“My treat!” I replied as I climbed into the spacious black taxi.
— CHAPTER 18 —
CORRECTING THE RECORD
Diane Ceribelli, Bill Keller’s assistant, called me on Friday afternoon, May 21, 2004. Could I stop by Bill’s office before I left for the weekend?
Could it wait until Monday?
No.
Her tone was grave. This can’t be good, I thought. Kind and resourceful, Diane never forgot a birthday. So if she sounded worried, it meant trouble.
Seeking insight, I called Bill Safire. He had just heard that Bill Keller and Jill Abramson were planning to run an editor’s note—a mea culpa—on the paper’s prewar reporting about Iraq. He didn’t know what it would say or when it would run, but he urged me to be prepared.
Prepared for what?
“For anything.”
* * *
Keller and Abramson were waiting for me in his office. Most reporters had already left by six o’clock, so the newsroom was still. Jill was seated, unsmiling. Keller was pacing, clutching papers.
Surely I was aware of the controversy surrounding the paper’s pre–Iraq War reporting, he began.
Of course. How could I not be? Since soldiers had failed to find WMD in Iraq, and a bloody insurgency had taken hold, opposition to the war had intensified. So, too, had attacks on the paper’s prewar coverage, especially my reporting, since it was by far the most extensive. WMD, terrorism, and the Middle East were all part of my beat, and I had written more stories about these subjects than other Times reporters. Bloggers and other media critics were portraying me as either a closet neocon bent on taking the country to war, or a credulous dupe spoon-fed by Ahmad Chalabi and White House “shillsters”—a “useful idiot,” one assistant professor from the University of Michigan called me.1 I had “blood on my hands,” the email declared.
Keller said that after Howell and Gerald left the paper, he first wanted to “heal the wounds” they had inflicted and “move on.” But continuing criticism of the paper’s prewar reporting—and of my work, in particular—had forced him to examine our coverage and publish an editor’s note acknowledging our “collective” failings. The paper had an obligation to “set the record straight.”
A note had been drafted, he said, handing me the papers he was shuffling. It would run on the front page, Sunday. In two days.
I was stunned. The schedule meant that space on the coveted front page of the Sunday paper, with our largest circulation, had already been allocated. Without having asked me a single question about my sources, the circumstances under which the articles were published, or the editors who had handled them, the paper was going to publish what read like a front-page indictment mostly of my articles. The editor’s note was a done deal.
The draft note impugned unnamed “senior editors”—a slap at Howell and Gerald—for having allowed my stories into the paper. It implied that I had written only stories that supported President Bush’s assertion that war was justified because the intelligence community had concluded that Saddam was hiding unconventional weapons. Attached to the note was a list of my prewar stories about Iraq, showing my ostensible dependence on Chalabi. The list was lengthy. However, it included stories that mentioned or quoted Chalabi as an opposition leader but had nothing to do with WMD. Nor was it comprehensive.
“If you run this,” I said as coolly as possible, “you had better prepare a second editor’s note to correct the errors, omissions, and unsupported innuendos in this version. And you’ll also have to explain why I’ll be denouncing my own paper on CNN.”
Keller asked me to identify the errors. First, I told them, I had not relied heavily on Chalabi or his prowar, neocon American allies, as the note asserted. Chalabi was the source of only one of my prewar WMD stories—the interview in Bangkok with Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, the Iraqi engineer—and that meeting had taken place in December 2001, before CIA agents were even tasked to seek information about Iraq’s WMD programs.2
I was not the only Times reporter who had written stories based on prewar intelligence that turned out to be wrong, I reminded them. Why was there no mention of Pat Tyler’s and John Tagliabue’s front-page exclusive in October 2001 about the alleged meeting between 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi diplomat in Prague before 9/11?3 Or another Tyler front-page exclusive, “Intelligence Break Led U.S. to Tie Envoy Killing to Iraq Qaeda Cell”? Published in February 2003, the story virtually declared the existence of a crucial, direct link between Saddam and Al Qaeda. Why had they not included a story by Jim Risen, our intelligence reporter, and David Johnston, who covered the Justice Department? Their page-one scoop challenging the alleged link between Iraq and Al Qaeda asserted that there was “broad agreement within intelligence agencies that Iraq has continued its efforts to develop chemical, biological, and probably nuclear weapons” and was “still trying to hide its weapons programs from United Nations inspectors.” Would Keller’s note mention that Pat Tyler had hired Chalabi’s niece to run the Times bureau he had opened in Kuwait before the war? Or Chris Hedges’s forever-exclusive scoops on Iraq’s alleged camps for training Al Qaeda recruits to hijack airplanes? His articles had relied on three defectors provided by Chalabi.
Here were the facts, I told them, pulling out my list of prewar stories. Yes, I had written more stories about WMD and the Iraqi opposition than other Times reporters: those topics were part of my beat. If I had not gotten such exclusives, I wouldn’t have been doing my job. I had written a total of ten stories about intelligence on Iraqi WMD in the year before the war. Only one mentioned Chalabi by name. None of the others relied on him as an unnamed source. In that same year, I had written thirteen stories about the Iraqi opposition, from Turkey, Iraq, London, and Washington. And yes, those articles had focused on Chalabi, not WMD, because he was the leader of the INC, the largest Iraqi dissident coalition. Moreover, ten of those twenty-three stories about various aspects of the impending war were collaborations with other Times reporters.
