Intelligence_ From Secrets to Policy - Mark M. Lowenthal [221]
The only person in the affair who was punished was the State Department officer, Richard Nuccio, who gave the information to Torricelli. A panel appointed by DCI Deutch decided that Nuccio had provided the information without proper authorization. Nuccio lost his clearances and resigned from the State Department, eventually returning to work on Torricelli’s staff. Torricelli could have saved Nuccio by saying that he had asked Nuccio for the information. But, by doing so. Torricelli would have undercut his argument that he had been the innocent recipient.
In 1998 the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act became law, after much debate in Congress and the executive branch. The law established procedures by which intelligence community employees may report a complaint or urgent concern. They must first do so through channels in the intelligence community but are free to inform the Intelligence Committees if the community has taken no action by a specific time. Even then, the employees must inform executive branch officials that they are going to Congress and must handle their information in accordance with proper security procedures. Reflecting the Torricelli case, the whistleblower law states, “A member or employee of one of the intelligence committees who receives a complaint or information . . . does so in that member or employee’s official capacity as a member or employee of that committee.”
THE MEDIA
Reporters and their media outlets exist to publish stories. The First Amendment to the Constitution offers the press broad freedom: “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom . . . of the press.”
The government has no way to prevent the media from reporting information that it has obtained, even if it has been classified. But freedom to publish is not the same as “the people’s right to know,” which is an enticing catchphrase but does not appear anywhere in the Constitution. The press’s right to report also does not obligate government officials to provide information, especially classified information.
But what, if any. obligations does the press have when it obtains information with national security implications? Should press limits be self-imposed, or should the press operate on the premise of “finders keepers, losers weepers”? Just as ethics and morals change in other areas, so, too. they change in the media.
In the past the press has come upon intelligence activities and agreed not to write about them for the sake of national security. For example, reporters discovered Cuban exile training camps in Florida prior to the Bay of Pigs and also learned about the construction of the Glomar Explorer, built by the Hughes Corporation for the CIA to retrieve a sunken Soviet submarine. More recently, in 2007, the New York Times said that it had initially refrained from publishing information it had obtained about U.S. efforts to help safeguard Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.
In the post-Watergate era of investigative journalism (a wonderful redundancy, as all journalism is investigative), it is difficult to imagine that many reporters or media outlets would be willing to suspend publication or drop a story entirely. One has only to think about such scenes as U.S. television camera crews waiting onshore as the first U.S. troops landed in Somalia in 1993 to question the premise. It is more likely that, at some point, the story will be published.
Still, the question remains. At what point, if any, should reporters put aside their professional and career interests for the sake of preserving the secrecy of some intelligence activity or information? What responsibilities, if any, does the press have for the results of a story it publishes?
CONCLUSION
Intelligence is not without its ethical and moral dilemmas, some of which can be excruciating. That these intelligence dilemmas exist also means that policy makers have choices to make that can have ethical and moral dimensions. Intelligence,