Ms. Rubin has been with the Times since 2007, and before that worked in Iraq for The Los Angeles Times. In Seth Mnookin's stirring profile of the Baghdad bureau in the December 2008 Vanity Fair, he says that Ms. Rubin has been basically functioning as the bureau chief all year since Jim Glanz has been home after suffering a neck injury (and he has recently been reassigned to the investigations unit).

Mr. Mnookin writes:

According to Mr. Mnookin, maintaining a presence in Iraq costs The Times "upwards of $3 million a year." He goes on to quote Times executive editor Bill Keller as saying:

As for that internecine warfare, Mr. Mnookin quotes photographer Ashley Gilbertson saying that in the early days of the war, "It was Iraqi and American politics by day and New York Times politics at night."

One example (among many) Mr. Mnookin recounts is the conflict between John Burns and James Glanz, which:

Just last week, The Times sent out a memo announcing that Mr. Glanz was appointed to the paper's Investigations desk.

In June, The Observer spoke to several reporters from The Times and other news organizations about life during wartime. (And in 2007, Politico's Michael Calderone, then of The Observer, wrote about Messrs. Burns and Glanz.)

Also, this week in The Times' Play Magazine, Dexter Filkins talks about how watching and listening to football got him through his Iraq experience, which Mr. Mnookin describes in Vanity Fair as a "collection of close calls [that] sounds like a horror-film montage."

Here are the memos:

Folks,

It's truly with a heavy heart that I announce something that's already gotten around: Ethan is going to become Jerusalem bureau chief. The graceful writing and incisive story sense that marked his tenure as deputy he will now unleash on one of our most demanding assignments. It's going to be great fun for him, and I am going to miss him like crazy. He's been a great partner: sharp and quick on the news; deft and clear-headed in conceptualizing and editing stories; a compassionate ear for many of you; a source of great humor, calm, and kindness on our desk; and a stimulating, provocative presence that kept all of us, me not least, reaching higher. My loss will be the readers' gain.

Please consider this a formal posting for the deputy job. We are still working out the precise timing of Ethan's move -- some time in the first half of 2008.

Albest, Susan

We are delighted to announce that the powerful team of Barry Bearak and Celia Dugger will be back in action, this time in South Africa. We were able to lure Barry away from his distinguished turn as writer for the Times magazine and journalism professor and to persuade Celia to move her global poverty beat to Johannesburg. She and Barry will continue writing on that theme, as well as the extraordinary canvas that is southern Africa. They move this winter.

Steve Erlanger, whose three-plus years in Jerusalem have produced insight-filled coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ­ from the death of Arafat, the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, the Lebanon war, and the Hamas takeover of Gaza ­ will move to Paris early next year to become bureau chief.

Elaine Sciolino, who between her dazzling coverage of the French election and the Iran nuclear issue has been a linchpin in our coverage of terrorism in Europe, will take up terrorism and nuclear proliferation as her full-time beat in the coming year. She will remain Paris-based, but will travel around Europe tracking the rise of the jihadi threat, the IAEA and Iran's nuclear program. She will jointly report to Investigations and Foreign.

Craig Smith, who ranged from unrest in the banlieue to tumult in Eastern Europe to terrorism in Northern Africa, is beginning language training in Japanese this year, in preparation for moving to Tokyo over the summer.

Ed Wong, our prescient chronicler of Iraq, has finally torn himself away from the story he told so well and has begun Chinese training, in preparation for a move to Beijing this spring.

Bobby Worth, another stalwart on our Baghdad team, has been studying Arabic over the past year in preparation for replacing Hassan Fattah in the Mideast. We are still conferring about exactly where he will be based, but are delighted that we could pull off what has long been overdue ­ systematic Arabic training to help cover this crucial region.

Hassan Fattah, who has been an anchor for us in Dubai, dashing off to story after story around the region, is resigning to take up an exciting opportunity, becoming managing editor of a new English-language pan-Arab daily. Hassan originally came to our attention through his work founding Iraq Today, an English-language newspaper in Iraq. He will be mentoring young Arab journalists, and we wish him well. Thanassis Cambanis, who covered the region for the Boston Globe, will fill in over the next two months until Bobby is ready to move toward the end of this year.

Susan and Ethan

Having already worked seven rotations in Iraq since May 2004, Mr. Glanz didn’t need a beginner’s course in reporting the war to assume Mr. Burns’ old job. Instead, said Mr. Glanz, speaking by phone from Baghdad to The Observer, they mostly discussed arrangements for Mr. Hassan’s family. Mr. Burns told The Observer that the July 13 killing looms as “the dark cloud” over his five-year tenure—a monumental tour of duty that started before “shock and awe” and lasted through the “surge,” helping to turn Mr. Burns into the most visible face, and pen, of The Times’ Iraq coverage.

In the coming weeks, Mr. Burns, will start a new challenge as The Times’ London bureau chief. But he’s already digging up old wounds. In his first post-Iraq dispatches—stamped with London, and Cambridge, England, datelines—Mr. Burns has brought readers back to the front lines. “On a stifling summer’s day in Baghdad a couple of years ago …” began the most recent, a Sept. 23 piece on embattled security firm Blackwater USA.

But pressing local matters, including a possible parliamentary election, will soon compete for Mr. Burns’ attention. And as the journalist and self-described nomad, who turns 63 this Thursday, adjusts to life without armored cars and barbed wire fences, the move also represents a peculiar sort of homecoming.

“I’m a Brit by birth who has never worked in England,” Mr. Burns said last week by phone from McLean, Virginia. Before getting comfortable behind the London desk, Mr. Burns has been traveling in the U.S. Four days later, he was at Colby College, in Maine, to accept the Lovejoy Award for courageous journalism, which he dedicated to Mr. Hassan’s memory.

