The Story

by Judith Miller

  Amanda “Binky” Urban, at ICM, has been my book agent and early reader for many years. Her calm, firm, candid advice has been indispensable. Thanks, too, to Gary Press, my accountant, friend, and fellow Florida fan.

  Simon & Schuster has published all my books except my instant paperback on the Gulf war. The hardworking editorial team—Stuart Roberts; Martha Schwartz, a superb production editor; Cary Goldstein, executive director of publicity; Leah Johanson, publicist for the adult publishing group; and Stephen Bedford, a marketing specialist—have worked very hard on this book. Thank you so much. But above all, I thank Alice Mayhew, my friend, chief editor, and the publisher of all my hardback books. Alice is a legend in her profession. Deservedly. This book would not exist without her advice, patience, faith in me, and fearsome red pencil.

  Ditto my other informal editor, the wisest man I know, my best friend and partner, Jason Epstein, who made me realize, finally, that there is far more to life than the story.

  © FOX NEWS

  JUDITH MILLER is an investigative reporter formerly with the New York Times. She was part of a team that won a Pulitzer for articles before 9/11 on Osama bin Laden. Miller is coauthor of the #1 New York Times bestsellers Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War and Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf and author of God Has Ninety-nine Names: Reporting from a Militant Middle East and One, by One, by One: Facing the Holocaust. Miller is an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, contributing editor of City Journal, and a theater critic for Tablet magazine. Since 2008, she has been a commentator for Fox News. She lives in New York City and Sag Harbor with her husband, Jason Epstein.

  MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT

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  ALSO BY JUDITH MILLER

  Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War (with Stephen Engelberg and William Broad)

  God Has Ninety-nine Names: Reporting from a Militant Middle East

  One, by One, by One: Facing the Holocaust

  Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf (with Laurie Mylroie)

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  NOTES

  Prologue

  1. Howard Gardner, ed., Responsibility at Work: How Leading Professionals Act (or Don’t Act) Responsibly (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007). Gardner, the editor of that volume, wrote the chapter about me entitled “Irresponsible Work.” While he quotes from my website and thanks eleven people for having provided “useful feedback on earlier drafts of this chapter,” five of whom worked at one time for the Times, there is no indication that he ever tried to contact me for comment, a basic pillar of the craft. Quoting “many observers,” all of them anonymous, he describes me as a “ ‘piece of work,’ ” a “middle-aged” reporter who “consistently behaved in a high-handed manner,” pursued stories “at all costs,” and ignored the “directives of her immediate supervisors.” He echoes anonymous claims that I was “too close to her sources” who helped me “spread a narrative for which there was little, if any, solid evidence.” He offers no examples of my supposedly egregious reporting and makes no mention of my Pulitzer. At the time of publication, he had still not responded to my request for a retraction and an apology.

  Chapter 1. Anbar Province, Iraq

  1. “Statement of Hon. Richard L. Armitage, Deputy Secretary of State, Department of State, Washington, DC,” The January 27 UNMOVIC and IAEA Reports to the U.N. Security Council on Inspections in Iraq: Hearing Before the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, One Hundred Eighth Congress, First Session, January 30, 2003 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 2003), pp. 12–16, www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-108shrg85796/pdf/CHRG-108shrg85796.pdf.

  2. Judith Miller, “After the War: Unconventional Arms; A Chronicle of Confusion in the U.S. Hunt for Hussein’s Chemical and Germ Weapons,” New York Times, July 20, 2003, www.nytimes.com/2003/07/20/world/after-war-unconventional-arms-chronicle-confusion-us-hunt-for-hussein-s-chemical.html.

  3. Charles Duelfer, “No Books Were Cooked,” Foreign Policy, March 18, 2013, www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/03/18/no_books_were_cooked_bush_iraq_wmd_intelligence.

  4. Michael Rubin, Dancing with the Devil: The Perils of Engaging Rogue Regimes (New York: Encounter, 2014), p. 203.

  5. Judith Miller and Laurie Mylroie, Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf (New York: Times Books, 1990).

  6. Rubin, Dancing with the Devil, p. 207; Bruce W. Jentleson, With Friends Like These: Reagan, Bush, and Saddam, 1982–1990 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), pp. 33, 42.

