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 Judith Miller is a former reporter for The New York Times and author of four books on the Middle East, biological weapons and the Holocaust. For information on her prosecution for refusing to reveal sources to federal prosecutors, see the news section of this Web site or the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
In this section:
 Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War by Judith Miller, William Broad, Stephen Engelberg Simon & Schuster, 2001  God Has Ninety-Nine Names: A Reporter's Journey Through a Militant Middle East by Judith Miller Simon & Schuster, 1996  Created and maintained pro-bono by Joshua Tanzer, web developer and journalist in New York City. • Resume • Web site • Contact |
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Bioterrorism’s Deadly Math Manhattan Institute, City Journal, Autumn 2008 by Judith Miller -- The White House wanted to know: How much safer are Americans today than they were on October 4, 2001? That was the day when a photo editor in Florida became the first reported case of inhalation anthrax in America in decades. In what became biology’s 9/11, five letters containing less than a quarter-ounce of anthrax total—the equivalent of two pats of butter—killed five people, infected 17, put more than 20,000 on antibiotics, and traumatized thousands more. Decontamination alone, including at the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington, took over three years and cost some $200 million. Original article Posted by Judith Miller | November 03, 2008 Judy Speaks in Brazil Banco de Eventos on behalf of ABAP - Associação Brasileira de Agências de Publicidade Judy recently spoke in Brazil on the topic of the importance of free expression in democratic societies at a forum sponsored by Banco de Eventos on behalf of ABAP - Associação Brasileira de Agências de Publicidade. We have provided a link to an article on the event in Spanish. Original article Posted by Judith Miller | August 11, 2008 Iraqi Militants Becoming Citizens Reader's Digest, July 2008 by Judith Miller -- Major General Doug Stone is trying to turn jailed Iraqi militants into citizens. Call him a do-gooder, but guess what? It's working. Turning Shame Into Pride After Major General Douglas Michael Stone arrived in Baghdad in April 2007 to take command of security prisoners in Iraq, he promptly assembled his officers for some blunt talk. The abuses of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib were a "moral failure" that had shamed a nation long admired for respecting international law and human rights, he told them. They were also a betrayal of the U.S. military's and America's "core values." Original article Posted by Judith Miller | August 10, 2008 Intelligent Policing Comes to New Jersey Manhattan Institute, City Journal, Summer 2008 by Judith Miller -- A state revolution in tracing guns, mapping crimes, and sharing information It was late March 2006, and Governor Jon Corzine was frustrated. Within 48 hours, there had been seven separate shootings in Trenton, the state's capital and home to 85,000 people, including several thousand gang members. In one of several shootouts between warring gangs, a stray .45 caliber round had blown seven-year-old Tajahnique Lee off her bicycle and ripped through her jaw. Tajahnique was alive, but photos of her angelic young face blanketed newspapers and TV screens. Violent crime was increasing in New Jersey, even though overall crime had been declining for five years. "How can we stop this violence?" the governor asked his police superintendent, Colonel Joseph R. Fuentes. Original article Posted by Judith Miller | August 07, 2008 Best of the Web -- I've Got a Secret Wall Street Journal, June 25, 2008 Judy Speaks at Symposium Regarding the Shield ... By JAMES TARANTO Last night found us at a Manhattan Institute symposium, where two distinguished journalists--Judith Miller, formerly of the New York Times, and Gabriel Schoenfeld, of Commentary--debated whether there should be a federal "shield law" protecting journalists from having to testify about confidential sources. (Miller spent almost three months in jail in 2005 for refusing to testify in the Valerie Plame kerfuffle; Schoenfeld is a frequent critic of Miller's former paper's reporting on national security secrets. Both are occasional contributors to The Wall Street Journal's editorial pages and this Web site.) Original article Posted by Judith Miller | June 27, 2008 The Other Terrorism Manhattan Institute > City Journal, Spring 2008 by Judith Miller -- Post-9/11, Spain’s Basque terrorists are on the run—but still a threat. The heart, if not the soul, of Spain’s capital, Madrid, is its bustling financial district. Thousands crowd daily into the skyscrapers that overlook the district’s main square. Thousands more shop at a branch of El Corte Inglés (Spain’s Macy’s), attend soccer games at