Informed Speculation

In an account that does not appear to be a CYA piece, the NY Times has finally broken its silence regarding the saga of its star reporter Judy Miller. Some highlights:

In a notebook belonging to Judith Miller, a reporter for The New York Times, amid notations about Iraq and nuclear weapons, appear two small words: “Valerie Flame.”

Ms. Miller should have written Valerie Plame. That name is at the core of a federal grand jury investigation that has reached deep into the White House. At issue is whether Bush administration officials leaked the identity of Ms. Plame, an undercover C.I.A. operative, to reporters as part of an effort to blunt criticism of the president’s justification for the war in Iraq.

Ms. Miller spent 85 days in jail for refusing to testify and reveal her confidential source, then relented. On Sept. 30, she told the grand jury that her source was I. Lewis Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff. But she said he did not reveal Ms. Plame’s name.

And when the prosecutor in the case asked her to explain how “Valerie Flame” appeared in the same notebook she used in interviewing Mr. Libby, Ms. Miller said she “didn’t think” she heard it from him. “I said I believed the information came from another source, whom I could not recall,” she wrote on Friday, recounting her testimony for an article that appears today.

…Neither The Times nor its cause has emerged unbruised. Three courts, including the Supreme Court, declined to back Ms. Miller. Critics said The Times was protecting not a whistle-blower but an administration campaign intended to squelch dissent. The Times’s coverage of itself was under assault: While the editorial page had crusaded on Ms. Miller’s behalf, the news department had more than once been scooped on the paper’s own story, even including the news of Ms. Miller’s release from jail.

Asked what she regretted about The Times’s handling of the matter, Jill Abramson, a managing editor, said: “The entire thing.”

…On June 23, 2003, Ms. Miller visited Mr. Libby at the Old Executive Office Building in Washington. Mr. Libby was the vice president’s top aide and had played an important role in shaping the argument for going to war in Iraq. He was “a good-faith source who was usually straight with me,” Ms. Miller said in an interview.

Her assignment was to write an article about the failure to find unconventional weapons in Iraq. She said Mr. Libby wanted to talk about a diplomat’s fact-finding trip in 2002 to the African nation of Niger to determine whether Iraq sought uranium there. The diplomat was Mr. Wilson, and his wife worked for the C.I.A.

Mr. Wilson had already become known among Washington insiders as a fierce Bush critic. He would go public the next month, accusing the White House in an opinion article in The Times of twisting intelligence to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.

But Mr. Libby was already defending Vice President Dick Cheney, saying his boss knew nothing about Mr. Wilson or his findings. Ms. Miller said her notes leave open the possibility that Mr. Libby told her Mr. Wilson’s wife might work at the agency.

On July 8, two days after Mr. Wilson’s article appeared in The Times, the reporter and her source met again, for breakfast at the St. Regis Hotel, near the White House.

The notebook Ms. Miller used that day includes the reference to “Valerie Flame.” But she said the name did not appear in the same portion of her notebook as the interview notes from Mr. Libby.

During the breakfast, Mr. Libby provided a detail about Ms. Wilson, saying that she worked in a C.I.A. unit known as Winpac; the name stands for weapons intelligence, nonproliferation and arms control. Ms. Miller said she understood this to mean that Ms. Wilson was an analyst rather than an undercover operative.

Ms. Miller returned to the subject on July 12 in a phone call with Mr. Libby. Another variant on Valerie Wilson’s name – “Victoria Wilson” – appears in the notes of that call. Ms. Miller had by then called other sources about Mr. Wilson’s wife. In an interview, she would not discuss her sources.

Two days later, on July 14, Robert D. Novak, the syndicated columnist, wrote that Mr. Wilson’s wife had suggested sending him to Niger, citing “two administration sources.” He went on to say, without attributing the information, that Mr. Wilson’s wife, “Valerie Plame, is an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction.”

…The Novak column prompted a criminal investigation into whether government officials had violated a 1982 law that makes it a crime in some circumstances to disclose the identity of an undercover agent. At the end of December 2003, the United States attorney in Chicago, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, was appointed special prosecutor.

Around the same time, F.B.I. investigators working for Mr. Fitzgerald asked officials in the White House, including Mr. Libby, to sign waivers instructing reporters that they could disregard earlier promises of confidentiality and reveal who their sources were.

