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.8 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.9
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.10 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.”11
Standing at my side in the newsroom that day, Keller said the paper would publish a “full account” of the episode as early as the following weekend. While the Times had been wary of revealing too much while I was in jail, for fear of compounding my legal jeopardy, he said that the staff and our readers had “a lot of questions about how this drama unfolded.” Since I was now free, the paper would answer those questions in a “thoroughly reported piece.” “We owe it to our readers, and we owe it to you, our staff.”12
Bill Safire called me, alarmed. Why would the paper conduct such an inquiry? I would have to testify if Fitzgerald indicted Libby, he reminded me. The project implied that someone had done something wrong. Safire reminded me that the Times hadn’t conducted such an investigation since the Jayson Blair affair, and we both knew how that had ended.
Bob Bennett was worried, too. He called Keller and Abramson when I told him they had assigned me to write a first-person account of my grand jury testimony and to cooperate with the paper’s in-depth report. Grand jury testimony was supposed to be secret, Bob reminded them. While I had the legal right to disclose it, Fitzgerald had asked witnesses not to do so. I had not been permitted to take notes at the sessions, and since no lawyer had been allowed to accompany me, Bob and Saul Pilchen, the other lawyer on my case, had been able to debrief me only after hours of testimony about what I had said under oath. Would I omit key details? Get them wrong? Would my article irritate Judge Hogan, who had sent me to jail and could send me back if he thought I was still stonewalling the court? Would it anger Fitzgerald? Would the prosecutor think I was signaling to Libby what I had said under oath, so that he could work around it? The slightest variation between my testimony and the published story, no matter how trivial, Bob argued, could be exploited on cross-examination in a future trial to make it seem that I had lied or changed my story. Did Keller and Abramson realize they were putting me in legal jeopardy?
I was a Times employee, Keller and Abramson replied. I would do what they asked if I wanted to remain one. Bob described their tone as “very aggressive.”
I was torn. Though I thought Bob was right, I felt loyal to the paper. Besides, I had done nothing wrong and had nothing to hide. I agreed with Keller and Abramson that our readers and my colleagues had a right to know why I had cooperated with Fitzgerald. I accepted the assignment and asked Bennett to cooperate with the four reporters writing the companion article.
He was not pleased. He sensed early on what I still did not see. With what must have been Arthur’s approval, they seemed to be laying the groundwork to force me out, he warned me. But before they acted, he later wrote, they wanted my account of my grand jury testimony, a last Judy Miller exclusive.13
* * *
I was unaware of how exhausted I was by the seemingly endless battles at the paper and with the courts until I began reviewing what were by then almost three-year-old notes to comply with Keller’s request for a firsthand account of my grand jury testimony about my conversations with Scooter Libby and my decision to testify. I was a wreck. I could barely
write a sentence.
With Keller’s okay, David Barstow helped me. Because we were friends, David had not participated in the paper’s inquiry into my involvement in the Plame affair or its coverage of my jailing. Over two days and one long night, we wrote an account of what I had told the grand jury. After anonymous colleagues had leaked portions of my earlier emails and memos to the Washington Post and to bloggers, Barstow was one of the few I trusted to review the notebooks and the identity of sensitive sources. His byline did not appear over my story, but it should have. Bennett was right: I was in no condition to write such a sensitive account.
The team that Keller and Abramson assigned to the paper’s reconstruction of my role in the Plame-Wilson affair was composed of four veteran reporters—Don Van Natta Jr., Adam Liptak, Clifford J. Levy, and Janny Scott. Only Van Natta had worked in Washington as an investigative reporter on national security. Although many colleagues considered Van Natta the paper’s “attack dog”—a solid reporter whom senior editors could unleash—I feared that they would not place my legal battle in the politically charged context of the Plame-Wilson affair.14 As I had struggled to respond to my colleagues’ questions within the confines that Bennett had delineated for my legal protection, I became ever more concerned about their tone and focus.
I was stunned by their six-thousand-word piece on my role in the scandal and the blistering reaction to the first-person account David and I had written under my byline. Both stories were published on Sunday, October 16, four days after I testified before the grand jury for a second time.
The paper’s account portrayed me as a “divisive” figure in the newsroom—an “intrepid” journalist, but one whom editors found “hard to control.” It highlighted what it called my “unusual” sourcing arrangements, disputes within the paper about my reporting, and my alleged efforts to mislead the story’s authors and my editors.
While the story noted that Arthur’s editorial page had “crusaded on my behalf,” the news department had chafed at having been scooped on aspects of my story. Keller and Abramson were quoted as saying they were shocked to learn that I had written “Valerie Flame” in my notebook. The story also quoted Roger Cohen, who had by then been reassigned as foreign editor.15 He pointed to “concern” in the newsroom that I had been “convinced in an unwarranted way . . . of the possible existence of WMD” in Iraq. It quoted Doug Frantz, the paper’s investigative editor, as claiming that I had boasted about being called “Miss Run Amok” and authorized to do “whatever I want.”
The story reported my regret that my sources were wrong about the presumed existence of WMD in Iraq. It acknowledged that the paper’s editor’s note criticizing its prewar coverage had not blamed specific reporters and had called the prewar intelligence reporting failures “institutional.” It implied that because I had written or cowritten “five of the six” articles singled out as “credulous,” I was largely to blame. In fact, I had written two thirds of the articles discussed, some of them with others, and neither of the flawed, front-page exclusives about alleged connections between Al Qaeda and Saddam’s ostensible training of jihadis at camps. The Van Natta story did not state that there had been a strong consensus within the intelligence community—and other countries’ spy agencies as well—that Iraq was continuing to hide chemical and germ weapons and was ramping up efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.16
As I acknowledged in Van Natta’s piece, I had gotten WMD “totally wrong.” “If your sources were wrong,” I told them, “you are wrong.” I had done the best I could to verify the classified information I had often gotten first, the story quoted me as saying. But I was “wrong.”
