Raines believed in the star system. He wanted star reporters chasing big stories. So he decided to send Judy Miller to Washington. “She has people in the White House who will talk to her and who will not talk to any other Times reporters,” Raines told editors.
Miller was a controversial, irrepressible, and vivacious fifty-three-year-old reporter who had a history of breaking big stories. She had also alienated many colleagues and often operated with an unusual (and somewhat puzzling) amount of free rein within the heavily managed Times bureaucracy. For years, there had been widespread talk among her colleagues that she frequently became too close to sources. And there was never-ending catty gossip about her propensity to socialize with sources, including heads of state. In the 1970s and 1980s, she had dated U.S. officials—including Representative Les Aspin and Undersecretary of State Richard Burt—who worked in areas related to those she covered. Burt, who had previously been a correspondent at the Times, wondered about her reporting. When they were dating, he later recalled, she had shown him drafts of stories that he believed were overly dependent on a single source, and he would ask her, “Are you sure about this?” She was, he said, “an unguided missile.”
She had been the paper’s Cairo bureau chief from 1983 to 1986. In the late 1980s, she served as deputy editor of the Washington bureau in a stint widely perceived among Times people as a disaster due to her abrasive management skills and heavy-handed editing. Still, she had cowritten a bestselling book on Saddam in 1990 and then authored a much praised book on her reporting stint in the Middle East that explored the rise of Muslim fundamentalism.
In early 2001, Miller had cowritten a three-part series that alerted the public to the rising threat posed by al-Qaeda. The articles later won a Pulitzer Prize. But a reporter who shared a byline with Miller on the first article, Craig Pyes, pulled his name off the other pieces in the series because he was disgusted with what he viewed as Miller’s fast-and-loose journalism. Before the series ran, Pyes sent his and Miller’s editors e-mails noting his concern that Miller’s reporting for the series was based too much on unconfirmed information from intelligence agencies. One of his e-mails read, “secret single source intel info that runs counter to the stated facts is nothing I hope we’d rely on.” And in a note to Engelberg he lit into Miller: “I do not trust her work, her judgment, or her conduct. She is an advocate, and her actions threaten the integrity of the enterprise, and of everyone who works with her…. She has turned in a draft of a story…that is little more than dictation from government sources over several days, filled with unproven assertions and factual inaccuracies, which she then called the product of a year’s investigation. Once she submitted the story…she then, as is her wont, tried to stampede it into the paper. This exact paradigm…has been her M.O. from day one.” Pyes’s note of alarm about Miller went unheeded within the Times. Pyes later remarked that it was “absolute hubris” for the Times’ editors to believe that they could compensate for Miller’s fault with effective editing: “Ultimately, the editor is a hostage of the judgments of the reporter.”
Miller, though, was tireless and relentless; she was, as Raines knew, well connected in Washington. In early July 2001, she had learned from a high-level source about a U.S. government intercept that had picked up a conversation between two suspected al-Qaeda figures overseas, during which one said words to the effect of “Something big is coming. They’re going to have to retaliate.” Miller was excited. “This struck me as a major page one–potential story,” she later said. She told Engelberg, her editor, about this. Who were these two men? he asked. Where were they? What sort of attack were they talking about? I don’t know, replied Miller. “I can’t put this story in the paper,” he told her. After a breathless lead about a possible al-Qaeda attack, he added, “what would the third paragraph say?”
At the time of the September 11 attacks, Miller had been concentrating on germ warfare. (She had just finished a book with Engelberg and Times reporter William Broad on the subject.) After Raines unleashed her (and other reporters) to find the blockbuster stories of the post-9/11 era, she headed to Washington and made sure to look up one particular Bush official who had been a source for Engelberg on the germ warfare book: Scooter Libby.
