The Story

by Judith Miller

  While I had intended to write about his saga in my book, Haideri’s very presence in Washington was news. Two weeks earlier, Jim Dwyer, a New York–based Times investigative reporter, had reported that Chalabi’s INC had coached Iraqi defectors he had steered to American journalists and US intelligence officials before the war. Dwyer had relied heavily on a former representative of the INC who had worked with several defectors, including Haideri. But the former INC official also acknowledged having had a bitter split with the group and having been arrested by the Americans, twice, after Saddam was defeated in April 2003. Dwyer based his claim largely on that embittered Iraqi. He also wrote that Haideri and the other defectors “could not be reached for comment.” But here Haideri was, two weeks later, having tea with me in Virginia.

  In May 2004, Keller’s editor’s note suggested that the paper had been “taken in” by Haideri’s false claims. Okrent’s public editor’s note, too, suggested that American officials and Haideri invented their concern about the fate of his relatives back in Baghdad. Okrent clearly doubted that they were in jeopardy and that one of them may have been hurt or killed as a warning to other defectors. “Were they?” Okrent wrote. “Did anyone go back to ask? Did anything Haideri say have genuine value?”

  The paper now had a chance to revisit Haideri’s claims as its editors had urged: to publish the missing “follow-up” to my controversial front-page story. Haideri, the alleged fabricator, was hiding in plain sight. He even had a Facebook account.

  I called Keller at home. Whatever our differences, the news came first. While Keller would not permit me to follow up on the story I had broken, another Times reporter could decide whether Haideri had lied or embellished—or, as his legion of critics charged, had misled our paper, its readers, and the country.

  Keller was furious again. Why had I disregarded his order to stop reporting on Iraq and WMD? While I had no intention of writing about Haideri for the Times, I replied, I would continue trying to understand how and why the prewar WMD intelligence had failed. I was writing a book—on my own time, I reminded him. I had paid for my trip to Washington myself. This was purely a courtesy call to pass along a story that Keller had said the paper had an obligation to pursue.

  In New York the next morning, Jim Risen, our intelligence reporter, called me. Keller had asked him to pursue the story. I gave him Haideri’s address. Jim later told me that he had driven to Centreville, only to find Haideri gone. Selwa was unable to speak enough English to explain his disappearance. Jim did not tell me whether he or another reporter had pursued the matter further.

  By 2014, Haideri had not been deported. John A. Rizzo, the CIA’s former general counsel and an agency lawyer for over thirty years, told me in an interview in 2013 that while he did not recall the details of Haideri’s case, defectors deemed to be fabricators were usually not compensated and were invariably forced to leave America. Soon after our 2004 meeting in Virginia, Haideri had hired a lawyer and applied for political asylum. In 2006 the CIA formally ended its relationship with him after negotiating what he and his lawyer claimed was a $400,000 payment in exchange for his pledge of silence.

  The CIA refused to comment on him and other defectors. But in 2009 Charles Duelfer, who had led the search for WMD in Iraq in 2004, published Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq, a book about his WMD hunt. His book confirmed my assertion that the intelligence community had debriefed Haideri at length and had issued many reports based on his reporting. “Sometimes what he said was correct; sometimes he was inferring too much,” Duelfer concluded. He did not use the word fabricator.

  * * *

  By October 2004, I had gone from being a reporter who made headlines to becoming the headline myself.

  It felt asphyxiating. I tried carrying on with my reporting, but I was increasingly preoccupied with legal meetings about how to avoid a confrontation with prosecutor Fitzgerald and jail. Though some critics wrote later that I was eager to go to jail as a First Amendment martyr, nothing was further from the truth.4 Jason, my amazingly healthy husband who rarely even got colds, had been ill. In 2004 he had a stent placed in an artery near his heart. I was merely a good actress, putting up a stoic front. Deep down, I was scared stiff.

  After several discouraging conversations with Floyd Abrams, I decided that I could not comply with Fitzgerald’s demands, even if it meant going to jail.

