David was clearly worried about facing further scrutiny over his interactions with reporters, but he had not seemed unduly depressed. He had often told me how eager he was to return to Baghdad and participate in the US Iraq Survey Group’s inquiry into the missing Iraqi WMD. He wanted to interview the Iraqi WMD scientists with whom he had once sparred, several of whom were then imprisoned at Camp Cropper, not far from where the 75th XTF weapons hunters and I had been based.
No one knew Iraq’s biowarfare scientists better than Kelly, I told Keller. Having long argued that those Iraqis were key to figuring out what had happened to the missing chemical and biological stocks, he hoped that the scientists he had known for so long would open up to someone they considered their peer.
I recalled our first meeting in 1998, when Bill Broad and I were researching our account of UNSCOM’s seven-year hunt for Iraq’s hidden biological program. David, a Welsh microbiologist who was one of the world’s top bioweapons experts, was one of the four UN weapons inspectors—the “gang of four,” they had christened themselves—whose detective work had forced Iraq to acknowledge that it lied after the 1991 Gulf War about not having germ weapons.3 In 1995 their persistence forced Baghdad to admit that, since 1974, Iraq had explored at least a dozen pathogens as potential weapons. David’s area of expertise was biological research and development, an inherently “dual-use” endeavor that made understanding intentions vital. “If David Kelly were a tax inspector,” wrote Tom Mangold, the author of a fine early account of the Soviet biowarfare program, “he would recoup Britain’s entire national debt.”4
David and I shared another interest: the former Soviet Union’s secret germ weapons program. In 1989 he had toured Soviet biolabs and facilities and had been one of the first two British scientists to debrief Vladimir Pasechnik, then the most senior Soviet biowarrior ever to defect from Moscow’s top-secret program. His assertions that the Soviet Union had developed long-range missiles to deliver germs, and a genetically modified version of plague that was impervious to some vaccines and antibiotics, had astonished and alarmed Western intelligence officials. Though his CIA counterparts had long argued that the Soviets had no sophisticated bioweapons program and had initially doubted Pasechnik’s claims, David’s work helped persuade them that Moscow was hiding what turned out to be the world’s largest, most ambitious germ weapons effort, a blatant violation of the 1975 biological weapons treaty.
David was also concerned about a possible connection between former Soviet germ warriors and Iraq. After Pasechnik’s revelations in 1989, both Britain’s MI6 and the CIA had attempted to monitor the movement of Soviet microbiologists and Moscow’s bioexchanges with Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Libya, and other countries of concern. He had tracked such movement ever since 1991, when he told me that MI6 had spotted at least one scientist in Baghdad.
David was among my first calls after a scientist who had attended a World Health Organization conference in Lyon, France, in August 2002 told me that Iraq might have obtained a virulent strain of smallpox from a Russian scientist who had worked in a Moscow lab in the Soviet era and was thought to have visited Iraq in 1990. Another scientist identified that Russian as Nelja N. Maltseva, a virologist who spent over three decades at the Research Institute for Viral Preparations in Moscow before her death in 2000. Because her institute had once housed what Russia claimed as its entire national collection of some 120 strains of smallpox, British and US intelligence officials were concerned that she might have given or sold the Iraqis a version of the virus that could be resistant to vaccines or transmitted easily as a bioweapon.
Having spent months visiting decaying former Soviet labs and ill-equipped, poorly heated research institutes, and having seen one of the world’s most dangerous plague strains stored in a used pea can, I knew how tempting Iraqi money would be to desperate Russian scientists. Intelligence officials were concerned that Iraq was among those rogue states trying to benefit from their financial distress.
When David confirmed that intelligence analysts in London and Washington were investigating the Maltseva report, which he stressed to me was uncorroborated, I flew to Geneva to comb through World Health Organization records of scientific exchanges. The records, plus interviews with scientists there, indicated that Dr. Maltseva had visited Iraq at least twice in the early 1970s as part of the global campaign to eradicate smallpox. But had she visited Baghdad in 1990?
