Campside media.
For much of her life, Judith Miller was a very incisive foreign correspondent.
She was downright badass.
This is a woman who had traveled the Arab world by bus, wearing a head-to-toe abaya.
She had reported from Beirut during the war, where a hotel clerk asked her if she'd prefer
the shelling or the car bomb side of the hotel.
She'd even talked her way into reporting from a prison in Saudi Arabia.
Judy did all this, she thought, with high-minded purpose.
She dedicated her life, as she said, to wrestling with history, memory, and the obligation of
civilized people to confront evil.
But now, Judy seemed to be on the other side of that line.
Rather than confronting those in power, she appeared to be doing their bidding.
So a few years into the disastrous war in Iraq, Judith's career and her reputation
were hanging in the balance.
When everything started to fall apart for her, she became the biggest get in media reporting.
And that challenge for a journalist like Gabe is dangling a tea-bone stake before a bulldog.
I had written a whole series of stories, and I'd just been desperate to tell her side
of it.
So I just kept calling her and calling her and emailing.
And finally, she agreed to talk to me.
I rented a car to go on a reporting trip.
And the observer had no money, by the way.
I was making $24,000 a year.
You probably weren't even allowed.
I guess if you were 25, you were just allowed to rent a car.
Exactly.
I drove out to Sag Harbor.
Of course, she summers in Sag Harbor.
I drove out there, and we met.
There's Judy with her Sofia Lauren oversized sunglasses.
And she looked smaller than I imagined.
Someone that I had thought about 24 hours a day for months kind of looms large in your
mind.
And then I meet her, and she's this tiny, tiny woman.
And so I just remember her being this like kind of frail woman, almost like a Joan Didion
like shape.
And I have my ancient tape recorder on the middle of the table, actually with cassette
tapes running.
And I remember being so paranoid that the tape recorder was going to run out of battery
during the interview, and I wouldn't have any of it.
So I spent like half the interview just like subtly staring at the red light to make sure
it was on.
And yeah, we talked.
And she was all over the map.
She was angry, emotional, sad.
I mean, I felt like she was confronting 30 years of her life coming to an end during
that interview.
And so how long did you guys sit there for?
I want to say at least an hour to two hours.
And I remember leaving there just being in a kind of a haze of like, did that just really
happen?
And I think it was the first time in my journalism career that I had the interview that everybody
wanted.
And it's one of those experiences that I'll always remember.
Because she was like the center of this giant scandal.
And what was her side of the story, just that it wasn't all her?
It wasn't all her fault.
Yeah, it wasn't all her fault.
She wasn't the only one writing these things.
And then she had this insane defense, which was that her job was not to vet the quality
of the information.
Her job was to report what the people inside the government were saying, which is the most
insane thing for a journalist to say, because you're not a stenographer.
I mean, people say a lot of shit.
Your job is to like, okay, that's interesting.
Let me check it out.
Right, right.
I mean, that's like, it's sort of journalism 101.
From campsite media and Sony Music Entertainment, this is Infamous.
I'm Gabriel Sherman.
It's set for the conclusion that I had reached based on what the intelligence analysts and
the experts were telling me.
Are you going to get that Times T that you have tattooed on your back removed?
My name and identity were carelessly and recklessly abused by senior government officials.
It's become kind of Kafkaesque this entire affair.
This is the final episode of our three part series, Little Miss Run Amuck.
So last episode, Judy's reporting took her to Iraq, searching for weapons of mass destruction.
But the internal politics of the New York Times was also something of a war zone, and
that did not bode well for Judy.
They'd just shaken up their editorial leadership, and two top editors had resigned, following
the biggest plagiarism scandal in the paper's history.
A new executive editor was brought in.
His name was Bill Keller, and he didn't have the same relationship with Judy.
Bill hadn't been in the newsroom for the Iraq war.
He'd been a columnist who wrote some columns that were supportive of the war in Iraq.
But he didn't really have his finger on the pulse a bit, so he was really relying on my
judgment for how to proceed.
He chose Jill Abramson to be his number two.
She was the first woman to hold the position.
Bill asked me right before he actually came into the executive editor's office whether
I thought we needed to do a big editor's note about all of the flaws in our coverage.
Bill was wondering, do we have to do something for the newsroom, but also do we have to come
clean with readers about this coverage?
I said to Bill, I think it would be wise if I broke away from running the day-to-day news
report and really fly-spect all of the stories that were done during this period.