Bernabéu Stadium, or ride the subways, trains, and buses whose lines converge here. Terrorists had hoped to strike this densely packed urban space in early 2008. But unlike the devastating coordinated suicide bombings of March 11, 2004, which killed 191 train commuters and wounded 1,600, this plot did not originate with al-Qaida or any of its loosely linked affiliates. Nor was it hatched among the 12 militant Muslim Pakistanis arrested in January for allegedly planning suicide bombings in Barcelona’s subways and other strikes in Britain, France, Germany, and Portugal. No, the terrorists who dreamed of creating mayhem in the square were as Spanish as paella, as much a part of the local landscape as flamenco or bullfighting: “Euskadi Ta Askatasuna,” or “Basque Homeland and Freedom,” commonly known as ETA (pronounced “etta”). This is Spain’s “other” terrorism—a Marxoid movement that, for some 50 years, has fought for independence for the 2.5 to 3 million Spaniards of Basque descent. Original article Posted by Judith Miller | May 24, 2008 WHAT I LEARNED AT 'ANTI-JIHAD U' New York Post, May 2, 2008 by Judith Miller -- LAST month, I visited one of the largest Islamic schools in the Middle East. It's run by the US military - for detainees in Iraq. The suspected insurgents also participate in discussion programs about Islam - and are being trained to be carpenters, farmers and artists. It's all part of the US military's radically new approach to detention in Iraq - an integral part of its counterinsurgency effort. For the past nine months, Task Force 134 (9,000 personnel from all the uniformed services) has been experimenting with such unconventional initiatives at two large "camps" that hold 23,245 suspected insurgents. The officer in charge is Maj. Gen. Douglas M. Stone, USMC, who oversees civilian detention in Iraq. Original article Posted by Judith Miller | May 02, 2008 FBI VS. THE NYPD: Behind the Latest Flap New York Post, March 25, 2008 by Judith Miller -- The latest apparent flap between the FBI and the NYPD turns on a factor that the intelligence world sometimes shares with the real-estate business: What matters is location, location, location. Original article Posted by Judith Miller | March 26, 2008 Anti-terrorism in paradise: Lacking funds and manpower, Bratton's war on terror is based on the principle of sharing. Los Angeles Times, July 15, 2007 by Judith Miller (Note: This article is adapted from a longer version appearing in City Journal. See above.) THREE TIME zones, 3,000 miles and a cultural galaxy apart, New York and Los Angeles — along with Washington — face a common threat: They are prime targets of Islamic terrorists. Original article Posted by Judith Miller | February 13, 2008 From the Shores of Tripoli The National Interest Online, May 1, 2007 By Judith Miller -- THE BUSH Administration can point to only one undeniable non-proliferation "success" so far in its tenure: Libya’s decision to renounce WMD in December 2003. But the administration that so adroitly pushed Libya to abandon unconventional weapons has been unable, or in some cases unwilling, to apply the key lessons of that success to its other nuclear challenges. Original article Posted by Judith Miller | May 11, 2007 Book Review: George Tenet's At the Center of the Storm The New York Sun, May 11, 2007 Review by Judith Miller -- How could the nation's intelligence agencies, with their multibilliondollar secret budgets, their thousands of employees in over 100 countries across the globe, their vast networks of all-seeing eyes and ears in the skies, and clusters of informants below, have failed to anticipate and prevent the attacks of September 11, 2001, or find that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction? The unforgivable flaw in George Tenet's alternatively fascinating, infuriating, important, and self-serving book is his failure to explain in any depth, as only he could have, these two colossal failures that occurred during his tenure as director of Central Intelligence. Original article Posted by Judith Miller | May 11, 2007 Commentary: When Activists Are Terrorists Wall Street Journal, May 3, 2007 By Judith Miller -- Did the New York Police Department spy on peaceful groups and citizens trying to exercise their constitutional right to protest the renomination of President Bush at the Republican National Convention in the summer of 2004? This is what civil liberties groups allege, and what the NYPD denies. Who is right? The issue is at the heart of several interrelated suits being adjudicated in federal district courts in New York, many of them filed on behalf of the 1,800 protesters who were arrested during the largest protest at a political convention in American history. In its complaints, the New York Civil Liberties Union, which represents seven of those arrested, accuses the department of having violated the law by its mass arrests, holding people in protracted custody for minor