If the double-agent spy business had a trophy to hold up and show neophyte spooks what happens when their craft is perfectly executed, it would be a story by Judith Miller and Michael Gordon that appeared on the front page of the New York Times on a Sunday morning in September 2002. The front-page frightener was titled "Threats and Responses: The Iraqis; US Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts." Miller and Gordon wrote that an intercepted shipment of aluminum tubes, to be used as centrifuges, was evidence Hussein was building a uranium gas separator to develop nuclear material. The story quoted national security advisor Condoleezza Rice invoking the image of "mushroom clouds over America."
The story had an enormous impact, one amplified when Rice, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Vice President Dick Cheney all did appearances on the Sunday morning talk shows, citing the first-rate journalism of the liberal New York Times. No single story did more to advance the political cause of the neoconservatives driving the Bush administration to invade Iraq.
But Miller's story was wrong.
It turned out that the aluminum tubes were covered with an anodized coating, which would have been machined off to make them usable in a centrifuge. But that change in the thickness of the tube wall would have rendered the tubes useless for a centrifuge, according to a number of nuclear scientists who spoke publicly after Miller's story. Aluminum, which has not been used in uranium gas separators since the 1950s, has been replaced by steel. The tubes, in fact, were almost certainly intended for use as rocket bodies. Hussein's multiple-launch rocket systems had rusted on their pads and he had ordered the tubes from Italy. "Medusa 81," the Italian rocket model name, was stamped on the sides of the tubes, and in a factory north of Baghdad, American intelligence officers later discovered boxes of rocket fins and motors awaiting the arrival of the tubes of terror.
The probable source for Miller's story, in addition to U.S. intelligence operatives, was Adnan Ihsan Saeed, an Iraqi defector Miller was introduced to by Chalabi. Miller had quoted him in a December 2001 report when Saeed had told her he had worked on nuclear operations in Iraq and that there were at least 20 banned-weapons facilities undergoing repairs. Of course, no such facilities have been found -- meaning Saeed was either lying or horribly uninformed.
"I had no reason to believe what I reported at the time was inaccurate," Miller told me. "I believed the intelligence information I had at the time. I sure didn't believe they were making it up. This was a learning process. You constantly have to ask the question, 'What do you know at the time you are writing it?' We tried really hard to get more information and we vetted information very, very carefully."
But Miller's entire journalistic approach was flawed. A few months after the aluminum tubes story, a former CIA analyst, who has observed Miller's professional products and relationships for years, explained to me how simple it was to manipulate the correspondent and her newspaper.
"The White House had a perfect deal with Miller," he said. "Chalabi is providing the Bush people with the information they need to support their political objectives with Iraq, and he is supplying the same material to Judy Miller. Chalabi tips her on something and then she goes to the White House, which has already heard the same thing from Chalabi, and she gets it corroborated by some insider she always describes as a 'senior administration official.' She also got the Pentagon to confirm things for her, which made sense, since they were working so closely with Chalabi. Too bad Judy didn't spend a little more time talking to those of us in the intelligence community who had information that contradicted almost everything Chalabi said."
Long after the fact, Miller conceded in her interview with me that she was wrong about the aluminum tubes, but not that she had made a mistake.
"We worked our asses off to get that story," she said. "No one leaked anything to us. I reported what I knew at the time. I wish I were omniscient. I wish I were God and had all the information I had needed. But I'm not God and I don't know. All I can rely on is what people tell me. That's all any investigative reporter can do. And if you find out that it's not true, you go back and write that. You just keep chipping away at an assertion until you find out what stands up."
In that description of her methodology, Miller described a type of journalism that publishes works in progress, and she raises, inadvertently, important questions about the craft. If highly placed sources in governments and intelligence operations give her information, is she obligated to sit on it until she can corroborate? How does a reporter independently confirm data that even the CIA is struggling to nail down? And what if both the source and the governmental official who "corroborates" it are less than trustworthy?
Next page: A story based on a source Miller never met or even interviewed