In accusing me, however, Keller, Abramson, and Okrent were accusing the Times as well. Nor did their notes quell the growing media fury over the paper’s prewar coverage of what was becoming a disastrous war. Suggesting that reporters and the paper had been insufficiently skeptical incited the paper’s critics. From then on, such critics would point to the notes as proof that the Times and “mainstream media” could not be trusted.
Howell, who feared the impact of Keller’s note on the institution he had led, attempted damage control. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, he denied that our Iraq stories had been rushed into the paper to get scoops. “In 25 years on the Times and in 21 months as executive editor,” Howell wrote, “I never put anything into the paper before I thought it was ready.” Any of the “30 or so people who sat in our front-page meetings during the run-up to the Iraq invasion and the first phase of the war can attest to the seriousness with which everyone took the story.” Neither Keller nor Okrent had contacted him about how such controversial stories had been handled, he told me.8
* * *
The editor’s note and Okrent’s essays refocused attention on Ahmad Chalabi, who had become a target of the war’s critics. A man on a mission, Chalabi made it his business to be well informed, and to share what he had learned, or suspected, with journalists. Talking to him was essential. But his allegations had to be double- and triple-checked.
When Chalabi sat behind Laura Bush at the president’s State of the Union address in January 2004, few would have predicted that four months later, an American-assisted Iraqi police raid would descend on his Baghdad HQ, or that the administration would soon sever the $340,000-a-month payment to his INC opposition group. The raid on his well-fortified compound was preceded by even more stunning news: Chalabi, according to Newsweek, was alleged to have given Iran information about top-secret American surveillance of Iran’s communications. Rich Bonin, a 60 Minutes reporter and producer, asserted that Chalabi and a top aide had informed senior Iranian intelligence officials in March that US intelligence had broken Tehran’s encryption code and was monitoring its diplomatic cables.9 Chalabi took to the Sunday talk shows to deny the charge: George Tenet was trying to smear him to shift blame from the CIA’s faulty prewar intelligence, he said.
Long before this, pressure had been building on Keller and Abramson to distance themselves and the Times from Chalabi. The American press had published 108 articles based on information that Chalabi’s INC had provided. (I had written one of them.) In our meeting before the editor’s note was published, Keller kept returning to Chalabi. Hadn’t I relied excessively on him?
No, I hadn’t, I insisted. Chalabi had provided information or quotes for two of the stories I had written before the war about Iraq’s WMD capabilities and only three of some twenty-four stories I wrote during my embed with the 75th XTF in the spring of 2003. Only one of those three concerned the hunt for WMD.
Yes, the 75th XTF’s MET Alpha unit I had spent the most time monitoring had worked closely with Chalabi for part of its mission in Iraq. So, too, had a team of DIA analysts working out of the INC’s headquarters at the Hunting Club. One of them was an agent whom I had come to trust. Code-named “Jim Preston,” he had recently returned to Washington from Baghdad.
I did not know whether the reports of Chalabi’s extensive lies and double-dealing were true, I had told Keller and Abramson. Like so many of the charges and countercharges swirling around the Iraq War mess, this one would remain murky. Military and intelligence analysts would remain divided over Chalabi. MET Alpha’s soldiers and other DIA analysts who had worked with his group most closely, including “Jim Preston,” had praised some of Chalabi’s information. Richard Myers, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had told Congress that information provided by Chalabi’s group had “saved American lives.”
Chalabi was at very least a convenient scapegoat for the intelligence community. Had his group “coached” defectors? Several reports and investigations said so. Others defended him. Whatever the case, the dispute over the impact of Chalabi’s information diverted attention from the CIA’s and the intelligence community’s grave shortcomings.
I was thinking about Chalabi’s sudden fall from grace as I entered the DC steak house where “Jim Preston” was at the bar, nursing what was apparently not his first beer. I was alarmed by his appearance. Like all of us, he had lost a lot of weight in Iraq. He looked exhausted. His blue eyes sat deep in their sockets; his pale cheeks were flushed. He was jittery.
“The beer’s a lot colder here than in Baghdad,” he greeted me. I smiled and hugged him.
“You look awful,” I told him. “What’s wrong?”
Nothing, he protested.
For an intelligence official schooled in the art of deception, Jim was a poor liar. The cause of his misery soon tumbled out. Ever since his return from Iraq, he told me, FBI counterintelligence agents had been grilling him about whether he was the source of the intelligence leak to Chalabi about the NSA’s secret surveillance of Iran’s diplomatic cables.
Jim protested that he had not known about the program, which was classified top secret. He said he had just been polygraphed. And he was not alone. FBI agents had gone to Baghdad to “poly” other DIA colleagues who were working with Chalabi, he told me.
Fearful of being blamed as the source of the leak, he had hired Plato Cacheris, a lawyer whose clients included such high-profile defendants as the spy Robert Hanssen and White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The investigation was costing him his extra combat and hardship pay in Iraq, but it was necessary. Before telling me what was wrong, Jim made me promise that I would not publish or reveal his name. Journalists were then competing to report what federal investigators were doing to identify the source of the Chalabi leak. If his real name was published, the FBI would assume that he had talked to me.
