The Story
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2. At one point in our talks, the paper announced publicly that I would be reporting back to work in the newsroom by November 2. One of my lawyers interpreted this as an indication that Arthur was having second thoughts about whether an amicable settlement of our dispute was preferable to a dignified separation. But Matt Mallow, then a senior Skadden, Arps, partner and a friend, asked me a clarifying question: Even if I got a public apology from the paper, would I feel comfortable working again for the Times? Did I want to continue working for a paper that had “turned so quickly and easily on one of its own”? Would I ever again trust journalists who had, as Bob Bennett wrote in his memoir, “snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory” by assailing me after my almost three months in jail?
3. I gave two interviews soon after I came out of jail: one to ABC’s Barbara Walters, whose father, a nightclub owner, had introduced my parents; and the other to Lou Dobbs, who was then at CNN and had run a clock at the top of the screen counting each day of my incarceration. I rejected numerous offers to write tell-all articles about jail and my fight with the paper and inquiries from filmmakers seeking my cooperation with a movie based on about my experience. In 2006 at the request of my lawyer, Floyd Abrams, who was involved in the project, I had lunch with Kate Beckinsale, the gifted actress who was preparing to play a reporter in a film about a court battle similar to mine. The film, Nothing But the Truth, written and directed by Rod Lurie, opened in the fall of 2007 went quickly to video distribution. Floyd was compensated. I did not participate.
4. Libby’s version of their conversation is different. Libby told the grand jury that in response to Cooper, he had said that he did not know whether Cooper’s claim that Plame worked at the CIA was true. Cooper’s contemporaneous notes of their conversation support Libby’s description.
5. Although Bush commuted Libby’s sentence, he still paid the hefty fine, served four hundred hours of community service, and had his law license revoked.
6. John Rizzo, Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA (New York: Scribner, 2014), p. 208. In his book, the former CIA general counsel challenged another of Plame’s complaints: she had not been forced out of the CIA by its indifference to her family’s personal safety, he asserted. In her memoir, Plame said that she was forced to leave Langley partly because her bosses had denied her pleas for added security for her and her young twins after her family had been explicitly threatened. But Rizzo, who had investigated her request for “round-the-clock security protection,” determined that neither she nor her family was in “any sort of danger.” As a result, he wrote, he had “reluctantly” concluded that the CIA “could not lawfully expend the considerable amount of taxpayer money that would be required to shield her from a nonexistent threat.” Plame’s book also revealed, among other things, that the CIA had recalled her from her first covert overseas assignment in 1997 because the agency feared that she “might be among the officers betrayed to the Russians by traitor Aldrich Ames,” the CIA official who spied for Russia for nine years before being caught in 1994. While the agency never determined whether Plame was among the compromised spies, the disclosure meant that it was not senior Bush officials who had ended Plame’s career overseas as a full-time undercover operative but a traitor within the CIA.
7. My belated discovery of the importance of my notation of “Bureau” explained something that puzzled me during the defense’s cross-examination of me on the stand in 2007. Libby’s lawyers kept asking me whether other agencies, such as the State Department, had “bureaus” rather than “offices” or “divisions” or “directorates.” But since neither they nor I knew that Plame had used the State Department as cover for her CIA work, the questions seemed odd, and their intention, at least to me, unclear.
8. Stan Crock, “Fair Game Glamorizes Distortions and Perpetuates Myths,” World Affairs, November 8, 2010, p. 4; http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/fair-game-glamorizes-distortions-and-perpetuates-myths.
9. Rizzo, Company Man, pp. 206–7.
10. Dick Cheney, interview, January 2014.
11. O’Sullivan, who worked at the State Department before being sent to Iraq soon after the invasion in 2003, argues that “there was no Sunni partner” willing to work with US forces to oppose Al Qaeda until 2006. Until then, she said, the US military’s top brass was convinced that the occupation of Iraq by US forces was the root cause of the insurgency, rather than Sunni bitterness over having lost control of the state they had controlled until Saddam’s ouster.
12. Thomas Donnelly and Gary J. Schmitt, “The Right Fight Now: Counterinsurgency, Not Caution, Is the Answer in Iraq,” Washington Post, October 26, 2003, http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/washingtonpost/doc/409635877.html?FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:FT&date=Oct+26%2C+2003&author=Tom+Donnelly+and+Gary+Schmitt&pub=The+Washington+Post&edition=&startpage=&dese=The+Right+Fight+Now%3B+Counterinsurgency%2C+Not+Caution%2C+Is+the+Answer+in+Iraq.
