The Story (52 page)

18
. Jervis,
Why Intelligence Fails
, p. 143. Jervis, moreover, points out that the CIA and the Energy Department had a “history of strong disagreement” about centrifuges in general dating back a decade or more, which would also explain, at least in part, why an interagency group charged with resolving technical disputes never did so.

19
. The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction,
Report to the President of the United States, March 31, 2005
, pp. 55–56,
http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/wmd/report/report.html#chapter1
.

20
. Bob Woodward,
State of Denial: Bush at War
, part 3 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), p. 278.

21
. Robert G. Kaiser, “ ‘Now They Tell Us': An Exchange,”
New York Review of Books
, March 25, 2004,
www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2004/mar/25/now-they-tell-us-an-exchange
.

22
. Though Massing accused us of having fingered Iraq as the bio attack's likely culprit, the record shows that Steve, Bill, and I were among the first to cast doubt on Iraq as the likely perpetrator. There was little substantial evidence “linking Iraq to the Sept. 11 attacks or to anthrax bioterrorism,” we wrote in October 2001. See William J. Broad and Judith Miller, “A Nation Challenged: The Investigation; Anthrax Itself May Point to Origin of Letter Sent to Daschle,”
New York Times
, October 18, 2001,
www.nytimes.com/2001/10/18/us/nation-challenged-investigation-anthrax-itself-may-point-origin-letter-sent.html
.

23
. Michael Gordon, “ ‘Iraq: Now They Tell Us': An Exchange,”
New York Review of Books
, April 8, 2004,
www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2004/apr/08/iraq-now-they-tell-us-an-exchange/?pagination=false
.

1
. Howell Raines, email message to author, March 5, 2013.

2
. In my meeting with Keller and Jill Abramson the week before the editor's note was published, I had warned them against getting out ahead of the experts who were still trying to determine the fate of the Iraqi unconventional weapons for which Saddam
had not yet accounted. My warning was based on conversations with David Kay and Charles Duelfer, the respective former and current chiefs of the American WMD hunt in Iraq. Both were widely regarded as independent experts, given their earlier work for UNSCOM, the international inspectors initially charged with monitoring Iraq's disarmament pledges.

3
. Sonya Moore, “Sulzberger on Blair, Miller, Getting a Job at the ‘Times,' ”
Editor & Publisher
, March 22, 2004,
www.editorandpublisher.com/Article/Sulzberger-on-Blair-Miller-Getting-a-Job-at-the-Times-
.

4
. Jack Shafer, “Press Secretary Sulzberger,”
Slate
, November 11, 2005,
www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/press_box/2005/11/press_secretary_sulzberger.html
. In one of his many assaults on me, Jack Shafer reported erroneously both the number of articles the editor's note had featured as well as the number I had written or coauthored. “Nine of the 11 flawed stories highlighted in the ‘From the Editors' note are by Miller or co-bylined by her,” Shafer wrote. Nor was he the only media critic who had had apparent difficulty counting. Yet another example, one of several, was an article published on October 21, 2005, in a magazine called
In These Times
. Entitled “Lies Judith Miller Told Us,” Joel Bleifuss, a former director of the Peace Studies Program at the University of Missouri-Columbia, and the publication's editor and publisher, wrote that Keller had cited “six faulty stories about the threat posed by Iraq, all but one of which was written or cowritten” by me.

5
. Okrent was the first journalist to occupy a post that the paper had created under pressure in response to the Jayson Blair fiasco. Billing himself as the “readers' representative,” Okrent described himself as an outsider.
Times
reporters did not discuss our sources or reporting techniques with outsiders.

6
. In an email, Howell Raines told me that Okrent had never contacted him—or Gerald Boyd, he believed—to discuss the editing of my stories, my many wrangles with the military during my embed, and about what the paper had done at the government's request to protect al-Husayni and other Iraqi informants, credible or not, whose lives were then in jeopardy because of their cooperation with Washington.