For the next week, Jill poured over every story that times had run on weapons of mass
destruction.
There were stacks of them in her office and in her home.
It was piles and piles of them because Judy was not the only reporter.
And much of this coverage had not gone through the Washington Bureau.
I really do want to underscore Judy conforms to the role of evil diva, but that's a caricature.
There were plenty of other reporters who sort of drunk the Kool-Aid on WMD, including
respected figures like Bob Woodward.
So to make this like this was Judy's war, or that she was the reporter who was the only
one credulous about weapons of mass destruction would be an unfair distortion.
After days of reading through the old coverage, Jill drafted a massive memo on all the problematic
stories and gave it to Bill Keller who holed up in his office to write.
He's a fantastic writer and he just he had he as he often did he was sitting at his desk
and computer with earphones on listening to music and just writing hour after hour.
Now they just had to talk to Judy.
Bill Keller's assistant called me on Friday afternoon.
Could I stop by Bill's office before I left for the weekend?
Could it wait until Monday I asked?
No, she said.
Her tone was grave.
The newsroom was quiet that Friday evening when Judy arrived at Bill's office.
Most reporters had gone home.
Judy looked at the note they had written.
She was stunned.
She 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.
She argued a point by point that it you know but felt the whole endeavor was grossly unfair
and that we were trying to pin you know the time says bad coverage on her and it was really
hard.
I think I sat with her for something like seven hours but I could kind of argue at point by
point with her.
If you run this I said as cool 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.
Both Judy and Jill say they thought the editor's note was going to run in that coming Sunday's
paper.
I went home Friday night.
I was completely exhausted and I assumed I don't think Bill actually told me this but
I assumed it was going to be on the front page.
I think we owed readers that.
The editor's note was not published that Sunday or on Monday.
I've been hearing from sources that the paper was finally going to write an editor's note
addressing what happened and why the paper got these stories wrong and how they would
correct it going forward and so no one really knew when the editors were going to put it
in the paper so I remember I would come home from the bars at midnight and wait outside
my bodega for the Sunday times to come be dropped off and I'd tear open the paper looking
for the correction the editor's note.
And then if you didn't see it there would you just walk back home dejected?
Yeah but I'd shelled out like five bucks for the Sunday time so I'd be hung over and dejected.
In the end the note ran on Wednesday on page 10.
Four days later the public editor of the times put out another piece criticizing the editor's
note.
He said we had played it quote unquote quiet as a lullaby.
That was true.
I mean it was noted you know by press critics and whatnot but you know readers could jump
right over it.
He laid into the leadership of the times for the failures of reporters like Judy and Jason.
It wasn't just their fault but the entire system that gave them such a wide berth hunger
for scoops lower standards of care quote front page syndrome coddling sources with unverified
information.
Judy wasn't pleased with either column.
They had taken my 27 year prize filled career and trashed it.
I was not a perfect reporter.
I had broken quite a few rules in my 30 years of journalism and committed my share of journalistic
sins.
As a foreign correspondent I had yelled at colleagues who I thought had failed to carry
their weight on a story or endangered our sources.
I had sharp elbows.
I resisted being cut out of stories.
But I had never lacked skepticism nor had I twisted or ignored facts to achieve a political
outcome.
Yet that was the crime of which I was accused.
Sometimes, it's easier to blame one female reporter even if she was in the wrong.
Then to look at all the ways a government might have lied.
The same way that it was easier to believe the lies about WMD than to believe that the
government was acting with the crass cynicism as it really was.
Shortly after the editors note Bill Keller called Judy into his office again to have another
conversation.
This time he told her that she could no longer cover national security in any form for the
paper.
It was painful.
I mean she was upset and argued with us.
I would not be sidelined I told them.
Their decision would surely leak.
I could not allow what remained of my professional integrity to be besmirched unjustly.
I would consider an assignment outside of national security tantamount to being fired.
Pretty soon though Judy would have bigger problems than being fired.
I'm not sure.
I'm not sure.
Hi I'm Jake Catlstein author of Tokyo Vice.
I've been covering Japan's criminal underworld for 30 years and I've seen more people disappear
than I'd care to.
Including my old accountant who as it turns out was getting up to a lot more than taxes.
My co-hosts Shoko Plambek and I are tracking him down and along the way we're exploring
what's really happening with Japan's missing people.
We call them Johatsu Shah or they evaporated.
From campsite media and Sony Music Entertainment, they evaporated.
Season 1 Gone with the Gods is available now.