13. Judith Miller, “A Witness Against Al Qaeda Says the U.S. Let Him Down,” New York Times, June 3, 2002, www.nytimes.com/2002/06/03/us/a-witness-against-al-qaeda-says-the-us-let-him-down.html. Despite my admiration of Fitzgerald’s vigorous prosecution of terrorists in the first World Trade Center bombing, I was one of the few journalists to write critically about his mistreatment of Essam Al Ridi, an Egyptian pilot who helped him convict Bin Laden’s personal secretary. Al Ridi told me, and an FBI agent quoted in my article agreed, that once Al Ridi’s usefulness as a witness ended, Fitzgerald did not honor promises he had made that he would not be penalized in the United States or mistreated in his native Egypt.
14. “Innovation, A New York Times internal report,” March 24, 2004, http://www.scribd.com/doc/224332847/NYT-Innovation-Report-2014.
15. Leonard Downie, Jr., The Obama Administration and the Press (New York: Committee to Protect Journalists, October 10, 2013), http://cpj.org/reports/2013/10/obama-and-the-press-us-leaks-surveillance-post-911.php.
16. The news of Abramson’s firing stunned the media but generated little interest among readers, even at the Times. The front-page article about the dismissal of the first female head of the nation’s leading newspaper was only the tenth most emailed story of the day—behind a story entitled “Steak That Sizzles on the Stovetop” and Frank Bruni’s column, “Read, Kids, Read.” BuzzFeed’s Kate Aurthur, a former Times employee, wrote that Abramson “got fired with less dignity than Judith Miller, who practically started the Iraq War.”
17. By late 2005, according to a Pew poll, 43 percent of Americans thought that America’s and Britain’s leaders were “mostly lying” when they claimed that Iraq had WMD before the war.
18. “As New Dangers Loom, More Think the U.S. Does ‘Too Little’ to Solve World Problems,” Pew Research Center, August 28, 2014, www.people-press.org/2014/08/28/as-new-dangers-loom-more-think-the-u-s-does-too-little-to-solve-world-problems.
INDEX
A note about the index: The pages referenced in this index refer to the page numbers in the print edition. Clicking on a page number will take you to the ebook location that corresponds to the beginning of that page in the print edition. For a comprehensive list of locations of any word or phrase, use your reading system’s search function.
Abdullah, Prince of Saudi Arabia, 106
Abrams, Floyd, 245, 251, 263, 264, 271, 274, 275, 276, 280, 287, 303, 356–57n3
Abramson, Jill, 54, 212, 356n20
Chalabi and, 232
Dowd as close friend, 265, 294, 356n20
firing of, 320, 358n16
Miller in Iraq War and, 175, 194
Miller’s jailing and, 265
Miller’s return to the Times after jail and “war on Judy,” 286, 287, 288–89, 290, 301
Miller’s sources and, 235
Miller’s stories restricted by, 237–38, 239
Miller’s WMD reporting and, 205–12, 219, 228, 346n7
on Obama’s White House, 320
Plame leak and, 244, 309
“The Times and Iraq” editor’s not
e and, 205, 225–26, 230, 347n10, 348–49n2
as Washington bureau chief, 148, 175, 209, 291–92, 296, 355–56n18
Abu Sayyaf, 149
Achille Lauro, 88
Afghanistan
Abu Khabab camp, 140, 142, 143–44
Bin Laden in, 139, 141
biological weapons lab in, 132
Faizabad, 140
Miller interviews Massoud and jihadists, 138–39
Miller visits with Laili Helms, Taliban interviews, 141–44
Taliban in, 138, 141–44, 169
terrorist training camps in, 134, 141, 146
US misspending in, 22, 333n20
US war in, 169
Against All Enemies (Clarke), 343n12
Agee, Philip, 351n1
