EYE OF THE STORM
Why Jeff Gerth, a most accomplished investigator,
is also most controversial

BY TED GUP

In 1902, Ida Tarbell made a name for herself as a pioneering muckraker exposing the excesses of Standard Oil. Almost seven decades later, a fresh-faced young man in Standard Oil of Ohio's market research department found himself spending his days in a car at shopping centers and truck-stops, stealthily peering through binoculars, spying on the competition. He was scribbling down the license plates of vehicles pulling in and out of garages and filling stations, gathering intelligence on why motorists were choosing Standard Oil's rivals. It was an early object lesson in the conduct of business.

The name of that studious employee was Jeff Gerth. He would soon leave Standard Oil and go on to become perhaps the most accomplished and, of late, most controversial investigative reporter at The New York Times. His storied career there spans a quarter century, during which time he has, in his own indefatigable fashion, rattled the White House, Congress, and corporate America, influenced national policy and debate, and compiled an enviable record of solid, sometimes groundbreaking reportage.

Gerth was one of the first to introduce the public to the name of Osama Bin Laden, today linked to allegations of terrorism. It was Gerth who broke the Whitewater story and exposed Hillary Clinton's wildly successful commodities trading and its connection to one of Arkansas' largest regulated industries. And it was Gerth who, two years ago, shared a Pulitzer for exposing how American firms gave the Chinese access to sensitive technology related to satellite launches. Most recently he and a Times colleague produced a 25,000-word exegesis on the pharmaceutical industry.

"The vast majority of stories I've done have not been controversial," says Gerth. That is true, but it is also true that some of his stories, particularly of late, have put Gerth and the Times under a spotlight. He has been accused of being too close to his sources. His seminal reporting on the Whitewater story and his aggressive coverage of Wen Ho Lee, the former Los Alamos scientist, have made Gerth-bashing something of a sport among media critics, partisans, and some readers, and sparked attacks on his newspaper. William Powers, media critic of the National Journal, speaks of "the cowboyization of the Times." If that is true, then Jeff Gerth is its premier gunslinger -- an image that hardly fits him.

Now fifty-six, balding and owlish, he sits across from me in a Washington motel room, nervously eyeing my tape recorder and laptop. We get off to a rocky start. "This is off the record," he announces. "If I feel comfortable with you later, then we can go on the record. I've been singed a lot." I try to conceal my surprise that a man who has made his living holding others accountable would now try to immunize himself from his own words. I refuse, and make a mock gesture to close my laptop and call it a day. Gerth relents, agreeing to go on the record. I am not sure if this is a victory or if the master is simply testing me.

A year after Gerth won his Pulitzer, he and his paper seem gripped by an odd mix of wounded pride and soul-searching, particularly about the Wen Ho Lee story, which Gerth wrote with James Risen. Lee is the Los Alamos scientist who the Times reported was suspected of leaking critical nuclear secrets to the Chinese. The spying case fell apart. After months of solitary confinement, Lee was released, pleading to a single charge of downloading classified materials. The White House and a federal judge issued rare reprimands to the Justice Department for its handling of the case, and the Times came under enormous fire for what was viewed by many as one-sided reporting with a prosecutorial bent.

Some Times editors outwardly deride their critics, dismissing them as out of touch with the complexities of investigative reporting. The paper's investigations editor, Stephen Engelberg, speaks of "drive-by" criticisms. "In today's environment," he says, "the facts don't matter." Still, his words and those of others belie a painful groping for answers conducted outside the glare of public scrutiny. Among themselves, Times reporters continue to debate and dissect the paper's coverage. With so much on the line -- the reputations of veteran journalists and the trust between reporters and editors, as well as the credibility of the newspaper -- it is clear that the editors at the Times were taken aback by the ferocity of the reaction to the Lee story. "The things that grow out of any given story," says Engelberg, "are shocking even to us -- the hurricanes, the inflated rhetoric -- the whole thing that was in part created by us consumes us too in the end." It is precisely the stature of Gerth and the Times that renders such biting criticism from outsiders so unsettling.

After twenty-five years with the Times, twenty-one of them in Washington, Gerth is the consummate insider, and yet little is known of him beyond his byline. "I am anonymous," he says proudly. He is right.

