The Story

by Judith Miller

  “My old newspaper used to believe that a person had to be contacted in advance every time he or she was named as an actor in a news story,” Howell wrote. Okrent’s failure was a “violation of basic reporting principles.” Only a handful of the dozens of journalists who had written blogs or articles had contacted me, either, for comment in advance of publishing their stories. Jack Shafer, for instance, who had written six personal attacks for the online Slate on what he had called my “wretched” Iraq reporting, had never once sought a response from me. For Shafer and others like him, buzz and internet clicks were what mattered, not truth or journalistic principle. This was the “new journalism.”

  9. The most detailed description of the allegations against Chalabi are in Bonin, Arrows of the Night, pp. 234–44.

  Chapter 20. Protecting Sources

  1. Several officials in the Bush White House opposed the retraction vehemently, arguing, presciently, that it would provide fodder to critics who claimed that senior officials had lied the country to war. This minority argued that the president’s statement was accurate, especially because it attributed the claim that Iraq had sought uranium in Niger to Britain, which continued to stand by the claim. So retracting the statement risked antagonizing Britain, America’s closest ally in the Iraq War. In a telephone interview as late as October 2013, Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, Britain’s chief spy agency, continued to stand by the claim but refused to reveal why British intelligence officials continued to believe it. Two independent British inquiries have also stood by the claim.

  2. Walter Pincus, a veteran national security reporter who had gone to law school in his spare time, disclosed eventually that he had agreed to testify about what his source had said without specifically identifying the source, who testified separately before the grand jury. Robert Novak, who had outed Plame, would later write a book in which he reiterated the reasons for his decision to cooperate with the prosecution: the Sun-Times would not cover his legal expenses, and he could not afford to fight Fitzgerald on his own. Tim Russert of NBC, whose news organization could afford to wage the fight, agreed to cooperate immediately in the inquiry and disclosed his confidential conversations with Libby and other sources. Norman Pearlstine, the editor in chief of Time, agreed to turn over to Fitzgerald Matt Cooper’s emails despite the objections of many reporters and members of the magazine’s legal team. His emails compromised, Cooper’s testimony became less crucial. Nonetheless, he received a personal written waiver from Scooter Libby, his source, whom he identified subsequently. I did not until I had spent almost three months in jail.

  3. Jonathan S. Landay, “White House Released Claims of Defector Deemed Unreliable by CIA,” Knight Ridder Newspapers, May 17, 2004, www.mcclatchydc.com/2004/05/17/16331/white-house-released-claims-of.html.

  4. Arianna Huffington, “Judy Miller: Do We Want to Know Everything or Don’t We?,” Huffington Post, July 27, 2005, www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/judy-miller-do-we-want-to_b_4791.html. Among others, Arianna Huffington, writing repeated attacks on her fledgling eponymous site while I was in jail, challenged my motivation for going to jail.

  Chapter 21. Inmate 45570083

  1. The act, which makes it a crime for those with access to classified information to disclose the name of a “covert” agent intentionally to damage national security, was enacted in the wake of the outing of scores of covert operatives by Philip Agee, Lewis Wolf, and Aldrich Ames. All three had sought to cripple the CIA’s clandestine services by outing its agents. Several legal analysts said they doubted that the outing of Plame, though reprehensible if intended as payback for Wilson’s criticism of the White House, would have been covered by the law. Among the most articulate advocates of this position was Victoria Toensing, a Republican who had been chief counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee. A key drafter of the act, Toensing insisted that Plame did not meet its definition of “covert,” and, hence, that Fitzgerald’s inquiry was “flawed from the get-go.” Victoria Toensing and Bruce W. Sanford, “The Plame Game: Was This a Crime?,” Washington Post, January 12, 2005, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2305-2005Jan11.html.

  2. Norman Pearlstine, Off the Record: The Press, the Government, and the War Over Anonymous Sources (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), pp. 112–14.

  3. Farber, a dogged reporter, had served forty days in Bergen County Jail in 1978 for contempt of court, and the paper was fined $286,000 for having refused to turn over his notes about a murder case he had investigated. The case was complicated and, like mine, had aroused intense debate. Although Myron had testified before a grand jury, he refused to give anyone notes that would betray his confidential sources. Determined to fight the growing number of subpoenas for reporters’ notes and sources, Abe Rosenthal and publisher “Punch” Sulzberger, Arthur’s father, had strongly supported Myron. After Myron was freed, New Jersey governor Brendan T. Byrne returned $101,000 of the $286,000 that the Times had paid in fines and pardoned both him and the paper. Myron’s case prompted New Jersey to toughen further its state shield law, making it one of the nation’s best. Though his ordeal had coincided with New York’s devastating newspaper strike, when the paper was under tremendous financial pressure, Abe’s support for him never wavered, during and after jail.

  4. Huffington, “Judy Miller: Do We Want to Know Everything or Don’t We?”

  5. Since I had already written two number one bestselling books, I was never worried about getting a book contract. But I sensed that if ever I got a waiver and had to testify, it would be impossible to write honestly about the case until the fate of the accused had been decided.

  6. Bob Novak had voluntarily testified that Karl Rove had told him about Valerie Plame’s identity. Matt Cooper had testified without going to jail about two of his sources. His boss, Norm Pearlstine, had turned over to Fitzgerald all of Matt’s emails and notes. Walter Pincus negotiated a deal with Fitzgerald to appear before the grand jury without disclosing the identity of his source, who testified separately before the panel. Tim Russert had spoken to the FBI about his conversations with Libby before he received a subpoena. NBC White House correspondent Andrea Mitchell had also been questioned. It was eventually revealed that Bob Woodward, who had volunteered in a TV interview to take my place in jail if he could, had learned of Plame’s identity from Richard Armitage five days before I had even met with Scooter Libby. Armitage turned out to have been the initial leaker, which the State Department’s top lawyer knew. They offered to discuss Armitage’s leak with the White House but said nothing when told that senior administration officials had no need for this information.

  7. In 2001 Vanessa Leggett, a former private investigator, spent 168 days in jail for refusing to compromise her sources in an investigation into the 1997 murder of a Houston socialite. But this brave, principled woman had been doing research for a book, not working for a newspaper.

  8. The tabs and other gossipmongers made much of my husband’s luxury cruise with friends while I languished in jail. But Jason, under enormous pressure, needed the rest. I had encouraged him to go.

  Chapter 22. Departures

  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 cont
acts 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.

  Epilogue

  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.