The Story (29 page)

Most of my colleagues had dismissed Kurtz's initial blast. But some were more troubled by his second attack a month later. Published in late June 2003 on the front page of the paper's much-read Style section, he alleged that I had “hijacked” at least one of the XTF's weapons-hunting units that I had covered. I had “crossed the line” from reporter to serving as a “middle man” between the unit and Chalabi. Quoting Sgt. Pomeroy, the disgruntled soldier, and anonymous military sources, he wrote that I wore a military uniform throughout my embed and helped debrief one of Saddam's sons-in-law. I had also supposedly bullied General Petraeus into forcing the XTF leader, Colonel McPhee, to rescind an order recalling MET Alpha back to the brigade's temporary base near Tallil.

None of this was accurate. MET Alpha's chief Gonzales, fed up with what he called the Pentagon's worthless “suspect site” list, had received his commander's approval to reach out to Iraqis who might help locate Iraqi WMD scientists. His commander, McPhee, had given me permission to accompany MET Alpha during that period. He had approved Gonzales's request to work with Chalabi, to whom a DIA liaison officer was already assigned. As for Saddam's son-in-law, I never met him. And I occasionally wore an army jacket because McPhee had barred me from covering MET missions unless I “blended in” with the units. Since he had assigned no women soldiers to the METs, I was already visible enough, he said.

I took special exception to Kurtz's assertion that I got Colonel McPhee to rescind an order pulling MET Alpha back from the search by complaining to General Petraeus and threatening to write a “negative story” about his decision. Kurtz quoted excerpts of a note I had written to Colonel McPhee informing him that I intended to stay in the Baghdad area even if MET Alpha rejoined the rest of its brigade in Tallil. What Kurtz apparently did not know was that I had discussed this course of action with Gerald Boyd, via satellite phone in New York. Gerald urged me to find a way to stay near Karbalā' to follow up on the front-page story I wrote in April about the Iraqi scientist whom MET Alpha had found, and who claimed to have seen chemical weapons and precursors destroyed shortly before the
war. The Iraqi source was in great potential danger, especially after I had reported that he was not a scientist but a military intelligence officer who was cooperating with the United States. At the time, I knew little more about him. But since he was willingly providing a small group of MET Alpha and US intelligence officers with leads, McPhee's decision to withdraw the soldiers he trusted seemed to epitomize the problems inherent in the army's WMD hunt. Gerald had asked me to prepare a story that focused on that decision as a reflection of the task force's weaknesses. We would publish it immediately if the colonel pulled back MET Alpha and refused to let me stay on in Baghdad.
⁷
“Try not to get yourself disembeded,” Gerald told me. “But stay with the story!”

McPhee had quickly reversed course after consulting on a secure line with MET Alpha's chief, General Petraeus, and other brigade officers. He instructed MET Alpha to continue working near Baghdad. Nothing I said or did affected that decision. Officers routinely changed orders based on new information, or new facts on the ground. And the “negative” WMD story Kurtz said I had “threatened” to write was, in fact, published at length, but in July, three days after David Kelly's death and a month after I ended my embed with the XTF and returned to New York. While my story praised the task force for persistence and creativity in what seemed to be a hopeless mission, I argued that the WMD hunt had been crippled from the start by a lack of resources, too little real-time intelligence, and, oddly, given the administration's repeated claims about the existence of Iraqi WMD to justify the war, a lack of priority. Even if there were hidden stockpiles of unconventional weapons in Iraq, I wrote, the XTF would have been unlikely to unearth them.
⁸

Had Kurtz been reporting from Iraq rather than Washington, he might have learned that the sole military source quoted in his story—Sgt. Eugene Pomeroy, the former substitute teacher from Albany—was problematic at best. Two of the four MET chiefs had banned him from accompanying them on sensitive missions. Senior officers in the task force decided that he was not knowledgeable enough to review my stories. Since I was the brigade's only embedded reporter, he essentially had no job.