"I had no idea even what he looked like," says the Times's Washington bureau chief, Jill Abramson, recalling their first meeting just before she joined the paper three years ago. "He had been a name I had only associated with fear up to that point." Abramson spent some years as an investigative reporter at The Wall Street Journal, when she viewed Gerth as a most formidable competitor.

His invisibility is no accident. Gerth shuns television appearances, avoids public talks, attends few parties, has written no books, and is, as he himself admits, a "homebody." He married at thirty-nine and became a father a year later. His wife, Janice O'Connell, works on the Foreign Relations Committee for Senator Christopher Dodd, who, during the 1996 Presidential campaign, chaired the Democratic National Committee. Gerth recused himself from any campaign coverage.

"Some people will jokingly tell you that I used it as an excuse to get out of stories I don't like to do," he laughs. But he did pursue a story later that focused in part on Bernard L. Schwartz, one of the largest personal contributors to the Democratic National Committee. Schwartz was head of Loral Space and Communications of Manhattan and an integral part of Gerth's 1998 stories on satellite technology that was shared with the Chinese. That story helped fuel a congressional investigation by Representative Christopher Cox, a California Republican.

Like all reporters, Gerth has been the beneficiary of partisan sources, but there is little evidence in his work to suggest any political pattern or party agenda. He is unlikely to show up on the guest list of Newt Gingrich or Bill Clinton. Gerth is a registered voter -- an independent. He closely guards his privacy and says he is sensitive to that of others. "I have assiduously avoided writing about people's private lives in my career," he says. That is especially true when it comes to the seamier side of private lives. During the confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas for U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Gerth says, he did not follow through with an assignment to ferret out the titles of pornographic videos Thomas may have rented.

Gerth's respect for others' privacy -- his focus on actions, not personalities -- is laudable, but in the extreme can give rise to stories that are too narrowly circumscribed. One of the criticisms of the Times's coverage of Wen Ho Lee, one that the paper acknowledged in its published post-mortem, was that readers were told little about Lee as a human being. The absence of what might be called "life details" reduced Lee to a mere suspect, a one-dimensional figure, opaque and unworthy of empathy. This is a recurrent problem in investigative reporting, and it does not help when, as in the Lee case, the subject is unwilling to talk to the reporter.

Gerth's own life was redefined four years ago by ordeal. His only child, Jessica, underwent eleven hours of surgery after a serious illness. Jessica is now sixteen. Gerth boasts that he has not missed a single one of her soccer games in two years, even though they are played on weekday afternoons.

"If I went through that, I can go through anything," he says. "It changed my life, it changed my family's life. It made me realize that the most important things in my life are not what I do during the day at work. The stories come and go, praise comes and goes, criticism comes and goes, and they all shall pass -- and they do pass."

He swims almost daily, watches his diet, plays jazz piano, can still, on a good day, shoot a seventy-four on the links, and is, by all accounts, level-headed -- an unlikely candidate to be at the center of any journalistic furor. "He's a profoundly sane, grounded person, and that's unusual," says Abramson. "Most investigative reporters are neurotic and high-strung and very insecure -- sometimes, prickly."

"I am no different than anybody else," says Gerth. "I make mistakes and don't have perfect judgment. I take criticism seriously. When I make a mistake and either I find out about it or somebody brings it to my attention, I correct it. Those are the kinds of mistakes and criticisms that I take seriously.

"Then," he goes on, "there is, I guess, what you would call the political or ad hominem or non-substantive criticisms." He puts criticism of his work on Whitewater, for example, in those categories. Gerth seems more open to correction than to self-examination. It is as if criticism might be limited to questions of fact alone.

Gerth's entry into journalism does not lend itself to easy romanticization. In the early 1960s as a student at affluent Shaker Heights High in Ohio, he was a member of the Junior Council on World Affairs and captain of the golf team. From there he went to Northwestern, not to its renowned journalism program, but to get a degree in business administration. He had a knack for numbers and a taste for business. His father was in real estate, manufacturing, and steel. Gerth spent another year at Northwestern in the graduate business program but left before getting the degree. He later did much the same at Columbia University. Then he found himself accepting a string of positions with foundations, law firms, and corporations, all of which availed themselves of his genius for research. He applied to law school in the mid-1970s and was accepted, but dreaded practicing law. In truth, he had no idea what to do next.