Aghion, Anne, 87
Ajami, Fouad, 112
Albright, David, 157
Iraq’s efforts to acquire a nuclear bomb and, 219
WMD aluminum tubes intelligence and, 213–14, 215, 216, 217, 220
Alexandria Detention Center (ADC), 255–62, 265–71, 279, 292
Alibek, Ken (Kanatjan Alibekov), 117–18, 121, 126, 129, 338n1
All-Russian Institute of Phytopathology, Golitsino, Russia, 124
Almodóvar, Pedro, 261
Al Qaeda
Bin Laden founds and funds, 137
black flag of, 18
Bush war on terror and, 148–49
chemical and biological weapons programs, 134, 146
Iraq and, 18, 27, 181, 210, 332n17
jihad against the West, 146
London bombings of 2005, 259, 265
Miller’s investigation and stories, xi, 135–36, 137, 170–71, 226
9/11 terrorist attacks, 147
Reid shoe bombing attempt, 165
Saddam Hussein and, 13, 207, 290–91
spread of, 322
US embassy bombings, Kenya and Tanzania, 132, 134, 140, 146
US response to 9/11 and, 164–65
American Colony Hotel, Jerusalem, 73
America’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 123
Ames, Aldrich, 351n1, 357n6
Ani, Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-, 152
Anson, Robert Sam, 261–62
anthrax letter attacks, 165, 342n4
early theories about Iraqi link, 150, 152, 222
intelligence community and, 165
Miller-Engelberg article on, 222–23, 348n22
US source of spores, 151
Anton, Michael, 165
Apple, R. W., Jr. “Johnny,” 95, 97, 98, 99
Gulf War coverage, 104
Arab nationalism, 5
Arafat, Yasser, 107, 110
Oslo Accords and, 112
Aral Sea, 115, 116, 127
Armitage, Richard, 304, 352n6
Arnold, Martin, 355n15
Arrows of the Night (Bonin), 156, 341n1, 341n3, 350n9
Ascari, Ismail, 336n3
Ashcroft, John, 243
Aspen Strategy Group, 62–63
Aspin, Les, 47, 48, 60–64, 103, 336n1
Assad, Hafiz al-, 69
Atomic Soldiers (Rosenberg), 37–38
Atta, Mohamed
middle-class background, 77
in Prague, 151–52, 207
Aurthur, Kate, 358n16
Ayres, B. Drummond, Jr., 95
Aziz, Tariq, 134
Baer, Robert, 341n3
Baker, James A., III, 12, 19, 107, 311, 343n15
Baker, Peter, 165, 315–16, 342n9
Baquet, Dean, 135
Baranger, Walt, 286
Barnard College, 44, 50
Miller commencement speech, 194–95
Barringer, Felicity, 58
Barstow, David, 148, 217, 265, 286, 289, 293, 316–17, 356n19
Barton, Rod, 120, 345n8
Barzani, Massoud, 24
Bashir, Omar al-, 134
Beckinsale, Kate, 356–57n3
Beers, Rand, 343n12
Behind the Times (Diamond), 335n3
Bennett, Bob
Keller-Abramson order to Miller for a first-person account of grand jury testimony and, 288, 289, 290
Miller’s grand jury testimony and, 280, 281, 285
Miller’s protection of sources case and, 263, 264, 268, 271–73, 274, 275, 276, 279, 294, 355n17
Miller’s resignation and legal settlement, 294, 295, 296, 297, 321
Berenson, Alex, 186
Bergen, Peter, 136
Bergman, Lowell, 293, 356n19
Bernstein, Carl, 54–55
Bernstein, Richard, 81, 87
Biden, Joe, 19, 166
Binder, David, 57, 95
Bin Laden, Osama, 132
in Afghanistan, 139, 141
Al Qaeda begun by, 137
Al Shifa pharmaceutical company, Khartoum, and, 134
escape from Tora Bora, 149
fatwa declaring war on America, 137, 147
interview with Bergen, 136
interview with John Miller, 137–38
killing of, 322
Miller declines interview, 136–38
Miller’s early coverage of, xi, 135–36, 226
9/11 terrorist attacks, 147
Saudi Arabia ejects, 106, 337n2
as terrorist financier, 136
training camps run by, 140, 142
US efforts to kill, 149
US intelligence community and, 135
WMD and, 132, 165
Biohazard (Alibek and Handelman), 338n1
biological weapons, 115–28
Al Hakam, Iraq, 119, 120
anthrax, 2, 115, 116, 119, 121–22, 127, 132, 165
anthrax letter attacks, 150–52, 165, 222–23, 342n4, 348n22