  It was ultimately my call, not the paper’s. Unlike Matt Cooper, I had not discussed my sources in emails that belonged to the Times. George and Floyd, who were representing me as well as the paper, were content not to contest my view that my notebooks were not the paper’s. If the paper did not own my notebooks, it, unlike Time magazine, could not be fined.

  In October 2004 Judge Thomas F. Hogan of the federal district court ordered me jailed for as long as eighteen months to persuade me to change my mind. He suspended the sanction pending our appeal. “We have a classic confrontation between competing interests,” he said from the bench. I was acting in “good faith,” he allowed, doing my “duty as a respected and established reporter who believes reporters have a First Amendment privilege that trumps the right of the government to inquire into her sources.” But I had no legal right to refuse to answer the government’s questions.

  Arthur Sulzberger, who had accompanied me to Washington, was supportive. The judge had said that I was a “great reporter doing a great job. And that’s absolutely right,” he told NBC. But journalists believed that we “have the law on our side,” that the First Amendment “protects us from having to give this information.” If we lost, I would be going to jail for something I never wrote and something we never published. “And that’s just wrong,” he said.

  Arthur and I knew that the law was not on our side. While the Times is fond of recalling legal victories in the Pentagon Papers case, the dispositive decision on a journalist’s right to protect a source was Branzburg v. Hayes, which Judge Hogan cited in holding Matt Cooper and me in contempt of court. In a 5-to-4 decision in 1972, the Supreme Court ruled that requiring reporters to appear and testify before grand juries does not abridge the freedom of the press that the First Amendment guarantees. A defendant has the right to “every man’s testimony.” A majority also ruled that the First Amendment does not give journalists the right to protect sources, especially if they have broken the law. James Goodale, then the general counsel of the Times, used opinions written by Justices Potter Stewart and Lewis Powell to carve out exceptions to the ruling.

  Justice Stewart had proposed a three-part balancing test to weigh a grand jury’s needs. The government had to demonstrate (1) “probable cause” to believe that the journalist has information relevant to the investigation; (2) that the information being sought cannot be gotten in another way; and (3) finally, that the government has a “compelling and overriding interest” in getting the information. Justice Powell gave journalists a bit more ammunition in his separate opinion. Though he had voted with the majority, he argued that the balancing test should be conducted on a “case-by-case” basis. In subsequent cases, the Supreme Court had usually sided with the government seeking the information. It would be an uphill battle, Floyd told me. Our chances were less than fifty-fifty.

  Arthur predicted that we would win. Was I willing to stick with this? To the end?

  I doubted I would have much choice, I replied. If I couldn’t get a voluntary waiver of the confidentiality pledge I had given my source—and Floyd had told me that was most unlikely—I was prepared to go to jail. Given the Branzburg ruling, I would probably be spending some “quality time” there, I told him.

  Arthur glanced away, reluctant to ponder the implications of losing such a high-profile case. I doubted that our fight would end as triumphantly as his father’s victory in the Pentagon Papers case. In my case, the source being protected, I noted, was not a classic “whistle-blower”: an obscure junior official trying to reveal wrongdoing in the public’s interest. It was a senior official who may have leaked informa
tion to smear a subordinate or, best case, to protect his boss from an allegation of having lied the country to war. That would not resonate well with the public, or even journalists.

  I wanted to set just a couple of ground rules. If I refused to cooperate, I wanted an open channel only to him. Arthur seemed pleased but puzzled by that request.

  “But what about Keller?” he asked me, looking slightly alarmed.

  I told Arthur that I no longer trusted Keller after he had nearly betrayed “Jim Preston,” my DIA source.

  I also told Arthur how wrongheaded I thought the decision to publish an editor’s note had been. Knowing that he, as publisher, would surely have approved the note, and perhaps Dan Okrent’s column as well, I said that neither the paper nor its reporters had been “taken in,” as the note suggested. And I told him I felt I had been scapegoated. Though the editor’s note had not mentioned my name, my journalistic integrity had been implicitly called into question. Since then, I told him, I had felt betrayed by the institution I had worked for for so long. For months, I had felt utterly alone.