“This is not a war that you leave in your heart or your mind,” Mr. Burns put it to The Observer. The Times needed an experienced hand in London, but despite telling C-SPAN last February that he planned to be there by midsummer of this year, the story of the Iraq war had become all-consuming for him, he said, and he was reluctant to leave it behind. But since the war isn’t ending any time soon, Mr. Burns—The Times’ longest-serving foreign correspondent—eventually returned to the land of his birth. “Absent the London job,” he said, “it was never a job I’d want to give up.”

In London, Mr. Burns said, he has the “opportunity now to meet people who I haven’t set eyes upon in 40 years.” And there are other perks: Mr. Burns recently bought a bicycle, and he said that he can “learn to swing a five iron again and get fit in a way that is very difficult to do when you’re living in a walled compound.” But lifestyle changes won’t go too far: his trademark head of wild curls, he assured The Observer, will remain. “A man has to know who he is,” he said.

In leaving, Mr. Burns said his biggest concern was for the Iraqi employees of The Times. The Baghdad bureau is easily the paper’s largest and most expensive foreign outpost, employing well over 100 people—including many Iraqis who are far from immune from the turmoil going on outside the compound. “The pool of available people is shrinking,” Mr. Burns said, referring to the challenges of attracting Iraqi journalists. “Working for an American institution in Iraq—whether the embassy, armed forces or media organizations—carries with it a considerable hazard.”

Mr. Burns said that over time there has been an “exodus of staff members to Jordan and Syria.” At Colby, he recalled that during a farewell party at the bureau, he asked who would leave if they could, and every Iraqi staffer raised their hand. Indeed, Abdul Razzaq al-Saiedi, a frequent contributor, is now on a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard; and Ali Adeeb, who managed the Iraqi reporters, and joined Mr. Glanz and Mr. Burns for their breakfast meeting in Amman, is starting a Knight-Wallace Fellowship at the University of Michigan.

“You can’t just put an ad in the paper and have 30 candidates e-mail you with their CV’s attached,” Mr. Glanz said, acknowledging the issue. “The logistics of everything, including hiring people, and getting to know who’s out there, is tough in Baghdad.”

However, Mr. Glanz said that the bureau under his watch is “not doing so bad,” and mentioned a 4,300-word Sept. 9 cover story (and accompanying interactive Web feature), with a co-byline for Damien Cave and Stephen Farrell, that assessed the success on the ground of the “surge” and included 16 other contributors—most of them Iraqis.

In addition to rotating Times staffers, and Iraqi employees, Mr. Glanz might have one more visitor: “I imagine I will find myself back in Baghdad,” Mr. Burns said. And his wife has remained in Baghdad as bureau manager.

Looking back on the bureau, Mr. Burns recalled a moment when a senior Iraqi staffer told him that The Times “made it possible for us within these walls to be Iraqis—not Shia, Sunnis, Kurds or Christians.”

“We achieved something within the walls of our compound which America seeks to achieve in Iraq,” said Mr. Burns. “We did create a civil society within those four walls.”

“If I’m proud of anything of my time in Baghdad,” he added, “I think we did accomplish that.”

Next month, Mr. Wong is due to complete his 10th rotation in the Baghdad bureau, after which he plans to leave the Iraq war zone for good.

“I had a really hard time coming back,” said Mr. Wong, whose current stay began in February. “I didn’t feel the need to do this last rotation. But once I was here and started reporting, the thought of leaving the story was difficult, and it still is. I’m not fully reconciled to the fact that I am leaving the story.”

Mr. Wong was on the phone from Baghdad the morning of April 16. Minutes earlier, he had filed an updated version of an article about how followers of radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr plan to break from Iraq’s fragile parliamentary government. The updated dispatch became the lead story on NYTimes.com.

The Iraq story goes on. That same day, the Pulitzer committee gave the international-reporting prize to a grab bag of China stories from The Wall Street Journal. The year before, the prize went to The Times, also for China.

The Times’ Baghdad bureau has never even been a finalist. When the war was the hot story, other papers’ coverage was hotter. But The Times has stayed dutifully on the case, even as the war becomes old news.

Mr. Wong’s first assignment, in theory, was to cover a post-invasion economic boom. “November 2003 was an entirely different war from what it is now—entirely different story,” Mr. Wong said. “We were getting into cars and driving at the drop of a dime to places like Fallujah or Basra or Mosul.”

“I remember one time in early 2004, I drove down to Basra and the marshlands,” Mr. Wong said. “When I was driving back, I had one of those moments in the car, with one of our Iraqi reporters next to me, and the driver, going through the desert. It was one of those moments when it was just that open road in front of you. Being free and being out here in the middle of this country. Talking to people whose world is different from yours—this is why I became a reporter …. In the last year or two, there have been very few moments when I’ve had that sense again.”

“I’ve talked to other reporters who have just come here,” Mr. Wong said. “If you’ve had those moments or memories of what Baghdad was to cling to, those things in a way inform all your reporting.”

Other members of the Times class of 2003 have already left Iraq: Sabrina Tavernise is now bureau chief in Istanbul, and Dexter Filkins is writing a book while on a Nieman Journalism Fellowship at Harvard. In June, John F. Burns, the grizzled, larger-than-life Baghdad bureau chief, plans to move to the London bureau.

“Basically, the entire old cast will be out by mid-summer,” Mr. Wong said. “I think that’s what’s happening. The bureau is running as smoothly as it’s ever run. We’re trying to hand over the reins to the new people who are starting.”

Alissa Rubin, formerly a Baghdad bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, joined the newspaper in early March; Stephen Farrell, Middle East correspondent for The Times of London, arrives this summer.

This past February, the Times foreign desk posted two job openings for Baghdad correspondents. The slots have not yet been filled.

“I think that there is some interest in-house,” foreign editor Susan Chira said. “We’re still evaluating.” Ms. Chira said the paper does not anticipate making an outside hire.