violations, and fingerprinting those detained. Original article Posted by Judith Miller | May 05, 2007 Opinion: Killing Again (Rwanda) The New York Sun, January 29, 2007 By Judith Miller -- Words can kill. The historic verdict of an international court concluded in 2003 that three Rwandan press executives were guilty of genocide for having helped incite the 1994 massacre of some 800,000 Rwandans in 100 days, most of them members of the Tutsi minority. . . . Original article Posted by Judith Miller | March 12, 2007 Opinion: Website for the germ-obsessed Los Angeles Times, January 13, 2007 By Judith Miller -- PLANNING A TRIP to Vancouver Island? You might want to know that Cryptococcus gattii, a pathogenic fungus that invades the central nervous systems of humans and other animals, has recently infected about 100 people there, six of whom have died. Do you know that at least 10 Egyptians have died of avian flu since Christmas Eve? Or that 50 people in central Russia have contracted a deadly form of hemorrhagic fever? Closer to home in Minnesota, could your child's extreme itching last summer have been caused by cercaria, the immature stage of a blood fluke found in some of the state's seemingly pristine lakes? . . . Original article Posted by Judith Miller | March 12, 2007 Commentary: The Weekend Interview -- Kurdistan's Massoud Barzani The Wall Street Journal, October 28, 2006 By Judith Miller -- ERBIL, Iraq -- Unlike Baghdad, 200 miles away, the air here does not echo with the sound of gunfire, car bombs and helicopters. Residents of this city of a million people picnic by day in pristine new parks and sip tea with friends and relatives at night. American forces are not "occupiers" or the "enemy," but "liberators." Mentioning President Bush evokes smiles -- and not of derision. . . . Original article Posted by Judith Miller | March 12, 2007 "The Man Who Exposed the Soviets' Viral Terror" Los Angeles Times, August 13, 2006 By Judith Miller -- A MAJOR CHAPTER in biological warfare quietly closed in June with the death of Lev S. Sandakhchiev, an extraordinary 70-year-old Russian scientist who until last year had led the former Soviet Union's most terrifying center of viral research. Located in remote Siberia, the State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology, informally known as Vector — worthy of James Bond — had throughout the Cold War been turning the world's most hideous diseases into weapons. A secret research facility, Vector had long been the target of American intelligence efforts and, as it turned out, justified anxiety. . . . Original article Posted by Judith Miller | March 12, 2007 "Terrorist Extravaganza" Wall Street Journal,August 11, 2006 By Judith Miller -- "The details of the latest failed Islamist plot against America are disturbingly familiar. A group of ethnic Pakistanis plot for months to blow up, simultaneously, multiple jet airliners en route to the U.S. using odorless, colorless liquid explosives contained in carry-on luggage. The resemblance to a failed effort in 1994, codenamed "Operation Bojinka," is unmistakable." . . . Original article Posted by Judith Miller | March 12, 2007 Libya: "Gadhafi's Leap of Faith" Wall Street Journal, May 17, 2006 By Judith Miller -- On Dec. 16, 2003, three days after Saddam Hussein was pulled from his hole near Tikrit, Robert G. Joseph, who headed counterproliferation on the White House National Security Council, flew to London for a secret meeting with his British and Libyan counterparts to discuss how and when Libya would announce the abandonment of its weapons of mass destruction. "The trip was so close-hold that it was cleared neither with the British Embassy in Washington nor the American Embassy in London," a senior U.S. official recalled. Neither Donald Rumsfeld nor Colin Powell knew of it in advance. . . . Original article Posted by Judith Miller | March 12, 2007 Posted by Judith Miller | August 30, 2006 My Four Hours Testifying in the Federal Grand Jury Room New York Times, October 16, 2005 By JUDITH MILLER In July 2003, Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador, created a firestorm by publishing an essay in The New York Times that accused the Bush administration of using faulty intelligence to justify the war in Iraq. The administration, he charged, ignored findings of a secret mission he had undertaken for the Central Intelligence Agency - findings, he said, that undermined claims that Iraq was seeking uranium for a nuclear bomb. It was the first time Mr. Wilson had gone public with his criticisms of the White House. Yet he had already become a focus of significant scrutiny at the highest levels of the Bush administration. Almost two weeks earlier, in an interview with me on June 23, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, discussed Mr. Wilson's activities and placed blame for intelligence failures on the C.I.A. In later conversations with me, on July 8 and July 