The Story (53 page)

1
. The paper's coverage of my situation was also being criticized. While the editorial page had crusaded on my behalf, the news department had been scooped repeatedly, even on my release from jail, which was reported first by the
Philadelphia Inquirer.

2
. Robert S. Bennett,
In the Ring: The Trials of a Washington Lawyer
(New York: Three Rivers Press, 2008), p. 357.

3
. The committee had released portions of an email from Plame to a senior CIA official noting that her husband had “good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity.” She said that she had approached her husband only after her bosses had selected him for the mission, but the committee noted that she had mentioned that her husband was planning a business trip to Niger and “might be willing to use his contacts in the region.”

4
. As several in the White House had warned, the retraction seemed to validate rather than undercut Wilson's charges. Once reporters smelled what Anna Perez, Condi Rice's press adviser, had called “blood in the water,” they had used the retraction to challenge all of the White House's intelligence claims. Several officials, including Dick Cheney, who had never made the Niger claim, had warned that retracting the sixteen words was “intellectually dishonest,” as Karl Rove would later assert in his memoir.(Britain, America's closest ally in the war and a main source of the intelligence, continued to stand by the claim.) It was also, they argued, a catastrophic political error that would reinforce, not rebut, Wilson's charges about the White House having lied the country into war.

5
. Harvey,
Explaining the Iraq War
, pp. 168–69.

6
. I had found the notebook under my desk in a Bloomingdale's shopping bag filled with notebooks stacked in chronological order. When, in October, the paper posted twin stories about my jailing and the paper's handling of the Wilson-Plame scandal, a blogger named Tim Porter, whose story was featured as an online link to the
Times
's account of my grand jury testimony, concluded that my failure to remember my earlier meeting with Libby and belated discovery of crucial notes in a shopping bag reflected “sloppy” and “disorganized” reporting. Tim Porter, “Judy Miller: What a Horribly Ordinary Affair,”
First Draft
, October, 17, 2005,
www.timporter.com/firstdraft/archives/000507.html
.

This is typical of the venomous reactions to my account of my grand jury testimony and a lengthy companion piece written by several colleagues on October 16 about my role in the Valerie Plame affair. Described by its author as a blog about “Newspapering, Readership & Relevance in a Digital Age,” Porter's attack is still featured by the
Times
as a link to our stories in its web editions, the second offering in a column entitled Bloggers Discuss the Miller Case. While Porter called my notebook storage system and memory lapses evidence of “sloppy” reporting, how many bloggers would have been able to retrieve two-year-old notes about a subject that, prior to an unforeseeable grand jury, had seemed to be little more than Beltway gossip?

7
. I had not written about the secret group because the embed agreements signed by
most reporters banned stories about such still-secret groups and operations. But Barton Gellman of the
Washington Post
, who was permitted to cover the XTF in action during a brief period in May, disclosed the existence of Task Force 20, as well as its composition and mission, in his paper. His exclusive, “Covert Unit Hunted for Iraqi Arms,” was published on June 13, 2003,
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/12/AR2006061200926.html
. Asked by editors in New York why I had not written the story, I said it would have violated the terms of my embed agreement—a disadvantage of privileged access to sensitive military operations on the military's terms.

8
. Howard Kurtz, “Miller and Her Stand Draw Strong Reactions,”
Washington Post
, October 1, 2005,
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/30/AR20 05093001553.html
.

9
. Myron Farber would later go public with his disdain for my decision. In an interview with Seth Mnookin in
Vanity Fair
(December, 2005) about my role in the Plame affair and dispute with the paper, Farber, who had been jailed three decades earlier, was quoted as opposing my decision to accept the waiver and narrow my testimony. “I just can't imagine doing it,” he told
Editor & Publisher.
“I am just against the notion of waivers. When I was in jail, the thought of accepting one never crossed my mind.”

10
. “Lawyers' Correspondence in Miller Case” (letters from I. Lewis Libby to Judith Miller; Joseph A. Tate to Patrick Fitzgerald; Floyd Abrams to Joseph A. Tate),
New York Times
, October 4, 2005,
www.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/national/nat_MILLER_051001.pdf
.