“Our intent is to keep three and four people in the country, as we have been doing for the past several years,” Ms. Chira said.

Ms. Rubin and Mr. Farrell, both seasoned war reporters, are to join a rotation that includes reporters Richard Oppel Jr., Kirk Semple, and Damien Cave.

Reporter James Glanz, who completed several rotations since April 2004, will take over as bureau chief after Mr. Burns leaves, according to a memo obtained by The Observer.

Whatever happens, there should be a smoother transition than the last one—when in December 2003, executive editor Bill Keller sent then–foreign editor Roger Cohen to Baghdad to intervene in disputes between bureau chief Susan Sachs and reporters Filkins and Burns. Ms. Sachs was called back to New York.

“When I started, it was a pretty awkward time,” Mr. Wong said. “There was the crazy bureau politics that really exploded. At that point I was thinking, ‘What have I gotten myself into?’”

Mr. Wong described the current bureau as “collegial.”

“You would think that there would be another implosion by now,” said Mr. Wong, “but there hasn’t.”

Mr. Burns, on taking control of the bureau, created a compound in which some 70 Iraqi staffers and a handful of Times reporters operate amid chaos and deteriorating security outside.

“The bureau is this extraordinary enterprise,” Mr. Filkins said.

“It’s in a society in a state of total collapse,” he said. “It’s autonomous. John built that. I don’t think anyone else could have done that. I hope it can carry on without him.”

Marc Santora, currently on The Times’ Rudy Giuliani beat, went to Baghdad this past February for the first time since the early days of the invasion, before there had been a formal bureau at all.

“When I went back th
is time, it was incredibly beneficial to have those people who have spent so much time there—three or four years,” Mr. Santora said. “For people like myself, to have those people to lean on, that institutional knowledge, made a difference.”

“There is nothing like sitting at a dinner table with John and a group of reporters there,” said Mr. Santora. “It’s a real perk in what can be pretty hellish at times.”

And on days when it’s impossible to leave the compound to cover a car bombing, it helps to have someone who’s been to the neighborhood in question—even two years before.

“That’s why we hired them,” Ms. Chira said of the newest hires. “I could anticipate this. We looked for people who had history in the country.”

“We have lots of talented folks, but not all of them have the history,” said Ms. Chira, of balancing a younger Times star like Mr. Cave with others who spent significant time in the region. “We wanted to balance the new talent with people who were there in 2003 and 2004.”

“Alissa brings a very experienced eye to the bureau,” said Mr. Wong. “I think part of the reason we hope this transition will go smoothly is because of the experience of the people coming in here.”

Ms. Rubin had not been in Baghdad since January 2006, and said the security situation, while still trying, has gotten slightly better.

“In Baghdad, it’s been a more accessible story than it has been in a while,” said Ms. Rubin, by phone from the bureau. “I think some of it’s the troop surge. There are fewer illegal checkpoints.”

“But there are still neighborhoods which you just can’t go to,” she continued.

Mr. Wong said that he may travel a bit more in the Middle East before returning home, visiting his family in Virginia and then his current girlfriend—whom he met while she was reporting in Baghdad for another media organization. Afterward, he said, he hopes to continue reporting overseas in some capacity.

Despite lacking a Pulitzer to take away, Mr. Wong said that the reporting from the Baghdad bureau has been the most comprehensive of any newspaper.

“If you look at the Baker-Hamilton report, which is a comprehensive study,” said Mr. Wong, “most of it had been covered by the paper in a lot of front-page stories.”

For the departing bureau, Baghdad has been a world-shaping experience. “I definitely went through a withdrawal,” said Mr. Filkins. “I went from Baghdad to Cambridge, Mass. It was quite dramatic.”

“I felt like I put my life on hold for three and a half years while doing this,” said Mr. Wong. “I want to be in a place where I have a circle of friends I can see in the evenings. Go out running whenever I want to. Eat at a café. Go to a movie.”

“When you’re in Baghdad, it’s a giant thing,” said Mr. Filkins. “It’s a huge, gigantic, epic story. You can feel the historic plates moving. People are dying and the stakes are incredibly high. You feel that everything you do really matters. And when you come out, you wonder why there aren’t enough bean sprouts on your sandwich.”

“It’s crushingly mundane,” Mr. Filkins said. “Over there, everything matters. When you remove yourself from that, it’s a shock.”

Speeding from Baghdad to Falluja, Mr. Filkins’ unflinching reports have granted renewed immediacy to the coverage in a war where street violence and carnage teeter on becoming the normal, not the news. Here he is, Dec. 18: “Surveying the bloody scene, it might be tempting to conclude that Iraq is violent and little else; that the cycle will come around again. Such a judgment would miss the heart and complexity of the place. In Iraq today, every reality seems to have its own countervailing reality, in equal measure and equal force. Less than three years ago, Iraqis lived in a state of near-permanent terror. Today, Iraqis live in a society that is free but anarchic, full of hope and full of death …. ”

Playing Butch Cassidy to Mr. Filkins’ Sundance Kid: Old Testament–looking, grizzled Times Baghdad bureau chief John F. Burns, his white beard and Anglo-fro setting him apart from the beauty boys who drop in to look around the Green Zone and depart. Mr. Burns and Mr. Filkins have focused the world on the ground in Iraq even as much of the media became distracted by sideshows, “Plan for Victory” banners, good-newsathons.

Mr. Burns’ coverage this year has been distinguished, but particularly his dispatches from Saddam Hussein’s trial: “[P]itiable he has not been. Tragic, perhaps, in the sense of a man incapable of the repentance that might lend him at least a glimmer of humanity in this, the extreme passage in his life; wildly deluded, too, in his insistence that he is Iraq’s legitimate ruler …. But of a reduction like Eichmann’s, to a figure so commonplace, so insignificant, that he seemed inadequate to his grotesque place in history, there has been no sign.”

