The Story

by Judith Miller

  I called Steve Sestanovich, a professor at Columbia and Bill Clinton’s expert on Russia, and Jenny Mayfield, who had worked on Cheney’s staff as what she called “Scooter’s memory bank.” Both had been at the rodeo with Libby that day and told me that he hadn’t worn a cowboy hat. “If he had,” Sestanovich told me, “I would have been talking about it for years.” In their six years working together, Mayfield told me, Libby had never worn a cowboy hat. “Scooter thought it was fine for cowboys to wear them,” she said, but “he was definitely not a cowboy hat kind of guy.”

  * * *

  The Libby trial and growing public furor over the Iraq War were interwoven. Jury selection began the week after the president enraged war critics by unveiling a new strategy for Iraq over the objections of most of his own senior staff, except Cheney, who had vigorously promoted a counterinsurgency approach for months. Rather than withdraw American forces, as an all-star bipartisan commission headed by Republican guru James Baker and Democrat Lee Hamilton recommended, America would “surge” its forces in Iraq. At the trial, antiwar protesters in front of the Capitol denouncing the “surge” and Bush’s “lies” could be heard at the courthouse from blocks away.

  At a press conference in October 2005, Fitzgerald said the trial would not be about the war in Iraq but about whether one man had lied and obstructed justice. His closing remarks to the jury framed the issue more broadly. “What is this case about?” he asked them. Wasn’t it about “something bigger” than perjury and obstruction of justice charges against Libby? “There is a cloud over the vice president,” Fitzgerald intoned, referring to Libby’s assertion that Cheney had authorized him to discuss with me the Iraqi WMD estimates, which the president had declassified. “And that cloud remains because this defendant obstructed justice,” Fitzgerald claimed.

  Apart from conservatives, few reporters protested Fitzgerald’s expansion of an alleged conspiracy to Cheney. Fitzgerald, in fact, had placed Iraq at the center of the proceedings. The media elaborated. What was really on trial, wrote Michael Duffy of Time, was “the whole culture of an Administration that treated the truth as a relative virtue.”

  The outing of Plame, a CIA officer with classified status, Fitzgerald declared at the press conference, was “not widely known outside the intelligence community.” He also painted a specter of grave, if unspecified, harm to America’s national security.

  John Rizzo, the CIA’s general counsel and a lawyer there for over thirty years, challenged both. In a memoir published in 2014, he wrote that “dozens, if not hundreds of people in Washington” knew that Plame worked for the CIA. By all accounts, he noted, Plame was a “dedicated, capable” employee who hadn’t sought the limelight, unlike her “publicity-seeking, preening blowhard of a husband.” But she was hardly a female James Bond whom the Hollywood movie version of her book had portrayed running Iraqi agents and tracking down endangered WMD scientists before Israel’s Mossad could kill them. Plame, Rizzo wrote, was an “obscure . . . mid-level agent” whom he had never heard of or met. He added that a CIA damage assessment of the leak, completed in late 2003 or early 2004, before I went to jail and Libby was indicted, had produced “no evidence” of harm to any CIA operation, agent in the field, or anyone else, including “Plame herself.”9 But this crucial CIA finding was disclosed only when Rizzo’s book was published.

  Given the CIA’s internal assessment, Rizzo had predicted to colleagues there was “no way” that the Justice Department would pursue it. Because the impact of Plame’s outing was “negligible,” “I fully expected Justice to treat it the way it treated 99 percent of our crimes reports, which is to say, to do little or nothing.” George Tenet told Cheney that he estimated there were close to four hundred reports of possible criminal violations involving leaks of classified information that Justice had seldom if ever pursued.10

  Rizzo’s conclusion was that the department’s pursuit of Libby could be explained only by “partisan political pressure being applied . . . by opponents of Bush administration policies in Iraq.” His view of that decision is harsh: “The crimes reporting process had never been trivialized and distorted like that in all my years at the CIA,” and the leak investigation was “a seemingly interminable distraction and a colossal waste of time and money.”

