When Massing called before publishing his essay and read me a long list of questions—most of them hostile about how reporters dealt with sensitive national security issues—I warned Jason that things could get “ugly.” But he urged me to talk to Massing, whose writing struck him as “fair-minded.”
The results were disastrous. By the time he called me, Massing was wedded to a view that the press had not only “failed” by not having stopped the invasion of Iraq, but also was “complicit” in having “sold” the war to a fearful American public. He accused the press of having held back information and of succumbing to a “pack mentality.”
Robert Kaiser, the Washington Post’s associate editor and senior correspondent, rejected Massing’s charges as “laughable.” Listing several Post stories that challenged the administration’s prewar assertions, Kaiser said that his paper had not suppressed news of bitter intelligence disputes.21 Journalists may have learned slowly that the administration’s WMD claims about Iraq were “almost all wrong,” in chief US inspector David Kay’s memorable phrase, Kaiser wrote. “But literally no one outside Iraq knew that before the war. . . . Still today,” he wrote on March 25, 2004, “we have no smoking-gun evidence” that the administration engaged in “deliberate deception.”
Kaiser accused Massing of doing what he accused the Bush administration of: cherry-picking “examples that suit his thesis” and dismissing articles that contradict it. Moreover, he added, Massing had not acknowledged his antiwar view.
In his response, Massing avoided the issue of whether he had opposed the war. But in an essay in January 2003 in the Nation, a left-of-center weekly, he had criticized intellectuals who favored ousting Saddam to end his systematic human rights abuses. While they probably meant well, he allowed, invasion was unjustified. “Despite his brutal record,” Massing wrote, Saddam was not then “carrying out the type of mass slaughter he did against the Kurds in the late 1980s.” Iraq was not Rwanda in 1994, when Hutus slaughtered Tutsis, nor even Bosnia in the early and mid-1990s. Massing wrote that he would oppose war with Iraq even if the Security Council authorized such action.
Two years earlier in late 2001, Massing had complained about me in two articles in the Nation. In October he criticized an article that Steve Engelberg and I had written soon after an anthrax-filled letter forced the evacuation of the Senate office of Majority Leader Tom Daschle. Accusing the press of “monolithic and unquestioning coverage” of the anthrax strikes, he wrote that we, and the Times especially, had hyped the story and tried to blame Iraq for the attack. But the front-page story that Steve and I wrote, as Massing acknowledged, reported that Iraq was only one of several potential suspects, and that it was far too early to hold anyone responsible.22 A second Massing article in December essentially accused Steve, Bill, and me of hyping the attacks to sell our book Germs, a serious charge. Our “alarmist language” and “strong suggestion of state sponsorship” had contributed to a “sense of panic in the land.”
The powder-filled letters ultimately killed five, infected seventeen, put over ten thousand Americans on antibiotics, and closed several post offices throughout the Northeast and a Senate office building. They triggered the largest, most complex FBI investigation in US history. A Times/PBS documentary based on that reporting for our book, Germs, won an Emmy in 2002.
I wanted to write a detailed response to Massing’s highly selective account of the press’s prewar coverage, as Bob Kaiser had done, but I didn’t. For one thing, as Jason reminded me, the Review gave its own writers the last word. Knowing that the social media would revel in a lengthy, angry exchange with Massing, given my husband’s continuing involvement with the Review, I decided to complain only about being misquoted in my response to his questions. I counted on Michael Gordon, who told me he was writing a response to Massing’s critique, to set the record straight and defend not just his own work but also the paper’s prewar reporting, including certainly what we had written together.
Michael’s letter listed Times stories that had challenged the administration’s case for war that Massing had ignored.23 He went toe to toe with Massing. My concerns about Massing’s rebuttal turned out to be well founded. His response to Michael’s two-thousand-word letter was almost equally long.