Mr. Burns and Mr. Filkins are hardly alone: There are hundreds of American journalists working in Iraq, including some 60 reporters and local staff in the Times Baghdad bureau, and much important reporting in American newspapers, broadcast correspondents, in books and on Web sites.

But Mr. Burns and Mr. Filkins, close friends, are a real-life duo, a buddy film even William Goldman couldn’t have come up with. Mr. Burns, stately, tough, eccentric, born in England, educated at McGill; Mr. Filkins, the flak-jacketed speedster from Coco Beach, Fla., known to jog through the streets of Baghdad at night. Michael Caine and Jake Gyllenhaal!

“For us, it’s been a long journey, as it has been for the American people,” Mr. Burns said by phone from Cambridge, England, on break from Baghdad. “It’s been a journey into shades of darkness.”

As for Mr. Filkins: “It’s been hard to stay here this long,” he said from Baghdad on Jan. 2. “I’m totally burned out and exhausted. Because I’ve been here two and a half years, I’ve been able to see the whole arc of the enterprise. I have a certain perspective. I drove in in March 2003, and I’ve seen—boy, I’ve seen a lot. I’ve see this gigantic enterprise go up and down and go up again. Nobody can be entirely sure about where things are headed here. Anyone who claims to know doesn’t know what they’re talking about. There are so many things in play, and so many things beyond anyone’s control.”

“John and I will be friends forever,” Mr. Filkins said. “We’ve been through quite a bit together. I pretty much go where my curiosity takes me, and John encourages me to do that.”

“Dexter is the most energized and questing reporter I know,” Mr. Burns said. “He’s the complete foreign correspondent—he is absolutely undaunted by risk and is tireless.”

“It’s the essential question: whether this gigantic enterprise will succeed or fail,” Mr. Filkins said. “I ask myself that question every morning when I get up and when I go to bed. It’s this gigantic thing, and it’s so ambitious and the stakes are so high. So many lives are riding on it. It’s what you think of every day.”

“We have to remember we’re writing for Americans,” Mr. Burns said. “For Americans who send their sons to war, who pay their taxes. It doesn’t make us cover it more negatively; it keeps us on our toes for what Americans care about.”

Because they covered Iraq brilliantly and with great integrity, brought New Yorkers close to our national conflict on the other side of world, reminded other reporters what great print reporting looks like, Dexter Filkins and John F. Burns of The New York Times are The Observer’s Media Mensches of the Year. Their prize: Our regard, gratitude and lunch anywhere in town—less the wine, which we can get for you wholesale.

Sachs, a former Baghdad bureau chief, and the Guild had been scheduled to challenge her termination at arbitration proceedings beginning today. Those proceedings have been put off in favor of settlement discussions.

Sachs' dismissal was accompanied by accusations she had sent anonymous e-mails and/or letters to the wives of Times reporters Dexter Filkins and John Burns, alerting them to alleged marital infidelity in the war zone.

Denouncing co-workers for philandering may be an uncollegial move, but it's not necessarily a firable offense. In August, the Guild described Sachs' case as "strictly one of credibility. The Times has accused her of doing something she insists she didn't do."

The Guild also said that the Times did not pay Sachs any severance, and that company officials said "she was being dishonest with them when they questioned her about the incident in question, an accusation she denies."

Under the Times' contract with the Guild, a source familiar with the terms explained, any type of dishonesty--lying, stealing, etc.--can be cause for termination.

But when she was dismissed, Sachs publicly disputed the charges and said she had taken a polygraph test and passed. Last month, Sachs traveled to New York from Paris, where she now lives, and took a second polygraph test, which she also passed, according to a source familiar with her case.

The Times is also facing an arbitration session on Nov. 15, that of former Times photographer Nancy Siesel, who was fired in March 2005 for performance reasons. Both Siesel and Sachs are being represented, along with the Guild, by Barry Peek, an labor lawyer with Meyer, Suozzi, English and Klein. Mr. Peek declined to comment on Sachs' case.

In an e-mail from Paris, Sachs wrote that charges brought against her by "some people at the New York Times" were "totally false."

Sachs joined the Times in 1998 from Newsday, where she had been both a Moscow and Middle East correspondent. She became the Times' Baghdad bureau chief in September 2003. After a troubled five-month tenure there--during which press reports had her in a turf war with both Burns and Filkins--she returned to New York, then became the Istanbul bureau chief in March 2004. She remained in that post till her firing.

More recently, she has lived in Paris, freelancing for the Globe and Mail. Her husband, Claude Lorieux, who covered the Middle East for Le Figaro, died in April, and she has been working to complete a book on the Arab world he had been writing. In the spring, she plans to start teaching at the journalism school at Sciences Po in Paris.

It remains unclear what, exactly, happened in the centrifuge that was the Times' Baghdad bureau during Sachs' tumultuous time there.

An acquaintance of Sachs said that some people who know her felt that the missives that led to her downfall may have been a setup by someone who wished her ill. Asked whether that reflected her own feelings on the matter, Sachs said, via e-mail from Paris, "No, it's not."

In another e-mail, Sachs wrote. "I hope you understand that I certainly enjoyed my job at the Times. The Istanbul bureau, where I was last, was my dream job, one I wanted for many years."

--Sheelah Kolhatkar

The two-month figure is misleading; Mr. Feuer spent less than three weeks in the war zone proper. But the proofs of his book have been something of a samizdat sensation on West 43rd Street-not because of what he saw in Baghdad, but because of what he claims to have missed.

Mr. Feuer-writing in the third person-recounts in one section how he filled gaps in his handwritten notes by taking liberties with the facts: "There was a name in the pad, Haidar something, A-R-something, Aruban or Arubay, it was impossible to tell. He bore down on the notebook and tried to sort it out. Aruban or Arubay-what difference did it make? All right, Mr. Arubay, speak some words to the readers of the Times."