12, Mr. Libby, who is Mr. Cheney's top aide, played down the importance of Mr. Wilson's mission and questioned his performance. My notes indicate that well before Mr. Wilson published his critique, Mr. Libby told me that Mr. Wilson's wife may have worked on unconventional weapons at the C.I.A. My notes do not show that Mr. Libby identified Mr. Wilson's wife by name. Nor do they show that he described Valerie Wilson as a covert agent or "operative," as the conservative columnist Robert D. Novak first described her in a syndicated column published on July 14, 2003. (Mr. Novak used her maiden name, Valerie Plame.) This is what I told a federal grand jury and the special counsel investigating whether administration officials committed a crime by leaking Ms. Plame's identity and the nature of her job to reporters. During my testimony on Sept. 30 and Oct. 12, the special counsel, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, asked me whether Mr. Libby had shared classified information with me during our several encounters before Mr. Novak's article. He also asked whether I thought Mr. Libby had tried to shape my testimony through a letter he sent to me in jail last month. And Mr. Fitzgerald asked whether Mr. Cheney had known what his chief aide was doing and saying. My interview notes show that Mr. Libby sought from the beginning, before Mr. Wilson's name became public, to insulate his boss from Mr. Wilson's charges. According to my notes, he told me at our June meeting that Mr. Cheney did not know of Mr. Wilson, much less know that Mr. Wilson had traveled to Niger, in West Africa, to verify reports that Iraq was seeking to acquire uranium for a weapons program. As I told the grand jury, I recalled Mr. Libby's frustration and anger about what he called "selective leaking" by the C.I.A. and other agencies to distance themselves from what he recalled as their unequivocal prewar intelligence assessments. The selective leaks trying to shift blame to the White House, he told me, were part of a "perverted war" over the war in Iraq. I testified about these conversations after spending 85 days in jail for refusing to cooperate with the grand jury inquiry. Having been summoned to testify before the grand jury, I went to jail instead, to protect my source - Mr. Libby - because he had not communicated to me his personal and voluntary permission to speak. At the behest of President Bush and Mr. Fitzgerald, Mr. Libby had signed a blanket form waiver, which his lawyer signaled to my counsel was not really voluntary, even though Mr. Libby's lawyer also said it had enabled other reporters to cooperate with the grand jury. But I believed that nothing short of a personal letter and a telephone call would allow me to assess whether Mr. Libby truly wished to free me from the pledge of confidentiality I had given him. The letter and the telephone call came last month. Equally central to my decision was Mr. Fitzgerald, the prosecutor. He had declined to confine his questioning to the subject of Mr. Libby. This meant I would have been unable to protect other confidential sources who had provided information - unrelated to Mr. Wilson or his wife - for articles published in The Times. Last month, Mr. Fitzgerald agreed to limit his questioning. Without both agreements, I would not have testified and would still be in jail. I testified in Washington twice - most recently last Wednesday after finding a notebook in my office at The Times that contained my first interview with Mr. Libby. Mr. Fitzgerald told the grand jury that I was testifying as a witness and not as a subject or target of his inquiry. This account is based on what I remember of my meetings with Mr. Fitzgerald and my testimony before the grand jury. I testified for almost four hours, much of that time taken by Mr. Fitzgerald asking me to decipher and explain my notes of my interviews with Mr. Libby, which I had provided to him. I was not permitted to take notes of what I told the grand jury, and my interview notes on Mr. Libby are sketchy in places. It is also difficult, more than two years later, to parse the meaning and context of phrases, of underlining and of parentheses. On one page of my interview notes, for example, I wrote the name "Valerie Flame." Yet, as I told Mr. Fitzgerald, I simply could not recall where that came from, when I wrote it or why the name was misspelled. I testified that I did not believe the name came from Mr. Libby, in part because the notation does not appear in the same part of my notebook as the interview notes from him. The First Libby Meeting Early in my grand jury testimony, Mr. Fitzgerald asked me to describe my history with Mr. Libby and explain how I came to interview him in 2003. I said I had known Mr. Libby indirectly through my work as a co-author of "Germs," a book on biological weapons published in September 2001. Mr. Libby had assisted one of my co-authors, and the first time I met Mr. Libby