Mr. Goldberg, please turn your attention to page 65 of Truth and Duty, by Mary Mapes.

Let us explain.

Last night on the O'Reilly Factor on Fox News, Bernard Goldberg toldanchor Bill O'Reilly that he had uncovered an exclusive scoop "about a lost crucial fact in the so-called 'Rathergate' scandal."

Mr. Goldberg directed viewers to an article he had posted moments earlier on his personal Web Site, entitled "A 'Lost' Fact in the 'Rathergate' Mess--Part 1."

Therein, Mr. Goldberg reminded his readers that in the fall of 2004, in the aftermath of a flawed story by Dan Rather on 60 Minutes II about President Bush's military service in the Texas Air National Guard, that CBS had formed an independent panel to investigate what had gone wrong. In January 2005, the panel issued its findings.

Mr. Goldberg explained that recently he had gone back and reread part of the Boccardi-Thornburgh report after receiving a tip for a source "Deep Throat style" telling him to "Go to page 130."

Sure enough, there on page 130, Mr. Goldberg discovered what he found to be an amazing revelation about Mary Mapes, the CBS News staffer who produced the flawed story (and who was later fired from CBS because of it). According to the panel, prior to airing the 60 Minutes story--which essentially detailed how a young Mr. Bush had used family connections to avoid combat in Vietnam--Ms. Mapes had been told by sources that Mr. Bush had actually volunteered to go to Vietnam.

Mr. Goldberg was amazed. President Bush had volunteered to go to Vietnam! Sources had told Mapes! How come nobody had ever written about this crucial part of the story?!?!

More from his post:

This information, despite the fact that it has been available since the CBS report came out four years ago, has remained a secret to almost everybody both in and out of the media — one lonely fact in a 234- page report loaded with thousands of facts, and overshadowed by the controversy surrounding the documents.

I made an online check and discovered that while a few websites noted the CBS finding, the story got no ink (that I could find) on the news pages of any big mainstream paper.  I did manage to find two opinion pieces about the CBS mess – one in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, the other in the Miami Herald — that briefly, and only in passing, mentioned the “Bush volunteered” angle. But that was it!  A check of network newscasts turned up nothing. And when I questioned two journalists with intimate knowledge of the story, both said Mapes never shared her information with them.

Perhaps not. But Ms. Mapes did eventually share this "secret" information with someone else. Namely, the entire English-reading world.

To wit: In her 2005 book Truth and Duty, Ms. Mapes writes explicitly about the "Bush volunteered," angle. Specifically, on page 65, she writes about a 1999 interview she conducted with Maurice Udell, who was George W. Bush's trainer in the 147th Fighter Group in Houston in the late 1960s.

Here's the passage:

Udell clearly liked his young trainee, describing him as "always good at coming up with a joke." As for discipline problems, Udell said that young Bush "responded very well. I thought he'd be a great American and fighter pilot."

Had Bush joined the Guard to avoid Vietnam? "That's bullshit, that he avoided the war," Udell told me in 1999. "They try to put George down...He performed very well. I'm not saying that because he's running."

Udell told me that Bush had wanted to go to Vietnam.

Some secret.

As a fan of Mr. Goldberg's investigative reporting on HBO's Real Sports, we hope part two of his "Lost" series turns up something a little bit more juicy.

Who would want to turn "Rathergate" into a feature-length film?

According to sources familiar with the situation, Producer Mikkel Bondesen, (his credits include serving as executive producer on the USA Network series "Burn Notice") is actively working on the adaptation with screenwriter James Vanderbilt.

Mr. Vanderbilt wrote the screenplay for the 2007 serial killer movie Zodiac—based on the nonfiction book by Robert Graysmith—and is currently writing the screenplay for Spider-Man 4.

In the book, Ms. Mapes was highly critical of how her bosses at CBS and Viacom handled the aftermath of the wildly controversial story about President Bush's military service. Along the way, she lays much of the groundwork for what could be a juicy White House conspiracy thriller.

"Money is the master," wrote Ms. Mapes. "That is the bottom line to what happened at CBS that fateful fall when we aired a story that, like all stories, was imperfect, but was absolutely grounded in fact. It was well researched and well documented. But when Viacom saw that the story was not well received and that a conservative firestorm was threatening the corporation's financial well-being, their collective wallets started itching. As a result, I believe CBS News, 60 Minutes, Dan Rather, and journalism itself got badly scratched."

(Mr. Rather is currently making similar charges in Manhattan court in a $70 million civil suit against his former employers, in part, for their handling of the aftermath of the story.)

"This was a corporate, political, and public relations operation, designed to take the heat off and allow Viacom to walk away unscathed, unencumbered by lingering anger from the White House or the various Republican-dominated committees that the corporation lobbied constantly," added Ms. Mapes.

It remains to be seen how much of the screenplay will be dedicated to the alleged bungling of the story and its aftermath at CBS versus the broader story of the President's military service.

When reached by phone on Monday afternoon, Ms. Mapes declined to comment. The Media Mob has a phone call in to Mr. Bondesen. We'll update if we hear back.

No word yet on who might play Mr. Rather if the script ever makes it to production. This wouldn't be the first film made about internal drama at CBS News: In 1999, Michael Mann directed The Insider, an account of 60 Minutes and its struggle with tobacco company Brown & Williamson. That movie was nominated for seven Oscars, including for Best Actor and Best Director.

