The Reporter Resists His Government

Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

by James Risen

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 285 pp., $28.00

In early 2003, James Risen, an investigative reporter in the Washington bureau of The New York Times, prepared a story about a covert CIA effort to undermine Irans nuclear program. Before publishing it, he informed the CIA of his findings and asked for comment. On April 30, 2003, according to a subsequent Justice Department court filing, CIA Director George Tenet and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice met with Risen and Jill Abramson, then the Timess Washington bureau chief. Tenet and Rice urged the Times to hold Risens story because, they said, it would compromise national security and endanger the life of a particular CIA recruit. (The agent is referred to in the Justice filing as Human Asset No. 1.) Eventually, the Times informed the CIA that it would not publish Risens story.1 Abramson said recently that she regrets the decision.

The following year, Risen and a colleague, Eric Lichtblau, learned of a National Security Agency surveillance program that collected details of Americans telephone and e-mail communications without reference to a search warrant. Some of Risens sources inside the NSA thought that the program was unconstitutional, because it violated the Fourth Amendments prohibition of unlawful search. Risen felt that he had come across my biggest story of the post-9/11 age, as he puts it in Pay Any Price, his revealing, diverse collection of investigations of greed, incompetence, and mendacity in the American national security state.

In October 2004, Risen and Lichtblau drafted their NSA story. They again informed the Bush administration of what they had discovered. The White House launched an intense lobbying campaign to persuade senior Times editors that the story would severely damage national security, Risen recalls. The decision about whether to publish fell to Bill Keller, then the Timess executive editor. Risen, Lichtblau, and Rebecca Corbett, their editor, argued that the paper should go forward, but Keller ultimately decided against them. That left Risen, as he writes, frustrated and deeply concerned.

He then took a leave of absence from the newspaper to write a book. In the summer of 2005, he finished his manuscript. He included in it his reporting about the CIAs Iran operation and, with Lichtblaus consent, their discoveries about the NSAs warrantless surveillance program. Risen found a willing publisher at Free Press. When he informed his editors at the Times about his book-publishing plans, he recalls, They were furious.

Rather than be scooped by their reporter and Free Press, the Timess executives reconsidered their decision not to publish his story about the NSAs warrantless surveillance. According to Risen, the deliberations culminated in an Oval Office meeting between President Bush and Arthur Sulzberger Jr., then and now the Timess publisher. In December 2005 the Times printed Risen and Lichtblaus account. It caused an immediate sensation and later won a Pulitzer Prize. Yet the Times did not reverse its decision to withhold Risens reporting about the CIAs covert operation to undermine Irans nuclear program.

On January 5, 2006, Free Press brought out State of War, Risens first book, which contained, in Chapter Nine, a critical account of Operation Merlin. In this covert action of the Clinton administration, according to Risen, the CIA recruited a Russian scientist to provide flawed nuclear weapons designs to Iran, in hopes of delaying the countrys progress toward constructing a bomb. Instead, the scientist pointed out the design flaws to the Iranians, which may have helped them.

From this tangled history of investigative reporting and espionage has arisen one of the most consequential confrontations between the government and the press in a generation. The Obama administration inherited the case from the Bush administration. The Obama administration then pressured Risen aggressively to reveal the sources he relied upon in describing Operation Merlin. The result, as his book and other evidence make clear, was that the Justice Departments actions damaged the First Amendment and the rights of journalists.

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The Reporter Resists His Government