Bin Laden and, 132
Biopreparat, 117
botulinum toxin, 2, 119, 133, 150
danger of rogue groups acquiring, 128
Germs (Miller, Engelberg, and Broad), xi, 117, 122, 172, 174, 208, 223, 342n1, 342n4, 346n3
Iranian attempts to acquire, 123, 124–25
Iraqi germ bombs, 133
Kelly as expert on, 195–99
lethal pathogens, miscellaneous types, 123, 129
Saddam’s program, xii, 26, 119–20, 133–34, 196–97
smallpox, 116, 123, 127, 197, 198–99
Soviet program, 115–16, 117, 121–22, 197
Stepnogorsk, Kazakhstan, 121–22
treaty banning, 116
vaccination of Bush and Cheney, 150
vaccination of Miller, 175
vaccination of US military, 117, 198
Vector research center, Siberia, 122–23
Voz Island, Aral Sea, 115–16, 125–28
White House botulinum false alarm, 150, 165
Blair, Jayson, 184, 185–86, 193, 288, 317, 349n5
Blair, Tony, 168, 195–96, 209
Bleifuss, Joel, 349n4
Blix, Hans, 209, 211
Miller interview, 208, 227, 228
Blundy, David, 8–11, 86
Bojinka plot, 136
Bolton, John, 262
Bonin, Rich, 156, 157, 232, 341n1, 341n3, 350n9
Boulenouar, Tewfik, 2
Boyd, Gerald, 95, 147, 148, 164, 169, 172
firing of, 191, 193, 194, 206, 209, 244, 297, 299
Miller in Iraq War and, 175, 180, 183, 184, 187, 188, 190, 200–201, 209, 236
Miller’s WMD reporting and, 190, 206, 345n7, 349n6, 350n8
Times plagiarism scandal and, 184, 185–86
Times staff revolt and, 185–86, 187, 193–94, 296
Bradlee, Ben, 54–55
Bragg, Rick, 344–45n3
Braun, Carol Moseley, 259
Bremer, L. Paul (Jerry), III, 22, 194, 314
Brisbane, Arthur, 354–55n14
Britain
credibility gap, 358–59n17
Iraq War and, 168, 195–96, 203, 209
London bombings of 2005, 259, 265
yellowcake claim and, 242, 282, 350n1, 35
3n4
Broad, William, xi
aluminum tube misinformation article, 217
anthrax letter attacks article, 152, 348n22
biological weapons reporting, with Miller, 116
Clinton interview, with Miller, 131–32, 133, 338n1
defectors as source, 118
Germs, with Miller and Engelberg, xi, 117, 122, 172, 174, 208, 223, 342n1, 342n4, 346n3
Iraq mobile germ lab stories, 209–10, 346n8, 347n9
Miller’s collaboration with, 342n1
as Times science reporter, 116
UNSCOM’s search for Iraq’s WMD article, with Miller, 196
WMD reporting, 210
Brooks, James, 248
Buckley, Susan, 271
Burnham, David, 55
Burns, John, 183, 188, 200, 202
Bush, George H. W., 64
Gulf War and, 12, 14, 102
Iraq no-fly zone and, 16–17, 23–24
Saddam Hussein and, 167
Bush, George W.
anthrax letter attacks and, 150, 165, 342n4
biological weapon threat and, 198
Iraq War and overthrow of Saddam decision, 17, 161, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 169, 272, 282, 284, 291, 312, 322, 339–40n2, 342n6
Iraq War mistakes, 22
Iraq War withdrawal and, 1
Libby’s sentence commuted by, 305–6, 357n5
neocons and, 154, 167
nuclear 9/11 fears, 165, 166
PDB (Presidential Daily Brief), 164–65
post 9/11 response, 164–65
“preventive war” strategy, 168, 343n13
Saddam Hussein and, 13–14
State of the Union address (2002), 169
State of the Union address (2003), 211, 242, 282, 283
State of the Union address (2003), retraction of “sixteen words,” 242, 353n4, 355–56n18, 356n19
State of the Union address (2004), 232
“the surge” and, 19, 311, 315
vaccinations given to, 150
war on terror, 148–49
West Point address of June, 2002, 166, 170
WMD and, 13–14, 155, 161, 164, 165, 184, 219, 242, 264–65, 344n5, 347–48n17
yellowcake claim and, 242, 282, 350n1, 353n4
Butler, Richard, 151, 160
BuzzFeed, 358n16
Byers, Steve, 261–62
Byrne, Brendan T., 351–52n3
Cacheris, Plato, 234–35
Calame, Byron, 295, 301