Ever since Judith Miller was cited for contempt of court and threatened with imprisonment back in March, her central role in the White House leak probe has had an air of unreality about it. After all, as reporters never tire of writing, Miller never even wrote about Valerie Plame, or anything else having to do with the case.

But with Miller’s release from jail last Thursday, her cloudy motives have grown even murkier. It may be time to admit that we’ve probably been asking the wrong questions about Judith Miller. The chattering classes so far have completely ignored the possibility that what Miller is so determined to protect may have nothing to do with the Plame case.

It may, however, have plenty to do with I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the vice-president’s chief of staff, whom Miller met with on July 8, 2003 and spoke with at least once more that week, along with other unnamed officials, after her return from Iraq and the unsuccessful U.S. search for Saddam’s weapons. And it may have everything to do with protecting the White House officials who leaked classified intelligence – not about Valerie Plame to Robert Novak in the summer of 2003 – but to Miller herself about Iraq’s allegedly reconstituted nuclear weapons program in September 2002.

When she left the Alexandria pokey last week, Miller’s flip-flop of a rationale – that Libby suddenly had “personally and voluntarily” released her from her obligations to him as a source – may have soothed Miller’s ego and mollified Times’ executives, but publicly it was met with justifiable skepticism and even hoots of derision.

There was, however, real steel in the jailhouse deal she did with Patrick Fitzgerald. After she had been behind bars for 12 weeks, Fitzgerald did his own flip-flop and agreed to allow Miller to narrow “the nature and scope” of her testimony before the grand jury, presumably to focus on the matter before the grand jury: what Libby said to her about Valerie Plame.

According to Times Executive Editor Bill Keller, Fitzgerald assured Miller he "intended to limit his grand jury interrogation so that it would not implicate other sources of hers."

Little is known about the July 8th conversation, which Miller presumably testified about in limited detail on Friday. Libby himself reportedly told federal investigators some time ago that he and Miller had discussed Valerie Plame and Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Friday stories in both the New York Times and the Washington Post reported that Miller had asked Libby about former ambassador to Niger Joseph Wilson and the circumstances surrounding his trip to Niger for the CIA in early 2002.

The Post, citing a source “familiar with Libby’s account” of the conversation – probably either Libby or more likely his lawyer, Joseph Tate – reported that “Miller met with Libby to interview him about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.” Specifically, she “asked him why Wilson had been chosen to investigate questions Cheney had posed about whether Iraq tried to buy uranium in the African nation of Niger.”

Both the Times and Post reported that Libby ended up telling Miller that Valerie Wilson worked for the CIA and had a role in sending him on the trip to Niger – but each paper was careful to note that its source insisted that Libby didn’t supply her name or reveal her covert status, for by-now obvious legal reasons. Saturday’s Times added that, after checking with Cheney, Libby later told Miller “that the vice president had not sent Mr. Wilson to Africa,” an admitted attempt to distance Cheney from the Wilson trip.

It is hardly surprising that Miller and Libby would have discussed the Plame case. The July 8 meeting took place two days after Joseph Wilson’s bombshell op-ed piece appeared in the Times sharply questioning the President’s use of intelligence about Iraq’s interest in African uranium ore in the 2003 State of the Union speech – and six days before Robert Novak revealed in his syndicated column that Valerie Plame was an undercover CIA agent.

But Miller was certainly more interested in talking to Libby about weapons of mass destruction. In court papers responding to Fitzgerald’s October, 2004 subpoena ordering her to appear before the grand jury, obtained by Murray Waas of The American Prospect, Miller denied having any documents “responsive” to any discussions about Plame and reminded Fitzgerald that “I have never written an article about Valerie Plame or Joe Wilson.” (She has some explaining to do about the sudden appearance of her “edited” notes of the conversation with Libby she turned over to Fitzgerald last week.)

Miller did say, however that she contemplated “writing one or more articles in July 2003 about issues related to Ambassador Wilson’s op-ed piece [my italics]. In preparation for those articles,” she said, she spoke or met with several sources, one of whom we now know was Libby.