Later in that passage, Mr. Feuer reproduces notes describing a source's age as "maybe 50 55," which becomes a definitive "50" in his news story.

A story including both bits of allegedly fudged copy-"Haidar Arubay" and "Nashet Maktouf, 50"-appeared in The Times on April 14, 2003.

In the book, Mr. Feuer makes much of his shortcomings as a reporter. Though his title is triple-stacked like a Times lede-all headline, Mr. Feuer plays the misfit Times person at every turn, dwelling on his discomfort with the hard work of gathering facts and his unhappiness with the paper's "cold" institutional voice.

The book begins with his third-person narrator-"T.R.", for "this reporter"-receiving his assignment in New York, and follows him through the minutiae of packing, traveling and waiting. The chapter "Welcome to Iraq" is No. 19 out of 27.

"He made his way to the elevator now with every neuron in his head on fire," Mr. Feuer writes at one point, "feeling itchy, feeling anxious-no way for a war reporter to feel, unless-forgive him, Father-he was no thing of the sort." That piece of head-spinning war-zone psychodrama takes place at the InterContinental Hotel in Amman, Jordan.

Mr. Feuer's self-critical eye falls occasionally on other reporters as well. After fudging the age and name of his two sources, T.R. hangs out and observes Ian Fisher taking a stab at writing the paper's lede-all Iraq story: Mr. Feuer "watched him scan the Internet for wire reports, listened as [Feuer] toted up his own experiences, borrowed bits from [John] Kifner, stole a pinch from Reuters, staged a raid on AFP, then cobbled everything together …. The premiere [sic] story in the next day's Times was being fashioned out of wire reports and late-night recollections from exhausted correspondents."

Times spokesperson Catherine Mathis, via e-mail, said that when the proofs of Mr. Feuer's book came out, metro editor Susan Edgerley "asked him flat out whether he was saying he had faked material in The Times, and whether he ever had. He told her he had not, and we know of no plausible assertion that he has."

In the front of the book, Mr. Feuer writes that it is "a book of recollected memory, not recorded fact." According to Ms. Mathis, the paper concluded that "T.R." is an unreliable narrator, but Mr. Feuer is a reliable reporter.

"In the book itself, Feuer acknowledges that he has taken liberties with his reminiscences," Ms. Mathis wrote. "We very much believe that is the case."

Mr. Feuer, reached by phone, said he hadn't received much grief about his account of fudging, "because I think it's a reality." He then asked to continue the conversation later, as he was working on deadline, but didn't answer follow-up calls.

In the book, Mr. Feuer recruits an unexpected figure to the cause of artistic unconcern for facts: no-nonsense editor Jonathan Landman, who hired him at The Times.

"As for honesty," Mr. Feuer writes, "Landman seemed to grasp that moral honesty, intellectual honesty, even journalistic honesty did not, at all times and in every case, require a strict adherence to the facts. Which is not to say that Landman lied. He was rather that rare soul who seemed to comprehend that good reporting was not an end to itself but served the purpose of the story, and who understood that underneath the epistemic truth of any story lay a different truth, a difficult and human truth, that did not match, or could not always be contained, by the cold arithmetic of fact …. Landman's honesty was an impressionistic honesty."

Around the Times, Mr. Landman is beetter known for practicing a photorealistic honesty–as the man who first warned the brass that Jayson Blair's work was unacceptable. In his current job as culture editor, Mr. Landman has ordered the arts staff to tighten up its sometimes loose command of the details.

Mr. Landman did not return calls seeking comment on Mr. Feuer's memoir. But a Times veteran, voice rising, described Mr. Feuer's portrayal as "antithetical" to Mr. Landman.

"Landman," the source said,, "is the last person like that."

Like the battle for Baghdad itself, the struggle for control of The New York Times Baghdad bureau began with a plain rout.

Less than five months after bureau chief Susan Sachs arrived in October of 2003, she was called back to New York, overthrown in a rebellion led by entrenched Iraq correspondents John Burns and Dexter Filkins.

But last week, The Times concluded that Ms. Sachs, like a car-bombing Sunni, had mounted an insurgent action of her own in defeat. According to multiple Times sources, the paper fired her for allegedly sending missives to the wives of Mr. Burns and Mr. Filkins, accusing the reporters of marital infidelity on the front lines.

In the middle of this whole mess, the story broke that married Times metro reporter Janny Scott was carrying on with former Times executive editor Joseph Lelyveld.

Sex, betrayal, war-normally the stuff of a great story anywhere but The New York Times-quickly became "the talk of The Times," according to one longtime staffer.

"Everyone's obsessed with it," said another.

"People can't get over how someone could show such a lack of judgment," a Times reporter stationed in Baghdad said.

One Times reporter said he wondered how the author of those letters separated fact from rumor-since in some sense the Green Zone is as much a rumor mill as any high-school cafeteria.

When the story broke in Lloyd Grove's Lowdown column in the Daily News April 7, Ms. Sachs (through a lawyer) didn't offer a defense for ratting out her colleagues, but a denial she'd written any such e-mails at all, even claiming to have taken a polygraph test that proved she's in the clear.

Ms. Sachs did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment, and Barry Lipton, the head of the newspaper guild, which is representing Ms. Sachs, did not return multiple phone calls over two days.

Likewise, neither Mr. Filkins nor Mr. Burns responded to repeated requests for comment via e-mail.

A Times spokesperson declined to comment on Ms. Sachs' case, on the grounds that it was a personnel issue.

Ms. Sachs arrived in Baghdad at the end of October 2003. She intersected with Mr. Burns, who returned to the U.S. to accept a journalism award in mid-November, for only a few weeks at the beginning and end of her term. Mr. Filkins overlapped more with Ms. Sachs, and they butted heads frequently. A correspondent who reported from Baghdad characterized her relationship with the two men as troubled from the start.

Mr. Filkins is mythologized by colleagues as an admirable swashbuckling loner, willing to take any risk for a story.