  After reading his book and talking to Rizzo, I was glad that he had finally made public what my CIA sources had been telling me on background for years. The CIA had cleared Rizzo’s book. But I couldn’t help but wonder: Where was anyone from the CIA, when Americans were debating whether the leak had caused great harm?

  * * *

  Cheney and other former senior officials assert that the Libby investigation may have had consequences for American policy and, arguably, the course of the Iraq War. In an interview, Cheney said that Fitzgerald’s four-year inquiry distracted and undermined the effectiveness of his chief of staff and adviser to the president, a skilled political infighter who recognized—long before other White House officials—the mistakes being made in Iraq and the need for a new war-fighting strategy there. Known in political shorthand as the “surge,” the crucial shift to a counterinsurgency strategy and the troop increase to implement it allowed the United States to stabilize Baghdad, curtail violence in most of the country, at least temporarily, and, under Obama, to leave Iraq with tattered dignity.

  Meghan O’Sullivan, a former deputy national security adviser on Iraq and Afghanistan who worked in Baghdad and Washington between 2003 and 2007, said she doubted that the strategy shift could have occurred much earlier, given what she called the “facts on the ground” in Iraq and Washington, a view echoed by several others who worked intensively on Iraq.11

  Some experts disagree. Gary J. Schmitt, now a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who was Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s aide and staff director on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that in the summer of 2003, Libby invited him and a few other experts to a small meeting to discuss the deteriorating security situation in Iraq. Having encountered resistance to a course correction from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary Rumsfeld, Libby appeared quietly frustrated by Bush’s passive response to the growing insurgency and his decision to let L. Paul (Jerry) Bremer preside over a two-year occupation. Schmitt said that Libby encouraged him to write an essay urging that a new strategy be adopted, and US troops surged, to restore stability against an insurgency. “Libby was discreet,” Schmitt said in an interview, “but he wouldn’t have encouraged me to write unless he felt that the administration was on the wrong path in Iraq.” “The Right Fight Now: Counterinsurgency, Not Caution, Is the Answer in Iraq” was published in the Washington Post in October 2003.12

  In an interview in 2013, Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy secretary of defense and among the most ardent neocon advocates of invading Iraq, described Libby as his “principal ally” in several early battles over the conduct of the war. Libby’s “strong voice” was most badly missed, Wolfowitz said, on the issue of military requirements for Iraq. Having grasped that early post-invasion planning for a very small Iraqi army for external defense “made no sense,” Libby kept pressing as early as June 2003 for what military planners call a “requirements analysis.” Wolfowitz said that such a review might have led to a new strategy and to the formation of Iraqi security forces capable of countering the insurgency years before the 2007 surge.

  In 2013 Gen. Jack Keane, the Iraq surge’s key promoter, told me that Libby had been among the first White House officials to grasp that America might well lose the war in Iraq if Washington did not stop the Sunni insurgents and Al Qaeda from gaining ground. Libby had worked closely with one of Keane’s top allies, Col. Derek Harvey, an expert on Iraq and its ruling Ba’ath Party, to arrange briefings on what Harvey argued was a Ba’athist-led insurgency and on the numbers of US forces that would be required to implement a counterinsurgency strategy. “Until he was distracted and ultimately taken out by the investigation,” Keane told me, Libby had worked hard to convince skeptical
officials to revisit America’s failing war-fighting strategy. “Without Scooter’s relentless early efforts,” Keane said, “I’m not sure the White House would have admitted failure and changed the military strategy.”

  “It took enormous courage to walk into a crowded interagency meeting and say that you are all wrong,” Cheney asserted in an interview in 2013. “And then to stick to your guns when they all gather around the conventional wisdom and dispute or dismiss you.” Libby had done that, repeatedly.

