Did The New York Times break the law over the weekend by apparently naming three undercover CIA agents in its article on the CIA’s drone program? Certainly, the decision to publish the names at first blush seems to fall under the terms of the Agent Identities Act of 1982, which makes it illegal to disclose “any information that identifies an individual as a cover agent,” with “covert agent” defined as “an officer or employee of an intelligence agency …whose identity…is classified information, and…who is serving outside the United States or has within the last five years served outside the United States”—all of which appears to be the case with two of the officers and probably all three.
Despite admitting that the CIA asked that the names not be published, the Times attempted to justify its decision to do so on the grounds that the three had “leadership roles in one of the government’s most significant paramilitary programs and their roles are known to foreign governments and many others.” However, the fact that they might have been known by “foreign governments” and “others”—whoever the unnamed “others” might be—isn’t a justifiable exception under the law’s terms.
As those of us who were around in the days when the law was passed know, the measure’s enactment was driven in part by the 1975 assassination of Richard Welch, the CIA officer serving as station chief in Greece. Welch was known to the Greek government but was murdered by the Greek terrorist organization, November 17, after his name was published by an American magazine. The fact that some other governments might know the true identities of the officers in the Times story isn’t the issue. The issue is that al Qaeda and ISIS now know their names. Anyone with decent computer search skills and a desire to make a terrorist name for himself is potentially capable of finding those agents’ families.
A fair reading of the story suggests nothing in it justifies naming them; there was no accusation that they were violating either the law or even the president’s own policies. Naming them was gratuitous. Not a single substantive point in the story would have been lost if the names had been left out or aliases used. No small irony of course that this is the same paper that was in high dudgeon back in 2003 when CIA officer Valerie Plame’s name was leaked to the late columnist Robert Novak, putting in question the Times op-ed her husband, Joe Wilson, had written pooh-poohing a possible Iraq-Niger-uranium link in the run-up to the Iraq War.
So, did the papers’ editors and reporters break the law? Probably not. Largely due to pressure from the Times itself in 1982, the Identities Act was modified from its original draft to include language that only made it a crime to reveal agent names if it was done “in the course of a pattern of activities” and if the government could prove that it was being done by someone who had “reason to believe” that exposing those agents “would impair or impede the foreign intelligence activities of the United States.” In fine, the paper helped print its own future “get-out-of-jail” card. That said, although publishing the names of three CIA undercover officers in this instance is probably not prosecutable under the law, it hardly means that doing so was justifiable even by the lax canons of today’s journalism profession.
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