  Arthur leapt to his feet and wrapped his arms around me, hugging me tightly, something he had not done since our days as reporters together in Washington. “I know it’s been rough on you,” he said. I noticed that he did not contradict my assertion that he had approved Keller’s note. “I know how stressful it’s been,” he added. “But that’s all over now. You are not alone.”

  We stood together, motionless for a few seconds while I struggled to regain my composure. “I promise you,” Arthur told me. “You will not be alone in this fight, Judy. I will never abandon you again.”

  — CHAPTER 21 —

  INMATE 45570083

  “Praise Jesus! Push on through the pain! Do those squats! Feel that pull! Praise the Lord!”

  It was late July 2005, Gospelrobics time at the Alexandria Detention Center, my home since Judge Hogan had jailed me until I agreed to discuss my confidential sources with a grand jury. Since the only exercise bicycle in Cell Block 2-E was broken, I was having fitness guru Reggie Thornton take me through his paces. I was punching the air to a Christian disco tune on the TV set in our lounge.

  Because it was early on a Sunday, most of the twenty-two women in this unit were sleeping. Only a few were sitting on our threadbare couch or playing cards at the Formica tables. A couple were watching Reggie urge us to “give it up for Jesus.”

  “He’s hot,” declared Ricochet, a fellow inmate, eyes fixed on Reggie’s pectorals and abs. “I wouldn’t mind a piece of him.”

  Soon residents of 2-E would be eating breakfast. Then the unit’s large steel door would be unlocked, and many would go next door to Bible class, one of the few places where male and female prisoners were permitted to mingle, which might account for its popularity. I would be able to switch from Gospelrobics or our usual BET channel to the Sunday news shows.

  The choice of programming in 2-F, the second unit in which I spent time, was by consensus. 2-E, where I spent my first month at ADC, used a rotation system: each day an inmate chose the programming she preferred. Consensus meant there were few votes for Jim Lehrer’s NewsHour, whereas hardly a day passed without Oprah and, on Sunday, Joel Osteen, the televangelist who filled stadiums throughout the country. We started our day with the TV serial Charmed, about a group of modern benign witches. Once a week at night, it was Prison Break.

  It took fewer than twenty-four hours to go from being Judith Miller, investigative reporter, to Inmate 45570083 at ADC, a nondescript, eight-story brick building in Alexandria, Virginia.

  On July 6, 2005, I was taken from a cell at the courtroom in which I had been sentenced, and “processed” through the system in record time (the prison director told me). I was photographed, fingerprinted, and given an olive green uniform with Prisoner embossed in faded white letters on the back of the jacket, along with two sets of underwear, one pair of sports shorts and a bra, two worn T-shirts, a sleeping gown, a beige plastic cup, one towel, two coarse brown sheets, a paper-thin mat and matching pillow, and one blanket. A see-through plastic bag held all my other worldly possessions: a comb, toothbrush, toothpaste, shampoo, deodorant, and soap.

  I was not permitted to wear the gold stud earrings I had worn since my ears were pierced as a teenager. I could not keep any jewelry except my wedding ring, since it contained no precious stones. The goal was to separate inmates from their own world. Even wristwatches were banned. “Deputies,” as we were told to call guards, had effectively abolished time.

  My two-story cell block had six tiny cells per floor, which opened onto a large balcony on the top floor and a lounge on the lower level, the unit’s only common space. Lit all day and dimmed only at night, the harsh fluorescent lights were not good for sustained reading. Fortunately, I am a sound sleeper, as I discovered in Iraq.

  I learned gradually to estimate the time based on the amount and angle of light that shone through a slit in my cell’s concrete wall, its only “window.” The seventy-square-foot rectangular cell had no furniture—just an open toilet and sink that two women shared, plus a mirror made of polished metal that could not be shattered or used to slash a wrist or murder a cell mate.

  Occasionally I had the cell to myself. But on busy summer weekends, I often had two cell mates, usually Hispanic illegal immigrants who spoke little English and were picked up in raids. The US Marshals Service rented space for them and other federal prisoners in this state facility.