Subscribe on Apple Podcast to binge all episodes or listen weekly wherever you get your podcast.
You're listening to infamous from campsite media.
So it might have seemed like we were coming to the end of Judy's story but soon there
was another very odd twist.
In August 2004 Judy Miller's reputation had been publicly called into question.
She had few allies to count on and she was trying to figure out how to piece her career
back together.
I imagine her drinking her morning coffee, sorting through her mail when she comes across
another unbelievable letter.
Not from some Florida address and shaky handwriting like the anthrax hoax.
No.
This one was from the Department of Justice.
It's become kind of Kafka-esque.
It was a subpoena.
Because the Bush Justice Department thought that we ought to appear before the grand jury.
Officials in the Bush administration had leaked the identity of an active CIA agent.
And now, federal prosecutors were trying to figure out the official behind the leak.
Journalists, including Judy Miller, were being summoned and asked to reveal their sources.
Funnily enough, the leak had quite a bit to do with untruths of the Iraq war.
There was a diplomat named Joseph Wilson.
Joseph Wilson was married to an undercover CIA operative named Valerie Plame.
After Seth Mnuchin, the media reporter who covered the scandal, Wilson had been tasked
with going to Africa, going to Niger to report on claims that Saddam Hussein was attempting
to buy enriched uranium to make nuclear weapons essentially.
His report was that he did not think that those were credible.
Wilson submitted his report to the CIA, basically saying the claims were bogus.
And that was that.
Except the problem was, a year later, in his 2003 state of the Union address, George W. Bush
said the exact opposite.
The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently saw significant quantities
of uranium from Africa.
Yep, the president of the United States went on TV and made claims that had already been
debunked by his own intelligence community.
Not long after that, Joseph Wilson wrote an op-ed, essentially saying that he thought
that that was wrong.
He published the essay in the New York Times.
It was titled, What I Didn't Find in Africa.
I think it was Mark Twain who once said the loyalty to the country always, loyalty to
the government only when it deserves it.
Wilson blamed the Bush administration for ignoring his secret mission to Niger, where he found
the claim to be false.
White House officials took calls with reporters to discuss Wilson's claims.
And not long after Wilson's criticism had gone public, a conservative columnist published
Valerie Plame's name.
My name is Valerie Plame.
You shouldn't know that, but you do.
Essentially, he is part of a neo-con campaign to discredit Joseph Wilson and his criticism.
I love my career because I love my country.
I was proud of the serious responsibilities entrusted to me as a CIA covert operations
officer, and I was dedicated to this work.
To state the obvious, revealing the name of an undercover CIA operative is a big no-no.
My name and identity were carelessly and recklessly abused by senior government officials in
both the White House and the State Department.
All of them understood that I worked for the CIA and having signed oaths to protect national
security secrets, they should have been diligent in protecting me and every CIA officer.
My name was intended to be leaked in retaliation against my husband, who was a fierce critic
of the Bush administration, the Iraq War.
Now, in terms of Judy Miller's role, she'd met with Vice President Dick Cheney's Chief
of Staff, Scooter Libby, several times after the Wilson column ran in the times.
Judy had known for months that Valerie Plain was a CIA agent, but she had never written
an article with that information.
The prosecutors wanted to talk to Judy and see her notes and her phone records about
who she had been talking to and if anyone had given her this information.
She refused and said that a reporter's ability to protect confidential sources is the most
important thing that a reporter can do.
That was the number one value in journalism and that this was something that she would
willingly go to jail for.
She did in fact then go to jail for this.
Here she is talking on a panel before she went.
Judy, how close are you to going to jail?
Well, you certainly do know how to get somebody's attention.
I think I'm unfortunately all too close.
We have just about exhausted our appeals in this case.
I have already been sentenced to up to 18 months in jail for refusing to discuss my sources
before a grand jury.
And the sentence has been stayed through the appellate court.
So once the full appellate court decides whether or not they're going to hear this, I at risk
of going to jail immediately.
Yup, in July 2005, Judy Miller went to jail for refusing to reveal her source.
The very malign Judith Miller was now maybe a journalistic hero.
She was taken to the Alexandria Detention Center in Virginia, just a 30 minute drive from the
source she was protecting.
I envied Martha Stewart as I read about her jogs on the footpath that linked inmates
cottages in the afternoon volleyball games at minimum security camp Alderson in West
Virginia, known as Camp Cupcake.
What was the feeling inside the newsroom?
It was mixed.