7
. In an interview in the spring of 2013, Ford told me that the CIA had deliberately suppressed information contradicting its conclusions that should have been shared with his Bureau of Intelligence and Research analysts and with other intelligence agencies. He had not learned until he read the Senate Intelligence Committee and Robb-Silberman commission reports years after the invasion, he told me, that a centrifuge model that a CIA contractor had built to show that the tubes could spin efficiently had broken down after only a few hours of operation and could not be made to work again. Nor had the CIA shared with him and his analysts the results of interviews with Iraqi-Americans it had sent back home to Iraq to visit relatives who were believed to have worked in Saddam's WMD programs. After their return, virtually all
of them had told the CIA that their relatives claimed to no longer be involved in such work. Such information would normally have forced the CIA to include the missing qualifiers in the intelligence estimates, he told me. “Instead, they kept telling us: ‘This is rock solid,' ” Ford recalled. “They lied,” he told me.

8
. In an email to me almost a decade later, Howell Raines criticized Okrent for having joined Keller in accusing him and Gerald Boyd of having relaxed standards for favored reporters such as me, which he called “categorically untrue.” Moreover, Raines complained, Okrent had never contacted him or Gerald for comment before he wrote his essay. Nor had Keller before publishing his own editor's note, Raines said. As a result, neither the editor's note nor Okrent's column gave readers any insight into the difficult judgment calls he and Boyd had made about what to publish or not publish—often to protect American or Iraqi HUMINT, the Iraqi weapons scientists whose cooperation with Washington had put them in jeopardy once the
Times
disclosed it.

“My old newspaper used to believe that a person had to be contacted in advance every time he or she was named as an actor in a news story,” Howell wrote. Okrent's failure was a “violation of basic reporting principles.” Only a handful of the dozens of journalists who had written blogs or articles had contacted me, either, for comment in advance of publishing their stories. Jack Shafer, for instance, who had written six personal attacks for the online
Slate
on what he had called my “wretched” Iraq reporting, had never once sought a response from me. For Shafer and others like him, buzz and internet clicks were what mattered, not truth or journalistic principle. This was the “new journalism.”

9
. The most detailed description of the allegations against Chalabi are in Bonin,
Arrows of the Night
, pp. 234–44.

1
. Several officials in the Bush White House opposed the retraction vehemently, arguing, presciently, that it would provide fodder to critics who claimed that senior officials had lied the country to war. This minority argued that the president's statement was accurate, especially because it attributed the claim that Iraq had sought uranium in Niger to Britain, which continued to stand by the claim. So retracting the statement risked antagonizing Britain, America's closest ally in the Iraq War. In a telephone interview as late as October 2013, Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, Britain's chief spy agency, continued to stand by the claim but refused to reveal why British intelligence officials continued to believe it. Two independent British inquiries have also stood by the claim.

2
. Walter Pincus, a veteran national security reporter who had gone to law school in his spare time, disclosed eventually that he had agreed to testify about what his source had said without specifically identifying the source, who testified separately before the grand jury. Robert Novak, who had outed Plame, would later write a book in which he
reiterated the reasons for his decision to cooperate with the prosecution: the
Sun-Times
would not cover his legal expenses, and he could not afford to fight Fitzgerald on his own. Tim Russert of NBC, whose news organization could afford to wage the fight, agreed to cooperate immediately in the inquiry and disclosed his confidential conversations with Libby and other sources. Norman Pearlstine, the editor in chief of
Time
, agreed to turn over to Fitzgerald Matt Cooper's emails despite the objections of many reporters and members of the magazine's legal team. His emails compromised, Cooper's testimony became less crucial. Nonetheless, he received a personal written waiver from Scooter Libby, his source, whom he identified subsequently. I did not until I had spent almost three months in jail.

3
. Jonathan S. Landay, “White House Released Claims of Defector Deemed Unreliable by CIA,” Knight Ridder Newspapers, May 17, 2004,
www.mcclatchydc.com/2004/05/17/16331/white-house-released-claims-of.html
.