he asked for an inscribed copy of "Germs." In June 2003 I had just returned from Iraq, where I had been embedded with a special military unit charged with finding Saddam Hussein's unconventional weapons. Now I was assigned to a team of reporters at The Times examining why no such weapons had been found. On the afternoon of June 23, 2003, I arrived at the Old Executive Office Building to interview Mr. Libby, who was known to be an avid consumer of prewar intelligence assessments, which were already coming under fierce criticism. The first entry in my reporter's notebook from this interview neatly captured the question foremost in my mind. "Was the intell slanted?" I wrote, referring to the intelligence assessments of Iraq and underlining the word "slanted." I recall that Mr. Libby was displeased with what he described as "selective leaking" by the C.I.A. He told me that the agency was engaged in a "hedging strategy" to protect itself in case no weapons were found in Iraq. "If we find it, fine, if not, we hedged," is how he described the strategy, my notes show. I recall that Mr. Libby was angry about reports suggesting that senior administration officials, including Mr. Cheney, had embraced skimpy intelligence about Iraq's alleged efforts to buy uranium in Africa while ignoring evidence to the contrary. Such reports, he said, according to my notes, were "highly distorted." Mr. Libby said the vice president's office had indeed pressed the Pentagon and the State Department for more information about reports that Iraq had renewed efforts to buy uranium. And Mr. Cheney, he said, had asked about the potential ramifications of such a purchase. But he added that the C.I.A. "took it upon itself to try and figure out more" by sending a "clandestine guy" to Niger to investigate. I told Mr. Fitzgerald that I thought "clandestine guy" was a reference to Mr. Wilson - Mr. Libby's first reference to him in my notes. In May and in early June, Nicholas D. Kristof, a columnist at The Times, wrote of Mr. Wilson's trip to Niger without naming him. Mr. Kristof wrote that Mr. Wilson had been sent to Niger "at the behest" of Mr. Cheney's office. My notes indicate that Mr. Libby took issue with the suggestion that his boss had had anything to do with Mr. Wilson's trip. "Veep didn't know of Joe Wilson," I wrote, referring to the vice president. "Veep never knew what he did or what was said. Agency did not report to us." Soon afterward Mr. Libby raised the subject of Mr. Wilson's wife for the first time. I wrote in my notes, inside parentheses, "Wife works in bureau?" I told Mr. Fitzgerald that I believed this was the first time I had been told that Mr. Wilson's wife might work for the C.I.A. The prosecutor asked me whether the word "bureau" might not mean the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Yes, I told him, normally. But Mr. Libby had been discussing the C.I.A., and therefore my impression was that he had been speaking about a particular bureau within the agency that dealt with the spread of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. As to the question mark, I said I wasn't sure what it meant. Maybe it meant I found the statement interesting. Maybe Mr. Libby was not certain whether Mr. Wilson's wife actually worked there. What was evident, I told the grand jury, was Mr. Libby's anger that Mr. Bush might have made inaccurate statements because the C.I.A. failed to share doubts about the Iraq intelligence. "No briefer came in and said, 'You got it wrong, Mr. President,' " he said, according to my notes. The Second Libby Meeting I interviewed Mr. Libby for a second time on July 8, two days after Mr. Wilson published his essay attacking the administration on the Op-Ed Page of The Times. Our meeting, which lasted about two hours, took place over breakfast at the St. Regis Hotel in Washington. I told Mr. Fitzgerald that I almost certainly began this interview by asking about Mr. Wilson's essay, which appeared to have agitated Mr. Libby. As I recall, Mr. Libby asserted that the essay was inaccurate. Mr. Fitzgerald asked about a notation I made on the first page of my notes about this July 8 meeting, "Former Hill staffer." My recollection, I told him, was that Mr. Libby wanted to modify our prior understanding that I would attribute information from him to a "senior administration official." When the subject turned to Mr. Wilson, Mr. Libby requested that he be identified only as a "former Hill staffer." I agreed to the new ground rules because I knew that Mr. Libby had once worked on Capitol Hill. Did Mr. Libby explain this request? Mr. Fitzgerald asked. No, I don't recall, I replied. But I said I assumed Mr. Libby did not want the White House to be seen as attacking Mr. Wilson. Mr. Libby then proceeded through a lengthy and sharp critique of Mr. Wilson and what Mr. Libby viewed as the C.I.A.'s backpedaling on the intelligence leading to war. According to my notes, he began with