By David Glenn
In conversation, Walter Pincus has two basic modes: amiable, sharp-witted enthusiasm and avuncular, seen-it-all grumbling. His words are sometimes accompanied by a subtle, sotto voce laugh, which can express amusement or disgust, depending on which gear he is in at the moment.
Last November 16, Pincus was given two new reasons to grumble. Judge Rosemary M. Collyer of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia threatened that day to hold him in contempt if he did not identify the anonymous sources he relied on when covering the 1999 investigation of Wen Ho Lee, the Los Alamos nuclear scientist who was suspected of passing computer codes to the Chinese. Lee is now suing the government, charging violations of the federal Privacy Act of 1974, and his lawyers have pressed Pincus and five other reporters to give up their sources.
The same day, a spotlight was thrown on an embarrassing he-said, he-said dispute between Pincus and his Washington Post colleague Bob Woodward. That morning’s Post contained Woodward’s belated confession that he had been told about Valerie Plame’s CIA employment as early as June 2003. Woodward said he had mentioned the tidbit to Pincus in the newsroom that same month. Pincus insists that he remembers no such conversation.
In a series of interviews over breakfast in December and January, Pincus griped about the number of hours he has recently had to spend huddled with lawyers strategizing about the threats hanging over his head: a $500-a-day civil fine in the Lee case (which has been stayed pending his next appeal) and potential subpoenas for his original notes about Ambassador Joseph Wilson in the Valerie Plame saga. Each case, of course, involves several reporters, but Pincus alone suffers the headache of having been drawn into both affairs. And the stakes are not trivial: when the dust settles, the jurisprudential foundation of reporter-source confidentiality might be weaker than it has been in decades.
Pincus scoffs at the idea of turning over his Wilson notes, which, he says, could not possibly include anything relevant to the perjury and obstruction-of-justice charges facing I. Lewis Libby. And toward Wen Ho Lee’s lawsuit, Pincus has not much sympathy — despite the fact that his original coverage of Lee was much less prosecutorial than that of The New York Times. “If I were Wen Ho Lee, would I want to sue someone?” he says. “No. I mean, I think he was badly treated. But he did plead guilty to a felony. He did something that no one in the history of the Los Alamos lab had ever done before. And they still haven’t found the tapes he transferred.”
But during precisely the same conversations, alongside the avuncular growls, there are moments when Pincus’s eyes light up and he launches into a soliloquy about some interesting new thing he has learned. He attended Georgetown Law School part-time beginning in 1995 and graduated in 2001, at the age of sixty-eight. While there, he says, he picked up new perspectives on the history and structure of the reporter-source privilege, and he has been pouring those insights into the briefs his lawyers have filed in the Lee case.
In these bright-eyed moments, it’s easy to see the curiosity and ambition that have propelled Pincus through his long career. He joined the Post in 1966, and he has been at the paper for thirty-five of the last forty years, primarily covering intelligence and national security. Most recently, Pincus has sweated on the story of the Pentagon’s expanded domestic-surveillance operations (not to be confused with the National Security Agency’s more heavily covered spying operation), which he first exposed in a late November article. Between 1975 and 1987, he also held gigs as a consultant and producer for network news operations, winning an Emmy in 1981 for the CBS series Defense of the United States. More recently, he has had a contract to offer business advice to the Washington Post Corporation. “He had about eight jobs at once for a while there,” says Ben Bradlee, the Post’s former executive editor. “At one point it was a little too rich for my blood. But I didn’t really care, as long as I got mine. He works incredibly long hours.”
Some of Pincus’s detours and enthusiasms have led to frustration. His brief mid-1960s tenure as editor of the Post’s Sunday magazine was not a notable success. “Why, oh why, did I think that would be a profitable use of Pincus?” Bradlee says with a laugh. Pincus also spent two years in the 1970s on an aborted attempt to launch a national daily, the Morning News, then tried and failed to buy The New Republic.