He was not untouched by the skepticism of the sixties and early seventies. One early Gerth piece, published in Penthouse in 1974, focused on Richard Nixon and organized crime. "Yet behind the shadows of Watergate lurks another series of questionable Nixon associations -- those with the underworld," wrote Gerth. "Rather than accuse Richard Nixon of wrongdoing, this report raises a series of questions and describes coincidences and associations that demand further inquiry by the public, the press, legislatures, and investigative agencies." In places, the writing borders on the lurid ("you begin to glimpse the sinister forces that plague the highest office in the land") and relies on innuendo in a story that is markedly less sophisticated than the stories he now writes for the Times.

One of the two books Gerth cites as most meaningful to him is Bob Woodward's and Carl Bernstein's All the President's Men, the story of the Watergate investigation. (Curiously, the other book he names is F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.) But the simplicity of his attraction to journalism might well confound detractors who see in him all manner of hidden agendas. What Gerth says drew him to journalism was not a reformist bent, but the realization that someone would pay him to do research. "I like to find things out," he says, "and I like then for other people to know. I don't think I could say that I went into journalism to try and save the world."

He speaks in shorthand: "I am not Sy Hersh," he says, referring to his friend and mentor, nearly as well known for his moral outrage as for his legendary reporting coups. "If I were a crusader," Gerth says, "I wouldn't have dropped the Whitewater story. I would have stayed on it and continued to write more and more stories. I don't stay on stories a long time. If I were a crusader I would have stayed on the Wen Ho Lee case for two years. If you look at the record of what I've done, you'll see I don't stay in one area too long. I move on. I don't go out and write books about stories I wrote. I don't go on TV to discuss my stories. If I really were heavily invested in my stories I would do all those things . . . . That's not the kind of person I am."

And that, admits Gerth, is just about as introspective as he gets. Shy and self-conscious, he is more at ease speaking of his stories than of himself. Today he is a capable interviewer, but he first made his mark working with documents -- more a Paper Person than a People Person. "The Times hired me because they mistakenly thought I was an accountant," he says.

Complexities that send lesser reporters fleeing are the very stuff that draws Gerth to a story -- the challenge of untangling a knot, of making sense of financial shenanigans, of finding nuggets in SEC 10b-6s and IRS 990s. Gerth is most at home in a maze. He could tease a page-one story out of a footnote. But along with that uncanny skill comes the risk of myopia, of being consumed by detail at the expense of context. Some close readers see that problem in Gerth's work on Whitewater. "His [first] story was incomprehensible," says an experienced Washington investigative reporter who asked that his name not be used. "I probably read the piece fifteen times trying to figure out what he was talking about."

Gerth's many colleagues and friends speak of him as if he were a national resource, his detractors as if he were a menace to the profession. It is difficult at times to square the two. "I was overwhelmed at how great an investigator he was," says Stanley Sporkin, a former CIA general counsel, chief of enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission, and federal judge. "He was absolutely superlative. I just couldn't understand how this guy was so good and getting stuff our people [at the SEC] couldn't get with all the power of the government behind them. He is, I think, the premier investigator of his day. I found him to be a man of great integrity, a person who always had the facts."

Seymour Hersh, who ushered Gerth into The New York Times, agrees. "He's a complete professional," says Hersh. "I can't work with anybody -- I couldn't even edit my child's stories, but I worked with Gerth for years without a problem. The only quibble I have with him, is that I wish he'd throw a typewriter once in a while and say 'I want three thousand words, not two thousand words.' He's too nice a guy. He's one of those guys who does it and gives it his best shot and goes on to the next thing."

