The Story (36 page)

Though Bill Keller had banned me from writing about Iraqi WMD (except for the competitive oil-for-food investigation for the
Times
), interviewing Haideri was crucial for the intelligence fiasco book I was researching and still hoped to write.

I had many questions for Haideri: First, above all, had he lied to me about having visited or worked at some twenty different Iraqi sites that he had been told were associated with Iraq's chemical or biological weapons programs? Had he exaggerated his claims? Had Saddam stored chemical or biological agents underneath the Saddam Hussein Hospital in Baghdad, as he had told me back in December 2001? Knight Ridder, the nation's second-largest newspaper publisher, had reported that when the CIA had taken Haideri back to Baghdad in February 2004 for a brief visit, he had been unable to identify any of the places where he claimed to have worked.
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Was that true? Had he failed CIA polygraph tests, as journalists also alleged, and been labeled a fabricator?

Haideri, then forty-six, had aged considerably since our first meeting. Perspiring and breathing heavily, repeatedly rubbing his hand through his thinning, slicked-back brown hair, he was obviously nervous as I began questioning him. He swore that he had not lied to me or to the US government. Nor had Chalabi's people encouraged him to lie. Would the CIA, he asked, have hustled him out of Thailand to the island of Saipan, and then to Honolulu, and finally to Virginia if they thought he was lying? Would they still be paying for him, his wife and ex-wife, and their six, and later eight, children, if he had misled them? Would they have gotten him and his family I-94 entry cards, which he showed me, and a six-month visa, which had been renewed every six months since his arrival in the States two years earlier? Would they have given him a work permit, which he also showed me, and coached him on drafting a résumé? The agents had slipped him out of Thailand to protect him, he told me, after one of his wife's brothers had been shot at their home in Baghdad. His wife's sister, too, had been beaten.

In mid-2003 he had failed a second polygraph because, he claimed,
the technician administering the three-day test made him nervous. But the CIA had continued paying his expenses since his arrival in Virginia over two years ago—more than $4,000 a month, he said, which his lawyer later confirmed. The agency was even paying for Selwa's English lessons, he told me.

I looked around at the drab décor—standard agency issue. Haideri was probably being truthful about the house, I thought; town houses in Virginia suburbs usually don't come equipped with cameras embedded in the living room and kitchen walls like the ones I noticed in this house.

Yes, intelligence agents had taken him back to Baghdad for a short stay in February 2004 to help the Iraq Survey Group identify places he claimed to have worked. But they had taken him to only two sites, he insisted, the first of which he had located, but it had been badly looted, he said. He couldn't find the second; he had never driven there himself. But he had given the Americans the name of the manager in charge when he had worked there. What about the alleged secret rooms or laboratories at the Baghdad hospital? I asked. He reminded me that he had never entered the hospital. Instead, Iraqi officers had brought materials to his car from inside the hospital for him to inspect. I knew that while MET Alpha's and Bravo's WMD hunting teams had found secret rooms inside villas, mosques, and palaces, none had been found at the sites Haideri had identified.

As usual, CIA and DIA analysts disagreed about Haideri's value and veracity, even in late 2004. A CIA spokesman had told me that the agency considered Haideri “unreliable” after he failed a third polygraph in Baghdad. But DIA officials continued calling his information “useful,” though not as “earth shattering” as the analysts initially thought. James Brooks, the DIA spokesman at the time, told me that the military had not walked away from Haideri. “He provided information for many reports on a lot of different topics,” Brooks said. “There were frauds out there, but not this guy.”

The CIA, however, apparently cooled toward him after his brief return to Baghdad. The day before my visit to Haideri's home, two immigration officials had come to the house and ordered him to prepare to leave the United States immediately. His visa was about to expire and would not be
renewed this time. The officials had left, but for how long? Could I help him find a lawyer? he pleaded.

