The Story (51 page)

14
. Harvey,
Explaining the Iraq War
, p. 7.

15
. Baker,
Days of Fire
, p. 210. In an interview, James Baker III makes clear to the author, who is no relation, that he was opposed to Cheney's alleged preference for going to war alone, but not to the war itself, unlike his former fellow Bush Sr. colleague, Brent Scowcroft, who blindsided Bush '43 by opposing an invasion in an op-ed in the
New York Times
in the summer of 2002.

16
. Former deputy UNSCOM inspector Charles Duelfer initially made this argument.

17
. Judith Miller, “A Nation Challenged: Diplomacy; In Visit to U.S., Kuwaitis Support Action on Iraq,”
New York Times
, February 3, 2002,
www.nytimes.com/2002/02/03/world/a-nation-challenged-diplomacy-in-visit-to-us-kuwaitis-support-action-on-iraq.html
.

1
. These restrictions applied to all reporters embedded in units or headquarters that dealt routinely with classified information, but critics would later write, inaccurately, that I had accepted unusual military censorship of my stories in exchange for access. No one who printed or broadcast that allegation ever spoke to me for comment—a basic rule of fair-minded, objective journalism. Unlike many of my colleagues, I refused to sign a standard embed agreement for reporters with access to classified information
that would have enabled a commander to review my notes. I scratched out that portion of the agreement before signing it. I do not know if other reporters did the same.

2
. Coalition Forces Land Component Command (CFLCC) OPLAN COBRA II, ORCON Rel MCFT//X4, Camp Doha, Kuwait, February, 1, 2003.

3
. Deeply religious and allied with an Iranian-linked political party, Shahristani would later be tasked with restoring his country's oil sector.

4
. A year later, I would learn that, if anything, my story, which several critics had cited as an example of my stories that had exaggerated the risk of WMD, had underestimated Iraq's quest for atropine. In 2004, Charles Duelfer, the former weapons inspector and leader of the Iraq Survey Group's hunt for WMD in Iraq, reported in his landmark study that by September 2002, Iraq had bought over nine hundred thousand of the antidote auto-injectors. See Charles Duelfer, “Table, Regime Strategy and WMD Timeline Events,” in
Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq's WMD
, September 30, 2004,
www.cia.gov/library/reports/general-reports-1/iraq_wmd_2004/WMD_Timeline_Events.html
.

5
. I never learned whether Abbas's charges or the report that MET Alpha filed on it had played a role in the substance or timing of the president's statement. In interviews years after the war, senior White House officials involved in nonproliferation told me they could not recall what specifically had triggered Bush's warning. Robert Joseph, the NSC point man on nonproliferation, said that the White House had been receiving myriad reports around that time expressing concern that WMD stockpiles might not be found. He said he did not remember reading a report from the XTF from Abbas. “There was a ton of material flowing in at that time,” Joseph said in an interview in mid-2013.

1
. Gellman's brief embed did not end happily. The XTF's senior officers wrote an angry letter to the
Washington Post
complaining about alleged errors in his stories. Col. Michael Endres, who died of natural causes in 2012, shared the letter with me.

2
. Judith Miller, Michael Moss, and Lowell Bergman, “Leading Exile Figure Draws Mixed Reviews,”
New York Times
, April 10, 2003,
www.nytimes.com/2003/04/10/international/worldspecial/10OPPO.html
.

3
. Shortly before I left New York, Rick Bragg, a national correspondent who had been one of Howell's favorites, was suspended for two weeks for having failed to disclose that a year-old story carrying his byline had been reported mainly by a stringer. Rick had blasted the paper's decision in an interview with Howard Kurtz of the
Post.
Most
Times
correspondents, he asserted, relied on stringers, researchers, interns, and others. My colleagues erupted in indignant fury, demanding Bragg's ouster. Instead, he quit.
Howell issued a terse notice to the staff saying that Rick Bragg had “offered his resignation, and I have accepted it.”

1
. Boyd,
My Times in Black and White.

2
. Ibid., p. 280.

3
. Rod Barton,
The Weapons Detective: The Inside Story of Australia's Top Weapons Inspector
(Melbourne, Australia: Black Inc. Agenda, 2006), p. 145; Tom Mangold and Jeff Goldberg,
Plague Wars: A True Story of Biological Weapons
(London: Macmillan, 1999), p. 307.