I said that Keller’s and Abramson’s list also omitted articles I had written or coauthored that cast doubt on the WMD intelligence, or had warned of crippling disputes within the Iraqi opposition, and by implication, the wisdom of the Iraq invasion.
“Such as?” Keller pressed, according to notes I made later that night.
Most significantly, I replied, his note overlooked my exclusive interview in January 2003 with Hans Blix, the Swedish chief of the UN chemical and biological weapons inspectors for Iraq, who disputed President Bush’s stated rationale for war. Blix then said that he did not believe that military action was needed “to avoid the risk of a September 11–style attack by terrorists wielding nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons.” Written with UN bureau chief Julia Preston, the interview challenged several of the administration’s most cherished assertions about Iraqi WMD cheating. Blix said he still endorsed disarmament through “peaceful” means and that it would be “terrible” if the standoff with Iraq ended in war. What I had assumed would be a front-page story was cut and run on page ten.
Keller’s draft implied that my stories had a political agenda; that I had written them to build a case for war. That was false, I told him. Having covered Saddam’s brutal regime for so long, I had privately hoped that President Bush would oust him and end the Iraqi people’s misery. But I had never peddled WMD to advance the case for war. And I had never taken a public position on the war, a mortal sin for a Times reporter. When journalists or book critics had pressed me about Iraq or our book Germs, which contained a chapter on Saddam’s bioweapons program and deceptions, I had laid out arguments for and against the war.4 My earlier book on Saddam had raised questions about the wisdom of our invading Iraq in 1991.
I had never publicly identified myself as a “reluctant hawk,” referring to an article Keller had written on the eve of the war. His op-ed in February, entitled “The I-Can’t-Believe-I’m-a-Hawk Club,” endorsed arguments by Britain’s Tony Blair, American Middle Eas
t expert Kenneth Pollack, and Hans Blix, who, he asserted, “without endorsing war” had demonstrated “Iraq’s refusal to be contained.”5 He was “hard pressed to see an alternative [to invasion] that is not built on wishful thinking,” Keller wrote.6
“I know you weren’t around then,” I said, referring to the fact that he had become executive editor after my articles were published and my embed in Iraq had ended. But Abramson was Washington bureau chief at the time.
“Yours were investigative stories—edited by the investigations editor, not Washington,” she interjected.7
Another error was the draft’s implication that I was solely responsible for the paper’s erroneous stories about Iraq’s mobile germ labs—the vehicles that Colin Powell had featured in his UN speech, which had been widely praised, including by the Times, but was now seen as exaggerated.
I had written three stories about the discovery of the trailers during my embed in Iraq in the spring of 2003. Keller’s note made no mention of Sabrina Tavernise’s initial article for the paper about the vans. Nor did it indicate that Bill Broad had coauthored two of the trailer articles with me. Worse still, I pointed out, the note made no mention of the final story that Bill and I wrote on June 7, 2003, after Gerald Boyd approved my return to Iraq. The article was the first to challenge in detail the administration’s claim that the trailers were intended to produce germ weapons.8 It corrected our own earlier front-page report that had repeated the CIA’s claim in a white paper that the trailers were intended to produce pathogens for bioweapons.9 The story might have received more attention if Howell and Gerald had not been fired on the day we filed it.
Finally, none of my mobile lab stories had come from administration officials or neocon sources, I told them. I had interviewed Paul Wolfowitz only once since President Bush took office, and Doug Feith, his deputy, twice, both times on the record. I had not written about or relied on “Curveball,” the fraudulent Iraqi source whose testimony supported the CIA’s claim that Iraq was making germs for weapons in mobile vehicles. The story that Broad and I wrote was sourced to intelligence experts who had refused to be named, but they had either been with me in Iraq or had reviewed the trailers themselves or seen videos, photos, and read descriptions of their specifications. The earlier stories were wrong because the initial intelligence assessments we reported were themselves mistaken—not lies or exaggerations. We had been first to report the final verdict.
My embed in Iraq had prevented me from revisiting my earlier WMD reporting, I reminded them. Camped for weeks in bombed-out or abandoned weapons facilities with neither running water nor reliable power, linked to the outside world by only a satellite phone and episodic access to the internet, I could not reach independent experts or sources I had relied on at home. Nor could I receive or read most of the heavily edited “playbacks” of stories that would run the next day under my name.
Bill Broad, who had faced none of those constraints, had not encountered intelligence dissenters on WMD back in New York and Washington. Nor, apparently, had Jim Risen. Jim and I had worked together on several intelligence exclusives, but he had not published a single story that questioned the intelligence community’s WMD estimates before the war.10 Though we had talked at length about the paper’s refusal to run several of his stories, he never told me that he doubted the CIA’s WMD estimates or my reporting on them. And while the CIA had tenaciously battled the White House’s claim of an operational link between Saddam’s Iraq and Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda, there had been no comparable dispute about WMD.