  Fitzgerald, a forty-seven-year-old prosecutor in Chicago when the Plame investigation began, had made a name for himself in the 1990s in New York for his tenacious prosecution of terrorists in the first World Trade Center bombing. Our meetings during the Plame investigation had always been professional, his manner gracious and polite. Even after he had put me in jail and got access to my telephone records, I agreed to testify as a prosecution witness in 2008 against militant Islamists in Chicago whom he accused of having provided material support for terrorism. But as we talked at the trial preparation sessions in Washington and Chicago, I thought that Fitzgerald had put his Plame inquiry—with no time constraints, budgetary limits, or oversight—foremost.13

  To learn the source of a story I had never written, Fitzgerald had put me in jail. In so doing, argued James Goodale, the former vice chairman of the Times, he had destroyed the long-standing delicate balance between reporters and editors, courts and the government. “For a generation,” Jim wrote, “the press, the courts, and prosecutors” had avoided precisely such a confrontation. Fitzgerald, he concluded, had no understanding of the press’s role in a democracy.

  Libby’s colleagues and friends saw in Fitzgerald’s pursuit self-righteousness and moral indignation. They suspected that what motivated him was a desire, as Karl Rove charged, to make a name for himself by hooking a really big fish.

  As Peter Baker, the Times reporter, would report in his 2014 book on the relationship between Bush and Cheney, the vice president believed that he, not Libby, had been Fitzgerald’s real target, a view that Cheney confirmed to me in 2013. Libby, Cheney said, was the instrument the prosecutor had used to acquire a more prominent, career-making scalp.

  Fitzgerald declined to discuss the case with me—though he was now working at the Chicago office of Skadden, Arps, the law firm that represented me. But Joe Tate, the lawyer who represented Libby until his criminal trial, and who was Libby’s law partner and long-standing friend, told me in an interview in 2014 that Fitzgerald had twice offered to drop all charges against Libby if his client would “deliver” Cheney to him.

  Fitzgerald had hinted at a deal even before Tate had flown to Chicago to discuss Libby’s case before his indictment, Tate said. When they spoke by phone before his trip, Fitzgerald warned him not to “waste” his time coming to Chicago unless he could “deliver something beyond what we’ve heard,” Tate said. “I went out there anyway.”

  By that time, Tate said, Fitzgerald was no longer looking at who had released Plame’s name. “They needed a scalp and were flyspecking Libby’s FBI interviews and grand jury appearances.” Arguing that such inconsistencies were immaterial, he asked Fitzgerald, “Why are you doing this?”

  He reported that Fitzgerald replied, “Unless you can deliver someone higher up—the vice president—I’m going forth with the indictment.” “I knew then he was out of control,” Tate said.

  * * *

  Bound by the legal agreement limiting what Times editors could say about me, they usually said nothing at all. My name rarely appeared in the paper, even in news stories about First Amendment battles or the struggle to pass a media shield law in Congress.

  Two years after my resignation, David Barstow, my former colleague, still had no explanation for the press’s almost uniformly hostile coverage of me and my role in the WMD intelligence failures and the Libby case. “Why it is that Judith Miller somehow became the embodiment of all those failures,” he wrote, remained “simply unfathomable to me.” It was both inaccurate and unfair, he insisted. But as Barstow himself noted, I was a pushy, high-profile reporter at the nation’s highest-profile newspaper. Other news outlets had followed my lead. That made me Azazel, the biblical goat upon which the community heaped its many sins.

  The blogosphere, which had been granted credentials to cover the Libby trial and had grown increasingly influential, filled in whatever blanks the paper left. The attacks were relentless, sexist, and ugly—the pernicious side of a technology whose ability to spread knowledge widely and instantly has transformed journalism and global communications.

  Occasionally, an independent thinker such as Niall Stanage, a young Irish journalist writing for the New York Observer, would read my WMD stories and challenge the conventional wisdom. He noted that my articles were filled with qualifiers; they were not based largely on Chalabi or anonymous sources, but quoted officials and experts by name. “Judith Miller: Was She Really So Bad?” the title of his essay asked. But such were minority voices. In the blogosphere, a cyber Roman Forum, and even in publications that should have known better, my name was increasingly linked with the “disgraced” plagiarist and fabulist, Jayson Blair, whom the paper had fired in another of those “scandals” that had “bloodied the profession,” as the New Republic wrote.