Miller was the perfect outlet for the INC, especially since Chalabi had been a source of hers for years. When the INC contacted her in December 2001 and offered her a story about an Iraqi defector who possessed direct knowledge of Saddam’s secret WMD sites, she hopped a plane to Thailand. Days later, al-Haideri’s eye-popping tales were on the front page of The New York Times under Miller’s byline.
Miller reported that al-Haideri had said he had personally helped renovate secret facilities in Iraq for biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons. His account, she wrote, “gives new clues about the types and possible locations of illegal laboratories, facilities and storage sites that American officials and international inspectors have long suspected Iraq of trying to hide.” She did concede that “there was no means to independently verify” al-Haideri’s allegations. But Miller signaled that this INC-backed defector deserved to be trusted because he “seemed familiar with key Iraqi officials in the military establishment, with many facilities previously thought to be associated with unconventional weapons, and with Iraq itself.” She reported that an unnamed INC representative had said he trusted al-Haideri—as if that somehow enhanced the defector’s credibility. Furthermore, she wrote, government experts—whom she didn’t identify or characterize—“said his information seemed reliable and significant.” (Engelberg would later say that the Times had no idea that al-Haideri had flunked his CIA lie detector test.)*5
This was quite a chain of events: Raines’s mania to Miller’s sensationalist reporting to the INC’s scheming to an official White House document. Wilkinson’s white paper, commissioned by the White House Iraq Group, had supported a crucial WMD claim with a Miller article that had been orchestrated by the INC—and was based on nothing but the unconfirmed stories of a defector deemed a fabricator by the CIA. This was how the WHIG was prepping the public for an invasion of Iraq—by footnoting a fraud. Even though the CIA had been able to keep Chalabi’s false intelligence out of official channels, the INC-to-Miller-to-WHIG nexus made the bogus information an important element of the president’s case. And CIA officials did not see it as their job to vet a White House white paper or to reveal the findings of a lie detector test in order to show a front-page New York Times story was wrong.
IN WASHINGTON, there was one man who was trying to undo the damage done by a more recent Judy Miller article. After reading the September 8, 2002, New York Times story by Miller and Gordon on the aluminum tubes, David Albright, the former IAEA weapons inspector, was outraged. He knew that government scientists had debated the meaning of the tubes.
Miller had called Albright for the aluminum tubes story before it was published, but he had been out of town. He returned the call the day after the story hit, and he desperately wanted to set the record straight. He thought it was important that The New York Times inform its readers (including members of Congress, policy makers, and journalists) that most government scientists didn’t accept the tubes argument. There’s another side to this, an upset Albright told Miller. There’s profound disagreement. Most people don’t believe these tubes are for centrifuges. They think they’re for artillery rockets. This is nothing to go to war over.
Don’t yell at me, yell at Gordon, Miller told Albright. She explained that the article had been an accurate reflection of what the Times’ sources knew of the intelligence on the tubes. But she listened to his complaints and passed them along to one of her editors, suggesting they do a follow-up. Albright assumed the Times would now run a story reflecting the deep skepticism within the government concerning the White House’s prime piece of evidence in the nuclear case.
On September 13, the Times published a follow-up article. This time the double byline was reversed and Miller’s name appeared before Gordon’s. The sh
ort article was mostly about the WHIG-produced white paper released for Bush’s UN speech. (Miller was echoing an echo: she was writing about a White House document that had been based in part on her own reporting.) On reading the Times article, Albright couldn’t believe it. This article, he thought, was worse than the first.
In the middle of this piece, Miller and Gordon returned to the aluminum tubes issue and reported that there had been “debates among intelligence experts about Iraq’s intentions in trying to buy such tubes.” But the article went on: “it was the intelligence agencies’ unanimous view that the type of tubes that Iraq has been seeking are used to make such centrifuges.” The article acknowledged that “some experts” in the State Department and the Energy Department had raised questions as to whether the tubes were better suited for artillery rockets but added that “this was a minority view among intelligence experts and…the CIA had wide support, particularly among the government’s top technical experts and nuclear scientists.” It seemed the debate was over: “the best technical experts and nuclear scientists at laboratories like Oak Ridge supported the CIA assessment.”