I mean, I think most of the people in the newsroom felt as I did that the government
had no place trying to force reporters to reveal confidential sources.
But you know, there's a lot of skepticism in the newsroom about Judy Miller.
Arthur Solsberger, Jr., the publisher of the paper, was an old friend of Judy's.
So when Judy was in jail, there was a ton of cheerleading on the editorial side.
Columns being written and editorials being written holding Judy up as a kind of free speech
and First Amendment martyr.
While that was going on, there was a ton of unease about that within the newsroom.
Because there had been all of this concern about Judy's coverage of WMDs, about Judy's
coverage of those aluminum tubes, and even though that was not the reason none of those
stories impacted why she was in jail, there was just concern that she was not the person
that the paper should be sort of uniting around as a First Amendment martyr.
Judy had gone to jail defending the confidentiality of her sources.
Those sources had agreed to speak with her on the condition of anonymity.
Judy had promised that under no circumstances would she reveal their names.
But the White House believed it had a workaround for that.
There had been these blanket waivers that were given out to everyone, and people were
asked to sign, saying, if I had a confidential conversation with a reporter, I now lift that
confidentiality off of that conversation and give reporters the right to talk about this
without being worried about breaking that deal.
Once Judy was in jail, she got a waiver from her source.
It released her from confidentiality, and Judy was free to reveal his identity and leave
jail.
It was an abrupt about face for someone who'd staked her identity on being a defender of
truth and a stout protector of press rheomes.
You could see it as an easy way out.
Judy was doing the exact opposite of what she saw that she would do, which is show prosecutors
that the threat of jail will not convince reporters to break their promises.
And I think that ultimately was really one of the most kind of damaging things.
She had been seen as this sort of fearless fighter willing to go to any lengths to get
a story and presumably go to any lengths to protect a principal.
And that obviously was not true.
The response among columnists once she was released was most definitely different from
when she was in jail.
Maureen Dowd referred to her as, I think, a woman of mass destruction in an absolutely
scathing column.
The Times put together a team of reporters to investigate the chain of events that led
to Judy Miller going to jail.
A Times reporter was tasked with speaking with Judy.
And she essentially just constantly blew him off.
Would say, I would love to talk to you, but I need to go meet with Barbara Walters, which
I think very understandable reaction is you don't have time to talk to someone at your
own paper about this story, but you have time to go on TV and talk to Barbara Walters.
She also would say, well, I can't talk about that.
And then would go on TV and talk about the very topic that she had told The Times reporter
that she couldn't talk about.
I think it was pretty clear to everyone involved that she would not be able to return to the
vapor.
There was just so much distrust and ill will that it would not ever work for her to work
in that newsroom.
And in fact, after she was released, her name only appeared on One More Story.
And that was her sort of explanation of her grand jury testimony.
41 days after Judy Miller was released from prison, she resigned from The New York Times.
She had been there for 28 years.
But the impact of what she had done would stain her reputation forever.
And that's what she did.
The Legend of Dr. Ronald Dante spans decades, movie stars, fugitive yachts, continents,
if you believe his version of events.
He is Ronald Pillow, a legendary combat.
No one but Ron could pull that off.
From campside media and Sony Music Entertainment, Chameleon Season 5, Dr. Dante is available
now.
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts to binge all episodes or listen weekly wherever you get your podcasts.
Why is it that American children are 10 times more likely to develop peanut allergies than
Israeli children?
And why do nearly 60% of adults take dietary supplements when there's limited research
on their effectiveness?
If you're curious about nutrition and the human body like I am, join me for Pearson's
new podcast, Body Unboxed.
I'm Anahado Connor and I'm a health and wellness columnist.
Listen and follow Body Unboxed on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast.
The Iraq War ended 11 years ago, but the truth is, the US global war on terror lasted much
longer than that.
That's why so many people call it the Forever War.
Looking back on the war in Iraq now, it's difficult to read the whole situation as anything but
a cynical ploy by the White House to drag the country into a useless war based on a
false pretense.
Whether it was for oil, petty revenge, neo-conservative paranoia, or a cocktail of all three is up
to your interpretation.
But what's more important is that no one who pushed for that war has been punished.
In fact, they're all doing great.
Former President George W. Bush is painting oil portraits of dogs.
Condoleezza Rice is a part owner of the Denver Broncos.
Dick Cheney is happily retired and lounging in one of his many mansions.
Some liberals are even praising him for standing up to Donald Trump.
