The Story (46 page)

In an interview in 2013, Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy secretary of defense and among the most ardent neocon advocates of invading Iraq, described Libby as his “principal ally” in several early battles over the conduct of the war. Libby's “strong voice” was most badly missed, Wolfowitz said, on the issue of military requirements for Iraq. Having grasped that early post-invasion planning for a very small Iraqi army for external defense “made no sense,” Libby kept pressing as early as June 2003 for what military planners call a “requirements analysis.” Wolfowitz said that such a review might have led to a new strategy and to the formation of Iraqi security forces capable of countering the insurgency years before the 2007 surge.

In 2013 Gen. Jack Keane, the Iraq surge's key promoter, told me that Libby had been among the first White House officials to grasp that America might well lose the war in Iraq if Washington did not stop the Sunni insurgents and Al Qaeda from gaining ground. Libby had worked closely with one of Keane's top allies, Col. Derek Harvey, an expert on Iraq and its ruling Ba'ath Party, to arrange briefings on what Harvey argued was
a Ba'athist-led insurgency and on the numbers of US forces that would be required to implement a counterinsurgency strategy. “Until he was distracted and ultimately taken out by the investigation,” Keane told me, Libby had worked hard to convince skeptical officials to revisit America's failing war-fighting strategy. “Without Scooter's relentless early efforts,” Keane said, “I'm not sure the White House would have admitted failure and changed the military strategy.”

“It took enormous courage to walk into a crowded interagency meeting and say that you are all wrong,” Cheney asserted in an interview in 2013. “And then to stick to your guns when they all gather around the conventional wisdom and dispute or dismiss you.” Libby had done that, repeatedly.

Fitzgerald, a forty-seven-year-old prosecutor in Chicago when the Plame investigation began, had made a name for himself in the 1990s in New York for his tenacious prosecution of terrorists in the first World Trade Center bombing. Our meetings during the Plame investigation had always been professional, his manner gracious and polite. Even after he had put me in jail and got access to my telephone records, I agreed to testify as a prosecution witness in 2008 against militant Islamists in Chicago whom he accused of having provided material support for terrorism. But as we talked at the trial preparation sessions in Washington and Chicago, I thought that Fitzgerald had put his Plame inquiry—with no time constraints, budgetary limits, or oversight—foremost.
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To learn the source of a story I had never written, Fitzgerald had put me in jail. In so doing, argued James Goodale, the former vice chairman of the
Times
, he had destroyed the long-standing delicate balance between reporters and editors, courts and the government. “For a generation,” Jim wrote, “the press, the courts, and prosecutors” had avoided precisely such a confrontation. Fitzgerald, he concluded, had no understanding of the press's role in a democracy.

Libby's colleagues and friends saw in Fitzgerald's pursuit self-righteousness and moral indignation. They suspected that what motivated him was a desire, as Karl Rove charged, to make a name for himself by hooking a really big fish.

As Peter Baker, the
Times
reporter, would report in his 2014 book on
the relationship between Bush and Cheney, the vice president believed that he, not Libby, had been Fitzgerald's real target, a view that Cheney confirmed to me in 2013. Libby, Cheney said, was the instrument the prosecutor had used to acquire a more prominent, career-making scalp.

Fitzgerald declined to discuss the case with me—though he was now working at the Chicago office of Skadden, Arps, the law firm that represented me. But Joe Tate, the lawyer who represented Libby until his criminal trial, and who was Libby's law partner and long-standing friend, told me in an interview in 2014 that Fitzgerald had twice offered to drop all charges against Libby if his client would “deliver” Cheney to him.

Fitzgerald had hinted at a deal even before Tate had flown to Chicago to discuss Libby's case before his indictment, Tate said. When they spoke by phone before his trip, Fitzgerald warned him not to “waste” his time coming to Chicago unless he could “deliver something beyond what we've heard,” Tate said. “I went out there anyway.”