Gene Roberts, a professor of journalism at the University of Maryland, and managing editor of the Times from 1994 to 1997, has nothing but praise for Gerth. He remembers that after Gerth broke the story of Hillary Clinton's commodities trading, he and Joseph Lelyveld, the executive editor, were at a Washington cocktail party. Roberts recalls that one of Washington's most celebrated journalists walked up to Lelyveld and said, "'You know I respect you, but this is a ridiculous story.' And Joe, I think, had the perfect answer. He said, 'If you think that, then you won't have to chase it, will you?'" The Times has grown accustomed to gloating over Gerth's exclusives.

But there are those in the field of investigative reporting who have reservations about Gerth's approach. Brant Houston, executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors, a professional association based at the University of Missouri that represents some 4,500 journalists, says his members are divided on the subject of Jeff Gerth. Some admire the reporter without reservation. Others express concern over his handling of stories.

Some prominent investigative reporters, meanwhile, are quite critical but, fearful of offending Gerth or the Times, will speak only on background. They argue that he has a tendency to insinuate without proof.

Few stories have generated more antagonism than Gerth's initial reporting on Whitewater in March of 1992. That first Gerth story on Whitewater revealed that beginning in 1978, while Clinton was Arkansas attorney general, he and his wife, Hillary, were partners in an Ozark real estate deal with James B. McDougal. When Clinton was governor, McDougal controlled a bank and Madison Guaranty, a savings and loan. Gerth's stories raised the question of whether it was appropriate for the then governor to be in partnership with those having immediate financial interests in an industry regulated by the state. Questions also were raised about whether the failed savings and loan was the beneficiary of preferential regulatory treatment.

One of the few observers who attempts to meld together the two views of Gerth -- profound respect and serious criticism -- is Lanny J. Davis, former special counsel to President Clinton, and author of Truth to Tell: Notes From My White House Education. Davis is obviously not neutral on the subject of Clinton, but it was Gerth who suggested I contact Davis.

"I'm a pretty good expert on Jeff Gerth," Davis says. "I did battle with him regularly and I got to know him better than most. I would rank him one of the two or three best reporters I worked with. I rank on two grounds: first, do they dig and find facts as opposed to rushing into innuendo journalism, which I'm afraid too many reporters are often too quick to do. I don't think Jeff does that. Second, on the character basis: I think Jeff has one hundred percent integrity. He is probably the most dedicated and ethical journalist I came across.

"I am leading to a great big but," warns Davis. He takes pains to make clear that his reservations are not about Gerth's aggressiveness. "I think it's part of the profession, looking for blood," he says. The problem in Davis's eyes is that some reporters -- Gerth most definitely among them -- practice a kind of "connect-the-dot journalism" in which individual facts are presented as patterns suggesting causation or culpability that may or may not be warranted. "Bob Woodward argues that if reporters didn't do that, Watergate would never have been broken, and he's exactly right," Davis concedes. "Woodward's argument is that there is a difference between post hoc ergo propter hoc and circumstantial evidence that leads a reasonable person to a reasonable conclusion. I'd say that's a very fine distinction and a dangerous conclusion." Connecting the dots, Davis says, "can also lead someone to the wrong conclusion and can smear someone's reputation."

Gerth's Whitewater land-deal stories, says Davis, illustrate how facts can be laid out in a way that inevitably leads the reader to conclude, for example, "that Hillary Clinton took advantage of her position as the wife of the governor and did something wrong -- something that's undefined and, to this day, has never been very well defined.

"There's no way to read that story [Whitewater] without there being a negative inference about the Clintons," Davis says. "It's not a neutral story." Yet Gerth "has defended it to me over lunches we've had. This is a famous 'Jeffism:' 'I can't be held responsible for the inferences that people draw from the facts, that's not my role. My role is to write the facts. Show me one inaccuracy in the story and I'll correct it if I'm wrong.'" A particular ordering or arrangement of facts, says Davis, can, and often does, produce an unwarranted conclusion.

Davis says he was even more disturbed by Gerth's reporting on Webb Hubbell, the former Justice Department official who came under criminal investigation during what came to be called Whitewater. On that story, Davis says that as special counselor to Clinton, he took an active role in responding to Gerth's questions. He was troubled by how efforts to help the beleaguered Hubbell find work and get retainers to help defray legal expenses were portrayed not as the efforts of concerned friends but rather as an attempt to raise hush money.