  7. Con Coughlin, Saddam, King of Terror (New York: Ecco Press, 2002), p. 174.

  8. Samir al-Khalil (Kanan Makiya), Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq (Oakland: University of California Press, 1989), p. 110.

  9. Ibid.

  10. Ibid., p. 120.

  11. Dick Cheney with Liz Cheney, In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir (New York: Threshold Editions, 2011), p. 191.

  12. Judith Miller, “Saudi King Says He Expects Iraq to Yield,” New York Times, January 7, 1991, www.nytimes.com/1991/01/07/world/confrontation-in-the-gulf-saudi-king-says-he-expects-iraq-to-yield.html.

  13. Judith Miller, “Egypt’s President Calls for a Delay in Attacking Iraq,” New York Times, November 8, 1990, www.nytimes.com/1990/11/08/world/mideast-tensions-egypt-s-president-calls-for-a-delay-in-attacking-iraq.html.

  14. Dick Cheney, interview, January 2014.

  15. Another prime mover of the effort to expose Saddam’s brutality and war crimes against the Kurds was Peter Galbraith, who, first as a staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and later as an adviser to the Kurdish government, worked tirelessly toward this end.

  16. Judith Miller, “Iraq Accused: A Case of Genocide,” New York Times Magazine, January 3, 1993, www.nytimes.com/1993/01/03/magazine/iraq-accused-a-case-of-genocide.html.

  17. That year, the Abu Mahal tribe in Al Qaim had rallied briefly to America’s side. But undermanned, hamstrung by tribal vendettas, and supported by too few American forces, this first, mini–Anbar Awakening was quickly overwhelmed by Al Qaeda. The next year, when Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, a dynamic younger sheikh with excellent smuggling and insurgent credentials from Anbar’s largest tribe, the Dulaimi, sided with the Americans, Al Qaeda began losing ground.

  18. A debate has long raged in academic and policy circles over whether it was the increase in US troops in Iraq or the Awakening that enabled the new counterinsurgency doctrine to succeed in Iraq. My own view is that they reinforced each other. The strategy shift and the surge, which the military called COIN, would never have worked without the Awakening, and vice versa. But it was the indigenous political shift among Iraqis a full year before the thirty thousand extra American forces started flowing into Iraq in February and March 2007 that initially prevented an American rout.

  19. Chief Warrant Officer-4 Timothy S. McWilliams and Lieutenant Colonel Kurtis P. Wheeler, eds., Al-Anbar Awakening, vol. 1, American Perspectives (Quantico, VA: Marine Corps University Press, 2009), p. 33.

  20. In its final report to Congress in 2010, the independent Commission on Wartime Contracting concluded that nearly $60 billion had been lost over the decade to waste and financial fraud, mostly in Iraq but also in Afghanistan, due to poor government oversight of contractors, even poorer planning, and gargantuan payoffs to warlords or insurgents.

  21. Charles Duelfer, Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq (New York: Public Affairs, 2008), p. 408.

  22. In 2004 Galbraith was instrumental in arranging for DNO, a Norwegian oil company, to become the first foreign oil company to operate
in Kurdistan. This became controversial in October 2009, when Dargens Nœringsliv, a Norwegian tabloid, published documents linking Galbraith financially to DNO. In November 2009 the New York Times wrote that Galbraith’s role as adviser to the Kurds on the constitutional negotiations with Baghdad and his undisclosed financial ties to DNO could raise “serious questions about the integrity of the constitutional negotiations themselves” and fuel suspicions that the “true reason for the American invasion of their country was to take its oil.” Galbraith denied any conflict of interest, since the Kurds knew of his role with DNO when they asked for advice on the constitution, and there was a congruence of interest between the Kurds’ desire to control their own oil and encourage foreign investment in the oil sector. He noted that he had also disclosed his compensation in a book about Iraq’s future, The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End (New York: Simon & Schuster, New York, 2006). In 2010 the Times reported that a British court had ordered DNO to pay Galbraith and a Yemeni investor between $55 million and $75 million for their stake in the oil deal.