a chronology of what he described as credible evidence of Iraq's efforts to procure uranium. As I told Mr. Fitzgerald and the grand jury, Mr. Libby alluded to the existence of two intelligence reports about Iraq's uranium procurement efforts. One report dated from February 2002. The other indicated that Iraq was seeking a broad trade relationship with Niger in 1999, a relationship that he said Niger officials had interpreted as an effort by Iraq to obtain uranium. My notes indicate that Mr. Libby told me the report on the 1999 delegation had been attributed to Joe Wilson. Mr. Libby also told me that on the basis of these two reports and other intelligence, his office had asked the C.I.A. for more analysis and investigation of Iraq's dealings with Niger. According to my interview notes, Mr. Libby told me that the resulting cable - based on Mr. Wilson's fact-finding mission, as it turned out - barely made it out of the bowels of the C.I.A. He asserted that George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, had never even heard of Mr. Wilson. As I told Mr. Fitzgerald, Mr. Libby also cited a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, produced by American intelligence agencies in October 2002, which he said had firmly concluded that Iraq was seeking uranium. An unclassified version of that estimate had been made public before my interviews with Mr. Libby. I told Mr. Fitzgerald that I had pressed Mr. Libby to discuss additional information that was in the more detailed, classified version of the estimate. I said I had told Mr. Libby that if The Times was going to do an article, the newspaper needed more than a recap of the administration's weapons arguments. According to my interview notes, though, it appears that Mr. Libby said little more than that the assessments of the classified estimate were even stronger than those in the unclassified version. Although I was interested primarily in my area of expertise - chemical and biological weapons - my notes show that Mr. Libby consistently steered our conversation back to the administration's nuclear claims. His main theme echoed that of other senior officials: that contrary to Mr. Wilson's criticism, the administration had had ample reason to be concerned about Iraq's nuclear capabilities based on the regime's history of weapons development, its use of unconventional weapons and fresh intelligence reports. At that breakfast meeting, our conversation also turned to Mr. Wilson's wife. My notes contain a phrase inside parentheses: "Wife works at Winpac." Mr. Fitzgerald asked what that meant. Winpac stood for Weapons Intelligence, Non-Proliferation, and Arms Control, the name of a unit within the C.I.A. that, among other things, analyzes the spread of unconventional weapons. I said I couldn't be certain whether I had known Ms. Plame's identity before this meeting, and I had no clear memory of the context of our conversation that resulted in this notation. But I told the grand jury that I believed that this was the first time I had heard that Mr. Wilson's wife worked for Winpac. In fact, I told the grand jury that when Mr. Libby indicated that Ms. Plame worked for Winpac, I assumed that she worked as an analyst, not as an undercover operative. Mr. Fitzgerald asked me whether Mr. Libby had mentioned nepotism. I said no. And as I told the grand jury, I did not recall - and my interview notes do not show - that Mr. Libby suggested that Ms. Plame had helped arrange her husband's trip to Niger. My notes do suggest that our conversation about Ms. Plame was brief. Mr. Fitzgerald asked me about another entry in my notebook, where I had written the words "Valerie Flame," clearly a reference to Ms. Plame. Mr. Fitzgerald wanted to know whether the entry was based on my conversations with Mr. Libby. I said I didn't think so. I said I believed the information came from another source, whom I could not recall. Mr. Fitzgerald asked if I could recall discussing the Wilson-Plame connection with other sources. I said I had, though I could not recall any by name or when those conversations occurred. Before the grand jury, Mr. Fitzgerald asked me questions about Mr. Cheney. He asked, for example, if Mr. Libby ever indicated whether Mr. Cheney had approved of his interviews with me or was aware of them. The answer was no. In my grand jury testimony, Mr. Fitzgerald repeatedly turned to the subject of how Mr. Libby handled classified information with me. He asked, for example, whether I had discussed my security status with Mr. Libby. During the Iraq war, the Pentagon had given me clearance to see secret information as part of my assignment "embedded" with a special military unit hunting for unconventional weapons. Mr. Fitzgerald asked if I had discussed classified information with Mr. Libby. I said I believed so, but could not be sure. He asked how Mr. Libby treated classified information. I said, Very carefully. Mr. Fitzgerald asked me