All of this "doesn't affect my judgment of his integrity," says Davis. "It does affect my judgment of the journalism that he practices."

Eight years after his first Whitewater story, Gerth remains confident of its merit. "The New York Times has never run a correction of the story because there's nothing to correct," says Gerth. Of more interest is how Gerth and his editors coped with criticism. To our meeting Gerth brings a letter that executive editor Lelyveld wrote on February 17, 1999, in answer to Max Brantley, editor of the Arkansas Times. Gerth lays the letter on the table like a trump card. Lelyveld writes,

No we won't be investigating the 'dry holes' of Whitewater or singing the praises of Gene Lyons [author of Fools for Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater]. We stand by 'that fateful Whitewater story' and continue to think the small-time partnership of a Presidential candidate with the head of a failed S & L was a legitimate matter to call to the attention of our readers. How that story blew up into the Starr investigation and how the Starr investigation blew up into the Lewinsky affair are interesting questions for some historian to explore. It wasn't because of Jeff Gerth. We think we faithfully asked questions that needed to be asked and that we reported these stories to the best of our ability, even when answers weren't forthcoming. If I may draw a parallel closer to where we happen to live, it would be to point out that Al D'Amato, our recently defrocked Senator, was never convicted of anything despite numerous newspaper investigations by us and some of our local competitors. We don't say he should have been. We also don't apologize for calling attention to his wheeling and dealing. It's pretty much the same deal here, as far as I can see. But thanks for the thought.

Sincerely,

Joe Lelyveld

It is certainly true that Gerth's Whitewater stories, precise and relatively small-caliber, set in motion the juggernaut that rocked the Clinton administration, Congress, and the press. Of course, by then, Gerth was on to other stories. Even he seemed a little puzzled over what all the fuss was about. Abramson says she fears that the Times and its reporters are sometimes held accountable for things they never wrote, but which, in the frenzied aftermath of such stories, are attributed to the Times, as other reporters amplify, summarize, or characterize the original story.

Gerth also played a brief but significant role in the reporting of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. It was Gerth who reported a controversial Sunday meeting between Clinton and his personal secretary, Betty Currie. At the meeting, according to Currie, Clinton asked her a number of sensitive questions, including whether she remembered his ever being alone with Lewinsky. To many, Gerth's story suggested that the president was attempting to coach Currie in her answers to investigators, or, at the very least, to help Clinton prepare his own testimony. The story landed on Washington like an incendiary device. Behind the story was another story. Gerth's editors, he says, were pushing him to make the lead more forceful. The editors wanted him to, in his words, "characterize rather than just reflect" what happened. Gerth said he resisted efforts to say that the accounts of Clinton and Currie "contradicted" each other. "I was under great stress and pressure on deadline at a very late hour -- and I am not a late-hour person -- I am usually in bed at the time this incident took place. I relented and let them use the word 'differ' letting them think they had won a great victory when in fact in my mind the word 'differ' means nothing because almost any two people or things can differ, it doesn't mean they contradict each other."

But such nuances, Gerth and his editors concede, are often lost on Washington, once partisans and press begin to push and pull at a story. In this Gerth is hardly alone. Many veteran investigative reporters, among them Woodward, Abramson, and Hersh, and recently Michael Isikoff, have found their work at the center of controversy.

The Wen Ho Lee story anchored the Times's front page on March 6, 1999, and left its competitors in its wake. The Times ran a two-column headline that declared china stole nuclear secrets for bombs, u.s. aides say. The article spoke of an as-yet-unidentified Chinese American. A government official was quoted as saying the case was "going to be just as bad as the Rosenbergs," referring to the couple convicted of atomic spying who were executed in 1953 in Sing Sing prison's electric chair. "If somebody says it and is in a position of authority, who am I to censor somebody?" asks Gerth, defending the use of the quote.

As anyone who followed the saga knows, the paper's coverage of Wen Ho Lee came under withering criticism. The Times ran an extraordinary editor's comment headlined the times and wen ho lee, in which the paper simultaneously attempted to defend its reporters and its reporting, while allowing that the paper did not do all it might have done in the name of editorial balance. It vowed to continue to both pursue the story and examine its own handling of the matter. Media Life, an online magazine, summarized what many took to be the gist of the paper's position: "Times: We coulda, we shoulda, but no apology." The National Journal's Powers wrote that "reading it was like watching a tape of a criminal who can't quite confess."