11
. Katharine Q. Seelye, “Freed Reporter Says She Upheld Principles,”
New York Times
, October 4, 2005,
www.nytimes.com/2005/10/04/national/04reporter.html
.

12
. Ibid.

13
. Bennett,
In the Ring
, p. 358.

14
. In 2010, for instance, the
New York Times
assigned Don Van Natta Jr. to investigate alleged wrongdoing at the
News of the World.
On September 5, 2010, the paper published the results of his six-month investigation of the British tabloid, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. The British paper called the allegations unsubstantiated and accused the
Times
of flawed reporting and of being motivated by commercial rivalry. Specifically, the Murdoch paper charged the
Times
with “seven breaches” of its own “ethical guidelines” involving accuracy, the use of anonymous sources, bias, impartiality, honest treatment of competitors, reader benefit, and conflict of interest. The paper also challenged Van Natta's “professional detachment,” claiming that he had sent a Twitter message linking to a personal attack on Murdoch alongside a message that stated: “The Last Great Newspaper War.” In his blog, Michael Wolff, the media commentator, called Van Natta Jr. a
Times
“enforcer” and “insider, loyalist, and gun.” In his response, Arthur Brisbane, then the
Times
's public editor, supported the paper's
reporting but agreed that Van Natta had relied heavily on anonymous sources. He also said that the paper's presentation of the story and gratuitous references to Murdoch could leave room for suspicions of a “hidden agenda.”

15
. Many reporters and fellow editors had complained about Cohen's stewardship of the foreign desk. Cohen and I had clashed ever since he joined the
Times
in 1990, when he worked as a reporter in what was then a newly created desk to cover media news. Martin Arnold, the paper's former media editor, and I, his deputy, had edited Cohen's stories; we'd refused to run at least one major feature he'd written about two
Time
magazine reporters unless he made major changes. As time passed, both of us grew increasingly skeptical about the neutrality and thoroughness of Cohen's reporting.

16
. Even the State Department's INR—the smallest intelligence unit, with the fewest people and smallest budget, and a historic tendency to miss or downplay significant potential threats to the nation—did not dispute the NIE's key finding that Iraq “has chemical and biological weapons” or that if it got fissile material from abroad, it “could make a nuclear weapon within several months to a year,” judgments to which the intelligence community had assigned a “90 percent” level of confidence.

17
. The Van Natta article had many other ill-founded complaints. It said, for instance, that although I had given the paper's reporting team two (lengthy) interviews about my role in the Plame affair, I had refused to elaborate on my grand jury testimony or my sources, or allow my colleagues to review the notes I had gone to jail to protect. The article did not say that my lawyer had explicitly warned me not to comment on such issues in light of the ongoing criminal investigation. After I left jail, Bob Bennett had permitted me to give only two broadcast interviews. I decided to talk to Barbara Walters and Lou Dobbs, reporters I respected and trusted, and whose medium, television, more or less prevented in-depth probing of issues that could prove problematic if I were to be a witness in a future criminal trial.

18
. If Jill told Van Natta that she didn't recall discussing Plame with me, I would understand. Who could blame her for having forgotten one of what had probably been a dozen such tips a week from her thirty-five-person bureau. I recall that she had seemed tense that day, which was understandable, since Howell Raines, her nemesis, had just been fired, but her own future was at that point undetermined. But she denied that I had told her anything at all about Plame. Van Natta did not report that I had told George Freeman, the paper's lawyer, about having passed along the tip to Jill. The dispute between us was never resolved, but when she testified at the Libby trial two years later, she did not deny that I had told her about it. Asked whether she and I had discussed Wilson's wife, she replied that she did not recall. Perhaps I remembered our conversation because I knew that, given my strained relations with Keller, she was unlikely to let me pursue the Plame tip, even though David Sanger and I had coauthored the paper's account of Steve Hadley's apology for having permitted
“faulty intelligence”—the infamous sixteen words about hunting for uranium in Africa—to appear in Bush's State of the Union address. See David E. Sanger with Judith Miller, “After the War: Intelligence; National Security Aide Says He's to Blame for Speech Error,”
New York Times
, July 23, 2003,
www.nytimes.com/2003/07/23/us/after-war-intelligence-national-security-aide-says-he-s-blame-for-speech-error.html?scp=28&sq=&st=nyt
.