4
. Mangold and Goldberg,
Plague Wars
, p. 288.

5
. Judith Miller, “Threats and Responses: Germ Weapons; C.I.A. Hunts Iraq Ties to Soviet Smallpox,”
New York Times
, December 3, 2002,
www.nytimes.com/2002/12/03/world/threats-and-responses-germ-weapons-cia-hunts-iraq-tie-to-soviet-smallpox.html
.

6
. See, among others, Jack Shafer, “Reassessing Miller,”
Slate
, May 29, 2003,
www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/press_box/2003/05
; shreassessing_miller.html. See also Herbert L. Abrams, “Weapons of Miller's Descriptions,”
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
60, no. 4 (July 2004): 56–64.

7
. By then, I had told Gerald that another group—Task Force 20, an intelligence-driven unit—was also scouring the country for WMD-related scientists and programs. Perhaps I could find a way to follow them, Gerald suggested, though so far the military had not even permitted reporters to mention the existence of such a group.

8
. Judith Miller, “After the War: Unconventional Arms; A Chronicle of Confusion in the U.S. Hunt for Hussein's Chemical and Germ Weapons,”
New York Times
, July 20, 2003,
www.nytimes.com/2003/07/20/world/after-war-unconventional-arms-chronicle-confusion-us-hunt-for-hussein-s-chemical.html
. See also Barton,
The Weapons Detective.
In 2006, Rod Barton, an Australian biologist and weapons inspector who had worked for UNSCOM and the Iraq Survey Group under David Kay and Charles Duelfer, summarized what he thought were the principal weaknesses of the XTF, in which I was embedded. First, he noted, the task force was comprised of “U.S. military personnel with little knowledge of WMD” and only “a few technical specialists” from the Pentagon. But the root cause was a faulty assumption, he writes: “Everyone in the U.S. Administration was so certain that weapons were there that the 75th ETF's [
sic
] instructions were simply to ‘search and find.' No one saw any need to conduct a more systematic investigation” (Barton, p. 230).

9
. In an interview in July 2014, Howard Kurtz, who now works at Fox News, where I also work part-time as a contributor, said that he stood by his sources.

10
. The rest of Petraeus's email states as follows: “I did what I thought was the right thing
at the time to help facilitate the search for possible WMD at a critical time in that effort. MET-Alpha had leads to run down, as you well know; some of them were potentially perishable, and they sure couldn't have pursued them in Kuwait.”

11
. “Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment of the British Government,” September 24, 2002,
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200102/cmhansrd/vo020924/debtext/20924-07.htm
.

1
. Juan Cole, “Judy Miller and the Neocons,”
Salon
, October 14, 2005,
www.salon.com/2005/10/14/neocon_4
.

2
. Robert Jervis,
Why Intelligence Fails: Lessons from the Iranian Revolution and the Iraq War
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), p. 150. Jervis, who was part of a small group that the CIA asked to explore the WMD failure in Iraq and to recommend steps to avoid repetitions, shared this and other insights with me in an interview at Columbia University in 2012, where he teaches international politics. His book is the most balanced analysis about the WMD intelligence disaster.

3
. Patrick E. Tyler and John Tagliabue, “Czechs Confirm Iraqi Agent Met with Terror Ringleader,”
New York Times
, October 27, 2001,
www.nytimes.com/2001/10/27/international/europe/27IRAQ.html
.

4
. For one of several efforts by fellow journalists to push me into expressing a personal view about the war, see Richard D. Heffner, on
Open Mind
, a conversation aired by PBS about
Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War
, November 6, 2002,
http://video.pbs.org/video/2047213129
.

5
. Bill Keller, “The I-Can't-Believe-I'm-a-Hawk Club,”
New York Times
, February 8, 2003,
www.nytimes.com/2003/02/08/opinion/the-i-can-t-believe-i-m-a-hawk-club.html
.

6
. 
Times
rules are strict with respect to what reporters can say publicly about the subjects they cover, and even topics they don't cover. As a columnist, he had been entitled to express that view, but he had not yet retracted or apologized for that stance, either. As a reporter, I was barred only from expressing a view publicly.