I refused to talk to Kurtz because he had published my private email
exchange with John Burns a month earlier, but Andy Rosenthal did. He called Kurtz's allegations “idiotic” and “baseless.”

“She didn't bring MET Alpha anywhere,” he told Kurtz. “She doesn't direct MET Alpha, she's a civilian . . . a reporter. She's not a member of the US armed forces. She was covering a unit, like hundreds of other reporters for the
New York Times
,
Washington Post
, and others. She went where they went to the degree that they would allow.”

“We think she did really good work there,” Andy Rosenthal was quoted by Kurtz as saying, having examined at least some of the twenty-four stories I had filed about the XTF's work. “We think she broke some important stories.”

When Monty Gonzales and several other XTF officers involved in the hunt read Kurtz's story, they wrote letters to the
Washington Post
flatly denying Kurtz's account, which they copied to me. The
Post
eventually published excerpts from two of them, but declined to run a retraction.
⁹

While I was furious, General Petraeus seemed bemused by the flap. He dismissed the story and urged me to do the same. “Quite a hatchet job,” he wrote me in an email. “Sounds like the
Post
was desperate for news . . . Trust me: You never pushed me around!” he joked.
¹⁰
“Keep your chin up.”

Despite such support, I knew that Kurtz's story was a problem. It was one thing for little-known bloggers to accuse me of “hyping” the WMD threat by noting that I had written more stories than other reporters about WMD intelligence regarding Iraq, Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi opposition, and the administration's post-9/11 concerns driving its decision to go to war. But Kurtz was published by the
Washington Post
, widely read and respected in our profession.

All this preoccupied me as I sat with Keller the day David Kelly died. I told him that we needed to write an obit describing Kelly's extraordinary career as a scientific biowarrior and hero of the US-UK's nonproliferation campaign. He assigned me to write it. For whatever reason, I left without telling him about my last meeting with Kelly, when I had stopped in London to see him three months earlier in March en route to Iraq before starting my embed. I had wanted to learn what he thought I might find in Iraq.

Over dinner at one of his favorite vegetarian restaurants, David told me
he had little doubt that Iraq was hiding some pre–Gulf War era chemical or germ-related materials, and perhaps some older weapons whose alleged destruction it had not documented, as the UN required. He believed, he said, that Iraq had active chemical and biological programs, and perhaps even in the nuclear arena, too. But he was concerned about the quantity and quality of British and American intelligence underlying their official estimates. “Not enough hard evidence to support . . . logical conclusions,” he told me, according to my notes of our discussion that night. Though he refused to be specific, he described the intelligence so far as “thinner” than he had hoped or expected.

David was briefly silent when I asked about the United Kingdom's claim, in a WMD dossier it had published in September 2002, that Iraq could launch chemical- and bioready rockets and missiles within forty-five minutes, an assertion that received widespread publicity and alarmed many in Britain and the United States.
¹¹
He had not written that part of the dossier, he told me after a pause, unwilling even off the record to challenge openly his government's official assessment. David was utterly loyal to a government that would prove unwilling to return the favor. Little reliable new evidence had been collected since he and other UNSCOM inspectors were ejected from Iraq in 1998, he complained. Given the limitations on their activities, the inspectors who had followed them there were unlikely to find whatever Saddam had chosen to hide, he told me.

Finding Iraq's WMD scientists was key to understanding what had happened to its WMD programs, David said. “Find Taha,” he said, referring to Dr. Rihab Taha, known in the United States as the notorious “Dr. Germ,” the former head of Saddam's biowarfare program. “Find Amir Saadi and Dr. [Nissar] Hindawi,” he counseled, referring to leading Iraqi weapons scientists about whom I had written for years. If the US military focused instead on visits to the Pentagon's suspect site list, “you'll be in Iraq for a very long time,” he predicted.

Did he doubt that we would find WMD in Iraq? I asked as we finished our meal. “I'm sure you'll find something of interest,” David said, evading a direct answer. “Just find the scientists,” he urged me, “and you'll find what you're looking for.”

