The Story (25 page)

Later that day, Howell Raines mounted a wooden platform beneath the spiral staircase that connected the third and fourth newsroom floors to thank the staff. Abe Rosenthal, who hadn't set foot in the paper since Arthur Sulzberger had broken his heart by canceling his column two years earlier, gave me a bear hug. “I'm so proud of you,” he whispered. “I was so smart to hire you!”

Several days later, Arthur threw a bash for the staff at a funky hotel on the West Side. At the start of the party, he announced that he was suspending his one-martini-a-night limit in honor of the paper's triumph: he would drink one martini for each prize. He and I hugged and drank and even attempted a disco dance—something we hadn't done since our days in Washington. I had missed Arthur. But those of us who were close to him in Washington knew that he was determined to distance himself from us once he became publisher. His father had given his friends top jobs at the paper, a practice that the staff resented deeply; Arthur was determined not to be accused of such favoritism. Despite my regrets about the wisdom of his keeping the peers who knew him best at arm's length, I respected his decision.

Three martinis or so into the evening—we all began losing count—he toasted Steve Engelberg and me for making Al Qaeda's life “miserable.” Pulling me aside and thrusting his arm around me, he said he had always loved my “passion” for the paper and for journalism. “So what will you do for us next year?” he joshed.

A month later at the Pulitzer award luncheon in May, Steve Engelberg revealed that he had decided to leave the paper. Why on earth? I asked him. This should have been the pinnacle of his career, he later confided. But as he contemplated a future of unending quarrels with Howell Raines over story ideas and how hard he was pushing reporters, he had grown ever more depressed. He and Howell were “fire and ice.” Howell never seemed
to appreciate Steve's creativity or the loyalty he commanded from reporters like me. If seven Pulitzers were as good as it got, Steve had concluded, he was in the wrong job.

Losing Steve, a friend and cowriter as well as an editor with perfect pitch, whose judgments the investigative reporters trusted, was a loss not only for me but also for the
Times.
Steve had a knack for making stubborn reporters rethink our assumptions. He had written some of the most challenging chapters of our book
Germs.
He had been an inspired intelligence reporter and gifted writer who worked as hard as his staff. When he told me that he was accepting an offer to start an investigative unit at the
Oregonian
in Portland, where his wife had grown up, I was devastated. The loss of an editor who I thought might lead the paper one day was a harbinger of tumultuous upheavals. Though I didn't know it at the time, a staff revolt was brewing against Howell and Gerald that would reshape my career and the paper.

The abandoned ammunition storage dump in southern Iraq near Karbalā' was in the middle of nowhere. Late one night in early April 2003, flashlight in hand, I inched through the derelict buildings and sheds. Desert dogs howled in the distance.

I was freezing. I had left my down jacket back at the base at Camp Udairi in northern Kuwait, the launching pad of the military's WMD-hunting brigade, the 75th Exploitation Task Force—the 75th XTF—to accompany Mobile Exploration Team Alpha, one of the brigade's units that were surveying suspect sites. This was supposed to have been a three-hour mission to Mussayab, a town where buried barrels of suspicious-looking liquids had turned out to be gasoline. That was ten days ago. Ever since then, MET Alpha and I, the brigade's sole embedded reporter, had been moving from one site to another, and, finally, to this abandoned facility. The unit members had hosed down the floor of a building in the complex and were sleeping on its icy floor.

I had stopped carrying my gas mask. So had other members of MET units Alpha and Bravo, both of which were led by enthusiastic young officers still hoping that any day now we would find traces of the elusive WMD that had brought us all here.

Col. Richard R. McPhee, forty-seven, who commanded the eight-hundred-person XTF, had insisted I wear a uniform if I wanted to travel with his METs. A reporter in civilian clothes was a natural target, he said. He was not going to be the first commander in Iraq to get his embed killed. Eventually we compromised. Wearing my own beige cargo pants and white T-shirt, I borrowed desert boots and an army jacket, which warmed me against the cold. Where was the weather that the military had warned would be too hot to fight in?

