz quoted her as saying, jail was merely “an opportunity to cleanse herself.” The
Times
should insist that I provide readers with a “full accounting” of my grand jury testimony. Lucie Morillon, of Reporters Without Borders, told Kurtz that my decision to testify was a “setback” for journalism, a view apparently shared by many colleagues.

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, on the other hand, defended me. Lucy Dalglish, its executive director, had visited me in jail and later said she was struck by how “hostile” and “vicious” journalists were toward me, which she attributed to the weapons controversy and to my style. “She's not exactly a warm and fuzzy person,” she told Kurtz, adding that I was “reserved.” “She's not going to go out of her way to make lots of friends.”

I was disappointed to hear that among those criticizing my decision was Myron Farber, the former
Times
reporter who had spent forty days in jail three decades earlier. Myron believed that a reporter should never testify about a source.
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A warning signal should have flashed as Claudia hugged me when I emerged in the lobby from the paper's heavy revolving door. Why had Keller or Abramson not escorted me back through the newsroom?

My apprehension subsided as we approached my cubicle. My desk was overflowing with flowers, handwritten notes, stuffed animals, and other small gifts; my computer was clogged with nearly one hundred thousand email messages. Most of the emails, said Walt Baranger, the paper's technology editor, were congratulatory.

Still, I sensed that many colleagues did not understand why I decided to cooperate with Fitzgerald; they shared Myron's view that a reporter should never testify about a source, even if the source granted a waiver. “Every day you're in, you win,” was the slogan that David Barstow, my colleague and friend, created for me in jail. David had championed the absolutist stand I embraced before I was persuaded that Libby wanted me to testify.

I tried to explain my position in an impromptu speech to the newsroom. Flanked by Arthur and Bill Keller, I said that I felt I had upheld the principles I had gone to jail to protect. While I was sure that some of my decisions had annoyed both “First Amendment absolutists” and those who had urged me to “testify, testify” rather than “cover up for those people,” my eighty-five days in jail had produced some victories for press freedom while respecting what I thought were the wishes of Scooter Libby, whom I identified publicly as the source I had been protecting since he had been authorized to do so.

Most reporters who had been subpoenaed had accepted blanket waivers of confidentiality, or they secured additional personal waivers from their sources. Since I had been unable to get a voluntary waiver from Libby, I explained, I felt that I had no choice but to go to jail.

Even after Libby offered me the waiver and encouraged me to testify, I refused to cooperate until Fitzgerald agreed to limit my testimony to my conversations with that one source (Libby), one subject (the Plame-Wilson affair), and to let me redact my interview notes. I had not allowed the government to search my notebooks and emails or ask about other sources. I spent an extra month in jail to extract these concessions and got most of what I wanted.

I had changed my mind about whether a waiver from a source under government investigation could be considered voluntary. Libby's telephone call and letter to me had persuaded me. In these tough calls, I “followed my conscience.” In the end, I decided that my cooperation was Libby's call.

I could see that some colleagues were not convinced. I couldn't blame them. As I was speaking, Joe Tate, Libby's lawyer, was publicly contradicting Floyd Abrams's assertion that Libby had refused to give me a personal, voluntary waiver before I went to jail. In an exchange of angry letters, Tate and Abrams called each other liars.
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Libby had been told that I was protecting other sources, not him, Tate claimed, defending his client. I did not know who was right. If I remained unsure, how could my colleagues know?

In an interview later that day by
Times
veteran Kit Seelye, I said I didn't know whether I would ever write an article, much less a book, about this episode. I hoped to take some time off, resume normal life, gain some weight, and lobby Congress to pass a federal shield law to protect reporters'
confidential sources. She asked whether I had thought about what returning to the paper as a reporter would be like. I confessed that I hadn't. “This is my clan, this is my tribe,” I said. “I belong here.”
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