  The ADC was a maximum-security jail intended to house inmates awaiting trial or those sentenced to less than a year. Some had been here longer. Others were repeat offenders: men and women, even generations of families, who had spent much of their lives circulating in and out of this jail. For them, the deputies, counselors, and administrators were a second family.

  Unlike prisons intended for longer-term confinement, ADC wasn’t required to provide courtyards for exercise or access to fresh air. I envied Martha Stewart as I read about her jogs on the footpath that linked inmates’ cottages and the afternoon volleyball games at minimum-security Camp Alderson, in West Virginia, known as “Camp Cupcake.” Martha called the prison “Yale.” Because males greatly outnumbered females at ADC, women were permitted on the basketball court, the jail’s sole common recreational area, only at odd hours when our male counterparts weren’t there. Sometimes an empathetic deputy would unlock a side door to the gym that opened onto an alcove with a wire-mesh roof, a giant birdcage. You could breathe fresh air there. In my eighty-five days at ADC, I had access to the alcove and fresh air five times.

  The worst part of jail was not sleeping on a paper-thin yoga mat on the cold concrete ledges that had replaced more expensive cots; nor the vile food—mystery meats drenched in thick brown sauce that a fellow inmate dubbed “sloppy no’s,” accompanied by starches and carbohydrates in shades of brown and gray. Nor was it the constant din. (My jail notes are filled with unanswered requests for earplugs.) What unnerved me most was the unpredictability and loss of control. The jail had a theoretical schedule: cell doors were unlocked electronically on a buzzer system and an ear-shattering clang each morning between six thirty and seven, and slammed shut again sometime after eleven thirty at night. Though lockdowns in our claustrophobic cells were supposed to coincide with daily staff shifts, they were irregular. We were locked down during national security alerts or storm warnings, during the jail’s frequent power failures, when a fight broke out among inmates anywhere in the jail, or sometimes to punish an entire unit when a few inmates became unruly or suicidal, the latter being the deputies’ constant concern. There had never been a suicide at ADC, and the jail’s staff intended to keep it that way.

  “We are in control here,” Mondre Kornegay, the jail’s director of inmate services, told me soon after my admission. I would have an easier time when I accepted that.

  I devised a plan to keep busy. I would consider jail a reporting assignment. The device would give me a mission beyond protecting my sources and restore some sen
se of control, however slender.

  Jail was boring. It was also insanely bureaucratic. Run out of dental floss? Fill out a form. Want a new pair of socks? Sign a form, in triplicate. Need two aspirins for a splitting headache? Complete the form. I would eventually get the aspirin—if not the socks or dental floss—but days later, long after the headache. ADC often ran out of the forms.

  The worst night was my first, July 7, in the jail’s central booking facility. I had barely recovered from being surrounded by burly marshals and yanked out of the DC courtroom where Judge Hogan had ruled against me. I had just enough time to wave good-bye to Jason and hear my lawyers’ protests. Judge Hogan had said that I would remain in jail until I agreed to testify, or at least until the end of the grand jury on October 28.

  I was bundled out of the courtroom into an adjacent room and put in a holding cell just behind the judge’s bench. The contrast was stark between the order and decorum of the proceedings (justice) and the lack of either on the other side of the door (punishment). After what seemed like an hour—my watch had been taken away—marshals slapped handcuffs on my wrists that were shackled to my ankles. I shuffled to a van that took me across the Potomac River to ADC.

  During that first night in the cramped, airless holding cell in the booking area, one of the other three newcomers kept screaming. A wisdom tooth was killing her. She needed her Percocet. She wanted to see a doctor, a lawyer, her mother, a guard, a-n-y-o-n-e! There was a common toilet in the dank cell, which smelled of urine, sweat, and stale food, but there was no toilet paper. She wanted that, too.

  Sometime in the early morning of that terrible first night, I was awakened by the distinctive wailing of British police car sirens; the sound of World War II movies. Disoriented by the incarceration and the blaring of British horns, I stepped over the other two sleeping women and inched toward the small, elevated rectangular window. Standing on tiptoes, I saw marshals huddled around a TV set.