4
. Arianna Huffington, “Judy Miller: Do We Want to Know Everything or Don't We?,”
Huffington Post
, July 27, 2005,
www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/judy-miller-do-we-want-to_b_4791.html
. Among others, Arianna Huffington, writing repeated attacks on her fledgling eponymous site while I was in jail, challenged my motivation for going to jail.

1
. The act, which makes it a crime for those with access to classified information to disclose the name of a “covert” agent intentionally to damage national security, was enacted in the wake of the outing of scores of covert operatives by Philip Agee, Lewis Wolf, and Aldrich Ames. All three had sought to cripple the CIA's clandestine services by outing its agents. Several legal analysts said they doubted that the outing of Plame, though reprehensible if intended as payback for Wilson's criticism of the White House, would have been covered by the law. Among the most articulate advocates of this position was Victoria Toensing, a Republican who had been chief counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee. A key drafter of the act, Toensing insisted that Plame did not meet its definition of “covert,” and, hence, that Fitzgerald's inquiry was “flawed from the get-go.” Victoria Toensing and Bruce W. Sanford, “The Plame Game: Was This a Crime?,”
Washington Post
, January 12, 2005,
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2305-2005Jan11.html
.

2
. Norman Pearlstine,
Off the Record: The Press, the Government, and the War Over Anonymous Sources
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), pp. 112–14.

3
. Farber, a dogged reporter, had served forty days in Bergen County Jail in 1978 for contempt of court, and the paper was fined $286,000 for having refused to turn over his notes about a murder case he had investigated. The case was complicated and, like mine, had aroused intense debate. Although Myron had testified before a grand jury,
he refused to give anyone notes that would betray his confidential sources. Determined to fight the growing number of subpoenas for reporters' notes and sources, Abe Rosenthal and publisher “Punch” Sulzberger, Arthur's father, had strongly supported Myron. After Myron was freed, New Jersey governor Brendan T. Byrne returned $101,000 of the $286,000 that the
Times
had paid in fines and pardoned both him and the paper. Myron's case prompted New Jersey to toughen further its state shield law, making it one of the nation's best. Though his ordeal had coincided with New York's devastating newspaper strike, when the paper was under tremendous financial pressure, Abe's support for him never wavered, during and after jail.

4
. Huffington, “Judy Miller: Do We Want to Know Everything or Don't We?”

5
. Since I had already written two number one bestselling books, I was never worried about getting a book contract. But I sensed that if ever I got a waiver and had to testify, it would be impossible to write honestly about the case until the fate of the accused had been decided.

6
. Bob Novak had voluntarily testified that Karl Rove had told him about Valerie Plame's identity. Matt Cooper had testified without going to jail about two of his sources. His boss, Norm Pearlstine, had turned over to Fitzgerald all of Matt's emails and notes. Walter Pincus negotiated a deal with Fitzgerald to appear before the grand jury without disclosing the identity of his source, who testified separately before the panel. Tim Russert had spoken to the FBI about his conversations with Libby before he received a subpoena. NBC White House correspondent Andrea Mitchell had also been questioned. It was eventually revealed that Bob Woodward, who had volunteered in a TV interview to take my place in jail if he could, had learned of Plame's identity from Richard Armitage five days before I had even met with Scooter Libby. Armitage turned out to have been the initial leaker, which the State Department's top lawyer knew. They offered to discuss Armitage's leak with the White House but said nothing when told that senior administration officials had no need for this information.

7
. In 2001 Vanessa Leggett, a former private investigator, spent 168 days in jail for refusing to compromise her sources in an investigation into the 1997 murder of a Houston socialite. But this brave, principled woman had been doing research for a book, not working for a newspaper.

8
. The tabs and other gossipmongers made much of my husband's luxury cruise with friends while I languished in jail. But Jason, under enormous pressure, needed the rest. I had encouraged him to go.