By the winter of 2002, I had pieced together intriguing information about Maltseva’s activities and what intelligence analysts thought they knew about them.
On a trip to Russia the previous autumn for a bioconference, I had tracked down Maltseva’s daughter, a physician in Moscow. She told me that she did not believe her mother had ever been to Iraq. Neither did the scientist who had been her deputy in the Moscow laboratory. Neither claimed to know about a secret trip she had made in 1971 to Aralsk, a port city in the then Soviet republic of Kazakhstan. Recently declassified records, however, showed that Maltseva had traveled there as part of a covert Soviet mission to stop a smallpox outbreak that Moscow had failed to report to the WHO. The documents indicated that she had taken tissue samples of the so-called Aralsk strain back to her lab. In interviews that fall in Moscow, Russian biologists insisted that the dangerous material was later destroyed. Western experts had no evidence of that. And Russia remained secretive about the illicit Soviet biowarfare effort as well as ongoing research and development activities.
When I learned in December 2002 that the CIA was concerned enough about the possible transfer of a Soviet smallpox strain to Iraq to have briefed President Bush, I decided to write a story. The president’s briefing, if not the CIA’s inquiry itself, would surely leak, especially because the administration was preparing to announce the number of American soldiers who would be vaccinated against anthrax and smallpox, an officially eradicated disease. My editors agreed we could no longer wait. I reported that the CIA was investigating whether Iraq had obtained a highly lethal smallpox strain from the old Soviet Union’s germ weapons program. David Kelly agreed to be quoted on the record, as did several other sources I had interviewed on background. I quoted him as saying that UN weapons inspectors had noticed a “resurgence of interest” in smallpox vaccine in Iraq back in 1990, “but we have never known why.”
The story was long but appeared deep inside the paper, since I stated clearly that Dr. Maltseva’s alleged trip in 1990 was uncorroborated and that the CIA was still investigating it.5 Many of the sources I interviewed were identified by name. And the story contained numerous caveats about what the agency knew and did not know about the allegation. So I was upset when critics of my WMD reporting began listing this story, among others, as examples of high-level White House leaks to me that I had rushed into print to scare Americans into going to war.6 Anyone who knew anything about germ weapons—or investigative reporting, for that matter—should have grasped how much time and effort this cautiously worded article about WMD-related intelligence had required. I had spent almost five months searching documents and conducting interviews in Russia, Switzerland, London, New York, and Washington to write the smallpox story.
As I sat with Keller that sultry day in July, I did not tell him how crucial a source David had been on so many other stories I had written, especially my prewar WMD stories. I said nothing because I never discussed the sources of sensitive stories with anyone, even editors, unless I was asked specifically. The focus of much of my WMD and terrorism work required the trust of people who saw classified information. Most could have been fired simply for talking to me without proper authorization. So I guarded their identities, limiting discussion of them to senior editors who asked about them and had a need to know.
Perhaps I also hesitated because I no longer felt comfortable with Keller. Unlike other senior editors, he had not been supportive initially, in public or private, when critics began attacking my reporting on Iraq and WMD. The ferocity of the blogger-led assault after the Iraq invasion had stunned me. Tr
ue, Keller was a columnist and not executive editor when Kurtz published my private email exchange with John Burns. But he had not asked me about it, either.
Most of my colleagues had dismissed Kurtz’s initial blast. But some were more troubled by his second attack a month later. Published in late June 2003 on the front page of the paper’s much-read Style section, he alleged that I had “hijacked” at least one of the XTF’s weapons-hunting units that I had covered. I had “crossed the line” from reporter to serving as a “middle man” between the unit and Chalabi. Quoting Sgt. Pomeroy, the disgruntled soldier, and anonymous military sources, he wrote that I wore a military uniform throughout my embed and helped debrief one of Saddam’s sons-in-law. I had also supposedly bullied General Petraeus into forcing the XTF leader, Colonel McPhee, to rescind an order recalling MET Alpha back to the brigade’s temporary base near Tallil.