…While the paper’s leaders were rallying around Ms. Miller’s cause in public, inside The New York Times tensions were growing.

Throughout this year, reporters at the paper spent weeks trying to determine the identity of Ms. Miller’s source. All the while, Mr. Keller knew it, but declined to tell his own reporters.

Even after reporters learned it from outside sources, The Times did not publish Mr. Libby’s name, though other news organizations already had. The Times did not tell its readers that Mr. Libby was Ms. Miller’s source until Sept. 30, in an article about Ms. Miller’s release from jail.

Mr. Keller said that before Ms. Miller went to jail, Mr. Sulzberger, the publisher, asked him to participate in meetings on legal strategy and public statements. Mr. Keller said he then turned over the supervision of the newspaper’s coverage of the case to Ms. Abramson, though he said he did not entirely step aside.

“It was just too awkward,” Mr. Keller said, “to have me coming from meetings where they were discussing the company’s public posture, then overseeing stories that were trying to deal with the company’s public posture.”

Ms. Abramson called The Times’s coverage of the case “constrained.” Ms. Abramson said that if Ms. Miller were willing to go to jail to protect her source, it would have been “unconscionable then to out her source in the pages of the paper.”

Mr. Keller and Ms. Abramson said this created an almost impossible tension between covering the case and the principle they believed to be at the heart of it.

…The editorial page, which is run by Mr. Sulzberger and Gail Collins, the editorial page editor, championed Ms. Miller’s cause. The Times published more than 15 editorials and called for Congress to pass a shield law that would make it harder for federal prosecutors to compel reporters to testify.

Mr. Sulzberger said he did not personally write the editorials, but regularly urged Ms. Collins to devote space to them. After Ms. Miller was jailed, an editorial acknowledged that “this is far from an ideal case,” before saying, “If Ms. Miller testifies, it may be immeasurably harder in the future to persuade a frightened government employee to talk about malfeasance in high places.”

Asked in the interview whether he had any regrets about the editorials, given the outcome of the case, Mr. Sulzberger said no.

“I felt strongly that, one, Judy deserved the support of the paper in this cause – and the editorial page is the right place for such support, not the news pages,” Mr. Sulzberger said. “And secondly, that this issue of a federal shield law is really important to the nation.”

…Mr. Freeman advised Ms. Miller to remain in jail until Oct. 28, when the term of the grand jury would expire and the investigation would presumably end.

Mr. Bennett thought that was a bad strategy; he argued that Mr. Fitzgerald would “almost certainly” empanel a new grand jury, which might mean Ms. Miller would have to spend an additional 18 months behind bars.

Mr. Freeman said he thought Mr. Fitzgerald was bluffing. Mr. Abrams was less sure. But he said Judge Hogan might release Ms. Miller if Mr. Fitzgerald tried to take further action against her.

“At that point,” Ms. Miller said, “I realized if and when he did that, objectively things would change, and at that point, I might really be locked in.”

…On Oct. 3, four days after Ms. Miller left jail, she returned to the headquarters of The New York Times on West 43rd Street.

Before entering the building, she called her friend Ms. Payne and asked her to come downstairs and escort her in. “She very felt frightened,” Ms. Payne said. “She felt very vulnerable.”

At a gathering in the newsroom, she made a speech claiming victories for press freedom. Her colleagues responded with restrained applause, seemingly as mystified by the outcome of her case as the public.

There’s much more, but it’s a long article. Some quick thoughts:

(1). Judy Miller is very unpopular at the Times, particularly with Jill Abramson.

(2). We know now that it was the thought of another 18 months in jail that caused Miller to reach out again to Lewis’s lawyers.

(3). There seems to be no basis whatsoever (sorry, AJ) for believing that Wilson or Plame are targets of the investigation.

(4). It’s far more likely that Lewis will be indicted than Rove.

(5). On the basis of this article, even that’s not a foregone conclusion.

(6). The Times is often at its best when describing how it screwed up.

(7). Sulzberger appears to ride roughshod over Gail Collins…perhaps I should start ridiculing him more often for the horrible editorial page of the Times.

Mr. Maguire, I await your return…

Many more links, as always, at Memeorandum…