Marc Ambinder
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Based in LA, I write about politics & policy, and nuclear war. A book on nuclear war due in '18. I teach at USC.
A number of government folks will say today that the press’s pugnacity post-Pentagon papers was a creation of the 6 to 3 court decision’s turgid prose. That a sort of oppositional defiant disorder did not exist in nature; that there was never a common law understanding of the press’s role in a a democracy, so that the press and the government had a shared understanding of what constituted national security and bargained informally, more or less towards a status quo, beforehand. It doesn’t quite get at the fissures within the press; an increasing number of journalists, editors and publishers were increasingly militant about policing government power because of Vietnam and the Civil Rights crusades of the decades prior; the field of journalism was already debating how close (if at all) journalists had to keep their sources; a number of prominent voices — The New York Times and the Washington Post were not the leaders of this debate, but as the most powerful journalistic institutions in the country, outside of perhaps CBS News, it was perhaps inevitable that they would wind up resolving it, at least temporarily.
In May, The New York Times, in a feat of national security journalism that made me quite jealous of their reporters and those reporters’ sources, broke the news that the CIA and the FBI were years-deep in a counter-intelligence investigation because virtually all of the CIA’s informants and agents inside of China had been killed beginning in 2010. The two agencies had come to a stalemate, despite, according to the Times, The mole hunt eventually zeroed in on a former agency operative who had worked in the C. I.A.’s division overseeing China, believing he was most likely responsible for the crippling disclosures. A lot of folks who “had worked” in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations division that oversaw Chinese espionage operations now lived overseas. Equally unknown is why the Department of Justice let Lee go four years ago… and did not (according to the original Times report) develop new evidence against him at least through May of this year — and yet decided when learning about his trip to the U. S. to finally arrest him.