David hailed a cab for me and wished me luck. Looking back at the notes I had scribbled during our dinner, I realized that he had not repeated George Tenet's cavalier assertion that finding Saddam's weapons and materials would be a “slam dunk.” Unlike so many other analysts, including me, David had not equated the absence of evidence confirming Iraq's claim to have destroyed its banned weapons with proof of such weapons' existence. Yes, he
believed
that Saddam was lying and was hiding such weapons, he told me. But he could not be certain. He said that he hoped we would soon enjoy another dinner together—next time along the banks of the Euphrates.

“My treat!” I replied as I climbed into the spacious black taxi.

Diane Ceribelli, Bill Keller's assistant, called me on Friday afternoon, May 21, 2004. Could I stop by Bill's office before I left for the weekend?

Could it wait until Monday?

No.

Her tone was grave. This can't be good, I thought. Kind and resourceful, Diane never forgot a birthday. So if she sounded worried, it meant trouble.

Seeking insight, I called Bill Safire. He had just heard that Bill Keller and Jill Abramson were planning to run an editor's note—a mea culpa—on the paper's prewar reporting about Iraq. He didn't know what it would say or when it would run, but he urged me to be prepared.

Prepared for what?

“For anything.”

Keller and Abramson were waiting for me in his office. Most reporters had already left by six o'clock, so the newsroom was still. Jill was seated, unsmiling. Keller was pacing, clutching papers.

Surely I was aware of the controversy surrounding the paper's pre–Iraq War reporting, he began.

Of course. How could I not be? Since soldiers had failed to find WMD in Iraq, and a bloody insurgency had taken hold, opposition to the war had intensified. So, too, had attacks on the paper's prewar coverage, especially my reporting, since it was by far the most extensive. WMD, terrorism, and the Middle East were all part of my beat, and I had written more stories about these subjects than other
Times
reporters. Bloggers and other media critics were portraying me as either a closet neocon bent on taking the country to war, or a credulous dupe spoon-fed by Ahmad Chalabi and White House “shillsters”—a “useful idiot,” one assistant professor from the University of Michigan called me.
¹
I had “blood on my hands,” the email declared.

Keller said that after Howell and Gerald left the paper, he first wanted to “heal the wounds” they had inflicted and “move on.” But continuing criticism of the paper's prewar reporting—and of my work, in particular—had forced him to examine our coverage and publish an editor's note acknowledging our “collective” failings. The paper had an obligation to “set the record straight.”

A note had been drafted, he said, handing me the papers he was shuffling. It would run on the front page, Sunday. In two days.

I was stunned. The schedule meant that space on the coveted front page of the Sunday paper, with our largest circulation, had already been allocated. Without having asked me a single question about my sources, the circumstances under which the articles were published, or the editors who had handled them, the paper was going to publish what read like a front-page indictment mostly of my articles. The editor's note was a done deal.

The draft note impugned unnamed “senior editors”—a slap at Howell and Gerald—for having allowed my stories into the paper. It implied that I had written only stories that supported President Bush's assertion that war was justified because the intelligence community had concluded that Saddam was hiding unconventional weapons. Attached to the note was a list of my prewar stories about Iraq, showing my ostensible dependence on Chalabi. The list was lengthy. However, it included stories that mentioned or quoted Chalabi as an opposition leader but had nothing to do with WMD. Nor was it comprehensive.

“If you run this,” I said as coolly as possible, “you had better prepare a second editor's note to correct the errors, omissions, and unsupported innuendos in this version. And you'll also have to explain why I'll be denouncing my own paper on CNN.”

Keller asked me to identify the errors. First, I told them, I had not relied heavily on Chalabi or his prowar, neocon American allies, as the note asserted. Chalabi was the source of only one of my prewar WMD stories—the interview in Bangkok with Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, the Iraqi engineer—and that meeting had taken place in December 2001, before CIA agents were even tasked to seek information about Iraq's WMD programs.
²