When I returned to New York the next morning, I met briefly with Keller and Abramson to tell them what I was learning about prewar intelligence and to discuss my reporting plans for our series. Jill mentioned that the bureau was scrambling for information about whom the FBI was targeting in its inquiry into Chalabi’s leak to Iran. I told them that a sensitive American source who had been ensnared in the dragnet had told me that the FBI was focusing on him and other civilian military intelligence analysts at the Pentagon, as well as other contractors who had worked with Chalabi in Baghdad.
Who was my source? Keller and Jill asked.
Senior editors have the right to know the identity of such sources, but I hesitated. Stressing that my source was desperate and that I had promised to protect his anonymity, I said his name was Jim Preston, using the code name. He had hired Plato Cacheris as his lawyer, I added.
By the time I returned to Washington the next day, Jim had called my cell phone several times. He was frantic. Why had I betrayed him? he shouted.
What was he talking about?
David Johnston, the Times Justice Department reporter, had just called Cacheris to ask whether he had a client named Jim Preston whom the FBI suspected of having leaked sensitive information to Ahmad Chalabi. Could Cacheris confirm the report? Did he have any other clients who were also targets in the inquiry?
Keller and Abramson had obviously passed on my source’s name, employer, and lawyer to David. Since they knew only Jim’s code name, Cacheris told David Johnston, accurately, that he had no client by that name. Fortunately, I had worked with David long enough to know that he was among the more discreet reporters in Washington. I stopped by his desk to explain the sensitivity of Jim’s involvement and to share what little more I knew about the FBI’s probe. David, a pro, wrote a story about the inquiry that protected my source.
When I confronted Keller and Abramson about the incident the next day, Abramson said that she hadn’t understood that my source was quite so sensitive. Keller told me that his broader obligation to the paper had prompted him to pass along Jim Preston’s name, without a reference to me, so that David could pursue
what was obviously a competitive story. But Keller had neglected to tell me what he had done, I said. As a result, I hadn’t alerted my source or his attorney. Jim Preston’s confidence in me, not to mention my flagging faith in my senior editors’ discretion, was shaken. The protection of sources was essential to investigative reporting. We were nothing without people who trusted us enough to risk their careers to help us inform our readers.
* * *
Some sources risked more than their careers in talking to journalists or the US government. They risked their lives. After what happened with Jim Preston, I was determined to say nothing to anyone about my efforts to learn the fate of Fadil Abbas al-Husayni, the “baseball cap” scientist who had been cooperating with the US army at great personal peril since MET Alpha had tracked him down.
Over time, I had learned more about his alleged WMD activities. While some of his claims to me were later described as wrong or exaggerated, or could not be verified, I was told that Abbas was, as he had claimed, privy to information about a very sensitive, secret part of the chemical weapons effort that would never be fully understood. Charles Duelfer’s final report on Iraq’s WMD, issued in September 2004, identified the Iraqi I had written about as a member of an elite group of senior military intelligence officers who had supervised a unit that made poisons and chemical agents for assassinations and other small-scale operations in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The ISG report noted that while this secret, twelve-man “chemical preparation division” within the Iraqi intelligence service’s M16 directorate was not producing toxic chemicals or poisons at the time of the invasion, it may still have been conducting some small-scale research and development. The report said that while the M16 directorate did not appear to be an attempt to keep a core group of scientists together to restart a larger chemical warfare production group when and if sanctions were lifted, sources had told the ISG that the M16 division had plans to “produce and weaponize nitrogen mustard using CS rifle grenades” and to make and ship “sarin and sulfur mustard” in perfume bottles to the United States and Europe. The plans were “extremely difficult to corroborate,” the ISG reported, “because they were not carried out” and because so few people within the Iraqi intelligence directorate were aware of them.
Still later, a former intelligence officer told me that Duelfer’s report should not have mentioned Abbas by name because he had been an important source for the American weapons hunters. The disclosure of his name, which appears but once in Duelfer’s three-volume, fifteen-hundred page report, had been a mistake, the official disclosed. Unaware of his status at the time, I had identified him in a draft of a story because the army’s translator thought that the name he had given MET Alpha in his written offer to cooperate was a pseudonym. I was mortified to discover that it wasn’t. While his name was deleted from most of the paper’s editions, I had inadvertently endangered an Iraqi who was cooperating with the United States. After consulting with Gerald and XTF officers, we decided that the best way to deflect attention from my innocent error was not to answer press questions about him. My silence allowed critics to charge that I was embarrassed by the story I had written. That was not true. Having inadvertently identified him, I feared that he would be targeted by forces still loyal to Saddam. He was, after all, a Shiite who had worked with Saddam’s dreaded intelligence service—a “traitor” to his fellow Muslims, some of the more fanatical Shia might conclude.
At a press conference in December 2003, David Kay told reporters about the danger faced by Iraqis who were working with the Americans. He mentioned that at least one scientist had been shot and badly wounded as a result of such retaliation. Kay declined to discuss the matter further—and declined to be interviewed by me. But an intelligence officer told me that Kay had been referring to an attempt on Abbas’s life.