They argued about the best way to protect the Times house, with Ms. Sachs favoring a low-key, discreet approach and Mr. Filkins favoring a handgun, which he carried for a time but has since abandoned, the reporter said.

"That caused a lot of tension between the boys and Susan," he said.

At a press conference announcing the capture of Saddam Hussein, one reporter asked Ms. Sachs how The Times would handle the story in the next day's paper. Another reporter said he watched as Ms. Sachs shrugged her shoulders and sighed, as if to say, "John does what he wants to do." This, according to two reporters who characterized her leadership in Baghdad, was emblematic of Ms. Sachs' frustrations. "Here she was, the bureau chief, not really having full control over all the people in her bureau," said one. "That moment says it all. Here was a huge story. She should have had at least a handle on what everybody was doing."

Roger Cohen, then the paper's foreign editor, was sent over by executive editor Bill Keller to mitigate. Ms. Sachs infamously pulled out a tape recorder at a meeting with the bureau's staff, effectively sealing her fate. Mr. Cohen was later forced from his post, and Ms. Sachs was called back to New York. After that meeting, she filed eight bylined stories with Baghdad datelines that ran between mid-December and the end of February. During that time, she did some work on an investigative project. After that, she was sent to Istanbul, from where she filed around 70 stories, including helping out with The Times' Olympics coverage, in the last year.

But Mr. Grove reported that a long investigation had traced the letters charging adultery to the sites of Ms. Sachs' assignments.

Indeed, if winning the war has been hard on New York Times reporters, one could be forgiven for thinking their battle for the piece of ass has never been easier, that The Times bureau has turned into the sort of freewheeling scene depicted in the artillery-unit documentary Gunner Palace, with a more favorable male-female ratio.

Not so, at least one reporter stationed in Baghdad told Off the Record. The real chips are going to the TV reporters.

"Baghdad was no Saigon," said a war correspondent who reported from there. "It was no Bangkok. Did journalists hook up with one another? Yes. Was it a land of free lovin' where there was lots of hookin' up? No. Just because of logistics and security. There was a lot of it going on within TV networks, where there are lots of expats. Did the Fox crowd sleep around? Yeah. Did the CNN crowd sleep around? Yeah. But in the print world" not much happened, partly because there were so few women around the major newspapers' compounds.

Mr. Burns, who is now running The Times' operation in Baghdad, managed to cultivate a reputation as a connoisseur of high living in his short time in Iraq. A Times star and winner of the 1993 and 1997 Pulitzer Prizes for international reporting, he is known by colleagues politely as the ambitious, virile type.

Given the chatter surrounding Mr. Burns, two reporters said, it was hard to imagine the claims in the e-mails allegedly sent by Ms. Sachs would have been unfamiliar to Mr. Burns' wife of 25 years, Jane Scott-Long.

Then factor in the fact that Ms. Scott-Long is hardly pining away at home for her husband's return: She's in Baghdad, too, managing the compound where the staff lives and works. There she oversaw a major renovation of the compound, bringing in patio furniture from Jordan, high-thread-count bed sheets and a cappuccino maker.

In a piece in the paper's new internal newsletter, Ahead of the Times, Mr. Burns described a festive atmosphere at the Times Baghdad compound, as witnessed by a PBS crew that was interviewing Mr. Filkins: "Just as Dex was describing the terrors of insurgent rocket fire, our cook, Alain … entered bearing cups of filter coffee on a tray. As a prop, the coffee might have passed a director's cut, but not Alain's breadboard-stiff, 15-inch-high French chef's hat, the kind known as a toque."

-Rebecca Dana

Former New York Post copy editor and right-wing blogger Dawn Eden has returned to the tabloid business, joining the New York Daily News April 11. Her new position, much like her last one, has her being a copy editor, editor-editor and headline writer.

"Dawn is a brilliant young editor and we are lucky to have her," said Daily News editor in chief Michael Cooke. "Whatever the opposite of dull is, she's it."

Her tenure was certainly the opposite of dull at the Post, which earlier this year fired Ms. Eden (née Dawn Goldstein) for ruthlessly injecting her pro-life views into an article on in vitro fertilization-a charge she strongly denied at the time-and for blogging on company time in between assignments (which she said she had thought was perfectly kosher).

After her firing, she was attacked in a gossip item in Women's Wear Daily, which was later retracted, and she was teased for having a sweet, heart-shaped "plump rump" in the Post and The Observer. Plus she had no boyfriend.

So what's happened to her since?

Besides the Daily News job, Ms. Eden has a book deal in the works with a major Christian publisher, according to her agent at Sheree Bykofsky Associates, Janet Rosen. The working title is Been There Done That: Now What? The Newly Chaste Woman's Guide to Restarting Your Life, but that may change (the final contract isn't signed yet).

Soon after Ms. Eden's dismissal from the Post, National Review Online's editor Kathryn Jean Lopez gave her a month-long gig editing such writers as John Derbyshire and Victor Davis Hanson on the conservative magazine's Web site. Ms. Lopez also published an op-ed Ms. Eden wrote making fun of playwright Eve Ensler's orchestrated readings of The Vagina Monologues on college campuses around the world ("V-Day").

Among the headlines Ms. Eden wrote for nationalreview.com were "Girls Just Want to Have Pundits" (for an article on female op-ed writers) and "One 'Ring' Leads to Another" (for a review of the movie The Ring 2). Another recent piece by Ms. Eden, attacking Planned Parenthood's "Teenwire" Web site, is in the April issue of Touchstone magazine.

Ms. Eden was unavailable for comment, but Ms. Rosen-a longtime friend dating back before her client found Christ in 1997- visited with her at an April 10 party Ms. Rosen hosted with the theme "I'm Not Middle Aged, I'm Vintage." The dress code was 70's attire; Ms. Eden wore a brown Nehru jacket, ate vintage food and sat on the sidelines during Twister.

