WASHINGTON, 3 October 2003 — Investigations of government leaks almost never succeed, experts on law and journalism ethics said Wednesday. And that history poses a challenge to investigators searching for the sources who identified a CIA employee’s name to journalists.
“We are moving to a rather typical Washington situation in which a leak investigation is under way with little chance of success, because leakers lie and journalists don’t talk,’’ First Amendment Attorney Floyd Abrams said.
The Justice Department has begun investigating whether Bush administration officials illegally disclosed that the wife of a prominent critic of the administration’s Iraq policy is a CIA employee. The officer’s name was published in July by syndicated columnist Robert Novak and then by two Newsday reporters whose article said she operated “undercover.’’
Even though the experts who were interviewed on the controversy said the journalists have the right to protect their sources, some said the woman’s name should not have been published in the first place or the initial report should have focused instead on why someone was revealing the information. “The problem in cases like this is that there may be certain news value in what the leaker is offering, but there may be more news value in the fact that the person is trying to leak it,’’ said Professor Jay Rosen of the New York University journalism department.
“When you are leaked something that is a genuine secret, even though it’s been leaked you should keep it a secret,’’ said Alex Jones, director of the Shorenstein Center on the Press at Harvard University. “I think Novak was wrong to publish this. But 99 percent of what is leaked is not secret in the same sense as the identity of an undercover CIA operative.’’
The 1982 law that bars disclosing identities of covert CIA employees is aimed chiefly at leakers, especially current or former CIA insiders, and generally does not cover journalists, although early draft versions of it were broad enough to include them. Also, a shield law in Washington, D.C., protects journalists seeking to keep sources secret.
The Justice Department has told the White House to preserve documents related to the matter, including contacts with Novak and the Newsday reporters.
No officials have stepped forth to say they leaked the information. But Jane Kirtley, the Silha professor of media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota, said that the current Justice Department may be more likely than past ones to issue subpoenas to the journalists involved.
Among the few instances where leakers were exposed, naval intelligence officer Samuel Morison was sentenced to two years in jail in the 1980s for giving classified satellite photos of a Soviet ship to Jane’s Defence Weekly.
In the 1970s, the government indicted Daniel Ellsberg for making the Pentagon Papers available to the media, but a federal court judge dismissed the charges, citing improper government conduct.