The new Times story, which ran on page A13, had been hurriedly put together, mainly by Miller, while Gordon had been stuck at home waiting for movers. Just as the first article had, this one relied on administration sources who depicted the CIA’s case as solid. But the claim that the intelligence agencies were “unanimous” in the view that the tubes were for centrifuges was flatly wrong; both the State Department’s INR and the Energy Department’s intelligence division had strongly disputed the agency’s position. As the Senate intelligence committee would put it in a later report, “the vast majority of scientists and nuclear experts at the DOE and the National Labs did not agree with the CIA’s analysis.”
Albright was furious. The reporters, relying on their administration sources, had gotten it completely wrong—again. Besides misleading the public about the tubes issue, this Times story had another serious consequence. The disclosure that there had been questions about the tubes prompted the Energy Department to issue an edict to its scientists: Don’t talk to the news media about this. The order sent fear throughout the department’s nuclear laboratories. It prevented scientists who could see that the White House was exploiting Joe Turner’s incorrect assessment from countering the misguided intelligence.
Houston Wood, the University of Virginia scientist and DOE consultant who was sure Turner’s conclusion was wrong, wrestled with what to do. He wanted to speak out, he later said. But like many other government scientists, he feared retaliation. He could lose his security clearance. So could his colleagues. “I think they were anguished about this,” Wood recalled. “They were trying to dissent internally. They were expecting that somebody would listen to reason.” At one point, Wood called one of the top scientists at Oak Ridge and discussed the issue of going public. “He was afraid he would give up his whole career if he went public,” Wood said.
Albright was anxious to undo the damage of the second Miller-Gordon piece. He persuaded Wood to at least talk on background to The Washington Post. Albright had given Post reporter Joby Warrick a draft report on the tubes prepared by his think tank. The paper, which focused on technical issues (such as the type of aluminum involved and whether it was suitable for the welding that would be needed for a centrifuge program) concluded, “By themselves, these attempted procurements [of aluminum tubes] are not evidence that Iraq is in possession of, or close to possessing, nuclear weapons.” Warrick wrote a story about the report. He noted that government scientists had disagreed about the tubes and that dissenters had been told to keep quiet. Within the Post’s newsroom, editors and reporters believed that Warrick had filed this story because he had been scooped by the Times on the importance of the tubes. The editors ran Warrick’s story deep inside, on page A18.
The Post article wasn’t much of a counter to the page-one blowout published by the Times on September 8. It caused few waves. Worse, it came out September 19, the day the White House sent Congress a draft resolution authorizing Bush to attack Iraq essentially whenever he saw fit. One reason for granting Bush this power, the resolution stated, was that Iraq was “actively seeking a nuclear weapons capability.”
ON SEPTEMBER 18, in a hotel room in New York, Bill Murray, the CIA station chief in Paris, met with his secret source, the Lebanese journalist. Naji Sabri, the Iraqi foreign minister, was due to deliver his own speech to the United Nations the next day—Baghdad’s response to Bush’s UN address. But Sabri couldn’t meet with Murray, the journalist told him. Swarms of FBI agents were tailing Sabri all over New York; he was nervous. But the journalist did have some good news: Sabri was interested in working with the Americans. He had answered all of Murray’s questions about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.
The WMD situation in Iraq, the journalist said, was complicated but quite different than what the White House was saying. Saddam’s chemical weapons arsenal was all gone. What was left of the weapons had been disbursed to tribal and provincial leaders years ago. Saddam didn’t want responsibility for them anymore. He didn’t want such munitions to be found by UN inspectors. The supposed biological weapons program was amateurish. Perhaps there were a few vials of biological poisons left over from years earlier. But there was no program, no actively functioning laboratories. As for nuclear weapons, the journalist related Sabri’s account of a meeting that Saddam had held with his nuclear scientists. The scientists had told Saddam that if they could obtain the right fissile materials, they could produce a nuclear bomb in eighteen to twenty-four months. But there was only one problem: the scientists didn’t have any fissile material—and they had no prospect of obtaining any. Whatever Saddam’s intentions, there was no revived nuclear program as the White House had claimed.