"Dawn has been upbeat and busy," Ms. Rosen said. "Her hair is blond now, she looks great, she's been energetic, she's been seeing friends and writing."

According to an item posted on her blog, Dawn Patrol (www.dawneden.com), on April 7, Ms. Eden has fallen in love with a blogger named Joel (www.chezjoel.com). A fan of her daily musings since last July, Joel has been writing her letters, chatting with her on the phone and being supportive. Finally they met in early April when he showed up in New York for five days. They went to Central Park, the Metropolitan Museum, saw Tosca at the Metropolitan Opera, and had dinner at Japonica, where he told her he loved her.

Unfortunately, Joel lives in Cleveland, but it's so serious they've been talking about bridging the gap. According to a source close to Ms. Eden, she's very happy.

-George Gurley

New York Times pundit standings, April 4-11

Frank Rich, 21.0

Paul Krugman, 19.5

Maureen Dowd, 18.0

Nicholas D. Kristof, 5.7

David Brooks, 0.0

Bob Herbert, 0.0

Thomas L. Friedman, 0.0

Along with this week's shuffle in the Op-Ed schedule, The New York Times Web site appears to have shuffled the schedule for posting its most e-mailed stories of the past seven days. Unlike previous Tuesdays' top-25 lists, this week's rankings included pieces less than 48 hours old. Hence this week's pundit standings cover eight days. With luck, the system-and the full field of opinion-mongers-will stabilize by next week.

Redemption was on display in its more awkward forms during the National Magazine Awards at the Waldorf-Astoria April 13. Most prominent was Martha Stewart, clambering onstage, in ankle-bracelet-friendly trousers, to celebrate Martha Stewart Weddings' victory for general excellence in the 250,000-to-500,000-circulation division. Unlike the other overbosses in the room, Ms. Stewart did not allow her editor a solo turn in the spotlight (it's not the American Society of Magazine Founding Editorial Directors, after all). But she received a warm round of applause, with people at the back of the banquet standing for a better look. After the ceremonies, Ms. Steward even plopped down in the middle of the winners' group photo, Calder elephant in hand. While Ms. Stewart was tasting the end of captivity, another winner was bidding farewell to freedom: The Atlantic Monthly's fiction section. Though the magazine captured the fiction award, it still intends--as announced in the current issue--to eliminate its monthly short-story hole, confining fiction to one issue a year. "We've been in one way or another the fiction business for a long time, nearly 150 years," Atlantic managing editor Cullen Murphy said in the Astor Room after the ceremony. "And it's going to continue to be part of our repertoire, and it's great to be honored for something that has traditionally had such a central place." Not so great, however, that the monthly story will get a reprieve. Henceforth, that central place will be the August issue. The rest of the time, Mr. Murphy said, The Atlantic will devote its space and energy to long-form narrative journalism. The magazine was a finalist for essays and feature writing--as well as online excellence and the junior-middleweight general-excellence crown claimed by Ms. Stewart's weddings magazine. But it was only a winner in fiction, for a trio of stories by Nathan Roberts, Aryn Kyle, and Robert Olin Butler. Mr. Murphy said that with the once-a-year arrangement, there will be "no net diminution of fiction." If anything, he argued, Atlantic fiction is better served; August, Mr. Murphy said, is the perfect time to curl up with short stories. "It's a great reading month," he said. -- Tom Scocca and Gabriel Sherman Correction: Last week's rankings incorrectly described a John Tierney piece as having been written for the Automobiles section. Though the Times Web site badged it as an Automobiles piece, Escapes section editor Amy Virshup wrote in to inform Off the Record that the piece had in fact run in Escapes. Off the Record regrets the error and resolves to read Escapes more closely.

"I lost my Purple Heart right then and there," he said on a recent morning at The Times ' Baghdad headquarters, to which he returned in October as bureau chief.

In country and off caffeine, Mr. Burns will have ample opportunity to win that medal back. You don't have to be a two-time Pulitzer Prize–winner for danger to knock on your door in Baghdad these days. But rather than sit around and wait for the inevitable, Mr. Burns is in the meantime collecting some other distinctions. At 59 years, he is possibly the oldest member of the Western press corps in Iraq. He is certainly the hairiest.

Of course, there are greater mysteries in the quicksand of this country than the grooming habits of journalists. But at a time when attacks against foreign civilians have led to a run on black hair dye and Iraqi makeover specialists, Mr. Burns' eye-catching crown of curly white fleece begs the question with all its unkempt mortar-magnet glory.

"Why do I not go to the barber very often?" he said. "This may be an affectation, but it's true. My father was an air force general-Royal Air Force. Twenty years ago, I went to have my hair cut in England, and in talking to the woman cutting my hair, she said that her father, a pilot, was killed with the Royal Air Force in Germany. And I said, 'Oh, my father was there at the time.' We quickly discovered that it was the same time. The following morning-I was staying at a hotel in the West End-she came to my room and said, 'I want to show you a photograph.' And it was the photograph of her mother and herself as a young child at the funeral of this pilot, and my parents, my father in uniform and my mother, standing on either side of her. And she said, 'My mother said your parents were so kind that I wasn't to charge you for the haircut.' And I said, 'I've got a better idea than that. Charge me for the haircut, but I will never have my hair cut anywhere else again other than by you.' And I have not had my hair cut by any other person than that woman in 20 years, and I'm not very often in England."

Those sheepish locks are also a rebuttal to any who would say that war reporting is a younger person's racket. Mr. Burns is mutton dressed as mutton.