While I had intended to write about his saga in my book, Haideri's very presence in Washington was news. Two weeks earlier, Jim Dwyer, a New York–based
Times
investigative reporter, had reported that Chalabi's INC had coached Iraqi defectors he had steered to American journalists and US intelligence officials before the war. Dwyer had relied heavily on a former representative of the INC who had worked with several defectors, including Haideri. But the former INC official also acknowledged having had a bitter split with the group and having been arrested by the Americans, twice, after Saddam was defeated in April 2003. Dwyer based his claim largely on that embittered Iraqi. He also wrote that Haideri and the other defectors “could not be reached for comment.” But here Haideri was, two weeks later, having tea with me in Virginia.

In May 2004, Keller's editor's note suggested that the paper had been “taken in” by Haideri's false claims. Okrent's public editor's note, too, suggested that American officials and Haideri invented their concern about the fate of his relatives back in Baghdad. Okrent clearly doubted that they were in jeopardy and that one of them may have been hurt or killed as a warning to other defectors. “Were they?” Okrent wrote. “Did anyone go back to ask? Did anything Haideri say have genuine value?”

The paper now had a chance to revisit Haideri's claims as its editors had urged: to publish the missing “follow-up” to my controversial front-page story. Haideri, the alleged fabricator, was hiding in plain sight. He even had a Facebook account.

I called Keller at home. Whatever our differences, the news came first. While Keller would not permit me to follow up on the story I had broken, another
Times
reporter could decide whether Haideri had lied or embellished—or, as his legion of critics charged, had misled our paper, its readers, and the country.

Keller was furious again. Why had I disregarded his order to stop reporting on Iraq and WMD? While I had no intention of writing about Haideri for the
Times
, I replied, I would continue trying to understand how and why the prewar WMD intelligence had failed. I was writing a book—on
my own time, I reminded him. I had paid for my trip to Washington myself. This was purely a courtesy call to pass along a story that Keller had said the paper had an obligation to pursue.

In New York the next morning, Jim Risen, our intelligence reporter, called me. Keller had asked him to pursue the story. I gave him Haideri's address. Jim later told me that he had driven to Centreville, only to find Haideri gone. Selwa was unable to speak enough English to explain his disappearance. Jim did not tell me whether he or another reporter had pursued the matter further.

By 2014, Haideri had not been deported. John A. Rizzo, the CIA's former general counsel and an agency lawyer for over thirty years, told me in an interview in 2013 that while he did not recall the details of Haideri's case, defectors deemed to be fabricators were usually not compensated and were invariably forced to leave America. Soon after our 2004 meeting in Virginia, Haideri had hired a lawyer and applied for political asylum. In 2006 the CIA formally ended its relationship with him after negotiating what he and his lawyer claimed was a $400,000 payment in exchange for his pledge of silence.

The CIA refused to comment on him and other defectors. But in 2009 Charles Duelfer, who had led the search for WMD in Iraq in 2004, published
Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq
, a book about his WMD hunt. His book confirmed my assertion that the intelligence community had debriefed Haideri at length and had issued many reports based on his reporting. “Sometimes what he said was correct; sometimes he was inferring too much,” Duelfer concluded. He did not use the word
fabricator.

By October 2004, I had gone from being a reporter who made headlines to becoming the headline myself.

It felt asphyxiating. I tried carrying on with my reporting, but I was increasingly preoccupied with legal meetings about how to avoid a confrontation with prosecutor Fitzgerald and jail. Though some critics wrote later that I was eager to go to jail as a First Amendment martyr, nothing was further from the truth.
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Jason, my amazingly healthy husband who rarely
even got colds, had been ill. In 2004 he had a stent placed in an artery near his heart. I was merely a good actress, putting up a stoic front. Deep down, I was scared stiff.

After several discouraging conversations with Floyd Abrams, I decided that I could not comply with Fitzgerald's demands, even if it meant going to jail.