Yesterday, Radar editor Maer Roshan said that his publication's story was "true" and "confirmed." Ms. Mapes said it was "not true" and "hilarious." The statement, attributed to Colette Carey, Director of Marketing and Public Relations for HDNet, reads in its entirety:

—Rebecca Dana

Both Ms. Mapes and HDNet's owner, Mark Cuban, denied the arrangement today

"The reporter, who's a trusted one here, did speak to her," Mr. Roshan said this afternoon. "We first got that information about a month ago. It could conceivably be that [Ms. Mapes] doesn't remember. It could also be that maybe that this was going to be official and.... You know? Things happen in a month. I know that this information when we got it was true. It was confirmed by Ms. Mapes."

Mr. Roshan further claimed that his reporter—identified only as "FI Staff"—had exchanged e-mails with Ms. Mapes. In them, he said, she suggested people that Radar might hire.

"The idea of making up out of whole cloth a story like that," he said. "Of all the stories to make up that doesn't seem like one that naturally leaps to mind."

Reached again at her Dallas home, Ms. Mapes again denied ever having had plans to work for HDNet. "I'm not sure what he's talking about," she said.

She also reiterated that she had never spoken to a Radar reporter. "I've not talked to anyone who called as a reporter from Radar to discuss anything like that."

Ms. Mapes did, however, clarify her position on her familiarity with Radar, the magazine. She knew of its existence. She just had trouble finding the Web site, she said.
—Rebecca Dana

Asked whether she had been offered a job at the network or ever would be, HDNet owner Mark Cuban told the Observer in an e-mail: "Not true. No idea where it came from. As far as the future, I would doubt it."

On Sept. 5, the newly-relaunched Radar website reported that Ms. Mapes would be producing documentaries for the network. The item quoted her as telling a Radar reporter she was "thrilled to be on board" and that "Mark Cuban has told Dan, 'I don't give a damn about ratings. Let's just break news and have some fun breaking balls.'"

Reached Tuesday afternoon at her Dallas home, Ms. Mapes said she was not joining HDNet, had never spoken to a Radar reporter and had never heard of Radar Online. "It's not true," she said, "and I'm entirely puzzled by the quotes they have from me. No one's talked to me. I didn't say that."

The story appeared in the Fresh Intelligence section of Radar Online. "They totally made it up," Ms. Mapes. "It's hilarious."

Radar editor Maer Roshan and Fresh Intelligence editor Chris Tennant did not immediately return calls for comment.
--Rebecca Dana

The book we can buy today is called Truth and Duty: The Press, the President, and the Privilege of Power, and though she hasn’t said anything publicly, Ms. Miller is probably a little peeved that Ms. Mapes has grabbed that title.

Truth and Duty tells the story of a flawed 60 Minutes II report on President George W. Bush’s National Guard service record. Ms. Mapes spent five years chasing down tips for the piece, which aired on Sept. 8, 2004, and claimed—on the basis of previously unseen documents and unaired interviews—that the President was somewhat less than exemplary in his service to this country during the Vietnam War.

Within 24 hours, typography experts had materialized all over the right-wing blogosphere; they insisted that the documents were bogus. The mainstream media ran with the story about the forgery instead of the story about the President’s spotty record, and, in Ms. Mapes considered opinion, vindictively tore her limb from limb. Mr. Bush won re-election; Ms. Mapes got fired. After a lengthy investigation, a CBS-appointed independent panel found that she and her colleagues had rushed an insufficiently reported story to air. Three others lost their jobs as well, and Dan Rather, who delivered the report, had to give up his anchor chair on the CBS Evening News.

For all its titular grandiosity, Truth and Duty is a plainspoken, occasionally self-righteous and oftentimes sympathetic look at how the National Guard story came to be and why it fell apart. Having suffered through a year of silence—first imposed by the strictures of a CBS gag order, then by those of a $250,000 book deal—Ms. Mapes has come out swinging: at the trigger-happy right-wing bloggers who savaged her; at the cowardly CBS and Viacom executives who didn’t protect her; at the fellow journalists who seemed to delight in her misery; at the cantankerous Guardsmen who lied to her; and at the Bush administration strategists who somehow destroyed her reputation.

The whole mess started, Ms. Mapes writes, when George W. Bush was still governor of Texas. In 1999, it became clear that he was planning to run for President, and she became interested in his military record, which raised questions about how he got into—and out of—the selective Texas Air National Guard. She revisited the story off and on during the first Bush administration but made little headway until Sept. 2, 2004, when Bill Burkett, a former Texas National Guardsman and a known anti-Bush partisan, met her outside a Whataburger in Clyde, Tex., and, over pizza at a nearby restaurant, handed her the mother lode: documents purportedly written by Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, Mr. Bush’s commanding officer, detailing the future President’s poor performance and suspending him for failing to take a physical exam.

Jackpot! Only, not so much. In her zeal to convince Mr. Burkett to hand over the memos, which were photocopies, Ms. Mapes was careful not to ask about the originals, lest she upset him. Eventually, she nagged him about the provenance of the documents (the sequence of events is fudged in the telling), and he told her he got the documents from another former National Guardsman, George Conn. (Mr. Burkett was lying.) Ms. Mapes made a few inconclusive calls to Mr. Conn while crashing the story for the Sept. 8 show, but was content to have the photocopies authenticated by typography experts and their substance corroborated by others who knew Mr. Bush in the National Guard.

It’s at this point (and elsewhere, too) that the reader will be tempted to close Truth and Duty and whack it against his forehead. Why would Ms. Mapes, an experienced journalist who’d been through war zones, won a Peabody and—just months earlier—broken the Abu Ghraib prison abuse story, not insist on finding out where the documents came from? Why wasn’t she suspicious when Mr. Burkett, so reluctant to give her the first two memos, called up researcher Mike Smith days later and offered him four more? Why on earth would she put Mr. Burkett in touch with the Kerry campaign as a thank-you for his help? Why is she so loyal to Mr. Rather, especially after he apologized for the segment and let her hang? And why does she gloss over these details as if they were tangential?