  In an interview in July 2014, Galbraith said that although he continues to advise the Kurds informally, he has no ongoing financial stake in Kurdistan or any company doing business there, and remains “proud” of his role in helping create “the financial basis for independence” for the Kurds, whose suffering under Saddam he did much to document. The website for the Kurdistan Regional Government says that Galbraith’s work on Iraq’s murderous campaign against the Kurds “led the US Senate to pass comprehensive sanctions on Iraq in 1988.”

  23. McWilliams and Wheeler, Al-Anbar Awakening, p. vii.

  24. Ali Khedery, “Why We Stuck with Maliki—and Lost Iraq,” Washington Post, July 3, 2014, www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-we-stuck-with-maliki--and-lost-iraq/2014/07/03/0dd6a8a4-f7ec-11e3-a606-946fd632f9f1_story.html. Khedery, an Iraqi-American who heads Dubai-based Dragoman Partners, was from 2003 to 2009 a special assistant to five U.S. ambassadors and an adviser to three heads of US Central Command. In 2011, as a private oil company adviser, he negotiated ExxonMobil’s entry into Kurdistan.

  Chapter 2. Nightclub Royalty in the Shadow of the Bomb

  1. Franklin Foer, “The Source of the Trouble,” New York, June 7, 2004, http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/media/features/9226.

  2. The quotes from Hank Greenspun’s “Where I Stand” columns are from the archives of the Atomic Testing Museum, Las Vegas, Nevada; Judith Miller, “The Melted Dog: Memories of an Atomic Childhood,” New York Times, March 20, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/30/arts/artsspecial/30atom.html?_r=0&pagewanted=all&position=.

  3. Howard Ball, “Downwind from the Bomb,” New York Times Magazine, February 9, 1986, www.nytimes.com/1986/02/09/magazine/downwind-from-the-bomb.html, adapted from Justice Downwind: America’s Atomic Testing Program in the 1950s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

  4. Derek S. Scammell, ed., Nevada Test Site Guide (DOE/NV–715) (Las Vegas: National Nuclear Security Administration, Department of Energy, 2005, p. 45, http://www.nv.doe.gov/library/publications/historical/DOENV_715_Rev1.pdf).

  5. Harvey Wasserman and Norman Solomon, Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America’s Experience with Atomic Radiation (New York: Delta Books, 1982), p. 49.

  6. Ball, “Downwind from the Bomb.”

  7. Wasserman and Solomon, Killing Our Own, pp. 43–44.

  8. Howard L. Rosenberg, Atomic Soldiers: American Victims of Nuclear Experiments (Boston: Beacon Press, 1980), pp. 64–65.

  9. Among them was a young Corporal Max Frankel, a budding reporter then in the army. In 1955 he wrote about the classified test of a tactical nuclear weapon at the Nevada Test Site with the military’s blessing to help boost the weapons’ budget. The incident helped shape Frankel’s attitude toward government secrecy and nuclear security. Frankel, a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter, was the Times’s executive editor from 1986 to 1994.

  10. Wasserman and Solomon, Killing Our Own, p. 47.

  Chapter 3. The New York Times, the Token

  1. Nan Robertson, The Girls in the Balcony: Women, Men, and The New York Times (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992).

  2. Ibid. p. 182.

  3. “Women and the New York Times,” Media Report to Women 6 (December 31, 1978): 7.

  4. Blair Jackson, “Traffic’s ‘Dear Mr. Fantasy,’ ” Mix Online, February 1, 2003, http://mixonline.com/recording/interviews/audio_traffics_dear_mr/.

  5. The project was known for the hill on which it was to be situated: Nebi Samuel. My paper on the successful campaign to reduce its scale and design—which succeeded with US government assistance—was well received by my adviser at the Woodrow Wilson School, Richard Ullman, a professor and eminent scholar who greatly influenced my early thinking about the Middle East and US foreign policy. Ullman died at age eighty in March 2014 after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease.