It is a sensitive subject for all involved at the Times, particularly for Jeff Gerth, who played a key role in the first Wen Ho Lee stories. "I am not going to talk a lot about Wen Ho Lee," he says. "There's litigation still out there and an investigation still out there and moreover, I think it may be years if not decades before we get a fuller picture, when all the materials are declassified and we finally find out what happened, what China did do, what Wen Ho Lee did do." He is unwilling to articulate any lessons learned from the Wen Ho Lee story beyond saying that intelligence stories, by their nature, are fraught with danger.

At times it sounds as though Gerth is distancing himself from his own stories on Wen Ho Lee, suggesting that -- despite his role as the Times's chief investigator and his page-one bylines on the story -- questions about the reporting are best directed elsewhere. Says Gerth: "I was not involved in that story for a long time... the day he [Lee] was fired, [James] Risen did a story -- I was in New York that day -- I am not trying to defend or deny anything, I'm just saying that if you have questions about the whole coverage of Wen Ho Lee, I don't think I am the person to address them to. It's not an area [intelligence] I write about a lot. I was brought into the story and was not involved in it a lot after the initial couple of stories." He later spoke of Risen as "the lead reporter" on the story. Indeed Notra Trulock III, the former intelligence director at the Energy Department who was a key source for the Times's Wen Ho Lee coverage, says that he dealt exclusively with Risen, and met Gerth only after the stories were printed. Risen is a former Detroit and Washington bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times who covers the CIA for the Times. He declined to comment for this story.

One veteran Washington investigative reporter who is sharply critical of the Wen Ho Lee coverage notes that, in the wider investigation of Chinese intelligence activities by the press and Congress, Gerth and Risen had abundant company. "There was a wholesale breakdown of skepticism," he said. Case in point: a New York Times editorial that declared: "The United States might as well have dumped its most sensitive defense secrets on Pennsylvania Avenue for the Chinese spies to pick up." Gerth bristles at the mention of some publications' take on the story. "I read some things, I don't read other things. I am a tougher critic of myself than anybody on the outside. I'm harder on myself than my editors are on me. It's a free world. People can write whatever they want.

"The fact of the matter is that any story can be held up, put under a microscope and rearranged an infinite number of ways and done better or worse. I could take any story I've done two weeks, two months, two years, two decades later, and find a better way to have said what I was trying to say with the benefit of hindsight. You always know more later. You can't wait till you have a hundred percent knowledge to write a story or you'll never write a story."

That hindsight helps is one of the themes at the Times as the wagons are circled in defense of the Wen Ho Lee coverage. "The easiest thing in the world to do -- the easiest thing -- is to go behind the people who do the path-breaking stories, wait eighteen months, two years, five years, and say things were not exactly as reported," says Engelberg. "What a surprise! What did you expect? I don't think anybody's reporting can withstand the march of history." Abramson puts it another way. "You're doing the story based on the best information you have."

Were there warning signs and questions in the Wen Ho Lee story that might have raised questions not in hindsight but contemporaneous with the reporting? Bill Keller, the Times's managing editor, says the paper made no presumption of innocence or guilt with regard to Wen Ho Lee. But placing the story above the fold with a headline that could be reduced to spy? clearly passed some internal threshold that telegraphed to millions of readers that there was a credible case for espionage.

No one at the Times is even remotely speaking of the Wen Ho Lee story as fundamentally wrong, or suggesting publicly that it represents some kind of systemic failure at the paper. But individual editors do seem somewhat chastened by the experience and willing to discuss some of the lessons there may be for future investigative stories. "I think that the danger of investigative journalism broadly is to have too prosecutorial a tone," says Abramson, "and in hindsight, going over those stories and rereading them as I did, many times, there are a few instances of that -- words, balancing paragraphs, that would have been better to be higher in the stories."

Times editors also point out that Notra Trulock, after leaving the Energy Department, became a spokesman for the conservative Free Congress Foundation, raising concerns that he may have had something of a political agenda. But they deny that Risen or Gerth was duped by Trulock or anyone else.