That night, Murray flew to Washington to share what he had been told with John McLaughlin, the CIA deputy director. The next day, Sabri appeared before the General Assembly to read a lengthy letter from Saddam. The Iraqi dictator assailed the “American propaganda machine” and its “lies, distortion, and falsehood” about Iraq. He declared that Iraq was “clear of all nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.” Watching the speech, Murray focused on something other than Saddam’s rhetoric. He was studying Sabri’s clothes. The Iraqi foreign minister was wearing one of the expensive suits the CIA had paid for. It was the signal that Sabri might be serious about becoming a CIA asset.
Sabri’s inside intelligence suggested a WMD program far less menacing than what the White House had been claiming. “Bill, you may be a hero,” Tyler Drumheller, the European Division chief in the CIA’s operations directorate, told him. “You may be the guy who stopped a war.”
But not everyone at CIA headquarters was impressed by Murray’s burgeoning operation and its potential. Luis and Maguire, the chief and deputy chief of the Iraq Operations Group, had no use for it, which led to shouting matches between Murray and the two Anabasis men. Sabri’s only value, Maguire later said, “was as a high-level defection…. We weren’t interestedin having Sabri stay in place and work for us because we knew we were going to war.” Anything Sabri had to say about Iraq’s WMDs while he remained part of Saddam’s corrupt regime, Luis and Maguire argued, would be worthless, just disinformation. If the CIA took this sort of information to the White House, Maguire told Murray, the agency would be laughed out of the office
The face-off between Murray and the CIA paramilitary experts reflected the larger struggle within the national security circles of the Bush administration. It was a fight between those who wanted more information on Iraq’s weapons programs so they could accurately assess the nature of the threat and those who were already sure they had a handle on what was at stake and were ready for war. Luis and Maguire’s mission—arranging sabotage within Iraq and preparing for a U.S. invasion—signaled (at least to Luis and Maguire) that the Bush White House was well beyond caring what Sabri had to say. During one confrontation with Murray, Luis was blunt: “One of th
ese days you’re going to get it. This is not about intelligence. This is about regime change.” (An intelligence community official later said that Luis denied making such a statement.)
Drumheller and Murray eventually heard that CIA Director George Tenet had told the White House about Sabri. The response came back: the White House would be interested if Sabri were to defect. What he had to say about WMDs was less important to the NSC. Probably all lies.
AFTER reading Bush’s proposed Iraq resolution, Senator Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican, thought, “My God, this crowd down at the White House is rolling right over the top of us—and we’re letting them do it.” The legislation that the White House sent to Capitol Hill was tremendously broad. It would permit Bush “to use all means that he determines to be appropriate, including force, in order to enforce the United Nations Security Council resolutions [demanding Iraq dismantle its WMD programs], defend the national security interests of the United States against the threat posed by Iraq, and restore international peace and security in the region.” Restore international peace and security in the region? That was a tall and wide-open order; the measure itself a blank check. Congressional Democrats were stunned by the sweep of this resolution—as were some Republicans.
Hagel, who believed Saddam was bottled up and posed no pressing threat to the United States, quickly talked to Senator Joe Biden, the Democratic chairman of the foreign relations committee, and the two discussed whether the White House’s war aims extended beyond Iraq. “I remember saying to Joe over the phone, the way this is written, the president could go to war anywhere in the Middle East,” Hagel later said. “And I remember Joe and I talked about Iran and Syria. Maybe they’re thinking, ‘We just take them all down, just take two, three of them out, go after Syria and Iran too.’ What’s to stop them?”
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