For the past ten days, Chief Warrant Officer Richard “Monty” Gonzales's ten-man unit had maneuvered its way up from Camp Udairi through southern Iraq past a series of ancient towns and villages—Nasiriya, Samarra, Najaf, Hilla—near the ruins of Babylon. Because we had assumed we would be back at Udairi by evening, I hadn't brought a sleeping bag or a change of clothes. To top it all, the mosquitos were ravenous.

Although more than 775 reporters and photographers were embedded in US military units at the start of the war, I was the only reporter with the military brigade that was charged with hunting for WMD. That was no accident.

As it became clear in the fall of 2002 that President Bush was heading for war, the media were clamoring for access to soldiers and “action.” When I learned in November that administration officials were apt to grant “embed” slots, I asked my Pentagon contacts whether I could embed with teams searching for WMD. I had trouble learning much about the Pentagon's plans for its WMD hunt. Later I would discover that the secrecy masked not the mission's sensitivity but the lack of serious planning.

When a senior Pentagon official asked me to inscribe a copy of
Germs
to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, I attached a letter to the man I had never met asking to embed in the WMD-hunting units. I heard nothing. In early January I explored the idea with Torie Clarke, the Pentagon's spokesperson, who said she found it “interesting.” That is Washington bureaucratese for “Get lost.” Finally, I wrote to Paul Wolfowitz. If WMD were found in Iraq, I wrote, the presence of an “independent” journalist with the American team could only “enhance the administration's credibility.” I heard nothing.

In late February 2003 I left for Erbil, in the Kurdish region of northern
Iraq, via Turkey, to cover the Iraqi National Congress's first meeting on Iraqi soil in a decade, a watershed. After the Gulf War, in 1992, Chalabi, with financial help from the CIA, had founded the diverse coalition of Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, Islamic fundamentalists, secularists, democrats, monarchists, nationalists, and former military officers in Vienna, Austria, to help oust Saddam. Chalabi had wanted to assemble the group months earlier on Iraqi soil to declare the existence of a provisional government run by Iraqi dissidents, but the State Department objected. They also slow rolled the INC's request for American military training for coalition fighters who would be able to provide post-invasion security. (By the end of February, the United States had trained only forty Iraqi volunteers at a military base in Hungary.) Against all odds, the meeting was about to be held.

The long-postponed gathering in the Kurdish region was electrifying. I was preparing for interviews I had arranged when my sat phone rang—an unusual event, given the cost. It was the Pentagon: my request for an embed had been granted. While the 75th Brigade had already left for Kuwait, I was to return to Washington immediately for briefings and immunization against anthrax, smallpox, and other potential biological hazards. I was to tell no one about this except my direct supervisors.

Now all I had to do was persuade my editors to let me go.

Before I raised the idea with the Pentagon, I had discussed it with Gerald Boyd, Howell's number two. He confirmed that I was not being considered for one of the paper's embed slots. Neither the foreign desk nor the Washington bureau had selected me. The new acting foreign editor, Roger Cohen, was no fan of mine, and I was not on Jill Abramson's list of reporters from the Washington bureau she led. If I could negotiate my own arrangement, I should try, Gerald told me. I suspected that he was humoring me.

“I have just spent the last week in Washington discussing a special assignment that I proposed to the Pentagon last fall,” my memo to Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Howell, and Gerald began. We were being offered a “rare chance to chronicle a unique mission.” Never before had the US military “attempted to forcibly disarm another state of weapons of mass destruction during ongoing combat operations.”

I would have access to most of the search activities. The only major restriction would be one that applied to all embeds: I would not be allowed to publish material that jeopardized operational security. And the Pentagon would insist on the right to review copy before it was filed, a requirement for all embedded reporters in sensitive posts.
¹

I compared the opportunity to that given William L. Laurence, the paper's science reporter, who had secretly been assigned to Los Alamos, New Mexico, to chronicle the development of the atom bomb during World War II. The articles he wrote after the bomb was used at Hiroshima had not only helped Americans understand the scientific and political significance of the weapon that had been created but also remained a valuable source of material for future historians. Such access in Iraq would enable us to tell “a rich story of a great challenge” comprehensively and with nuance, I wrote. “And it will be a great story whether or not the administration is able to find the weapons of mass destruction it claims Saddam Hussein has hidden.”