The failure to find WMD in Iraq had prompted some rewriting of history by politicians, analysts, and journalists. Before the war, a majority of Republican and Democratic politicians and many independent analysts asserted that Iraq was hiding some of its older chemical and biological weapons and was trying to reconstitute its nuclear program—or, at very least, trying to preserve an ability to do so quickly when sanctions were lifted. President Clinton made that claim. So, too, had four of the six Democratic presidential hopefuls who tentatively supported the war. Iraq’s search for WMD, Al Gore said, “has proven impossible to completely deter, and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power.”11 “We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction,” Senator Ted Kennedy said on the Senate floor, though he opposed the US invasion. “All US intelligence experts agree that Iraq is seeking nuclear weapons,” said Democratic senator John Kerry of Massachusetts.12
Most foreign intelligence agencies—British, French, Canadian, Israeli, Australian, German, and even Russian—thought that Saddam had retained weapons and had active unconventional weapons programs, even those that did not believe such violations of UN resolutions justified war. So did Hans Blix, the UN chief Iraqi weapons inspector, according to our interviews and his book about the UN’s effort to disarm Iraq of WMD.13 So, too, did most influential nongovernmental organizations that specialized in nonproliferation, including the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies. Both had published estimates of Saddam’s hidden WMD arsenals and programs similar to the administration’s.14
Colin Powell, the cautious author of the much-quoted “Pottery Barn” rule—“If you break it, you own it”—was convinced enough to have staked his personal credibility on his WMD presentation to the Security Council six weeks before the invasion. While Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell’s former chief of staff and one of his closest aides, asserted after the war that Powell had long harbored doubts about the estimates, Powell and other aides contradicted that claim. In his 2012 book on leadership, Powell recalled the four “frantic” days and nights when his team of experts had put aside the “prosecutor’s brief” that Cheney’s aide, Scooter Libby, and NSC deputy adviser Steve Hadley had given them at President Bush’s request and instead assembled their own “airtight” case for Saddam’s possession of WMD. Will Tobey, a team member who participated in vetting its key claims, later told me that Secretary Powell and all of his team considered the UN presentation “rock solid.”15
Powell wrote that he was “annoyed” years later when he heard former CIA officials bemoan in articles and interviews the “unsupported claims” in his speech. “Where were they when the NIE was being prepared months earlier,” he wrote, “or when the same claims were being written into the president’s January 2003 State of the Union address?”
Powell declined my requests for an interview on Iraqi WMD (before, during, and after the war). But I shared his criticism of the analysts’ self-serving historical revisionism. I, too, had tried to find specific examples of flawed intelligence from dissenters on the WMD estimates before the war. Even had I thought they were wrong, I would have published their concerns.
“But what about the aluminum tubes story?” Keller asked. How could I explain that intelligence and reporting debacle?
I was, by now, exhausted. No story had been more professionally or personally traumatic for me.
* * *
Michael Gordon and I were drowning in work in late August 2002 when a Washington desk editor conveyed Howell’s request for a comprehensive account of why the Bush administration believed that Saddam was hiding WMD. He wanted the story in two weeks.
Earlier that week, Vice President Cheney had given a bellicose speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars national convention in Nashville, declaring there was “no doubt” that Saddam was hiding WMD and was prepared to use such arms against the United States. The administration had to protect the nation by taking preventive action. The speech was widely regarded as the strongest signal yet that the White House was determined to go to war.
The request for a story on what the US intelligence community knew about Saddam’s WMD effort was certainly warranted. Michael and I, however, were both committed to other ambitious projects with short deadlines.
Somehow we would have to juggle it all, Abramson told Gordon and me. But we all knew
there was not enough time to do the reporting that such an extensive report required. If we were lucky, we would probably restate what had already been published and top it with a few new facts. Michael would pursue new intelligence about nuclear weapons; I would hunt for fresh information about Saddam’s chem-bio activities.
I made countless calls to sources and came up dry. A relentless reporter, Michael kept picking up rumors of new intelligence about Iraq’s nuclear efforts but couldn’t nail it down. We were both gloomy on the Thursday before our Sunday story was set to run. The only new information I had about Saddam’s chem-bio program came from an Iraqi military officer I had interviewed the previous summer in Istanbul who claimed to have worked in Iraq’s chemical warfare program. I had met him through the Iraqi Officers Movement, an opposition group that the CIA preferred to Ahmad Chalabi’s INC. While several intelligence experts deemed much of what he told me “credible,” his allegations were uncorroborated. I did not feel they merited a “stand-alone” story.
Then Michael hit pay dirt: a trusted source let slip a reference to an order of aluminum tubes that the Iraqis planned to use to enrich uranium for nuclear bombs. Michael called the White House, which refused comment. He was slowly filling in details of the program, but we needed the White House to give us some reaction, if only a “no comment.”
With time running out, I called Robert Joseph, President Bush’s senior adviser on proliferation. I bluffed. Michael and I were writing a front-page story about the tubes whether or not the administration would discuss them. He promised to get back to me.
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