But on the whole, his colleagues say, Pincus’s diverse projects, and his desire to have his fingers in several pies at once, have served him well. The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh, whose name is often mentioned in the same breath as Pincus’s, says, “Walter’s one of the good guys. We disagree about a million things, but he does excellent work.” Doyle McManus, the Washington bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times, calls Pincus “the Cal Ripken of intelligence reporting — sustained excellence over an astonishingly long run.”
The question the seventy-three-year-old Pincus might be asking himself at 3 a.m. is whether he, like Ripken, ought to have ended his streak in 1998, before the names Wen Ho Lee and Valerie Plame had made headlines. A less driven person might have retired around then; very few members of Pincus’s generation remain in the newsroom. The clubby world of Washington journalism that Pincus knew as a young man has come to an end, and the Lee and Plame cases somehow seem to punctuate the change. Pincus himself plans on writing a book that will be part memoir, part exploration of “what the hell has happened to the news media.” He says, however, that he has no urge to retire soon, and is eager to plug away at the Pentagon-surveillance story: “My view is, you do it in chunks. You just keep going back until it sinks in.” Sinks in not only to the public consciousness, but also the Washington bunker. Pincus is not at all shy about saying that he hopes his coverage will change the Pentagon’s behavior. “That’s what papers are about,” he insists. “That’s why you own a paper, that’s why you write for a paper.”
Pincus published his first piece of journalism on his twenty-second birthday — an editorial related to the New York Times’s “Hundred Neediest Cases” campaign. In 1954 Pincus graduated from Yale, and on a friend’s advice he landed a job as a copy boy at the Times, working with Hanson Baldwin and James Reston, among others. “Hanson Baldwin, at that time, was the military correspondent of The New York Times,” Pincus says. “And everything he wrote had a huge impact. People read him to find out what the hell was going on. And that always impressed me.” At the family dinner the night his editorial ran, Pincus recalls, “My father, who didn’t want me to go into journalism, told me that they only published it to make me feel good, because it was my birthday.”
Pincus’s job at the Times ended in 1955 with his induction into the Army. He was stationed in Washington, serving his two-year stint in the counterintelligence corps. When he was discharged, he decided to try his hand at reporting, at least for a bit. During the evenings, he worked on the copy desk of the Washington edition of The Wall Street Journal, and during the day, he served as the D.C. correspondent for the Goldsboro (North Carolina) News-Argus. This, he says, “was the greatest training in the world,” because he was competing with the wire services, and had to master speed and detail. If he beat the AP by three hours on a story about farm legislation, that was a good day.
It was during this period, Pincus says, when he was scrambling to overcome his ignorance about tobacco subsidies, that he developed the habit of poring over obscure reports and transcripts from congressional committees. (In later years, according to a mutual friend, Bradlee used to introduce Pincus by saying, “This is Walter Pincus. He likes six-point type!”) On one such fishing expedition, in 1959, he discovered a trove of records that suggested that members of Congress were abusing their travel privileges. “A congressman would travel with his wife,” he says, “but the bill would have the wife’s name crossed off. Or there would be a bar bill and they’d cross ‘bar’ off and they’d put ‘food.’”
Compared to the territory Pincus would later cover — illegal lobbying, Iran-contra, alleged nuclear spying — that was a picayune scandal. But it turned out to be his big break. He showed the travel records to his friend Don Oberdorfer, who then covered Washington for The Charlotte Observer. The two men wrote a long investigative feature, but weren’t sure where to place it. “So we went to Izzy Stone” — the muckraking icon I.F. Stone — “who sort of acted as a mentor to a bunch of us,” says Pincus, “and he said why don’t you try Life?” That sounded slightly outlandish, but it worked. Life bought the piece, Pincus says, “for more money than either one of us made in a year.”
Nineteen fifty-nine turned out to be pivotal. That year Pincus realized that his interest in journalism was not simply a lark, that he would definitely not work for his father’s electrical-supply business, and that he wanted to stay in Washington. Pincus’s first marriage didn’t survive those insights; his wife and young son moved back to New York. Newly divorced and feeling footloose, Pincus took a vacation that has haunted him ever since.