  More than the prospect of a second newsroom revolt, the steady rise of the blogosphere preoccupied Arthur and other senior Times executives. Arthur and I had spoken often of the blogs’ growing, in his view, often pernicious impact on mainstream journalism. When the war began in Iraq, there were roughly one hundred thousand bloggers. By the time of Valerie Plame’s outing, there were an estimated twenty-seven million of them.

  The Times circulation numbers, along with paid advertising, revenues, and stock price, continued to plummet through 2013. The paper’s efforts to boost its digital profile faltered. In the spring of 2014, an internal report by Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, Arthur’s son, warned that in the past year, readership had fallen “significantly” not only on the website but also on smartphones and other mobile platforms.14 Rounds of layoffs and buyouts of some of the paper’s most experienced talent and the departure of younger, digitally savvy stars fueled gloom. Among the veterans pushed out in the spring of 2012 was George Freeman. The Wall Street Journal had quoted him in late 2005 defending me against the paper’s attacks, implicitly criticizing the Times’s leaders. Though sixty reporters wrote to Arthur Sulzberger protesting the decision to dismiss the lawyer who had defended so many of us for so long in libel and source protection cases, there was no reprieve. Freeman told me he did not think that his defense of me might have played a role in his termination. But the paper did dock his pay a bit because he had talked to the Wall Street Journal without authorization.

  After Keller resigned as executive editor in 2011, he told Editor & Publisher, a magazine and online industry site, and Media Matters for America, a liberal, pro-Democratic online group created to criticize Fox News, that the “whole Judy Miller WMD experience” was “one of the low points” of his eight years. He had decided to review the paper’s prewar reporting, he told Media Matters, after “a lot of people, particularly people on the left, became disenchanted with the Times because they saw it as having been cheerleaders for the war.” He told Esquire that he had erred in not having acted sooner to put me “on a leash.”

  Lawyers from Skadden, Arps, and I wrote to Arthur Sulzberger, reminding him that such comments violated our agreement. Arthur, who declined to be interviewed for this book, replied that he had forwarded our complaints to Keller, who wrote that he saw nothing pejorative in them. In May 2013 my lawyers complained again when the paper’s “public editor” described me in print as the “disgraced” reporter. By then, I had written major stories for the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and a dozen other prominent newspapers and magazines, and was appearing regularly on Fox News as a national security and First Amendment commentator. Margaret Sullivan, the public editor, had never called me for comment. But the
paper’s general counsel wrote back that because Sullivan was “neither an ‘executive’ of the Times nor a part of the senior editorial management” and because her observation was unrelated to my “departure from the Times and her dealings with Scooter Libby,” her characterization was not “inconsistent with or contradictory to the references statements.”

  * * *

  The nature and focus of my reporting changed after leaving the Times. Though I reported in cities throughout the nation and in a dozen different countries, I was no longer able to hop on a plane and travel anywhere to pursue a story without advance planning and financial commitments from news outlets to offset the cost. But soaring travel costs and plummeting circulations and advertising were forcing many publications, even wealthier TV networks, to reduce international coverage as well.

  Political changes in the Middle East, too, affected my reporting. In 2012 some 119 journalists—a record in modern times—were killed in the field, most of them in Syria and the Middle East. While I continued returning to Iraq to report on the state of the war and its impact on Iraqis and American forces, I, too, became increasingly focused on security. After Marie Colvin was killed in Syria in early 2012, I reevaluated the risks I had once downplayed. Marie, my friend since our days as young correspondents in Paris, had been among journalism’s most courageous, relentless reporters. When we reported together in Tahrir Square during the eruption of the Arab Spring in Egypt in 2011, I told her that I feared she had become cavalier about the dangers of reporting in war zones. Other friends had pleaded with her not to take so many chances. No story was worth it, we said. The night before she was killed, her editor ordered her to leave the besieged part of Homs, which was being shelled by government forces. But Marie could not bring herself to abandon the story.