Ms. Mapes doesn’t share Mr. Rather’s gift for metaphor. (Before the story broke, she writes, “you could have put everything I knew about document analysis and authentication on the head of a pin and still had room for the state of Texas.” Huh?) But when it comes to basic journalistic maxims—modesty, curiosity, hard work—she and her former boss are a lot alike. On the whole, Ms. Mapes and the CBS team that assembled the National Guard story seem to have been well-intentioned. So how did a flawed report get on the air? The failures were incremental; the time pressures were intense; the executives were unusually aloof; Mr. Rather was exhausted from covering a hurricane—and Ms. Mapes and her fellow producers cut a corner or two.

When it aired, the National Guard segment included an interview with former Texas Lieutenant Governor Ben Barnes, a Democrat, who talked about how he had helped get young George into the Texas Air National Guard. Also in the original segment script, according to Ms. Mapes, was analysis from Marcel Matley, a document expert who explained why he thought the photocopies were authentic—but that part was cut for time.

Ms. Mapes still hasn’t given up: In an attempt to prove that the documents were not forged—and that her report was solid—she marshals many complicated details about superscript type and proportional spacing. But mostly she relies on her portrait of a ragtag band of do-gooders pitted against the twin evils of political operatives and media conglomerates. Ms. Mapes herself is a “wan little character, abandoned by her bosses, battered by bloggers, and beaten up by Rush Limbaugh.” Her lawyer, a large man named Dick Hibey, “looks like a six-year-old boy when he smiles.” Mr. Rather, removing his make-up, was “like a little boy tearing off his tight and uncomfortable Sunday clothes”—he was “the heart of our little club.” These happy few had to defend themselves against CBS News president Andrew Heyward (who’s since been pushed out of his job), CBS chairman Les Moonves, Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone and a vast network of right-wing activists.

Ms. Mapes can’t help herself from occasionally addressing these villains directly. As the story is breaking apart around them, she describes Mr. Heyward yelling into a conference call about what they would do if “someone fucked this up.” She writes: “That was helpful, Andrew, a real rallying of the troops. Nothing like a vote of no confidence to help build your stamina for a long campaign.”

I think I can already hear the sound of Truth and Duty smacked against foreheads all over town. But Ms. Mapes, who’s been bludgeoned and scapegoated without having her say, clearly sees her book as a pebble aimed at Goliath’s brow.

Rebecca Dana is a reporter at The Observer.

The book we can buy today is called Truth and Duty: The Press, the President, and the Privilege of Power, and though she hasn’t said anything publicly, Ms. Miller is probably a little peeved that Ms. Mapes has grabbed that title.

Truth and Duty tells the story of a flawed 60 Minutes II report on President George W. Bush’s National Guard service record. Ms. Mapes spent five years chasing down tips for the piece, which aired on Sept. 8, 2004, and claimed—on the basis of previously unseen documents and unaired interviews—that the President was somewhat less than exemplary in his service to this country during the Vietnam War.

Within 24 hours, typography experts had materialized all over the right-wing blogosphere; they insisted that the documents were bogus. The mainstream media ran with the story about the forgery instead of the story about the President’s spotty record, and, in Ms. Mapes considered opinion, vindictively tore her limb from limb. Mr. Bush won re-election; Ms. Mapes got fired. After a lengthy investigation, a CBS-appointed independent panel found that she and her colleagues had rushed an insufficiently reported story to air. Three others lost their jobs as well, and Dan Rather, who delivered the report, had to give up his anchor chair on the CBS Evening News.

For all its titular grandiosity, Truth and Duty is a plainspoken, occasionally self-righteous and oftentimes sympathetic look at how the National Guard story came to be and why it fell apart. Having suffered through a year of silence—first imposed by the strictures of a CBS gag order, then by those of a $250,000 book deal—Ms. Mapes has come out swinging: at the trigger-happy right-wing bloggers who savaged her; at the cowardly CBS and Viacom executives who didn’t protect her; at the fellow journalists who seemed to delight in her misery; at the cantankerous Guardsmen who lied to her; and at the Bush administration strategists who somehow destroyed her reputation.

The whole mess started, Ms. Mapes writes, when George W. Bush was still governor of Texas. In 1999, it became clear that he was planning to run for President, and she became interested in his military record, which raised questions about how he got into—and out of—the selective Texas Air National Guard. She revisited the story off and on during the first Bush administration but made little headway until Sept. 2, 2004, when Bill Burkett, a former Texas National Guardsman and a known anti-Bush partisan, met her outside a Whataburger in Clyde, Tex., and, over pizza at a nearby restaurant, handed her the mother lode: documents purportedly written by Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, Mr. Bush’s commanding officer, detailing the future President’s poor performance and suspending him for failing to take a physical exam.

Jackpot! Only, not so much. In her zeal to convince Mr. Burkett to hand over the memos, which were photocopies, Ms. Mapes was careful not to ask about the originals, lest she upset him. Eventually, she nagged him about the provenance of the documents (the sequence of events is fudged in the telling), and he told her he got the documents from another former National Guardsman, George Conn. (Mr. Burkett was lying.) Ms. Mapes made a few inconclusive calls to Mr. Conn while crashing the story for the Sept. 8 show, but was content to have the photocopies authenticated by typography experts and their substance corroborated by others who knew Mr. Bush in the National Guard.