I never stopped asking experts on Iraq and WMD whether they knew where he was and what had happened to him. In my subsequent trips to Iraq, I kept searching for Fadil Abbas al-Husayni. I never found him.
On Friday, June 4, 2004, I was back in Keller’s office in New York with Jill Abramson. Agreeing to “cut right to the chase,” as I had requested, Keller said that a week ago, he thought that after the editor’s note had run, he could assemble a team of reporters, including me, to pursue an investigative series about prewar intelligence, its impact on Iraq policy, and mismanagement of the occupation. He had changed his mind, he said. Whatever I wrote about Chalabi, Iraqi WMD, or the war would lack “credibility.” I would not be covering any of them in the future. In fact, he did not want me to cover national security.
I was astonished.
Like the editor’s note, this was a fait accompli. Bill Safire’s hunch had been right. The paper would publish several excellent stories that examined specific instances of alleged failures in prewar intelligence, but there would be no in-depth investigation into this spectacular intelligence failure. I realized then that there was never going to be. Even if there was one, I would not be part of it. As Safire had suspected, Keller and Abramson had dangled the prospect of my working on subjects I cared about so deeply to buy my silence in advance of the editor’s note, which I had agreed not to discuss in print, on radio, or on TV.
I came close to rage in his office that day. The record suggested that I was committed to the pursuit of the truth, however complex, no matter where it led, I told him as calmly as possible. Since returning from Iraq a year earlier, I had helped break stories about problematic prewar intelligence and policies that were unflattering to the administration.
I could understand his decision to remove me from Iraq War reporting, I told him, though I thought that was a mistake, given my expertise. But why was I being barred from all national security? How could that possibly be in the paper’s interest?
“Because all national security involves Iraq and those same sources,” he replied, according to my contemporaneous notes of the meeting. “People inside and outside of the paper are now suspicious of your reporting,” he said. The paper could not tolerate such doubt. He had to defend its “integrity.”
He had publicly defended my reporting, I reminded him. The editor’s note had called our “flawed” stories an “institutional” failure, rejecting individual blame. Why was I now being singled out? And what signal would it send the paper’s critics—many of them motivated ideologically—to know that if they complained loudly enough about a reporter’s work, no matter how inaccurate or reckless their complaints, the paper would bar that reporter from a story or a beat—indeed, from an entire area?
I would not be sidelined, I told them. Their decision would surely leak. I could not allow what remained of my professional integrity to be besmirched unjustly. I would consider an assignment outside of national security tantamount to being fired. I would leave the Times and write the book on intelligence failures and the hunt for WMD, which I had begun researching with Charles Duelfer, the inspector.
By the end of the meeting, Keller and Abramson were almost as angry as I was. We agreed to consider our options over the weekend. “It was, without a doubt, the ugliest meeting I have ever had with any senior editors at this paper,” I wrote in a notebook.
I thought their decision made no sense in such a competitive news climate. I suspected they would relent. And they did. A week later, Keller and Abramson assigned me to two competitive national security stories: Saddam’s use of the UN’s oil-for-food program to buy banned technology and bribe diplomats and foreign officials, and back to the FBI’s investigation into the anthrax letter attacks.
I had won the battle, but the victory felt hollow.
— CHAPTER 20 —
PROTECTING SOURCES
I had setbacks at the paper before and had always bounced back. Bill Keller and Jill Abramson’s edict in the fall of 2004 that I not cover national security was rescinded after a week. In addition to working on the Iraqi oil-for-food program and the anthrax attack probe, I was investigating with Will Rashbaum, a superb Times reporter, th
e New York Police Department’s ambitious effort to prevent another 9/11-scale attack on the city, particularly involving WMD. Together Will and I were describing for the first time some of the NYPD’s innovative programs.
I was also still gathering material for the book I hoped to write with Charles Duelfer about the Iraqi WMD intelligence failure. I was busy.
Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism czar who had turned on President Bush after the invasion of Iraq, urged me to leave the Times. “Why are you still working for people who don’t value you?” he said as we sipped coffee on a cool fall day in 2004 on a bench outside the headquarters of ABC News, where he was a consultant. My bosses had tried to blame the government’s bad WMD intelligence and the paper’s ostensible institutional failings on me to save their jobs, he asserted. “You’ve got to get out of there.”
I said nothing. Though I sensed he was right, I could not imagine quitting the paper that had been my home for twenty-seven years. Where would I go? Where would I work? Reporting for the Times was all I knew how to do.
There was a more compelling reason not to quit that I dared not share with Dick—or almost anyone else. I had begun confronting what I sensed might become the most grueling professional challenge of my life: I was waging two separate but concurrent efforts to protect my sources from a zealous prosecutor. Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the US attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, was demanding my home, office, and cell phone records—and those of Phil Shenon, another Times reporter—in a leak investigation involving two Islamic charities. Fitzgerald wanted to know who had told us about planned federal raids on the offices of the charities, which the government suspected of terrorist links. In 2002 we had written a story about a federal investigation of the charities. Our requests for comment had alerted them to the impending raids and damaged the government’s inquiry, Fitzgerald said.
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