The Story (44 page)

My lawyers insisted on another demand, one that had not occurred
to me but should have: in addition to remaining silent about the content of my severance package, no
Times
“executive” and “senior editorial management” could make statements that were “inconsistent with, or contradictory to” those made in the paper by Arthur or Keller, the paper's press release about my resignation, or any other statement related to my “departure from the
Times
” and “dealings with Scooter Libby.” I was free to say what I liked, but the
Times
had to stick to our agreed-upon language.

My lawyers were pleased with this provision, but we would soon be disappointed, for the ink had barely dried when anonymous
Times
sources began leaking false and unflattering versions of what had occurred. In the beginning, I ignored such lapses, but perhaps I shouldn't have. I failed to appreciate early on that the planted gossip about my fierce temper, imperious ways, rogue reporting, and overall pushiness—the way in which aggressive female journalists were then and continue to be characterized—were part of a narrative the paper would use to blame me for what the editor's note itself had called institutional failings. But since I had achieved my major demands, I was eager to move on with my life.

I spent the next year redefining my identity. Having introduced myself professionally for almost three decades in English, French, and Arabic as “Judith Miller of the
New York Times
,” I felt stateless. I discovered slowly that I had become my own brand—for better or worse. For many readers, the paper is their secular bible; what it writes is gospel—“all the news that's fit to print.” Some seemed unsure what to think: Had the paper coddled me for too long, or had it panicked and betrayed me?

In interviews about what jail was like and why I had left the paper, I repeated my initial story, which was true enough: that I had left partly because “I had become the news, something no reporter wanted to be.”
³
In my letter to the paper, I had acknowledged that even before I went to jail, I had become a “lightning rod for public fury over the intelligence failures that helped lead our country to war.” But mostly I remained silent. A criminal trial lay ahead. Whatever I said about my quarrels with the paper could impact the credibility of my testimony and possibly the trial's outcome.

In the summer of 2006, Fitzgerald won another round. In a 2-to-1 decision in August, a federal appeals court in New York ruled that he could
inspect my home, office, and cell phone records and those of Phil Shenon to determine who had told us about raids and asset seizures the government was planning against two Islamic charities suspected of supporting terrorism: the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development in Texas and the Global Relief Foundation in Illinois. With Floyd Abrams and George Freeman representing us, Phil and I had vigorously resisted subpoenas to the telephone companies for our phone records, to prevent Fitzgerald from identifying our sources. The verdict from a court that had been historically sympathetic to claims that journalists were entitled to protect their sources was a blow and, we argued, an intrusion on the First Amendment. It had also reversed a lower court ruling and, as the
Times
wrote, “dealt a further setback to news organizations, which have lately been on a losing streak in the federal courts.”

I was appalled as I watched copies of page after page of calls that I had made or received turned over to Fitzgerald. The logs contained hundreds of calls that Phil and I had made before our story ran. The media paid little attention to this case compared with the ink and airtime they devoted to the Plame investigation and Scooter Libby. That was unfortunate. For Fitzgerald's seizure of our telephone records turned out to be a far more important bellwether of the challenge that journalists would soon face from a cyber-wise, techno-savvy government intent on plugging national security leaks.

Despite access to our phone logs, Fitzgerald was apparently unable to identify our sources. Perhaps he did so, but no one was ever charged with disclosing classified information in his inquiry, and none of our sources told us that they had been asked about their discussions with us. Phil and I managed to protect our sources because Jeff Gerth, my friend and colleague with whom I had collaborated on sensitive investigative stories, had drilled into his friends the importance of taking defensive measures to protect our sources. While I initially felt silly, and even a bit paranoid, using unregistered cell phones to call sensitive sources and acting like an amateur drug dealer, Jeff was right. With the government ever more able and willing to inspect journalists' phone calls and emails to identify their sources, such precautions were becoming essential tradecraft.