It’s at this point (and elsewhere, too) that the reader will be tempted to close Truth and Duty and whack it against his forehead. Why would Ms. Mapes, an experienced journalist who’d been through war zones, won a Peabody and—just months earlier—broken the Abu Ghraib prison abuse story, not insist on finding out where the documents came from? Why wasn’t she suspicious when Mr. Burkett, so reluctant to give her the first two memos, called up researcher Mike Smith days later and offered him four more? Why on earth would she put Mr. Burkett in touch with the Kerry campaign as a thank-you for his help? Why is she so loyal to Mr. Rather, especially after he apologized for the segment and let her hang? And why does she gloss over these details as if they were tangential?

Ms. Mapes doesn’t share Mr. Rather’s gift for metaphor. (Before the story broke, she writes, “you could have put everything I knew about document analysis and authentication on the head of a pin and still had room for the state of Texas.” Huh?) But when it comes to basic journalistic maxims—modesty, curiosity, hard work—she and her former boss are a lot alike. On the whole, Ms. Mapes and the CBS team that assembled the National Guard story seem to have been well-intentioned. So how did a flawed report get on the air? The failures were incremental; the time pressures were intense; the executives were unusually aloof; Mr. Rather was exhausted from covering a hurricane—and Ms. Mapes and her fellow producers cut a corner or two.

When it aired, the National Guard segment included an interview with former Texas Lieutenant Governor Ben Barnes, a Democrat, who talked about how he had helped get young George into the Texas Air National Guard. Also in the original segment script, according to Ms. Mapes, was analysis from Marcel Matley, a document expert who explained why he thought the photocopies were authentic—but that part was cut for time.

Ms. Mapes still hasn’t given up: In an attempt to prove that the documents were not forged—and that her report was solid—she marshals many complicated details about superscript type and proportional spacing. But mostly she relies on her portrait of a ragtag band of do-gooders pitted against the twin evils of political operatives and media conglomerates. Ms. Mapes herself is a “wan little character, abandoned by her bosses, battered by bloggers, and beaten up by Rush Limbaugh.” Her lawyer, a large man named Dick Hibey, “looks like a six-year-old boy when he smiles.” Mr. Rather, removing his make-up, was “like a little boy tearing off his tight and uncomfortable Sunday clothes”—he was “the heart of our little club.” These happy few had to defend themselves against CBS News president Andrew Heyward (who’s since been pushed out of his job), CBS chairman Les Moonves, Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone and a vast network of right-wing activists.

Ms. Mapes can’t help herself from occasionally addressing these villains directly. As the story is breaking apart around them, she describes Mr. Heyward yelling into a conference call about what they would do if “someone fucked this up.” She writes: “That was helpful, Andrew, a real rallying of the troops. Nothing like a vote of no confidence to help build your stamina for a long campaign.”

I think I can already hear the sound of Truth and Duty smacked against foreheads all over town. But Ms. Mapes, who’s been bludgeoned and scapegoated without having her say, clearly sees her book as a pebble aimed at Goliath’s brow.

Rebecca Dana is a reporter at The Observer.

But the end remains out of sight. Executive producer Josh Howard still refuses to resign. And now Mary Mapes, the producer fired for her involvement in the flawed segment, is preparing to shop a book proposal offering an inside account of what happened at CBS News during the memo scandal.

The book will constitute Ms. Mapes' defense against charges of journalistic misconduct. According to Wesley Neff, president of the literary and lecture agency that is representing Ms. Mapes, the producer plans to argue for the veracity of the four memos supposedly typed by President Bush's former National Guard squadron commander, Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, in the early 1970's.

The independent panel that investigated the segment for CBS did not reach a verdict on those memos, which were at the center of the scandal. In its Jan. 10 report, the panel wrote that it could not conclude "with absolute certainty whether the Killian documents are authentic or forgeries."

Ms. Mapes' book proposal will include 40 pages of analysis and documentation that she offered to the panel to back up the documents' authenticity. In an addendum to that material-supplied on the condition it not be directly quoted-Ms. Mapes avoids direct discussion of fonts and character spacing.

Instead, she argues that the substance of the memos meshes with Mr. Bush's known records (the panel had claimed the documents clashed) and that inconsistencies in their format could have reflected the work of different typists-as found, she argues, in some of the official records.

Moreover, Ms. Mapes adds, given that two of Mr. Killian's contemporaries said the documents fit his thoughts and actions, a forger would have had to correctly guess the mental state of a dead man.

"Now that the other people have copped a plea … she's the only one who can tell this story," said Mr. Neff, of the Somerville, N.J.–based Leigh Bureau.

Beyond Ms. Mapes' dossier, CBS' investigation into the ultimate origin of the memos had gone further than the network has revealed to the public.

According to e-mail documents obtained by The Observer, by October 2004, Erik T. Rigler-the private eye hired by CBS News president Andrew Heyward to find the source of the documents-had identified six "suspects" who might have given the Killian papers to CBS' primary source, former Guardsman Bill Burkett.

One of Mr. Rigler's primary interests, according to a source familiar with the investigation, was a man named J.R. Rodriguez, a former first master sergeant in the 147th Regiment of the Texas Air National Guard. Mr. Rodriguez was at Ellington Air Force Base during the period that Colonel Killian was stationed there.

Reached at his home in Richmond, Tex., Mr. Rodriguez said he had worked in the same regiment as Killian, but had never come across the documents. "I have no knowledge of that," he said.

Mr. Rigler was unable to verify whether Mr. Rodriguez or one of the other five subjects had contacted Mr. Burkett because Mr. Burkett would not speak with him. Via e-mail, Mr. Burkett said that he had refused to cooperate with CBS or its associates unless Mr. Heyward would sign a letter clarifying Mr. Burkett's role in the debacle.