None of this was accurate. MET Alpha’s chief Gonzales, fed up with what he called the Pentagon’s worthless “suspect site” list, had received his commander’s approval to reach out to Iraqis who might help locate Iraqi WMD scientists. His commander, McPhee, had given me permission to accompany MET Alpha during that period. He had approved Gonzales’s request to work with Chalabi, to whom a DIA liaison officer was already assigned. As for Saddam’s son-in-law, I never met him. And I occasionally wore an army jacket because McPhee had barred me from covering MET missions unless I “blended in” with the units. Since he had assigned no women soldiers to the METs, I was already visible enough, he said.
I took special exception to Kurtz’s assertion that I got Colonel McPhee to rescind an order pulling MET Alpha back from the search by complaining to General Petraeus and threatening to write a “negative story” about his decision. Kurtz quoted excerpts of a note I had written to Colonel McPhee informing him that I intended to stay in the Baghdad area even if MET Alpha rejoined the rest of its brigade in Tallil. What Kurtz apparently did not know was that I had discussed this course of action with Gerald Boyd, via satellite phone in New York. Gerald urged me to find a way to stay near Karbalā’ to follow up on the front-page story I wrote in April about the Iraqi scientist whom MET Alpha had found, and who claimed to have seen chemical weapons and precursors destroyed shortly before the war. The Iraqi source was in great potential danger, especially after I had reported that he was not a scientist but a military intelligence officer who was cooperating with the United States. At the time, I knew little more about him. But since he was willingly providing a small group of MET Alpha and US intelligence officers with leads, McPhee’s decision to withdraw the soldiers he trusted seemed to epitomize the problems inherent in the army’s WMD hunt. Gerald had asked me to prepare a story that focused on that decision as a reflection of the task force’s weaknesses. We would publish it immediately if the colonel pulled back MET Alpha and refused to let me stay on in Baghdad.7 “Try not to get yourself disembeded,” Gerald told me. “But stay with the story!”
McPhee had quickly reversed course after consulting on a secure line with MET Alpha’s chief, General Petraeus, and other brigade officers. He instructed MET Alpha to continue working near Baghdad. Nothing I said or did affected that decision. Officers routinely changed orders based on new information, or new facts on the ground. And the “negative” WMD story Kurtz said I had “threatened” to write was, in fact, published at length, but in July, three days after David Kelly’s death and a month after I ended my embed with the XTF and returned to New York. While my story praised the task force for persistence and creativity in what seemed to be a hopeless mission, I argued that the WMD hunt had been crippled from the start by a lack of resources, too little real-time intelligence, and, oddly, given the administration’s repeated claims about the existence of Iraqi WMD to justify the war, a lack of priority. Even if there were hidden stockpiles of unconventional weapons in Iraq, I wrote, the XTF would have been unlikely to unearth them.8
Had Kurtz been reporting from Iraq rather than Washington, he might have learned that the sole military source quoted in his story—Sgt. Eugene Pomeroy, the former substitute teacher from Albany—was problematic at best. Two of the four MET chiefs had banned him from accompanying them on sensitive missions. Senior officers in the task force decided that he was not knowledgeable enough to review my stories. Since I was the brigade’s only embedded reporter, he essentially had no job.
I refused to talk to Kurtz because he had published my private email exchange with John Burns a month earlier, but Andy Rosenthal did. He called Kurtz’s allegations “idiotic” and “baseless.”
“She didn’t bring MET Alpha anywhere,” he told Kurtz. “She doesn’t direct MET Alpha, she’s a civilian . . . a reporter. She’s not a member of the US armed forces. She was covering a unit, like hundreds of other reporters for the New York Times, Washington Post, and others. She went where they went to the degree that they would allow.”
“We think she did really good work there,” Andy Rosenthal was quoted by Kurtz as saying, having examined at least some of the twenty-four stories I had filed about the XTF’s work. “We think she broke some important stories.”