By that time, Tate said, Fitzgerald was no longer looking at who had released Plame's name. “They needed a scalp and were flyspecking Libby's FBI interviews and grand jury appearances.” Arguing that such inconsistencies were immaterial, he asked Fitzgerald, “Why are you doing this?”

He reported that Fitzgerald replied, “Unless you can deliver someone higher up—the vice president—I'm going forth with the indictment.” “I knew then he was out of control,” Tate said.

Bound by the legal agreement limiting what
Times
editors could say about me, they usually said nothing at all. My name rarely appeared in the paper, even in news stories about First Amendment battles or the struggle to pass a media shield law in Congress.

Two years after my resignation, David Barstow, my former colleague, still had no explanation for the press's almost uniformly hostile coverage of me and my role in the WMD intelligence failures and the Libby case. “Why it is that Judith Miller somehow became the embodiment of all those failures,” he wrote, remained “simply unfathomable to me.” It was both inaccurate and unfair, he insisted. But as Barstow himself noted, I
was a pushy, high-profile reporter at the nation's highest-profile newspaper. Other news outlets had followed my lead. That made me Azazel, the biblical goat upon which the community heaped its many sins.

The blogosphere, which had been granted credentials to cover the Libby trial and had grown increasingly influential, filled in whatever blanks the paper left. The attacks were relentless, sexist, and ugly—the pernicious side of a technology whose ability to spread knowledge widely and instantly has transformed journalism and global communications.

Occasionally, an independent thinker such as Niall Stanage, a young Irish journalist writing for the
New York Observer
, would read my WMD stories and challenge the conventional wisdom. He noted that my articles were filled with qualifiers; they were not based largely on Chalabi or anonymous sources, but quoted officials and experts by name. “Judith Miller: Was She Really So Bad?” the title of his essay asked. But such were minority voices. In the blogosphere, a cyber Roman Forum, and even in publications that should have known better, my name was increasingly linked with the “disgraced” plagiarist and fabulist, Jayson Blair, whom the paper had fired in another of those “scandals” that had “bloodied the profession,” as the
New Republic
wrote.

More than the prospect of a second newsroom revolt, the steady rise of the blogosphere preoccupied Arthur and other senior
Times
executives. Arthur and I had spoken often of the blogs' growing, in his view, often pernicious impact on mainstream journalism. When the war began in Iraq, there were roughly one hundred thousand bloggers. By the time of Valerie Plame's outing, there were an estimated twenty-seven million of them.

The
Times
circulation numbers, along with paid advertising, revenues, and stock price, continued to plummet through 2013. The paper's efforts to boost its digital profile faltered. In the spring of 2014, an internal report by Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, Arthur's son, warned that in the past year, readership had fallen “significantly” not only on the website but also on smartphones and other mobile platforms.
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Rounds of layoffs and buyouts of some of the paper's most experienced talent and the departure of younger, digitally savvy stars fueled gloom. Among the veterans pushed out in the spring of 2012 was George Freeman. The
Wall Street Journal
had
quoted him in late 2005 defending me against the paper's attacks, implicitly criticizing the
Times
's leaders. Though sixty reporters wrote to Arthur Sulzberger protesting the decision to dismiss the lawyer who had defended so many of us for so long in libel and source protection cases, there was no reprieve. Freeman told me he did not think that his defense of me might have played a role in his termination. But the paper did dock his pay a bit because he had talked to the
Wall Street Journal
without authorization.

After Keller resigned as executive editor in 2011, he told
Editor & Publisher
, a magazine and online industry site, and Media Matters for America, a liberal, pro-Democratic online group created to criticize Fox News, that the “whole Judy Miller WMD experience” was “one of the low points” of his eight years. He had decided to review the paper's prewar reporting, he told Media Matters, after “a lot of people, particularly people on the left, became disenchanted with the
Times
because they saw it as having been cheerleaders for the war.” He told
Esquire
that he had erred in not having acted sooner to put me “on a leash.”