For his part, Trulock denies having any agenda beyond shoring up what he saw as lax security in government labs. He says he voted twice for Bill Clinton, and that he took his current job because it was the only one he could find in the wake of the Wen Ho Lee episode. He was out of work for three months, he says, and on April 5 filed for personal bankruptcy.

The centrality of Trulock's role in the Wen Ho Lee saga underscores, for some Times editors, a subtle and humbling lesson for all reporters -- that one need not be gullible to be misled. "Trulock," says Keller, "was putting the direst possible face on what he knew in order to get the attention of the people who he thought were not paying proper attention. His point of view resonated in the echo chamber of Washington to such an extent that it influenced the vetting process that the reporters went through. Jeff Gerth and Jim Risen published stories that had multiple, multiple sources and the sources were all confirming that yes, Trulock had given this briefing and, yes, this document said such and such and it all tended to reinforce it. But what wasn't really clear from the reporting at the time was how much of the confirmation was in fact an echo of Trulock's own briefings." Those briefings, numbering about sixty, occurred on the Hill, at agencies, and throughout Washington. Their contents, Keller says, "would pop up in intelligence reports and in congressional reports and White House briefings. You could find endless numbers of sources who had heard the same information, but a lot of it was Trulock confirming Notra Trulock." Engelberg draws a similar lesson. "What we learned from this -- and it's something we already knew, but one needs to be reminded again and again -- is that what you hear in Washington, what you think you're hearing, what you think you're seeing, is not ever the whole story. Washington is full of people whose knowledge is derivative.

"To me," says Engelberg, "this points up the great fallacy. There is a belief in our business that if you can get two or three sources to say the same thing or if you can find a document on which this is written, then you have something you can write because if you have two sources it must be true. Of course the answer is two people who don't know anything agreeing on the same story is not nearly as good as one person who knows something. So you get at the question of not only who is talking and how many, but what is the basis of their knowledge?"

One of the few indisputable facts concerning Wen Ho Lee is this: the sixty-one-year-old Los Alamos scientist spent nine months as a prisoner, much of that time in solitary confinement and in shackles. Of fifty-nine criminal counts against Lee, fifty-eight were dropped. In September, after pleading guilty to the one remaining count, he was released without any solid evidence linking him to espionage. The judge who set him free said Lee's treatment had "embarrassed our entire nation." Subsequently, in a lengthy two-part series that ran in February, the Times focused on the murkiness of the federal investigation, but the role of the Times itself was largely absent from the story. Keller, the paper's managing editor, says the paper chose not to focus on itself because it did not influence events, it merely reported them.

It is worth noting that FBI investigators waved the Times's stories in front of Lee as they interrogated him, and that, in congressional hearings, charts featured footnotes referring to articles in the Times. Does Keller really believe that the Times's responsibility in all this can be so narrowly circumscribed?

I asked him a question: "If I were a best friend or a trusted Times colleague, would you give me a different assessment of the Wen Ho Lee story?" He weighs the question carefully. "You are not a close friend or trusted colleague," he says.

The paper has rededicated itself to aggressive investigative reporting. And for Jeff Gerth and for the Times, the past several years have been as full of triumphs as turbulence, as steeped in prizes as recriminations. Working calmly in the eye of the storm has been Jeff Gerth, never oblivious to the disturbances around him but unwilling to be distracted from the investigation at hand.

"I don't believe anybody has ever spent twenty-five years at The New York Times doing investigative reporting," he says. "The fact I've survived so long I think indicates that I've been able to stay on a steady course. That's not to say I haven't encountered setbacks or encountered great successes, but I think I've tried and largely succeeded in maintaining an even and steady keel. One is better able to do this kind of work if one has a steady hand on the wheel." In the interview he hints that his next investigative project, about to pop any time now, will be a humdinger.

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Ted Gup, a former Washington Post reporter, is the author of The Book of Honor: Covert Lives and Classified Deaths at the CIA, which in April won the 2000 Investigative Reporters and Editors book award. He is a professor of journalism at Case Western Reserve University.