"Yes, I was contacted by Mr. Rigler," Mr. Burkett wrote. "I told him I would not submit to an interview UNTIL Mr. Heyward took the actions to clear up facts and clear my name consisting primarily of a simple letter of clarification and a full unedited copy of the Crescent Court Dallas taping."

Mr. Burkett was referring to a three-hour interview between him and Mr. Rather, of which CBS News showed only a short clip. That clip was used to show that Mr. Burkett "misled" CBS producers about who had given him the documents. Mr. Burkett has said that the full tape casts his dealings with the network in a different light.

Mr. Burkett later scaled down his request, asking only for a letter signed by senior CBS News management stating certain facts about his reporter-source relationship with the network-a set of facts that both CBS and the investigative panel acknowledged to be true.

CBS News turned down Mr. Burkett's offer.

By not meeting Mr. Burkett's terms, CBS in essence kept the official and unofficial investigations from cooperating with a central figure in the controversy-thereby potentially cutting off the trail to the documents' original source.

CBS declined to comment for this story, citing an inability to digest all the assertions presented on deadline, calling them "a mixture of supposition, spin, rumor and perhaps some fact, apparently derived from interested parties, both known and unknown."

Neither Mr. Rigler nor the six alleged suspects on the private eye's list were mentioned anywhere in the independent panel's report.

On Feb. 22, Michael Missal, the lead counsel for the panel, said the group had not received any information about the source of the documents from Mr. Rigler "beyond Burkett. There was nothing to give us."

But on March 1, Mr. Missal said that multiple members of the panel had direct contact with Mr. Rigler and had received information about some of his leads. Mr. Missal said that the panel had contacted Mr. Rodriguez, saying he was one of the 66 people interviewed for the report.

Mr. Missal would not discuss what the conversation had yielded. "The panel contacted him," he said. "I don't think I can go into details beyond what's in the report."

When asked about the CBS independent panel, Mr. Rodriguez repeatedly said he had never heard of it, but he acknowledged that he could not distinguish among all the reporters who had called him. "One of the guys that talked to me mentioned some kind of panel," he said, "but I wasn't sure what kind of panel he was talking about."

Mr. Missal also explained that Mr. Rigler's goal of finding the source of the documents was not the same as the panel's.

"I think we were generally aware of what he was doing," he said. "But it was a separate thing. His objective and our objective were different. We were looking at the broadcast; he was trying to find the source of the documents."

The documents and Mr. Burkett were the focus of skeptics' scrutiny of the 60 Minutes Wednesday segment from the moment after it aired. Overwhelmingly, critics argued against the authenticity of the typefaces in the memos (starting with the infamous "th" superscript) and against the credibility of Mr. Burkett, who has claimed he witnessed operatives of then-Governor Bush "cleansing" National Guard files in the mid-1990's.

For its part, the independent panel said that Mr. Burkett should not have been considered an "unimpeachable source," as Ms. Mapes, anchor Dan Rather and CBS News had once insisted.

After initially suggesting that a former National Guard colleague named George Conn may have been the source of the documents, Mr. Burkett later said that a woman named "Lucy Ramirez" had instructed him by phone to attend a livestock show in Houston, Tex., where he picked up the memos from an unidentified man.

According to an e-mail written by Mr. Rigler and obtained by The Observer, the private eye offered Mr. Burkett an opportunity to look at photographs of six suspects so Mr. Burkett could identify who had handed him an envelope with the four Killian documents inside. Mr. Rigler introduced himself to Mr. Burkett as a former F.B.I. agent who specialized in aviation accidents. His "client," he said, was "an investigative firm retained by CBS."

At multiple points during the investigation, Mr. Burkett offered to cooperate with CBS-and thus Mr. Rigler-in exchange for key demands. Starting on Sept. 16, according to a source with knowledge of the proceedings, Mr. Burkett asked CBS News for a copy of the three-hour interview. CBS News refused.

CBS did, however, later give a copy of the tape to Mr. Rigler for his investigation. In Mr. Rigler's e-mail, he describes reading the transcript of Mr. Burkett's unedited interview with Mr. Rather and concluding that Mr. Burkett is not "a liar."

One person who met with Mr. Rigler in the course of the private investigator's search for the source of the memos was Harvey Gough, a well-known Republican in Texas who owns the Lover's Lane hamburger stand in Dallas, where legend has it fund-raisers for George W. Bush first met to plan his run for governor in the 1990's. After meeting with Mr. Rigler in October 2004, Mr. Gough concluded that the investigator believed in the truth of the documents, if not their authenticity.

"He thought there was" reason to believe in the documents, said Mr. Gough. "I think he thought there was at least consistency."

In November, after the Presidential election, Mr. Burkett dropped his demand for the interview tape. Mr. Burkett instead asked for a letter written on CBS letterhead and signed by senior CBS management that stated the following:

· CBS News initially approached Mr. Burkett, rather than the other way around.

· The original faxed copies of the Killian documents sent to CBS News were sent not by Mr. Burkett, but by Ms. Mapes.

The second point was important to Mr. Burkett because the faxed documents bore a mark from a Kinko's in Abilene, Tex., which had tipped off The Washington Post to his identity and had launched a full-scale media onslaught of Mr. Burkett's home.

The independent panel's report confirmed that both statements were true. And in November, CBS News went so far as to put the facts on CBS letterhead, according to a source who saw the letter-but neither Mr. Heyward nor any of senior management at CBS News would sign it.