It was ultimately my call, not the paper's. Unlike Matt Cooper, I had not discussed my sources in emails that belonged to the
Times.
George and Floyd, who were representing me as well as the paper, were content not to contest my view that my notebooks were not the paper's. If the paper did not own my notebooks, it, unlike
Time
magazine, could not be fined.

In October 2004 Judge Thomas F. Hogan of the federal district court ordered me jailed for as long as eighteen months to persuade me to change my mind. He suspended the sanction pending our appeal. “We have a classic confrontation between competing interests,” he said from the bench. I was acting in “good faith,” he allowed, doing my “duty as a respected and established reporter who believes reporters have a First Amendment privilege that trumps the right of the government to inquire into her sources.” But I had no legal right to refuse to answer the government's questions.

Arthur Sulzberger, who had accompanied me to Washington, was supportive. The judge had said that I was a “great reporter doing a great job. And that's absolutely right,” he told NBC. But journalists believed that we “have the law on our side,” that the First Amendment “protects us from having to give this information.” If we lost, I would be going to jail for something I never wrote and something we never published. “And that's just wrong,” he said.

Arthur and I knew that the law was not on our side. While the
Times
is fond of recalling legal victories in the Pentagon Papers case, the dispositive decision on a journalist's right to protect a source was
Branzburg v. Hayes
, which Judge Hogan cited in holding Matt Cooper and me in contempt of court. In a 5-to-4 decision in 1972, the Supreme Court ruled that requiring reporters to appear and testify before grand juries does not abridge the freedom of the press that the First Amendment guarantees. A defendant has the right to “every man's testimony.” A majority also ruled that the First
Amendment does not give journalists the right to protect sources, especially if they have broken the law. James Goodale, then the general counsel of the
Times
, used opinions written by Justices Potter Stewart and Lewis Powell to carve out exceptions to the ruling.

Justice Stewart had proposed a three-part balancing test to weigh a grand jury's needs. The government had to demonstrate (1) “probable cause” to believe that the journalist has information relevant to the investigation; (2) that the information being sought cannot be gotten in another way; and (3) finally, that the government has a “compelling and overriding interest” in getting the information. Justice Powell gave journalists a bit more ammunition in his separate opinion. Though he had voted with the majority, he argued that the balancing test should be conducted on a “case-by-case” basis. In subsequent cases, the Supreme Court had usually sided with the government seeking the information. It would be an uphill battle, Floyd told me. Our chances were less than fifty-fifty.

Arthur predicted that we would win. Was I willing to stick with this? To the end?

I doubted I would have much choice, I replied. If I couldn't get a voluntary waiver of the confidentiality pledge I had given my source—and Floyd had told me that was most unlikely—I was prepared to go to jail. Given the
Branzburg
ruling, I would probably be spending some “quality time” there, I told him.

Arthur glanced away, reluctant to ponder the implications of losing such a high-profile case. I doubted that our fight would end as triumphantly as his father's victory in the Pentagon Papers case. In my case, the source being protected, I noted, was not a classic “whistle-blower”: an obscure junior official trying to reveal wrongdoing in the public's interest. It was a senior official who may have leaked information to smear a subordinate or, best case, to protect his boss from an allegation of having lied the country to war. That would not resonate well with the public, or even journalists.

I wanted to set just a couple of ground rules. If I refused to cooperate, I wanted an open channel only to him. Arthur seemed pleased but puzzled by that request.

“But what about Keller?” he asked me, looking slightly alarmed.

I told Arthur that I no longer trusted Keller after he had nearly betrayed “Jim Preston,” my DIA source.

I also told Arthur how wrongheaded I thought the decision to publish an editor's note had been. Knowing that he, as publisher, would surely have approved the note, and perhaps Dan Okrent's column as well, I said that neither the paper nor its reporters had been “taken in,” as the note suggested. And I told him I felt I had been scapegoated. Though the editor's note had not mentioned my name, my journalistic integrity had been implicitly called into question. Since then, I told him, I had felt betrayed by the institution I had worked for for so long. For months, I had felt utterly alone.