When Monty Gonzales and several other XTF officers involved in the hunt read Kurtz’s story, they wrote letters to the Washington Post flatly denying Kurtz’s account, which they copied to me. The Post eventually published excerpts from two of them, but declined to run a retraction.9
While I was furious, General Petraeus seemed bemused by the flap. He dismissed the story and urged me to do the same. “Quite a hatchet job,” he wrote me in an email. “Sounds like the Post was desperate for news . . . Trust me: You never pushed me around!” he joked.10 “Keep your chin up.”
Despite such support, I knew that Kurtz’s story was a problem. It was one thing for little-known bloggers to accuse me of “hyping” the WMD threat by noting that I had written more stories than other reporters about WMD intelligence regarding Iraq, Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi opposition, and the administration’s post-9/11 concerns driving its decision to go to war. But Kurtz was published by the Washington Post, widely read and respected in our profession.
All this preoccupied me as I sat with Keller the day David Kelly died. I told him that we needed to write an obit describing Kelly’s extraordinary career as a scientific biowarrior and hero of the US-UK’s nonproliferation campaign. He assigned me to write it. For whatever reason, I left without telling him about my last meeting with Kelly, when I had stopped in London to see him three months earlier in March en route to Iraq before starting my embed. I had wanted to learn what he thought I might find in Iraq.
Over dinner at one of his favorite vegetarian restaurants, David told me he had little doubt that Iraq was hiding some pre–Gulf War era chemical or germ-related materials, and perhaps some older weapons whose alleged destruction it had not documented, as the UN required. He believed, he said, that Iraq had active chemical and biological programs, and perhaps even in the nuclear arena, too. But he was concerned about the quantity and quality of British and American intelligence underlying their official estimates. “Not enough hard evidence to support . . . logical conclusions,” he told me, according to my notes of our discussion that night. Though he refused to be specific, he described the intelligence so far as “thinner” than he had hoped or expected.
David was briefly silent when I asked about the United Kingdom’s claim, in a WMD dossier it had published in September 2002, that Iraq could launch chemical- and bioready rockets and missiles within forty-five minutes, an assertion that received widespread publicity and alarmed many in Britain and the United States.11 He had not written that part of the dossier, he told me after a pause, unwilling even off the record to challenge openly his government’s official assessment. David was utterly loyal to a government that would prove unwilling to return the favor. Little reliable new evidence had been collected since he and other UNSCOM inspectors were ejected from Iraq in 1998, he complained. Given the limitations on their activities, the inspectors who had followed them
there were unlikely to find whatever Saddam had chosen to hide, he told me.
Finding Iraq’s WMD scientists was key to understanding what had happened to its WMD programs, David said. “Find Taha,” he said, referring to Dr. Rihab Taha, known in the United States as the notorious “Dr. Germ,” the former head of Saddam’s biowarfare program. “Find Amir Saadi and Dr. [Nissar] Hindawi,” he counseled, referring to leading Iraqi weapons scientists about whom I had written for years. If the US military focused instead on visits to the Pentagon’s suspect site list, “you’ll be in Iraq for a very long time,” he predicted.
Did he doubt that we would find WMD in Iraq? I asked as we finished our meal. “I’m sure you’ll find something of interest,” David said, evading a direct answer. “Just find the scientists,” he urged me, “and you’ll find what you’re looking for.”
David hailed a cab for me and wished me luck. Looking back at the notes I had scribbled during our dinner, I realized that he had not repeated George Tenet’s cavalier assertion that finding Saddam’s weapons and materials would be a “slam dunk.” Unlike so many other analysts, including me, David had not equated the absence of evidence confirming Iraq’s claim to have destroyed its banned weapons with proof of such weapons’ existence. Yes, he believed that Saddam was lying and was hiding such weapons, he told me. But he could not be certain. He said that he hoped we would soon enjoy another dinner together—next time along the banks of the Euphrates.
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