  Chapter 4. The Washington Bureau

  1. Robertson, The Girls in the Balcony. Nan’s book contained examples of sexism at the Times, of which most young women at the paper today are probably not aware. Dan Schwarz, the Sunday editor, had responded to the London bureau’s recommendation that a young woman be hired by asking “What does she look like? Twiggy? Lynn Redgrave? Perhaps you ought to send over her vital statistics, or a picture in a bikini?” Another file quoted by Nan contained an assessment of a woman in the circulation department: “Good at short-hand and typing,” wrote Robert MacDougall. “Her chief ambition is probably to get married. Has a good figure and is not restrained about dressing it to advantage.”

  2. Ibid., p. 195.

  3. Edwin Diamond, “Crashing the Boys’ Club at The New York Times,” American Journalism Review (April 1992). Diamond’s own book about the paper, Behind the Times (New York: Villard Books, 1994), contains insightful accounts of discrimination toward women and minorities and other internal sources of dissension.

  4. Max Frankel, The Times of My Life and My Life with “The Times” (New York: Random House, 1999).

  5. Arthur Gelb, City Room (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2003), p. 573.

  6. Jeff would later be criticized—unfairly, I thought—by some colleagues and liberal Democrats for having broken the story on President Clinton’s Whitewater property, in which the Clintons had invested and lost money.

  7. After leaving the Times to make a fortune, Rattner became a major fund-raiser for the Democrats, became President Obama’s “car czar,” and rescued ailing General Motors. But he was punished for his alleged role in a “pay-to-play” scandal involving his former investment banking firm, Quadrangle. Without admitting or denying SEC charges of wrongdoing, he paid a multimillion-dollar fine. He was also banned from appearing “in any capacity before any public pension fund within the State of New York for five years,” New York magazine reported, and from “associating with any investment adviser or broker dealer” for two years. Despite Rattner’s long association with the Times, the paper gave front-page coverage to the scandal. He considered the coverage pejorative, slanted against him, and unfair. But he has remained close to Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher and his long-standing friend.

  8. Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones, The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind “The New York Times” (Boston: Little, Brown, 1999), p. 560.

  Chapter 5. Becoming a “Timesman”

  1. Les and I remained close friends until his death in 1995. When Jason Epstein and I finally decided in 1993 to marry, Les was President Bill Clinton’s secretary of defense. I told Les about my decision over breakfast in his conference room at the Pentagon. Three months later, President Clinton asked for his resignation following the death of American soldiers in Somalia. Suffering from a congenital heart problem, Les never really recovered. After Les’s death, Dick Holbrooke badgered the White House into hosting a memorial service for him, which it did reluctantly.

  Chapter 6. Egypt: Foreign Correspondent

  1. Eric M. Hammel, The Root: The Marines in Beirut, August 1
982–February 1984 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), p. 303.

  2. Judith Miller, “Reagan Declares Marines’ Role in ‘Vital’ to Counter Soviet in Lebanon: Toll at 192,” New York Times, October 25, 1983, www.nytimes.com/1983/10/25/world/reagan-declares-marines-role-in-vital-to-counter-soviet-in-lebanon-toll-at-192.html.

  3. American intelligence would eventually identify the suicide bomber as Ismail Ascari, an Iranian national. But this information, along with the extent of Iranian complicity in the attack, would not be known to the public until 2003, when a victim of the attack sued the Islamic Republic of Iran in a US District Court in the District of Columbia. See Peterson, et al. v. Islamic Republic, et al.

  4. A more detailed account of my trip through southern Lebanon is contained in God Has Ninety-nine Names: Reporting from a Militant Middle East (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), pp. 253–58, my book describing the growth of militant Islamic movements in ten Middle Eastern countries.

  5. Report of the DOD Commission on Beirut International Airport Terrorist Act, October 23, 1983 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1984), http://fas.org/irp/threat/beirut-1983.pdf.

  Chapter 7. From the Nile to the Seine

  1. Judith Miller, “Economy Gives Saudis Growing Pains,” New York Times, November 2, 1983, www.nytimes.com/1983/11/27/weekinreview/economy-gives-saudis-growing-pains.html.

  2. Judith Miller, “A Saudi Amnesty Frees Half of Jailed Americans,” New York Times, August 4, 1984, www.nytimes.com/1984/08/04/world/a-saudi-amnesty-frees-half-of-jailed-americans.html.