For Mr. Burkett, the letter was crucial because it corrected claims in news reports circulating around the Internet that had Mr. Burkett faxing the documents and exposing his own identity.

In Mr. Burkett's assessment, CBS had breached the confidentiality agreement between reporter and source. An associate of Mr. Burkett said he has claimed some 31 death threats were made against him.

"VIACOM/CBS did absolutely nothing to defend me, though that was a part of my agreement with them," wrote Mr. Burkett in an e-mail to The Observer. "But even worse, VIACOM/CBS always made sure by acts of commission or omission that they precluded me from defending myself. I will assure you, any source should be wary of dealing with confidences, confidentiality or deals with the media. CBS wasn't the only one to violate such agreements; but they were far worse than others. And when it came down to the bottom line, VIACOM/CBS senior leaders exposed me … and then blamed me for their own mistakes. I would warn anyone-whistleblowers or not-against trusting either the mainstream or blogger communities. They're in it for themselves and will sell you down the river at the drop of a hat."

Five days later, CBS launched another inquiry into the memo scandal. The network hired a private investigator named Erik T. Rigler, a former F.B.I. agent and Navy aviator, to track down the source of the troublesome documents.

Mr. Rigler's sleuthing was not mentioned in the list of interviews and other pursuits in the independent panel's final report on Jan. 10. Though CBS had promised transparency in investigating the memo scandal, of a half-dozen CBS News producers who spoke to The Observer, only one had even heard a rumor that the network had hired the private investigator.

Segment producer Mary Mapes and anchor Dan Rather were both aware of Mr. Rigler's assignment. Because the independent panel was looking into the memos, Ms. Mapes and Mr. Rather were no longer investigating the case themselves. CBS News president Andrew Heyward assured Ms. Mapes that CBS was pursuing the source of the papers, according to two people familiar with the situation.

Neither Ms. Mapes nor Mr. Ratherwould comment on any aspect of the segment or the investigation. CBS sources said that Mr. Rather has been officially muzzled: On March 9, when he steps down as anchor of the CBS Evening News, he will be limited to seven controlled interviews with the press to avoid questions about the scandal.

But sources said that Ms. Mapes was glad to cooperate with the private eye. Her lawyer, Richard Hibey, said that Ms. Mapes handed over all of her leads and notes about the National Guard story to Mr. Rigler.

But Mr. Rigler's search for the origins of the documents dead-ended with the man who had given them to CBS, former National Guard employee Bill Burkett. His work did yield one result, which he passed on to the independent panel: a two-page memorandum about Ms. Mapes herself.

Mr. Hibey and another outside source said that Ms. Mapes was dismayed to learn that the ostensible investigation of the documents had turned into an inquiry into the producer.

"When she saw the report she felt completely betrayed by Heyward and CBS," Mr. Hibey said. "Because this guy didn't apparently do what Heyward said he was going to be doing."

Mr. Rigler provided the panel, led by former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh and former Associated Press head Louis Boccardi Jr., with personal information about Ms. Mapes, including her answers to a line of inquiry about her estranged father. He did not report on his unsuccessful pursuit of the documents.

Michael Missal, the lead counsel for the independent panel, confirmed that the panel had received information from CBS' hired hand, but only material about Ms. Mapes.

"We saw a summary of what they discussed to see if there was any inconsistency" with what the producer had told the panel on other occasions, Mr. Missal said.

"We were aware that CBS was still pursuing the source of the documents independently of the panel," he said, "and we were given access to information CBS gave in that regard."

"He didn't get any more information beyond Burkett," said Mr. Missal. "There was nothing to give us."

Mr. Rigler declined to comment on his work for CBS.

Reached for comment, a spokesperson for CBS News said that "CBS News hired a private investigator with the full knowledge and enthusiastic approval of all of those involved in the original Sept. 8 report for one purpose only: to help get to the bottom of the authenticity and origin of the documents."

The CBS spokesperson said the private investigator's aims were not to find critical information about any of CBS's producers. "The investigator's brief report was not critical of any individuals involved in producing the original Sept. 8 report," she said. "To this day, the basic questions about the documents have not been answered, but we remain hopeful that, one day, they will be."

The fact that CBS had a private investigator looking into its own employee suggests that well before the panel issued any findings, network management had begun to shift its focus away from solving the mystery behind the documents and toward placing the blame for the decision to air the segment. That foreshadowed the investigative panel's own report, which, having failed to figure out the source of the memos, focused instead on internal procedural and journalistic failures at CBS.

Was CBS getting ahead of itself?

It's easy to argue that Ms. Mapes was worth investigating, given her instrumental role in dragging the network into a wholesale disaster. Ms. Mapes, the panel's final report concludes, convinced everyone to trust her throughout both the airing and the defense stages of a segment that depended on still-unverified memos.

But whatever breaches of journalistic procedure Ms. Mapes may have committed, CBS News still hasn't solved the mystery surrounding her fundamental news judgment: Was she the victim of a hoax or not?

The final assessment of the report was that it could not conclude "with absolute certainty whether the Killian documents are authentic or forgeries."

As a result, the panel reported that it had no choice but to focus on the news-gathering sins. "While the focus of the Panel's investigation at the outset was on the Killian documents," it read, "the investigation quickly identified considerable and fundamental deficiencies relating to the reporting and production of the September 8 Segment and the statements and news reports during the Aftermath."

As it stands, the report's conclusions about the news gathering-and particularly about the follow-up-are still under attack. As of Tuesday evening, the three CBS staffers asked to resign as a result of the investigation continued to refuse to do so, with former 60 Minutes Wednesday executive producer Josh Howard demanding CBS correct the record about his own responsibility.