Howell approved the embed. Seven days later, my arm still aching from the vaccines I had been given, I was at Camp Udairi, fifteen miles from the Iraqi border. The next day, March 20, American land forces crossed into Iraq. The invasion had begun.

The early days of my assignment were frustrating. While I had been warned that Colonel McPhee would be crucial to my assignment's success, the XTF's leader made it known that he was not thrilled to have a reporter embedded on such a sensitive mission. McPhee was traditional, and set in his ways. Concerned about exposing female soldiers to unconventional weapons, he had assigned none to the MET teams, much to their chagrin, as they had quickly told me. Would I not prefer to write about the army's support activities that his wife was leading back at Fort Sill, Oklahoma?

He initially resisted letting me accompany his MET units anywhere, even on training missions. He had also barred me from entering the tactical operations center: the cluster of trailers where key meetings were held. He kept me out of the battle update assessments each morning and the video-teleconference meetings conducted from the task force's HQ in
Kuwait City, essential to understanding how the XTF's mission fit into the military's plans and operations.

No reporter was going to see the “classified” maps and mission statements posted in the TOC without higher authorization, McPhee ruled. Cajoling, joking, and pleading failed with him, so I appealed to the Pentagon's public affairs office in Washington. My embed would be disastrous unless McPhee gave me access.

He gradually relented, but only after a senior officer whom he wouldn't identify reassured him that Secretary Rumsfeld was aware of this unusual embed. Poor Colonel McPhee. I was bombarding him with requests for interviews and other access. Though the task force headquarters had sent the XTF a marine experienced in working with reporters to review stories that might risk compromising operations, McPhee insisted on reviewing them personally as well. Though he usually rose before dawn, I routinely filed late at night. So my copy rarely reached him until well after midnight, when his aides would have to rouse him to read it. I was exhausting the guy.

A turning point in our relationship was a serendipitous meeting in late March with a senior military officer who became a supporter not only of the WMD mission but also of my own journalistic integrity when it came under fire a few years later: Maj. Gen. David Petraeus.

I had never heard of General Petraeus, who was commanding the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) when Colonel McPhee invited me to accompany him to the general's temporary HQ an hour's drive from our base. Petraeus had received his doctorate at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School a few years after I had gotten my master's. He admired
Germs
, he told me, and asked pointed questions the book had raised. He also asked me what biological agents I thought we were likely to encounter in Iraq. I asked him why had we found so little trace of WMD to date. He didn't know, either.

Colonel McPhee seemed impressed that General Petraeus had read my book. From then on, our relationship was usually “pure goodness,” his favorite phrase.

Almost every day, the generals who chaired the morning battle update assessments warned of impending chemical or biological attack by forces loyal to Saddam, particularly as US forces crossed what was considered the regime “red line”: Al Kut, the last city before Baghdad, crucial to its defense. This was consistent with what the military had been predicting ever since setting up its command, the so-called CFLCC, or Coalition Forces Land Component Command, at Camp Doha in Kuwait City, where my colleague Michael Gordon was embedded. “The IRAQI Ministry of Defense (MOD) will use WMD early but not often,” concluded a secret sixty-page planning memo, signed by Gen. David D. McKiernan, the coalition commander, and dated February 1, 2003, which I would later be shown. The “probability” of WMD use would increase “exponentially as Saddam Hussein senses the imminent collapse of his regime,” the memo stated.
²

On March 27, a week after American land forces crossed into Iraq, my notes quote a senior commander at CFLCC headquarters as saying that the “use of WMD” remained “likely within the next 48–96 hours.” The officer said that Hussein al-Shahristani, a prominent Shiite Iraqi nuclear scientist and Ba'athist foe, had warned the military that if Saddam was going to use WMD, he would probably do so as US forces closed in on Baghdad. I had interviewed Shahristani before the war in London and had stayed in email contact with him. Saddam had imprisoned and tortured him at Abu Ghraib for twelve years for refusing to work on Iraq's nuclear weapons program.
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