Nor did the story we wrote in the summer of 2001 cripple the government's effort to move against the charities or thwart terrorism, as Fitzgerald claimed. The Holy Land Foundation and several of its officers were eventually convicted of having provided material support for terrorism. The Global Relief Foundation remained closed, and the Treasury Department's seizure of its assets stuck, despite a libel suit it filed against the
Times
and other papers for having published the government's charges, as well as a lawsuit challenging the government's designation of the charity as linked to terrorism.

In January 2007 the long-awaited trial of Scooter Libby began. Antiwar activists and other administration critics confidently predicted that the trial would prove that there had been a White House conspiracy to expose Plame's CIA job. The public disclosure in 2006 that the original source of the leak was Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, Colin Powell's alter ego, and a skeptic of the war, had jolted antiwar critics. By the time the trial began, so much was known about intelligence failures and the Plame case that the trial was an anticlimax.

Fitzgerald had known since his appointment in December 2003 that Armitage was the source of the Plame leak to Bob Novak. He had also known that the leak—apparently aimed at protecting the State Department from blame for the Wilson mess and the faulty WMD estimates—had been confirmed by Bill Harlow, the CIA's spokesman. Neither was a neocon. The only senior official involved in this supposedly White House–orchestrated plot was Karl Rove, Bush's political adviser. But since he had acknowledged having done little but confirm what Novak had heard from Armitage and Harlow, he had not been indicted. So the alleged White House scheme was a conspiracy of one: Scooter Libby, who was charged not with leaking Plame's identity, but with lying to federal officials about what he had said to two other reporters and me. No one was ever charged with the leak.

I was one of ten journalists among nineteen witnesses to testify at the trial. Most of the other journalists—Bob Woodward, Glenn Kessler, and
Walter Pincus from the
Washington Pos
t
; David Sanger of the
Times
; and Bob Novak—swore that Libby had never mentioned Plame or her CIA job. I was the only reporter to state that Libby had discussed Wilson's wife. So my testimony, Fitzgerald said in his closing arguments, was crucial to the case against Libby. It was also crucial to Fitzgerald's assertion that the vice president had been involved, since Libby had told the grand jury that Cheney had approved his suggestion that he discuss the intelligence estimate about Iraq and WMD with me.

At the same time, I testified that I did not recall Libby's having mentioned Plame's name, the fact that her job was secret, or that she had helped send her husband to Niger for the CIA. Although I testified that my notes and memories of our conversations were often sketchy, Fitzgerald endorsed my memory of our conversations over Libby's.

Two other journalists were key to Fitzgerald's case. Matt Cooper, who by then had left
Time
, testified that Karl Rove had first told him that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA and may have helped send him to Niger. When Cooper had asked Libby whether he, too, had heard that, Libby had responded, “Yeah, I've heard that, too,” Cooper quoted Libby as saying.
⁴
Tim Russert, NBC's Washington bureau chief, said that Plame had not come up in his conversation with Libby, and that he had not told Libby about Plame's job and role in Wilson's trip, as Libby recalled.

Both Fitzgerald and my lawyers instructed me not to follow news accounts of the trial or what other witnesses were saying, lest it influence my testimony. I complied. Only later did my lawyers tell me that Judge Reggie B. Walton ruled there was no evidence that Libby had lied about the last of our three discussions and dismissed the prosecution's charges that we had discussed Plame in a telephone conversation on July 12, 2003.

In March 2007, after deliberating for ten days, the eleven jury members convicted Libby on four counts of making false statements to the FBI, lying to a grand jury, and obstructing justice. They acquitted him on one count: lying to the FBI about his conversation with Matt Cooper.

In June, Judge Walton sentenced Libby, the most senior White House official to be convicted of a felony since the Iran-contra scandal twenty years earlier, to thirty months in prison and a fine of $250,000. He was spared jail
when President Bush, at the last possible minute, voided his prison term and commuted his sentence.
⁵
But to Dick Cheney's enduring fury, Libby did not receive one of the twenty-nine pardons that the president issued shortly before leaving office, in December 2008. I had expected Bush to pardon Libby. If he didn't, I had expected Libby to appeal the verdict. But Libby had told friends that an appeal would be too hard on his family, financially onerous, and would prevent him from moving on with his life.