But also on Tuesday, Salon reported on a 2,600-word letter that Mr. Burkett had written to CBS, in which the former National Guardsman seemed to agree with the panel: He blamed CBS for failing to properly vet the documents, which he said he had offered only on the condition that he not have to explain their chain of custody.

"CBS, through its employees, had to make a critical decision as to whether they were willing to take that risk," he wrote. "There were no expressed or implied warranties about the documents. Yet I believed them to be authentic."

Few producers inside CBS News seemed interested in the veracity of the memos, focusing instead on their colleagues who had taken the blame. But few felt that the report had led to justice-and that its injustice began with its failure to resolve the mystery.

"It'sabig gaping hole, isn't it?" said one CBS News staffer.

Other avenues of cracking the case, outside the network's own investigation, don't appear very promising at the moment. If the documents are fakes, they are apparently illegal-it is against the law in Texas to forge a government document, according to Chapter 32.21 of the Texas Penal Code. The chapter on forgery makes it clear that forging a government record, state or federal, is a felony.

But Mr. Burkett has never been pursued by authorities, who could feasibly force him to answer questions under oath about where he got the memos supposedly drafted by former Texas Air National Guard Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, who was President Bush's commanding officer in the early 1970's.

On Oct. 5, 2004, 51 members of Congress called for an investigation into the suspected forgery. A spokesperson for Texas Representative Lamar Smith said that Mr. Smith's efforts to drum up support for an investigation had not yielded results. "We are not aware of any legal action on this," he said.

Kathy Colvin, a spokesperson for the U.S. attorney's office in Dallas, said she was "not aware of any charges that have been filed."

Producer Mary Mapes, who was fired, has released a statement saying that she had done nothing wrong in preparing the Sept. 8, 2004, report or in the aftermath. And the three staffers who CBS asked to resign-executive producer Josh Howard, his top deputy Mary Murphy, and CBS News senior vice president Betsy West-have declined to actually tender their resignations.

The trio has remained silent, but all three are consulting with lawyers about the possibility of bringing legal action against CBS News.

As critics continue to question how CBS News president Andrew Heyward survived the upheaval that took out his underlings, the gaps in the official narrative of events suggest there may be one or more alternate versions of what happened.

And those who know Ms. West, Mr. Howard and Ms. Murphy said that they have an uneasy choice to make between fighting for their own professional reputations-by expanding on those missing links and possibly trying to bring top executives down with them-or peaceably drawing the best possible severance package from the company.

CBS News staffers and colleagues familiar with the grievances of both Mr. Howard and Ms. West said that the pair's account of what happened is not merely one of gross journalistic negligence (though that was clear, in queasy detail) but of cutthroat survival by network brass.

The report by former Attorney General Richard Thornburgh and former Associated Press head Louis Boccardi Jr. does not present evidence to support the view that top executives were culpable. But it doesn't offer the evidence to clear them, either.

In a tale populated by scoundrels, CBS News staffers were quietly heralding at least one moment of heroism in the report: Mr. Howard's attempt, amid the clamor that followed the airing of the segment, to take a stand against stonewalling. For some, Mr. Howard was shaping up to be the Jon Landman of the CBS News scandal-a reference to the New York Times editor who had tried to sound the warning that Jayson Blair shouldn't be writing for the paper.

"There's only one thing that sits there on the record with someone having taken a stand," said a CBS News staffer, "which its existence alone puts everyone else in a horrible place."

The staffer was referring to an e-mail written by Mr. Howard to Ms. West at 4:53 a.m. on Sept. 10, two days after the segment aired. In it, Mr. Howard-a 24-year veteran of CBS who had been just six days into his job as executive producer when the segment aired-recommended that CBS News acknowledge the possibility that it had been duped.

The message was roundly ignored, and the company continued to defend the story for the next five days.

The bald facts of what 60 Minutes Wednesday did wrong are undeniable. The journalistic indiscretions include, but are not limited to, the fact that no one investigated the ultimate source of Ms. Mapes' documents, and the decision not to confront the White House with the alleged findings until the morning of the day the segment was to air.

That latter choice showed not only hubris, but a kind of myopia that should have been flagged in the screening room-where Mr. Heyward was sitting an hour before the program aired.

So who was pushing-or encouraging-the segment to go forward? Ms. Mapes, the zealous producer, was clearly a moving force. But in the past, Mr. Heyward had been able to hold her in check. During the program's Abu Ghraib report, also produced by Ms. Mapes and reported by anchor Dan Rather, Mr. Heyward reportedly held the story back from running for three weeks.

In the case of the Bush National Guard memos, Mr. Heyward gave tentative approval for the airing of the report the day before it was completed. And it wasn't until that evening that CBS News first spoke to the White House-which contacted the network after hearing that a story was in the works.

According to the report, there was no actual segment to screen until 7 p.m. on Sept. 8-one hour before showtime-when Mr. Heyward saw and approved it.

In essence, the report accused Ms. Mapes of steamrolling not only her immediate supervisors-including and especially Mr. Howard-but also the president of the news organization.

Mr. Howard, after all, was only nominally in charge. His advocates concede that the executive producer made a mistake by allowing himself to be big-footed by Mr. Heyward, who assigned Ms. West to be a caretaker of the segment, reporting back to him.

In what the report noted was a highly unusual level of hands-on involvement by management, Ms. West screened two versions of the segment and was in the editing room the day it aired.

Mr. Howard's "main sin," said a CBS News staffer, "was he was exceedingly weak and he ceded to authority a role that has never been breached previously. No one could ever remember [current 60 Minutes executive producer] Jeff Fager or [former 60 Minutes executive producer] Don Hewitt allowing a supervisor in on their decision-making."