Lawyers from Skadden, Arps, and I wrote to Arthur Sulzberger, reminding him that such comments violated our agreement. Arthur, who declined to be interviewed for this book, replied that he had forwarded our complaints to Keller, who wrote that he saw nothing pejorative in them. In May 2013 my lawyers complained again when the paper's “public editor” described me in print as the “disgraced” reporter. By then, I had written major stories for the
Wall Street Journal
, the
Los Angeles Times
, and a dozen other prominent newspapers and magazines, and was appearing regularly on Fox News as a national security and First Amendment commentator. Margaret Sullivan, the public editor, had never called me for comment. But the paper's general counsel wrote back that because Sullivan was “neither an ‘executive' of the
Times
nor a part of the senior editorial management” and because her observation was unrelated to my “departure from the
Times
and her dealings with Scooter Libby,” her characterization was not “inconsistent with or contradictory to the references statements.”

The nature and focus of my reporting changed after leaving the
Times
. Though I reported in cities throughout the nation and in a dozen different
countries, I was no longer able to hop on a plane and travel anywhere to pursue a story without advance planning and financial commitments from news outlets to offset the cost. But soaring travel costs and plummeting circulations and advertising were forcing many publications, even wealthier TV networks, to reduce international coverage as well.

Political changes in the Middle East, too, affected my reporting. In 2012 some 119 journalists—a record in modern times—were killed in the field, most of them in Syria and the Middle East. While I continued returning to Iraq to report on the state of the war and its impact on Iraqis and American forces, I, too, became increasingly focused on security. After Marie Colvin was killed in Syria in early 2012, I reevaluated the risks I had once downplayed. Marie, my friend since our days as young correspondents in Paris, had been among journalism's most courageous, relentless reporters. When we reported together in Tahrir Square during the eruption of the Arab Spring in Egypt in 2011, I told her that I feared she had become cavalier about the dangers of reporting in war zones. Other friends had pleaded with her not to take so many chances. No story was worth it, we said. The night before she was killed, her editor ordered her to leave the besieged part of Homs, which was being shelled by government forces. But Marie could not bring herself to abandon the story.

After Scooter Libby's conviction, some media critics called the testimony of a parade of reporters, including mine, a catastrophe for journalism. Several predicted that sources would dry up, that there would be a permanent chill between reporters and officials. Confidentiality pledges would be disregarded; waivers would routinely be required. Prosecutors like Fitzgerald would have little reason not to subpoena reporters with impunity.

Some concerns proved warranted. Under President Obama, who had promised to run the most open and “transparent” government possible, access to senior officials declined sharply and the number of leak investigations soared. As of June 2014, six government employees, plus two government contractors, had been the subjects of felony criminal prosecutions under the 1917 Espionage Act for alleged leaks of classified information to the press—compared with a total of three such prosecutions in previous
administrations. In two of these cases, the Justice Department had secretly subpoenaed and seized reporters' phone logs and emails.

Many officials became more fearful of even talking to the press, much less leaking to us, according to a forty-page report by the Committee to Protect Journalists in 2013.
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Those suspected of doing so were given lie detector tests and had their telephone and email records scrutinized. An “Insider Threat Program” throughout agencies instructed federal workers to help prevent unauthorized disclosures by monitoring their colleagues' behavior. By June 2012, the report notes, the director of intelligence's inspector general was reviewing 375 unresolved investigations of employees of the nation's sixteen intelligence agencies. Moreover, President Obama's political advisers increasingly used social media—their own videos, sophisticated websites, even their own official photographer—to give Americans the information they wanted them to know.

Though many reporters at mainstream news outlets initially voiced little protest, criticism of the administration's secretive style and policies increased in Obama's second term. David Sanger, my former colleague and a veteran Washington correspondent, called Obama's White House the “most closed, control freak administration I've ever covered.” Jill Abramson, before Arthur Sulzberger unceremoniously fired her in May 2014 for having lost the newsroom's “confidence,” called Obama's White House the “most secretive” she had covered in twenty-two years of political reporting.
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