"I find it difficult to think of myself now as being the oldest man around," he said. "But it creeps up on you, and you suddenly realize: 'My goodness, I'm nearly 20 years older than the next-oldest person in this bureau!' When I first went to China as a foreign correspondent, 33 years ago, I was 26. I met, on a covered bridge leading from Hong Kong into China going north, the only other Western correspondent then active in China at the time, a German correspondent coming south, looking woebegone and quite a bit frightened. He said to me, in effect, 'Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. Turn around. Go back.' He was probably then 10 years younger than I am now. And I remember thinking, 'Well, you lack the exuberance of youth, my friend. And that's the essential difference between you and me.' So I headed north into the worst of the Cultural Revolution.

"Now, when I am gathered with my colleagues-many of whom are not much older than 26-I wonder if they look at me and think, 'It's way past your bedtime. The curtains have come down, the crowds have gone home.'

"In one of John le Carré's books," he continued, "Smiley is trying to recruit his old network as they are closing in on Karla the K.G.B. chief, and he goes to this entirely dubious shop in London to talk to one of the Eastern European guys who work for him. And he says, 'I need you,' and the guy replies, 'George, George, remember what you used to tell us in Secret Service training? "Old spy in a hurry-the worst kind."'

"Old man in a hurry. Is that true? Does age weary, and do the years condemn in this business? I don't think it is. I'm not aware of having any less enthusiasm or any less energy than I had 30 years ago. I would hope that along the way one would have picked up a little wisdom about these affairs."

Mr. Burns joined The Times in 1975; though born in England, he was raised in Canada, graduated from McGill University in Montreal, and became a reporter for Toronto's Globe and Mail. During his Times career, he's reported from Johannesburg, New Delhi, Moscow, Sarajevo and Belgrade. He picked up his twin Pulitzers for Bosnia and Afghanistan.

"And although there are things that make this job look stressful, there are important ways in which it has become so much easier than in the previous generation," he said. "Just think of satellite phones and computers. Things have progressed so much in my lifetime, that when I started as a foreign correspondent in difficult environments, you could spend half or three-quarters of the day finding a way to transmit what you'd written. Finding a cable. Finding the man who's supposed to be operating the cable, who's gone off for tea. All that time has come back to us in the form of productive reporting and writing time."

Of course, most journalists in Iraq are less concerned with maintaining productivity into their autumnal years than in actually reaching their autumnal years. Mr. Burns is hardly unaware of the security risks that journalists face-he is married and has three children-and asked that the location of The Times ' bureau not be mentioned in print. He said he was particularly disturbed by the bombings in Baghdad of the United Nations headquarters and the International Committee of the Red Cross last year.

"People who can attack these two organizations are not likely to give us an exemption," he said. In two separate instances last month, The Times had members of its staff kidnapped, including Mr. Burns himself along with a photographer. And though all were released-a sign that there might still be some latitude for the press to cover both sides of the conflict-Mr. Burns said the bureau was now operating on the assumption that resistance groups would make little distinction between civilians and soldiers.

"We don't walk around with hats on that say 'Press,'" he said. "The privatization of the war-the role of private security firms for example-is a factor of this. There are quite a lot of foreign civilians in this country who carry weapons. So simply distinguishing ourselves in the battle zone is more difficult than it was before.

"Our employers make it possible to do everything to protect ourselves. For all that, there's only so much you can do. You are left with a large measure of risk for which there is essentially no protection. There is no protection that I know of against suicide bombing or against people who fire heavy weapons at motor vehicles, nor ultimately against hostage-taking in battle zones.

"And still people want to come here and want to report this story. I don't think there's a single case of a New York Times correspondent-and I mean since before the war-we've never had a single reporter or photographer who's been assigned here who hasn't wanted to come back.

"Why is that? At least to speak for myself, I don't think that bravery has much do with it. I think it's the sense of being at the heart of the matter. Of reporting about something that engages the keen attention of just about everybody in America. I don't want to sound grandiloquent about the position of The New York Times in American life, but there are many people who depend on us to report on what is happening here. We have to find a way to continue to cover this.

"It's a challenge," he continued, "it's a real challenge to a find way to do this effectively and to do so without engaging in acts of bravado, to the find the balance between what we feel we need to do, on the one hand, and what is simply foolhardy. Every single assignment we take, we have to make that choice. And our editors insist that we err on the side of caution."

For all the bombs and bland kebobs, working in Baghdad does have its charms, not the least of which is friendly competition among hacks. The Times bureau has a bulletin board where all the major Iraq stories from other papers are posted. "Every morning, first thing we do is read what The Washington Post has done," Mr. Burns said. "Anthony Shadid in particular, but all of them.

"You know, it's these very circumstances, as we've experienced elsewhere-Bosnia in my case in particular-where there's great hazard, it does tend to forge a kind of collegiality," he said. "It's not to say that this hasn't happened elsewhere, but there are probably closer relations between reporters of all major newspapers and news networks here than there have been in any place I've ever worked."

The bonds formed under pressure have gone a long way to smoothing over any bad feelings remaining in the wake of the remarks that Mr. Burns made to the editors of Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq-An Oral History , a collection of first-person accounts by journalists who covered the invasion. In the book, Mr. Burns recalled that some correspondents whitewashed Saddam's regime so that they would be allowed to stay in Iraq. In particular, he noted that one unnamed reporter had printed copies of Mr. Burns' critical articles to show government minders "what a good boy he was compared to this enemy of the state." Mr. Burns said that he never thought his comments would end up in the public realm.

"I believe that there's tremendous redemptive power in nature," he said. "One of the things that's happened in the course of the last months of increasing hazard here is that we've all drawn together. And that includes myself and the people of whom I spoke critically at that time. It reminds me of a wonderful phrase from Rupert Brooke's First World War poem. In another context, he talked about 'all evil shed away.' We're all in this together now. If there were people who were wary about stating the essential truth about Saddam Hussein's regime, which is to say that it was a terror state, those people now are showing tremendous bravery, and I've also seen just how good they are as journalists. It's a different time. It's a different challenge. That seems a country far away and long ago. And one or two of my colleagues who were upset by those remarks are now friends again. So all evil shed away."