19
. Barstow and Bergman would relay similar concerns and observations about my case to Marie Brenner, a friend and journalist whose articles I long admired, and who wrote about the impact of the Valerie Plame affair for
Vanity Fair.
See Marie Brenner, “Lies and Consequences: Sixteen Words That Changed the World,”
Vanity Fair
, April 2006,
www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/04/brenner200604?currentPage=1
.

20
. Dowd's column did not identify Jill Abramson as one of her closest friends.

21
. In May 2009, Dowd was accused of having lifted without attribution a forty-plus-word paragraph from a posting by Josh Marshall on the online site Talking Points Memo. Dowd admitted making a mistake and ran an update that attributed the paragraph to Marshall. The paper ran a correction. Her explanation—that she had not read the TPM column but solicited input from a friend and then cut and pasted that response into one of her columns—was criticized by several media critics and bloggers.

1
. Before Bill Safire could talk to Punch, Abe, spurned and humiliated, accepted an offer to write a column for the New York
Daily News.
According to numerous accounts, Arthur had long resented Abe Rosenthal for having challenged his conduct and judgment in front of his father and other perceived slights. See Mnookin,
Hard News
, and Tifft and Jones,
The Trust.

2
. At one point in our talks, the paper announced publicly that I would be reporting back to work in the newsroom by November 2. One of my lawyers interpreted this as an indication that Arthur was having second thoughts about whether an amicable settlement of our dispute was preferable to a dignified separation. But Matt Mallow, then a senior Skadden, Arps, partner and a friend, asked me a clarifying question: Even if I got a public apology from the paper, would I feel comfortable working again for the
Times
? Did I want to continue working for a paper that had “turned so quickly and easily on one of its own”? Would I ever again trust journalists who had, as Bob Bennett wrote in his memoir, “snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory” by assailing me after my almost three months in jail?

3
. I gave two interviews soon after I came out of jail: one to ABC's Barbara Walters, whose father, a nightclub owner, had introduced my parents; and the other to Lou Dobbs, who was then at CNN and had run a clock at the top of the screen counting
each day of my incarceration. I rejected numerous offers to write tell-all articles about jail and my fight with the paper and inquiries from filmmakers seeking my cooperation with a movie based on about my experience. In 2006 at the request of my lawyer, Floyd Abrams, who was involved in the project, I had lunch with Kate Beckinsale, the gifted actress who was preparing to play a reporter in a film about a court battle similar to mine. The film,
Nothing But the Truth
, written and directed by Rod Lurie, opened in the fall of 2007 went quickly to video distribution. Floyd was compensated. I did not participate.

4
. Libby's version of their conversation is different. Libby told the grand jury that in response to Cooper, he had said that he did not know whether Cooper's claim that Plame worked at the CIA was true. Cooper's contemporaneous notes of their conversation support Libby's description.

5
. Although Bush commuted Libby's sentence, he still paid the hefty fine, served four hundred hours of community service, and had his law license revoked.

6
. John Rizzo,
Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA
(New York: Scribner, 2014), p. 208. In his book, the former CIA general counsel challenged another of Plame's complaints: she had not been forced out of the CIA by its indifference to her family's personal safety, he asserted. In her memoir, Plame said that she was forced to leave Langley partly because her bosses had denied her pleas for added security for her and her young twins after her family had been explicitly threatened. But Rizzo, who had investigated her request for “round-the-clock security protection,” determined that neither she nor her family was in “any sort of danger.” As a result, he wrote, he had “reluctantly” concluded that the CIA “could not lawfully expend the considerable amount of taxpayer money that would be required to shield her from a nonexistent threat.” Plame's book also revealed, among other things, that the CIA had recalled her from her first covert overseas assignment in 1997 because the agency feared that she “might be among the officers betrayed to the Russians by traitor Aldrich Ames,” the CIA official who spied for Russia for nine years before being caught in 1994. While the agency never determined whether Plame was among the compromised spies, the disclosure meant that it was not senior Bush officials who had ended Plame's career overseas as a full-time undercover operative but a traitor within the CIA.