Officials I trusted had declined to share with me whatever doubts they may have had. State Department intelligence chief Carl Ford, for instance, whom I had covered for over a decade and was a key critic of the prewar intelligence, later told me he had not returned my calls or permitted his aides to meet with me because he had long refused on principle to discuss classified information with reporters. “Although my staff and I did not have to take polygraphs,” he told me in 2013, “I believed then, and still do, that sharing classified intelligence with reporters would have been wrong.”17
Richard Clarke, the counterterrorism adviser who had urged President Clinton to bomb Iraq and kill Bin Laden long before 9/11 and had fallen out with President Bush over the Iraq War and other issues, offered another explanation for his prewar silence. When I asked why he had said nothing to me about the thinness or quality of the WMD intelligence before the invasion, he replied: “Because I hoped it would work.” In retrospect, I concluded, other doubters may also have remained silent in hopes of ridding the region of a tyrant whose ambitions were unlikely to have been contained. Or they may have kept quiet because they thought disclosing classified information about specific instances of weak or faulty intelligence would have risked their careers without affecting President Bush’s determination to oust Saddam.
The Times article about my case implied that I misled Phil Taubman, a long-standing friend and Jill Abramson’s successor as Washington bureau chief, by denying that I was one of six Washington journalists to whom White House officials had disclosed Plame’s job. In fact, as the story noted, I told Phil that I had discussed Wilson and his wife with numerous sources. I also told him that I did not believe I had been targeted in a campaign to discredit Wilson.
When Van Natta asked why I hadn’t written anything about Plame’s job at the CIA, I answered that I tried to pass the tip along to the Washington bureau. I had stopped by Jill Abramson’s office late one Friday afternoon in July to tell her about Plame’s job and her alleged help in getting her husband sent to Africa. The tip needed pursuing, I told her.18
Asked by Van Natta what she regretted about the paper’s handling of the Plame affair, Abramson replied: “The entire thing.” Keller told the team that he wished the paper had been able to wage its First Amendment fight for a reporter with less “baggage.”
Bill Safire called. Though he said he was troubled by Keller’s decision to run such a negative feature about me in the Sunday paper, he thought the crisis had peaked. I was out of jail; the Van Natta story was behind me. I was about to receive a First Amendment prize from the Society of Professional Journalists in Las Vegas. It was time to return to work.
* * *
I thought my speech to journalists on October 18 in Nevada went well. So, too, my appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee. I argued that a federal shield law was needed to prevent reporters from being forced to reveal their sources. According to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and lawyers who handle First Amendment cases, as many as two dozen reporters were subpoenaed in the prior two years in cases involving confidential sources. Many of them faced the prospect of being jailed. Unless Congress passed a shield law to protect them and their sources, I said, Alexandria Detention Center might have to open “an entire new wing.”
While the Times did not normally permit reporters to testify before Congress or lobby for legislation, the paper’s management blessed my appearance, and our lawyers vetted my statement. Jail, I testified, had highlighted the need for congressional action. Anne Gordon, the managing editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer who supported shield legislation, said she thought the furor over my case may have “muddled the issue.” I feared she was right. The source I had gone to jail to protect was not a whistle-blower. The war had deeply polarized the country. Even many journalists thought Libby deserved to be punished for having promoted the war, never mind what he may or may not have said about Plame.
I was also still part of the news. Senator Arlen Specter joked at the hearing, wasn’t I a “strong-willed person” who sometimes operated out of the control of editors, a proverbial “bull in the china closet”?
Investigative reporters needed to be “a little pushier than some sources or editors would like,” I replied. But yes, I added, it sometimes created “tensions with editors.”
Anne Gord
on came to my defense. “Well-behaved women don’t change the world,” she told the panel.
When I returned from DC, David Barstow and I had coffee in the Times cafeteria. He seemed troubled. He had underestimated the hatred, jealousy, and resentment so many colleagues felt toward me, he told me. The slurs and slanders about me, my WMD reporting—by then over two years old—and the debate over whether I should have left jail a month early were drowning out issues my jailing had raised. A rebellion within the paper was brewing, he feared. As Lowell Bergman, my long-standing colleague and friend at the journalism school at UC Berkeley also warned me, I was becoming a “surrogate” for what so many Iraq War critics wanted to do to the Bush administration.19 That was a dangerous place to be, he told me.
I stopped by Keller’s office to talk about my next assignment. He was huddled with Arthur Sulzberger. Though they seemed to be having an intense conversation, Keller waved me in. Arthur congratulated me on my testimony and the SPJ award. I had done well, he said.
“If we all hang in there together, we shall weather this storm,” I said.
They exchanged a glance that I couldn’t read. “Hang in there,” Arthur said. “Well, that’s one way of putting it.”
The following day, Friday, October 21, I took an early bus home to Sag Harbor. By the time I arrived, the cell phone I had turned off for the ride showed over twenty messages. What was happening? Jason asked when I got home. The phone, which he had stopped answering, had been ringing nonstop. I found a lengthy “message to the staff” in my email in-box from Keller. He said that he wished he had dealt with the controversy over our coverage of WMD as soon as he had become executive editor. “In this case,” he said, referring to the Valerie Plame saga, he had missed what should have been “significant alarm bells.” For instance, I had “misled” Washington bureau chief Phil Taubman about the extent of my involvement in the leak case, something that Phil had not claimed.
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