Miller had a tremendous professional stake in the Iraqi nuclear weapons story. Ten months before, in September 2002, she had co-authored the blockbuster exclusive with Times military reporter Michael Gordon that revealed Iraq had imported aluminum tubes from China for centrifuges capable of refining yellowcake ore into weapons-grade uranium. The Niger uranium story and Miller’s aluminum tubes story were the twin pillars of the administration’s case that Saddam had restarted Iraq’s nuclear weapons program.

Unnamed Bush “administration officials” were cited as sources for the story. Neither Miller nor Gordon ever revealed their names.

For anyone who has read Miller’s dispatches from Iraq during the spring and early summer of 2003, it’s not hard to guess what was on her mind in July, 2003 – namely, what had happened to Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction? “To this day,” she wrote, “whether Saddam Hussein possessed such weapons when the war began remains unknown.  It is the biggest mystery of the war…”

When she returned from Iraq to the Times’ Washington bureau, she was working on a 2,000-word Times wrap-up about the failed efforts of the star-crossed weapons hunters of the 75th Exploitation Task Force in Iraq. The front-page story appeared on Sunday, July 20, twelve days after she met with Libby. The Times confirmed Sunday, in a page two correction, that she was working on the story when she met with Libby.

The Times has refused to say whether Miller was assigned to write a story on the Plame case, most likely because she wasn’t. The timing of the June 8th meeting with Libby and Libby’s own testimony leaves little doubt that, though Miller and Libby discussed Plame and Wilson, she was focussed on reporting her upcoming story on the Army’s unsuccessful search for weapons in Iraq and, conceivably, possible follow-up stories on Saddam’s vanished nuclear weapons programs.

But if  Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were the subject of the July 8th meeting between the vice-president’s chief of staff and a high-profile Times investigative reporter, certain troubling questions arise. Was Libby, for starters, one of the anonymous “administration officials” behind the September 2002 blockbuster about Iraq’s purchase of aluminum tubes? Had Miller simply checked back with Libby after returning from Iraq to find out if the Bush administration had any intelligence on why Army teams found nothing in Iraq?

The possibility that Libby was a source for that now-discredited story, or was involved in any way with leaking such intelligence, is potentially explosive. It also casts Miller’s willingness to go to jail rather than reveal what she discussed with Libby in a rather self-protective light. In short, it may have had less to do with upholding the First Amendment than with protecting her political allies and potential felons. It also would explain why Fitzgerald’s sharply narrowing the scope of her testimony was so critical to Miller’s release from jail and decision to testify. This way there was zero of risk of having to identify other administration officials sources and reveal how they might have supplied her with bogus intelligence about Saddam’s prohibited weapons.

Lastly it may explain why Miller never asked for – and Libby never offered – an acceptable waiver of confidentiality that would have forced Miller to talk about the July 8 meeting in its entirety. We know there are other official administration sources besides Libby she will now be able protect, thanks to the deal she cut with Fitzgerald. But what else would she have had to reveal about Libby and her earlier dealings with the Bush administration if, like Matt Cooper of Time magazine, she had accepted a waiver from Libby to avoid going to jail?

The stakes are high, particularly for Libby and those other, as-yet unnamed administration sources. Confirmation that Libby was involved in leaking the earlier story would for the first time directly link the Vice-President Cheney’s office to a major leak of politically volatile intelligence – and provide more hard evidence that the WMD propaganda campaign was run out of the White House, not out of Langely.

Getting to the bottom of that kind of tangle should the business of a Congressional investigation, a suggestion that the Republican-dominated Senate intelligence committee has quashed recently. Such a probe may be more difficult to avoid if Fitzgerald hands down indictments in the leak case. But for the moment, the special counsel has chosen to pursue the narrower interest of wrapping up the grand jury investigation over prying out new information that might lead a full-scale investigation of the underlying Bush WMD fiasco. Up to now, the grand jury investigation has effectively served both ends.

That, in turn, puts Miller squarely on a collision course with her employers. Shortly after she went to jail in July, the Times became the first major newspaper in the country to call for Congress to investigate the intelligence failures behind the WMD mess. This story is far from over.


Russ Hoyle is a former senior editor at Time and the New York Daily News. He wrote the foreword to the paperback edition of Joseph Wilson’s “The Politics of Truth,” published this past May, and is working on a book about events between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq.