He initially resisted letting me accompany his MET units anywhere, even on training missions. He had also barred me from entering the tactical operations center: the cluster of trailers where key meetings were held. He kept me out of the battle update assessments each morning and the video-teleconference meetings conducted from the task force’s HQ in Kuwait City, essential to understanding how the XTF’s mission fit into the military’s plans and operations.
No reporter was going to see the “classified” maps and mission statements posted in the TOC without higher authorization, McPhee ruled. Cajoling, joking, and pleading failed with him, so I appealed to the Pentagon’s public affairs office in Washington. My embed would be disastrous unless McPhee gave me access.
He gradually relented, but only after a senior officer whom he wouldn’t identify reassured him that Secretary Rumsfeld was aware of this unusual embed. Poor Colonel McPhee. I was bombarding him with requests for interviews and other access. Though the task force headquarters had sent the XTF a marine experienced in working with reporters to review stories that might risk compromising operations, McPhee insisted on reviewing them personally as well. Though he usually rose before dawn, I routinely filed late at night. So my copy rarely reached him until well after midnight, when his aides would have to rouse him to read it. I was exhausting the guy.
* * *
A turning point in our relationship was a serendipitous meeting in late March with a senior military officer who became a supporter not only of the WMD mission but also of my own journalistic integrity when it came under fire a few years later: Maj. Gen. David Petraeus.
I had never heard of General Petraeus, who was commanding the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) when Colonel McPhee invited me to accompany him to the general’s temporary HQ an hour’s drive from our base. Petraeus had received his doctorate at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School a few years after I had gotten my master’s. He admired Germs, he told me, and asked pointed questions the book had raised. He also asked me what biological agents I thought we were likely to encounter in Iraq. I asked him why had we found so little trace of WMD to date. He didn’t know, either.
Colonel McPhee seemed impressed that General Petraeus had read my book. From then on, our relationship was usually “pure goodness,” his favorite phrase.
* * *
Almost every day, the generals who chaired the morning battle update assessments warned of impending chemical or biological attack by forces loyal to Saddam, particularly as US forces crossed what was considered the regime “red line”: Al Kut, the last city before Baghdad, crucial to its defense. This was consistent with what the military had been predicting ever since setting up its command, the so-called CFLCC, or Coalition Forces Land Component Command, at Camp Doha in Kuwait City, where my colleague Michael Gordon was embedded. “The IRAQI Ministry of Defense (MOD) will use WMD early but not often,” concluded a secret sixty-page planning memo, signed by Gen. David D. McKiernan, the coalition commander, and dated February 1, 2003, which I would later be shown. The “probability” of WMD use would increase “exponentially as Saddam Hussein senses the imminent collapse of his regime,” the memo stated.2
On March 27, a week after American land forces crossed into Iraq, my notes quote a senior commander at CFLCC headquarters as saying that the “use of WMD” remained “likely within the next 48–96 hours.” The officer said that Hussein al-Shahristani, a prominent Shiite Iraqi nuclear scientist and Ba’athist foe, had warned the military that if Saddam was going to use WMD, he would probably do so as US forces closed in on Baghdad. I had interviewed Shahristani before the war in London and had stayed in email contact with him. Saddam had imprisoned and tortured him at Abu Ghraib for twelve years for refusing to work on Iraq’s nuclear weapons program.3
Over dinner one night at Camp Udairi, Cpt. Ryan Cutchin, who then headed MET Bravo, told me that soldiers were finding stockpiles of chemical protective suits and gas masks, as well as large quantities of atropine. I perked up at his mention of the nerve agent antidote. The previous November, I had written a story asserting that Iraq had ordered a million doses of atropine, most of it from a Turkish company, as well as seven-inch auto-injectors that could be plunged into a person’s thigh. An official had said that Washington was trying to block the sale, which is probably why news of it had leaked. I reported that while atropine had several benign uses—hospitals and clinics used it to resuscitate heart attack patients—the auto-injectors Iraq had ordered contained five times the amount of atropine that was normally administered intravenously. Frederick R. Sidell, a chemical expert at the Army Medical Institute of Chemical Defense, had told me there were “virtually no peaceful uses for that much atropine.” There was no convincing peaceful explanation for so large an order, agreed Dave Franz, a former director of the army’s biodefense lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland, whom I had also quoted and consulted while writing Germs.
Atropine is highly effective at blocking nerve agents such as sarin and VX, both of which Iraq acknowledged having made and stockpiled but claimed to have destroyed. American intelligence agencies doubted it had done so. My story stated clearly that it was unclear how much of the drug, if any, had been delivered. So I was intrigued when Ryan told me that unit commanders were finding large amounts of it.4
American military planners feared that Iraq had ordered the atropine to protect its own soldiers against the chemical weapons it was planning to use against US forces. But more than a year later American weapons inspectors would conclude that Iraqis feared the opposite—that America might use the nerve agent against Iraqi troops. US officials had distributed fliers and made numerous statements on Arabic-language broadcast networks insisting that America did not have and would not use chemical weapons in Iraq, but “mirror imaging”—or believing one’s enemy would do something we would not do—was apparently not just an American intelligence failing.
* * *
By early April, the XTF’s officers and I were both beginning to wonder whether we would ever find the WMD that had brought us all to war. McPhee and other officers suspected the hunt did not have military priority. Two of the four METs that were supposed to be hunting for unconventional weapons had already been assigned other tasks, such as investigating human rights abuses. METs Alpha and Bravo were constantly short of everything: gasoline, food, water, power, and even detergent and toothpaste, which soldiers wound up buying with their own money from local Iraqi merchants. Humvees had to be begged or borrowed from other army units.
Reporting conditions were tough. Though I had held on to my Thuraya phone against XTF orders, I found it harder and harder to get a satellite signal to talk with Howell and Gerald or to file copy through my phone to New York. Part of my laptop’s computer screen had been smashed in transport from Udairi to Karbalā’. Almost a third of the screen was a black ball the size of a tangerine, making reading a story playback or the occasional email that managed to get through to me almost impossible. Given Colonel McPhee’s obsession with operational security, I could discuss potential stories I would file only with the paper’s top executives: Howell or Gerald.
As days passed, the XTF’s frustration was boiling over. Iraqis seemed to have buried everything of potential value—barrels of gasoline, air conditioners, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, an entire jet plane—but not, apparently, WMD.
On April 5 I wrote a story with Doug Jehl, a national security correspondent in Washington, saying that the hunt for WMD was a mess. US forces had searched fewer than a dozen of the 578 WMD “suspect sites.” Disclosing that none of the searches had uncovered evidence of illicit weapons, Pentagon officials were starting to say that the WMD hunt was in “a distant second place” to the fighting. The lack of priority had resulted in the destruction of WMD-related materials through looting and organized attacks. The soldiers told me that Colonel McPhee disliked the story, but he did not complain to me about it.
The war was nineteen days old when MET Alpha got a tip that would change
the XTF’s mission and operations and cause no end of controversy. MET Alpha had just finished searching another dry hole near Karbalā’ when Monty Gonzales heard that an Iraqi claiming to be a scientist with evidence of Iraq’s chemical weapons program had passed a note offering cooperation to soldiers in his town. Tired of unearthing barrels of gasoline and touring heavily looted suspect sites, he decided to pursue the tip.
The note had been passed from one unit to another until it had wound up in the 101st Division’s Second Brigade headquarters, under General Petraeus’s command. It had never been sent to the “fusion cell,” the analysts at the operational headquarters in Kuwait who were supposed to vet such information and provide the METs with WMD intelligence tips.
The letter that Gonzales showed me was tantalizing. “I am a senior Iraqi scientist,” it said in the sprawling Arabic script that filled a single piece of rumpled paper. Identifying himself as Fadil Abbas al-Husayni, a chemist who claimed to have worked in “secret labs,” he asserted that stocks of chemical weapons had been destroyed between the mid-1990s and up until a week before the war. He also claimed that information about unconventional weapons programs had been “hidden” from UN inspectors and that he had worked on “other projects” that would interest the Americans. He asked for protection and immunity from prosecution.
On April 17, a week after he had given the letter to an American soldier in a convoy passing through his town, MET Alpha tracked him down and staked out his house. I sat in the unit’s Humvee outside as Gonzales and the unit’s translator talked to him at home. When the soldiers escorted him to their vehicle behind ours, he was wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap the soldiers had given him as a disguise.
Gonzales was excited by what he had told them. Repeating his claim that the Americans were unlikely to find WMD, since the chemical stockpiles had been destroyed, the Iraqi said that Saddam had tried to “preserve Iraq’s ability to return to making chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons” by transferring some sensitive equipment and materials to Syria, and focusing its recent activities on “small-scale research projects that were virtually impossible for international inspectors, or even American forces coming through Iraq’s giant weapons plants, to detect,” Gonzales wrote in an after-action report to Colonel McPhee and the XTF weapons experts. Abbas also told them Iraq had started cooperating with Al Qaeda, but provided few details about the nature of that cooperation or at what level it was supposedly occurring.
The Iraqi gave Gonzales’s team the names of at least a dozen intelligence officers and scientists who he said were involved in the chemical program. He led them to what he said were banned equipment and samples of chemicals he had buried in his backyard and elsewhere. He claimed to have worked part-time in a lab in a warehouse on the outskirts of Baghdad. He would take Gonzales there if they promised not to detain him and to protect his family.
Why did they believe him? I asked. Because the Iraqi had confessed that he had not been fully candid about his job in his note, Gonzales told me the next day. Though he had been trained as a scientist, as he had initially told the soldiers, their translator, and the intelligence experts who interviewed him for a second time the next day, he was also a military intelligence officer who had overseen part of his agency’s chemical program.
After several more meetings with Abbas, the experts deemed his allegations “credible”—which in intelligence parlance means that they did not seem to be an obvious fabrication. After they made their determination, I positioned myself outside the communications room they had set up in one of the Karbalā’ complex buildings and listened quietly as Gonzales and the experts gave a lengthy report on the Iraqi’s allegations and steps they were taking to verify them. I was told that the report was being sent to senior officials at the Pentagon and the White House. By flashlight, I took careful notes.