The day after Libby's lawyers announced that he was dropping his appeal, Bill Safire called me. I had to write my own account of the ordeal— “
Now
!
” he ordered. Bill knew that I was determined not to write anything that could be subpoenaed for another trial. Still, I hesitated. Reviewing my emails, memos, and notes about the
Times
, my months in jail, and my trial testimony was painful. I might have abandoned the project had it not been for a chance encounter with Libby at a national security conference in Israel in 2010.

We had not spoken since 2003, and when he saw me enter the hall, he gave me a decidedly chilly look and did not approach me. I couldn't blame him. We had barely known each other before our meetings in the summer of 2003 became the talk of Washington and ammunition in Fitzgerald's hands. Our “entanglement,” as Keller had first called it, had consisted of two interviews, one telephone call, and a chance two-minute encounter with my husband and me at a rodeo in Jackson, Wyoming.

After most guests had left the hall, I asked Libby how he was doing. I told him, neutrally, that I regretted how things had turned out. We spoke briefly about our lives since the trial. I did not mention jail. He seemed cautious. Before leaving, he asked whether I had read Valerie Plame's memoir, which had been published soon after his trial in 2007. No, I hadn't, I confessed. In fact, I had read little about those troubled times; I had no wish to do so.

He suggested that I might find something of interest.

A few months later, I read
Fair Game
. Though I had occasionally encountered Joe Wilson at social events before the trial, I had never met his wife.

Libby was right. The book was certainly of interest. In addition to Bush, Cheney, and Libby, Plame was also furious at the CIA, which she accused
of having failed to protect her family after her “outing.”
⁶
Her account of how the Bush administration's campaign had ended her career and nearly ruined her marriage sold well and became a Hollywood movie starring Sean Penn as Wilson and Naomi Watts as Plame. She expressed regret about letting
Vanity Fair
photograph her in secret spy gear—a Hermès head scarf and large, dark sunglasses—seated alongside her husband in his Jaguar convertible. When the photo spread hit newsstands in January 2004, she complained that the right had denounced her “publicity stunt” and “self-promotion” and what Rove called the Wilsons' unmasking as “vain, arrogant celebrity wannabes.” She attributed her lapse in judgment, which she acknowledged had embarrassed the CIA and even her supporters, to one of those “what the hell” moments after having been “beaten down.”

Of most interest to me in Plame's book was the revelation that while working overseas for the CIA, Plame's cover were jobs at the State Department. The CIA is organized by offices within divisions—such as the counterproliferation division of the Directorate of Operations, in which Agent Plame worked. But the State Department is divided into functional offices and regional and other “bureaus”: the Bureau of European Affairs, the Bureau of Consular Affairs. Both, I was learning, had served as her cover.

That Plame had worked for a State Department bureau as cover stopped me cold. I found the notebook in which I had recorded my initial conversation with Libby on June 23, 2003. On page 1, I had written “Scooter Libby—uranium.” On page 26, well before my interview with Libby, I had written Joe Wilson's name and phone number. It was underlined four times. My notes with Libby did not begin until page 33. My first question to Libby involved the NIE: “Was the intell slanted?” A page and a half later, in the midst of our discussion of the NIE and Iraq's reported efforts to acquire uranium, was a note in parentheses: “(wife works in Bureau?).”

I remembered what I had learned after the trial: that Libby had consistently told the FBI in October and September 2003, and a grand jury in March 2004, that Cheney had told him sometime before June 11, 2003, that Plame worked at the CIA. If Libby, a seasoned bureaucrat, had been trying to plant her employer with me at our first meeting in June, he would not have used the word
Bureau
to describe where Plame worked. But a
source who thought that she
really
worked at the State Department might have described her job that way. A terrible thought raced through me: Contrary to my testimony, had someone
else
told me that Plame worked at the State Department before my meeting with Libby? Someone who may have given me Wilson's telephone number? Had I written
Bureau
between parentheses to ask Libby about her job that day?