In his response to my letter, Massing asserted that I was “simply wrong” about his misquoting me, though he offered no evidence to support that claim. He was relying on memory, as was I, but his quote of what I had supposedly said made no sense. Moreover, it was “revealing,” Massing added, that I had not contested the other “serious shortcomings” he had identified in my work.
Massing was surely aware of my awkward position. My decision not to respond, however, was a mistake.
— CHAPTER 19 —
SCAPEGOAT
I was at a biology conference in New Orleans on May 26, 2004, when the Times published its unsigned editor’s note, “The Times and Iraq.”
Initially I was relieved. At 1,145 words, it was half as long as the draft Keller and Jill Abramson had shown me five days earlier. It ran on a Wednesday, not the Sunday paper; on A-10, not the front page. It did not name me or any other reporter. It blamed prewar coverage that was “not as rigorous as it should have been” and “insufficiently qualified” on anonymous “editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing them for more skepticism” who were “perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper.” Those unnamed editors had bannered “dire claims” about Iraq on page 1 and “buried” more skeptical stories inside the paper.
Though being accused of trying to “rush scoops into the paper” was usually not considered a transgression, the criticism seemed to be aimed at Howell Raines, who had complained often that the paper’s “ingrained complacency” had resulted in a “slow response to competition.”1
The note also blamed a “circle of Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on ‘regime change’ in Iraq,” especially Ahmad Chalabi, an “occasional source” since 1991. Chalabi, a “favorite” of Bush administration “hard-liners” and “a paid broker of information from Iraqi exiles,” had “taken in” administration officials and many news organizations with his “misinformation . . . in particular, this one,” the note stated.
“The Times and Iraq,” the note “From the Editors,” asserted that the paper had produced some good reporting that had accurately reflected “the state of our knowledge at the time.” It acknowledged the possibility that chemical or biological weapons might still be found in Iraq.2
I thought of that session the week before. It had taken me almost five hours to persuade Keller and Abramson that their original version of the note was wrong, but a great deal was at stake. An editor’s note is not just one of those standard corrections published on page 2. It is the paper’s equivalent of a papal bull: an acknowledgment that something terrible has happened. Two months earlier, Keller had rejected a request for a review of the paper’s Iraq War–related reporting from Daniel Okrent, the Times’s newly minted “public editor.” Soon after becoming executive editor, Keller wrote Okrent an email that Okrent subsequently put online, saying that he had reviewed my WMD coverage and had not seen a “prima facie case for recanting or repudiating the stories.” Charges that our coverage had been “insufficiently skeptical” were “an easier claim to make in hindsight,” he wrote. Keller had called me a “smart, well-sourced, industrious and fearless reporter with a keen instinct for news, and an appetite for dauntingly hard subjects.” My early Osama bin Laden coverage was “uniquely foresighted before 9/11” and had been “at least partly responsible for one of our Pulitzers.” Like many “aggressive reporters,” I had sometimes “stepped on toes,” but that was hardly “grounds for rebuke.”
Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. defended me, too. Challenged about my Iraqi WMD reporting in March 2004 at a college newspaper convention in New York City, he said that he had known me “for decades” and that I had “fabulous sources.”3 “Were her sources wrong
? Absolutely,” he said. “Her sources were wrong. And you know something? The administration was wrong. And when you’re covering it from the inside like that, you’re going to get things wrong sometimes.” He blamed the Bush administration for “believing its own story line.”
While I welcomed Arthur’s defense, I had not parroted the administration’s line. I had struggled to verify every published tip. Still, I was pleased that Arthur was unwilling to let antiwar critics scapegoat me for the intelligence community’s failure.
So what had changed between March and May of 2004? After months of criticism of my reporting and that of others at the Times, why had Keller—and, by implication, Arthur, since such an institutional statement would have required his approval—decided that an editor’s note was needed? And why the sudden rush?