The Iraqi’s account was clearly news, and I was determined to publish it. But how? Colonel McPhee pointed out that naming the Iraqi or identifying his former job or current location might compromise the XTF’s mission, endanger him, and get me “disembedded.” To make matters worse, the able public affairs officer who had helped mediate disputes between McPhee and me had returned to Kuwait and been replaced by an army reservist, Sgt. Eugene Pomeroy, a substitute English teacher from Albany, New York. Most of the XTF’s officers, usually a tolerant bunch, considered him incompetent and cut him out of their units’ information flow.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon and the CIA had begun fighting over who would debrief the new source, as they had fought over almost everything since the start of the WMD search. Although Gonzales considered the Iraqi official his most promising find, the CIA believed that all human intelligence sources (HUMINT) were its responsibility. So did Task Force 20, the Special Operations forces working closely with the CIA who were pursuing Iraq’s most wanted regime leaders and WMD scientists. Task Force 20 not only wanted sole access to the source whom MET Alpha had found and cultivated, but it also wanted to keep the Iraqi at one of its detention facilities near Baghdad airport. Gonzales warned that the Iraqi would stop cooperating if he was detained and his family left unprotected.
Colonel McPhee opposed my publishing anything about the Iraqi, the still-top-secret Task Force 20, or the bureaucratic struggles between the CIA and the military. He had also ordered MET Alpha back to Tallil, an eight-hour drive, where the bulk of the XTF was deployed. That would have effectively barred me from writing about the Iraqi’s claims. This was unacceptable. I hadn’t spent weeks roaming around the desert to ignore such a development.
Standing outside in the moonlight later that night, the wind howling, I called Howell and Gerald in New York on my Thuraya to discuss my limited options. If the army insisted on suppressing the story, I could voluntarily disembed and join John Burns and the other Times reporters at the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad. Gerald opposed this. Why should the paper give up a unique embed just as it was starting to produce news? Howell agreed, he told me.
They were right. I had to do whatever it took to stay in Karbalā’, remain embedded with the XTF, and get the news published without endangering the Iraqi or compromising national security. I would find a way, Gerald said encouragingly.
I decided to take my dilemma to General Petraeus. He quickly understood that I could write a story of discord and bureaucratic warfare over a promising source, or a more positive story about MET Alpha’s discovery and a potential breakthrough in the WMD puzzle. He told me he would vet my story about the Iraqi to ensure that I was not inadvertently compromising sensitive sources or methods. Later that day, he discussed Gonzales’s work with Colonel McPhee and the reasons why he thought I could publish the news without collateral damage. The Iraqi would be handed over to Task Force 20, along with MET Alpha’s three weapons experts, to continue the debriefing, while Gonzales would remain in the Baghdad region and report to a military intelligence unit to search for new information about unconventional weapons. The compromise seemed to please everyone.
The next day, General Petraeus awarded Gonzales a bronze star for his performance. Then he vetted my story, which made no mention of Task Force 20. If the Iraqi’s information was verified, and he and his family could be protected, I could write more about him later, which I did. Petraeus changed almost nothing and gave me a strong quote. The potential of MET Alpha’s new source was “enormous,” he told me, echoing what military experts were reporting to the Pentagon. Though much work remained to validate the Iraqi’s assertions, I quoted him as saying, if it proved out, it would “clearly be one of the major discoveries of this operation, and it may be the major discovery.”
On April 21 the Times put the story on the front page.
* * *
Three days later, less than a week after the Iraqi had met with American military and intelligence officials in Baghdad, and White House officials had been given a report about his claims, President Bush said publicly for the first time that “perhaps” the military might not find Iraqi unconve
ntional weapons stockpiles because they had been destroyed.5
I called Gerald Boyd to discuss MET Alpha’s plans and mine. I needed a break, I told him. I had been in Iraq since February and with the military since early March. I had assured Jason that hunting for Iraqi WMD would probably require only a couple of weeks. That was almost three months ago. Jason, who had always opposed the war, was understandably puzzled and annoyed. A break sometime in May would be fine, Gerald agreed.
Gerald seemed distracted. He and Howell were having a “problem,” he told me. A plagiarism scandal was about to break wide open. It would embarrass the paper and was personally painful to him. Had I met a young reporter on the metro staff named Jayson Blair?
— CHAPTER 16 —
THE REVOLT
I was still in Iraq in early May 2003 when I learned that Howell and Gerald would publish a 7,500-word story on how Jayson Blair, a twenty-seven-year-old reporter, had plagiarized and fabricated news during his four years at the Times, producing stories that were, literally, too good to be true. It would be accompanied by a 6,500-word account correcting mistakes in the six hundred stories he had written.
The articles, published on Sunday, May 11, called Blair’s invention or plagiarizing of at least thirty-six articles he had written as a national correspondent a “profound betrayal of trust” and a “low point in the 152-year history of the newspaper.” It was the talk of the trade.
When I returned from Iraq and entered the newsroom the next day, nobody was thinking or talking about WMD or Iraq. Gerald and Howell were in lockdown, meeting reporters and editors in small groups to discuss the collateral damage to the paper and growing complaints about their leadership.
The Story Page 20