But if Mr. Howard was guilty of ceding responsibility for the segment while it was being created, he could not be accused of that sin two days later, when he made the first concerted effort to begin addressing the possibility of error.

Early on Sept. 10, Mr. Howard sent Ms. West the warning e-mail, saying that he was now uncertain about the report and thought that CBS News should acknowledge the growing outside evidence.

Mr. Howard suggested that CBS News should tell the public that if indeed one or more of the documents were not authentic, it would mean that CBS News was the victim of an elaborate fraud: "We have no evidence that that was the case. But we are continuing to aggressively investigate, and should we find that anyone-the Kerry campaign, the Bush campaign, or anyone else-was responsible for circulating fraudulent documents and orchestrating a hoax, no one would be more anxious to break that story than CBS News.

"The point," he wrote, "would be to shift the conversation from CBS did something wrong, to something wrong was done to us and we're mad as hell."

As the report describes, Ms. West wrote back to Mr. Howard at 8:39 a.m. with the reply: "I think we need to defend ourselves specifically [and] not even concede that we think it could be a hoax."

On its face, it appeared Ms. West had overridden Mr. Howard in the course of events. In the narrative of the report, Ms. West is responding directly to Mr. Howard's suggestion, on her own behalf. But in real-time, according to documents in the report's appendix, her reply was informed by an e-mail from Mr. Heyward at 7:49 a.m., an hour and 10 minutes before she responded to Mr. Howard.

That e-mail by Mr. Heyward pushed for a stronger defense: "This is a direct attack on our credibility that will stick if we don't come back as hard as possible-not by saying 'we'll investigate allegations' (which of course we should), but by giving some indication WHY we're so confident."

Nowhere in the Thornburgh report does Mr. Heyward acknowledge having seen Mr. Howard's e-mail. Had Ms. West told Mr. Heyward about the executive producer's reservations? The question goes unanswered.

But Mr. Howard's doubts were confirmed again later that day when, according to his testimony to the investigative panel, he spoke to a typewriting expert named Peter Tytell: "Howard told the Panel that he spoke to Tytell for about 30 minutes and found Tytell to be convincing," the report reads. "He found the discussion to be an 'unsettling event' that shook his belief in the authenticity of the documents."

This time, Mr. Howard reported his findings to both Ms. West and Mr. Heyward. At this point, one assumes, Mr. Heyward may have become familiar with Mr. Howard's qualms.

The result? Ms. West, said the report, suggested he tell Ms. Mapes and noted that "one could always find experts willing to take different sides in the authentication debate."

Mr. Heyward, apparently, had no reaction. That morning, the CBS News president had given a list of instructions to Ms. West to fully vet every detail of Ms. Mapes' report-a directive, the report explains, that "was not implemented in a prompt or systematic way."

In the report's rendering, Ms. West didn't fulfill her duty to vet the piece "without undercutting our people," as Mr. Heyward requested, leading eventually to her dismissal. Whether or not she responded to the instructions-and if not, why not-is another question the report fails to answer. The investigators never explain why Mr. Heyward didn't follow up on his memo, and Ms. West doesn't reappear in the narrative in any significant way until three days later.

Supporters of Ms. West were naturally suspicious of a storyline that suggested Ms. West had been anything other than a managerial extension of Mr. Heyward. One of his e-mail directions to her on Sept. 10 was: "You also have to talk to Mary [Mapes] about what the Evening News does tonight."

Yet later that afternoon, Mr. Heyward had asked corporate communications executive Gil Schwartz to orchestrate a response for the Evening News. Instead of Ms. West, it was Mr. Schwartz who ended up buttonholing Ms. Mapes about document experts.

On that day, Mr. Schwartz had made forceful demands for facts and experts supporting CBS News' contention that the documents were authentic. In an e-mail not to Ms. West, but to Jim Murphy, the executive producer of the CBS Evening News, Mr. Schwartz wrote: "We need our expert available NOW to speak to all those who are reporting this story," he wrote.

Where was Ms. West? In the report, it appears that Mr. Schwartz is doing her job-and by extension, Mr. Heyward's-with Ms. West no longer visible in the narrative.

As the report lays out, what followed on the day of the Sept. 10 e-mail exchanges was not a trumpeting of new experts or new facts dug up by Ms. West. Instead of a concession to a possible hoax, as suggested by Mr. Howard, what followed was a "stubborn repetition of what [CBS News had] already said," according to the report.

But judging by the report, it was a stubborn repetition managed without the aid of Ms. West or the executive producer of the segment, who had expressed serious doubts about the authenticity of the documents.

Despite Mr. Howard's "unsettling moment," the rest of CBS News did not have its wholesale "psychological breakthrough," as Mr. Heyward described it, until the following Wednesday, Sept. 15, when Mr. Rather interviewed Marian Carr Knox, the former secretary of purported document author Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, and discovered that Ms. Knox did not recognize the documents. After Sept. 10, the report is never again clear who was responsible for the continuing strategy of defending the documents despite growing evidence against them-only the group called "management," which apparently was at the mercy of a maverick producer, Mary Mapes, and two fumbling, uncommunicative foot soldiers, Mr. Howard and Ms. West.

By November, however, it became clear whom CBS president Leslie Moonves considered the hero in the debacle. That month, with the independent report still pending, Gil Schwartz was promoted to executive vice president, giving him consolidated control of communications at a newly formed CBS Communications Group. Mr. Moonves called him "the most gifted communicator I have ever worked with."