to examine a series of documents. Though I could not identify them with certainty, I said that some seemed familiar, and that they might be excerpts from the National Intelligence Estimate of Iraq's weapons. Mr. Fitzgerald asked whether Mr. Libby had shown any of the documents to me. I said no, I didn't think so. I thought I remembered him at one point reading from a piece of paper he pulled from his pocket. I told Mr. Fitzgerald that Mr. Libby might have thought I still had security clearance, given my special embedded status in Iraq. At the same time, I told the grand jury I thought that at our July 8 meeting I might have expressed frustration to Mr. Libby that I was not permitted to discuss with editors some of the more sensitive information about Iraq. Mr. Fitzgerald asked me if I knew whether I was cleared to discuss classified information at the time of my meetings with Mr. Libby. I said I did not know. The Third Libby Conversation My third interview with Mr. Libby occurred on July 12, two days before Robert D. Novak's column identified Ms. Plame for the first time as a C.I.A. operative. I believe I spoke to Mr. Libby by telephone from my home in Sag Harbor, N.Y. I told Mr. Fitzgerald I believed that before this call, I might have called others about Mr. Wilson's wife. In my notebook I had written the words "Victoria Wilson" with a box around it, another apparent reference to Ms. Plame, who is also known as Valerie Wilson. I told Mr. Fitzgerald that I was not sure whether Mr. Libby had used this name or whether I just made a mistake in writing it on my own. Another possibility, I said, is that I gave Mr. Libby the wrong name on purpose to see whether he would correct me and confirm her identity. I also told the grand jury I thought it was odd that I had written "Wilson" because my memory is that I had heard her referred to only as Plame. Mr. Fitzgerald asked whether this suggested that Mr. Libby had given me the name Wilson. I told him I didn't know and didn't want to guess. My notes of this phone call show that Mr. Libby quickly turned to criticizing Mr. Wilson's report on his mission to Niger. He said it was unclear whether Mr. Wilson had spoken with any Niger officials who had dealt with Iraq's trade representatives. With the understanding that I would attribute the information to an administration official, Mr. Libby also sought to explain why Mr. Bush included the disputed uranium allegation in his 2003 State of the Union address, a sentence of 16 words that his administration would later retract. Mr. Libby described it as the product of a simple miscommunication between the White House and the C.I.A. Mr. Fitzgerald asked whether I ever pursued an article about Mr. Wilson and his wife. I told him I had not, though I considered her connection to the C.I.A. potentially newsworthy. I testified that I recalled recommending to editors that we pursue a story. Mr. Fitzgerald asked my reaction to Mr. Novak's column. I told the grand jury I was annoyed at having been beaten on a story. I said I felt that since The Times had run Mr. Wilson's original essay, it had an obligation to explore any allegation that undercut his credibility. At the same time, I added, I also believed that the newspaper needed to pursue the possibility that the White House was unfairly attacking a critic of the administration. Mr. Libby's Letter When I was last before the grand jury, Mr. Fitzgerald posed a series of questions about a letter I received in jail last month from Mr. Libby. The letter, two pages long, encouraged me to testify. "Your reporting, and you, are missed," it begins. Mr. Fitzgerald asked me to read the final three paragraphs aloud to the grand jury. "The public report of every other reporter's testimony makes clear that they did not discuss Ms. Plame's name or identity with me," Mr. Libby wrote. The prosecutor asked my reaction to those words. I replied that this portion of the letter had surprised me because it might be perceived as an effort by Mr. Libby to suggest that I, too, would say we had not discussed Ms. Plame's identity. Yet my notes suggested that we had discussed her job. Mr. Fitzgerald also focused on the letter's closing lines. "Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning," Mr. Libby wrote. "They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them." How did I interpret that? Mr. Fitzgerald asked. In answer, I told the grand jury about my last encounter with Mr. Libby. It came in August 2003, shortly after I attended a conference on national security issues held in Aspen, Colo. After the conference, I traveled to Jackson Hole, Wyo. At a rodeo one afternoon, a man in jeans, a cowboy hat and sunglasses approached me. He asked me how the Aspen conference had gone. I had no idea who he was. "Judy," he said. "It's Scooter Libby." Original article Posted by Joshua Tanzer | October 16, 2005 | |||||||
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