I had urged Keller to examine more closely what the paper had published. I had sent him and Abramson copies of memos and emails I hoped would shake their conviction that my reporting had been unduly credulous and reflected a prowar bias. I included an example of a headline, crafted by editors, that had contradicted my story. The headline, “U.S. Experts Find Radioactive Material in Iraq,” ran over the article, which asserted, at its top, that the discovery was “very unlikely to be related to weaponry.” I attached copies of unanswered emails to foreign editor Roger Cohen and a memo I wrote to several editors, before the invasion, suggesting stories that had questioned the rush to war and the administration’s competence.
I included a memo I sent two senior editors on January 28, 2003, listing ideas I hoped to pursue alone or with other reporters. First was the interview with Hans Blix, the UN’s Iraqi WMD inspections chief. Another concerned the Bush administration’s “Lack of Day-After Planning” in the run-up to the invasion. A third challenged the oft-repeated assertion that international inspections could not be prolonged because soldiers who had already been deployed to the region could not be kept there “for weeks and months on end.” Keeping them there would be expensive, I wrote, and there would be some degradation of capability over time. But military sources had assured me that the US forces could remain deployed “thru next September without a significant loss in war-fighting capability.” I proposed a more detailed look at the antiwar movement at home. A Michigan paper had reported that “42 cities across the nation” had already approved resolutions opposing the war—impressive, I thought, and undercovered by the Times.
I also suggested a deeper look at Condi Rice’s dysfunctional decision-making at the NSC. “People leave principals’ meetings unsure of what has been decided,” I quoted a senior source as having remarked about the White House’s Cabinet-level meetings. They seemed to resolve few disputes, especially those between Rumsfeld’s Pentagon and Powell’s State Department—America’s “Sunnis and the Shiites,” as Charles Duelfer had called their notorious rivalry. “So everyone goes off and does his own thing,” I wrote in my memo. Could this continue “if the nation is at war?”
I proposed exploring the apparent policy contradiction between administration officials who, on the one hand, wanted to transform Iraq into a pro-Western democracy, and, on the other, claimed to be “instinctively resistant to nation building.” How would the president resolve this inconsistency?
While I interviewed Blix with UN bureau chief Julia Preston days after sending the memo, neither Abramson nor any other editor had asked me to pursue my other suggestions. Occasionally I would see stories by Times reporters on similar themes. But I had no idea whether my memo had helped trigger them.
Recalling Keller’s original draft of the editor’s note, I felt less distressed than I had anticipated when I read the note in New Orleans, until I called Safire. He was furious. Had I not noticed that I had written, or coauthored, four of the seven “problematic” stories that had accompanied the paper’s online version of the note?4 “You’ve been trashed, kiddo.”
“You should have seen the original version,” I replied. Besides, my battle over the note had not been totally in vain. Keller had told me before the note ran that once the issue was behind us, the paper would explore in depth the Iraq War intelligence, policy, and operational failures that so preoccupied me. He had finally decided to assemble a team of reporters to investigate the alleged WMD intelligence lapses and the poorly managed postwar occupation, the type of inquiry at which the Times excelled. I would be part of that team, he assured me. Excited about the prospect of revisiting issues and experts I had written about before the war, I agreed to go to Washington as soon as possible to start reporting on the sudden end of the Pentagon’s relationship with Ahmad Chalabi.
Launching such an investigative series meant that I would be able to figure out whether the paper and I had been misled and to interview officials who were normally off-limits, given the paper’s preoccupation with turf, particularly at the Washington bureau.
Keller had insisted since September 2003 that I clear each trip to DC in advance with him. The desk in the Washington bureau that I once regularly occupied had been given to another reporter. I felt increasingly like a nonperson during my visits.
Safire knew that Keller had quietly urged me that fall to avoid Iraq War topics, especially WMD, until criticism of me in the blogosphere had subsided. Why, he asked me, would Keller suddenly launch such a controversial series now? And why would he risk more criticism by including me on such a reporting team? Washington bureau reporters came by each day to chat with him. Safire spoke often with Phil Taubman, the new Washington bureau chief, who had been a friend of mine since our reporting days in Washington and a champion of investigative reporting. But neither Phil nor any of his reporters had mentioned such an ambitious project, Safire told me.