Even for the other people in this story, their careers took wild twists and turns, but they
generally landed on their feet.
Valerie Plame enjoyed the notoriety of being outed as an undercover CIA agent.
She was even photographed for Vanity Fair and had a movie made about her starring Naomi
Watts.
Ladies and gentlemen, please give a warm Bush school in Texas A&M welcome to Valerie Plame.
Hi, good evening everyone.
I am really delighted to be here and I have to say I'm not unaware of the irony that
I am speaking at the Bush School for Public Service.
And two years ago, Plame launched a campaign to be a representative for New Mexico.
Her campaign imploded, but did yield incredible TV spots like this.
I was an undercover CIA operative.
My own government betrayed me.
I've got a few scores to settle.
Jill Abramson for her part?
She's had a bit more of a complicated story.
Abramson became the first woman to ever lead the Times Newsroom, making her one of the
most powerful women in media and the world.
The biggest job in all of journalism was hers, but it wasn't for long.
The Times said that there was questions about her management style, and there was a power
struggle too.
And then she was fired.
And it was the honor of my life to lead the newsroom.
A couple of students who I was talking to last night, one of them asked me, are you
going to get that Times T that you have tattooed on your back removed?
Not a chance.
From Bush to Rice to Cheney.
The Iraq war has largely slipped off their backs, but for Judy, it still follows her
around to this day.
She was the sin eater for how an entire war was sold.
Judy shouldered the blame, unfairly, for the entire campaign for fooling the American
public.
This happened, it seems, because she was eager to take credit.
While other journalists might have been wary of the red flags with sourcing or military
embeds, Judy was always full steam ahead, using whatever information she could to get
her stories on the front page.
And yeah, she made a lot of journalistic mistakes.
Oh, I mean, I think there's a lot of lessons, but you know, at the top of the list, it would
be the danger of groupthink, right?
The danger of not questioning your sources.
But I think there's a bigger reason this whole thing has stuck to her.
Judy has never, ever apologized or corrected herself.
Judy Miller has never come out and explicitly said that her reporting on weapons of mass
destruction was wrong.
In 2015, she published a book titled The Story, which was supposed to be her side of the story,
explaining the decision she'd made in her Iraq coverage.
Readers had expected a mea culpa.
They wanted an apology, but that's not what Judy gave them.
This is what she said during her media tour.
The sin in journalism is not a wrong story.
It's not going back to correct a wrong story.
That's what I've tried to do both in my journalism and in this book.
It used to be that we were all entitled to our own opinions.
Now it seems we're entitled to our own facts, and that's why I wrote this book.
Of course, it's confirmation bias.
That's a good confirmation bias.
It's a good conclusion that I had reached based on what the intelligence analysts and
the experts were telling me.
I don't think she's ever shown the kind of remorse or contrition or even understood why
her articles were so problematic.
That to me is the most interesting part of this story.
It almost seems like she can't bring herself to be wrong.
Now it's a pretty human thing wanting to be right.
We all want to be right, whether we're arguing with a partner or someone on Twitter.
Sometimes we want to be right so badly that we ignore any facts that contradict our point
of view.
And we only pay attention to the stuff that backs it up.
It's a common psychological trap that we often fall into.
Confirmation bias.
And I think that Judy felt like she had to be right.
Because being wrong would mean that the institution she'd always trusted from the government
to the military had lied to her.
And that in being wrong, she had fucked up beyond comprehension and contributed to a
war that had cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
But here's the thing.
Everyone can be wrong.
The most powerful people in the world, from presidents to secretaries of defense, can
get it wrong.
And it's our job as journalists to figure it out and call it out when they are.
Infamous is a production of campsite media and Sony Music Entertainment.
It's created, executive produced and hosted by Gabriel Sherman and me, Vanessa Grigoriata.
Sushi Schmolevex is our managing producer and editor.
Lily Houston Smith, Gary Graham and Grace Huerman are associate producers.
Some of this reporting appeared in the Observer newspaper.
This episode was written for audio by Heather Schurring and Rajiv Gola.
It was sound designed and mixed by David Devarro, recorded by Ewan Laidt-Rumuen, and
fact-checked by Alia Farouk-Shake.
All of our live executive producers are Josh Dean, Adam Hoff, Matt Cher and myself.
Thank you to campsite's operations team.
Doug Sloewin, Alia Papes and Destiny Dingle.
If you're enjoying infamous, please rate and review the show.
It helps us more than you know.
Thanks for watching.
Bye.