7
. There was no investigations editor for much of the prewar period. Investigations chief Steve Engelberg, my
Germs
coauthor, who had edited my article on engineer Haideri with his usual skepticism and thoroughness, had left the paper in June 2002. Doug Frantz, his successor, had taken over in October 2002 and resigned after a six-month stint to join the
L.A. Times.
Matt Purdy, whom I liked and respected, became editor only in January 2004, long after the articles had run. In any event, an investigative “exclusive” from Washington would rarely be sent to New York without a light edit by the bureau and its approval.

8
. Judith Miller and William J. Broad, “Some Analysts of Iraq Trailers Reject Germ Use,”
New York Times
, June 7, 2003,
www.nytimes.com/2003/06/07/world/some-analysts-of-iraq-trailers-reject-germ-use.html?scp=22&sq=&st=nyt
.

9
. Judith Miller, “U.S. Aides Say Iraqi Truck Could Be a Germ-War Lab,”
New York Times
, May 8, 2003,
www.nytimes.com/2003/05/08/international/worldspecial/08WEAP.html
; Judith Miller and William J. Broad, “Aftereffects: Germ Weapons; U.S. Analysts Link Iraq Labs to Germ Arms,”
New York Times
, May 21, 2003,
www.nytimes.com/2003/05/21/world/aftereffects-germ-weapons-us-analysts-link-iraq-labs-to-germ-arms.html
; Miller and Broad, “Some Analysts of Iraq Trailers Reject Germ Use.”

10
. Three of Jim Risen's seven prewar articles on the administration's handling of intelligence on Iraq refer to debates about whether Iraq intended to use aluminum tubes it bought in a nuclear program or for other purposes. But Risen also wrote (with David Johnston) on February 2, 2003, that unidentified “officials” were saying that the United States had obtained “communications intercepts that show Iraqi officials coaching scientists in how to avoid providing valuable information about Iraq's weapons programs to inspectors.” See James Risen and David Johnston, “Split at C.I.A. and F.B.I. on Iraqi Ties to Al Qaeda,”
New York Times
, February 2, 2003,
www.nytimes.com/2003/02/02/international/middleeast/02INTE.html
. Long after the war, I learned that Jill Abramson had refused to run the one prewar story Jim wrote that cast doubt on the WMD estimates, a decision for which she later apologized in print. Jill Abramson, “The Final Days,”
New York Times
, September 26, 2008,
www.nytimes.com/2008/09/28/books/review/Abramson-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
.

11
. Al Gore, September 23, 2002, speech before the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/transcripts/gore_text092302.html
.

12
. John Lott, “What Democrats Said Early on About the Threat that Saddam Hussein Posed,” Johnrlott.tripod.com/other/WhatDemsSaidEarlyOnIraq.html.

13
. Hans Blix,
Disarming Iraq
(London: Bloomsbury, 2004).

14
. Paradoxically, Pentagon Secretary Donald Rumsfeld struck one of the few official cautionary notes about WMD intelligence in a memo famously titled the “Parade of Horribles.” In mid-October 2002, he highlighted the risk that WMD might not be found in the event of war in Iraq. See Douglas J. Feith,
War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism
(New York: HarperCollins, 2008), p. 352.

15
. Will Tobey, interview, March 2012; Colin Powell with Tony Kolitz,
It Worked for Me: In Life and Leadership
(New York: Harper, 2012), p. 223.

16
. Though INR proved correct in its doubts about Saddam's nuclear intentions and capabilities, the State Department's intelligence unit has traditionally been the smallest of the intelligence agencies and the least influential, given its record of having underestimated the capabilities and intentions of several WMD aspiring states.

17
. The memoirs of Bush, Cheney, Condi Rice, and other key players in the Bush White House contain no suggestion that CIA director George Tenet doubted that Saddam had chemical and biological weapons and an active nuclear program. In an interview, Dick Cheney said that Tenet had never given him any reason to doubt the accuracy
of the NIE and its other reporting on Iraqi WMD. But Les Gelb, a former State Department official and
New York Times
columnist, who headed the Council on Foreign Relations during the Iraq War, said that he believed Tenet had doubts about the WMD estimates. In an interview in March 2014, Gelb said that several months before the invasion, he had met privately with Tenet, whom he had known for many years, and asked him whether he had “smoking gun” evidence that Saddam Hussein had retained chem-bio weapons and was continuing work on an atomic bomb. Tenet said no. Gelb told me that he interpreted Tenet's statement as confirmation that the evidence underlying the NIE's WMD claims was shakier than the CIA and other intelligence agencies had led the White House and American citizens to believe.