A History of Publishing, and Not Publishing, Secrets
But some current and former intelligence officers express exasperation at what they see as journalists' arrogance in publishing in the face of government pleas for caution.
"I'd say views are hardening," said Bobby R. Inman, former director of the National Security Agency and deputy director of the C.I.A., who is generally viewed as friendly to the press. "If we're going to avoid an official secrets act" — a British-style law far more draconian than anything in this country — "we're going to have to have more discipline from the media."
KATHARINE GRAHAM, the publisher of The Washington Post who died in 2001, backed her editors through tense battles during the Watergate era. But in a 1986 speech, she warned that the media sometimes made "tragic" mistakes.
Her example was the disclosure, after the bombing of the American embassy in Beirut in 1983, that American intelligence was reading coded radio traffic between terrorist plotters in Syria and their overseers in Iran. The communications stopped, and five months later they struck again, destroying the Marine barracks in Beirut and killing 241 Americans.
"This kind of result, albeit unintentional, points up the necessity for full cooperation wherever possible between the media and the authorities," Ms. Graham said.
But such cooperation can prove problematic, as her newspaper's former editor, Benjamin C. Bradlee, has recounted.
In 1986, after holding for weeks at government request a scoop about an N.S.A. tap on a Soviet undersea communications cable, The Post learned that the Russians knew all about it already from an N.S.A. turncoat named Ronald Pelton. NBC beat The Post on its own report.