That was odd, I agreed.
* * *
It didn’t take long for media critics to pounce on Keller’s editor’s note as “too little, too late.” Why had the Times’s “mini culpa” not appeared on the front page? demanded Jack Shafer. Writing for Slate, Shafer had been complaining about my WMD reporting for almost a year.
Okrent, the paper’s public editor, weighed in on the Times’s Iraq War reporting on Sunday, June 30, four days after the editor’s note. Okrent, who had taken the ombudsman’s job only five months earlier, was still learning how the Times operated. Three days before his column was published, we discussed my work for an hour over coffee. Because he seemed to have his mind made up, I declined to discuss in any detail how my stories had been written or the identity of my sources.5
Okrent’s 1,850-word essay in the Sunday paper reflected Keller’s apology. He, too, concluded that the paper’s “flawed journalism” had been “not individual, but institutional.” While he cited two of my articles about defectors’ claims in his list of “flawed” stories—my prewar article based on Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri’s allegations and the postwar story based on the claims of Fadil Abbas al-Husayni, the Iraqi military intelligence officer—Okrent concluded that critics’ effort to pin the paper’s “failure” on me was “inaccurate and unfair.” He blamed unnamed editors for questionable story assignments, placement, length, headlines, and the lack of follow-up.6
Okrent’s note helped explain why Keller had seemed so determined to publish an editor’s note quickly. Okrent disclosed that he had told Keller on May 18 that he would be writing about the paper’s failure to revisit its Iraq intelligence coverage. Keller had replied that an independent inquiry was already under way. Their discussion took place three days before Keller and Abramson showed me their first draft of the editor’s note.
I was pleased that one of Okrent’s main complaints was the lack of follow-up on controversial stories. But he repeated Keller’s assertion that our stories were wrong because we had fallen for “misinformation, disinformation, and suspect analysis.” While I couldn’t rule out the possibility that some intelligence analysts had altered their conclusions under White House pressure, or told their bosses what they thought they wanted to hear, two major studies after the invasion discounted the exi
stence of such political pressure and endorsed a less conspiratorial conclusion. The reports about the WMD intelligence debacle by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Robb-Silberman commission found that the analysts were wrong, but not because they wanted to go to war. Some did; some didn’t. Rather, the studies concluded, the analysts had erred because of sloppy tradecraft, bureaucratic rivalries, failures of communication, and because they feared the consequences of underestimating a WMD or terrorist threat in the wake of 9/11, as many had done so often before the September attacks. State Department intelligence chief Carl Ford argued that such 9/11 fears had been reinforced by the intelligence community’s underestimation of Saddam’s nuclear weapons program before the 1991 Gulf War.7
* * *
After the editor’s note and Okrent’s column were published, I contemplated the damage. Though Keller’s note had not named me, and Okrent had explicitly concluded that it was inaccurate and unfair to blame me alone for the paper’s alleged “failings,” their essays scarred my reputation. In attempting to restore the newspaper’s editorial integrity, they had taken my twenty-seven-year prize-filled career, as Bill Safire had complained, and trashed it. I was not a perfect reporter. I had broken quite a few rules in my thirty years of journalism and committed my share of journalistic sins. As a foreign correspondent, I had occasionally drunk too many martinis in too many hotel rooms on the road after eighteen-hour-long reporting days. I had yelled at colleagues who I thought had failed to carry their weight on a story or endangered our sources. I was perpetually late filing expense accounts. I had sharp elbows. I resisted being cut out of stories. I failed to appreciate the importance of building a network of friends inside the Times. While I had a few close pals at the paper, I tended to regard time spent at the coffee cart with colleagues as goofing off since I was not reporting. But I had never lacked skepticism. Nor had I twisted or ignored facts to achieve a political outcome. Yet that was the crime of which I was accused.
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