On the suggestion of his friend Charles Bartlett of the Chattanooga Times, Pincus signed up with a Massachusetts-based organization that was sending an anticommunist contingent to a huge communist-sponsored youth festival in Vienna. “It cost $150, and it was ten days in Vienna and then four days on your own,” he says. “So it seemed like a great deal.” Pincus and the rest of the delegation — whose ringleader was the twenty-five-year-old Gloria Steinem — passed out thousands of newspapers and pamphlets, most of them in a liberal-but-anti-Soviet vein. Pincus’s primary memories of Vienna, however, are of meeting people over beer in the evenings. “It was sort of a college weekend, but with Russians,” he says.
When he came home, Pincus learned — not too surprisingly, in retrospect — that Steinem’s outfit received most of its money from the CIA. Even after learning that fact, Pincus attended three more conferences on the group’s behalf — and, indeed, mulled and rejected an offer to join the agency.
The episode has never quite been forgotten. In early 1967, Ramparts published a long report about the CIA’s covert operations within student groups. The Ramparts article did not name Pincus, but he felt he should come clean about his earlier adventure. In a front-page article in the Post that February, Pincus wrote a detailed — although oddly dry and clinical — account of his involvement with the group. Thirty years later, Gary Webb would suggest that Pincus’s CIA ties explained why the Post had dismissed Webb’s sweeping San Jose Mercury News stories of drug-running by CIA affiliates in the 1980s. More recently, a few conservatives have insinuated that Pincus’s CIA associations explain why he publicized Joseph Wilson’s doubts about Iraq’s nuclear-weapons programs.
Pincus doesn’t deny that he has longstanding relationships with sources in the CIA. Most of those, he says, ultimately stem from his social network in Washington in the mid-1960s, not from the earlier encounters at youth conferences. But he says it’s absurd to suggest that he has been a stooge for the agency. He has been sharply critical of the CIA’s actions in Watergate, the Iran-contra scandal, and the run-up to the Iraq war. Even his 1975 critique in The New York Times of Philip Agee’s exposé, Inside the Company: CIA Diary — a critique that Webb cited as further evidence of Pincus’s complicity — argued that Agee was essentially correct about the extent of CIA political interference in Latin America and domestic surveillance at home. “There is a line that can be drawn between covert intelligence gathering and undeclared covert political warfare,” he wrote. “The former is acceptable where needed; the latter is not.”
Pincus’s review of the Agee book describes some disturbing CIA behavior, but it also exudes a certain cool confidence that “presidential and congressional review” can rein in the agency. Pincus’s entire career since 1960 — and especially his approach to the national-security beat — has reflected this duality. He works hard to unearth misdeeds, but his coverage also consistently implies that, somewhere in official Washington, there are wise old heads who can set things straight. Pincus’s articles rarely contain the undertone of alarm and rage that one finds in, say, Seymour Hersh’s.
That sensibility surely evolved in part from Pincus’s two stints during the 1960s as an investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. There, after all, he was digging in dark corners with the clear expectation that his research would lead to policy reform. Pincus’s connection with the Senate committee began in 1962, after its chairman, Senator J. William Fulbright, read a pair of articles that Pincus had co-authored in The Reporter, a liberal biweekly that had become one of his major venues after the CIA episode. In one piece, Pincus and Douglass Cater exposed foreign governments’ covert attempts to use U.S. media for public relations. The article detailed, among other things, the efforts of Rafael Trujillo, the U.S.-backed dictator of the Dominican Republic, to buy favorable news coverage on the Mutual radio network, and the Guatemalan regime’s covert purchase of friendly coverage in, of all places, The American Mercury.
After seeing Pincus’s work, Fulbright called and offered him a temporary assignment investigating the activities of unregistered foreign agents. In 1962, Pincus traveled to the Dominican Republic and gathered evidence that Trujillo (who had been assassinated the previous spring) had used various dicey means as he tried to influence the Kennedy administration’s sugar policies. Among other things, in early 1961 Trujillo had secretly paid the nationally syndicated gossip columnist Igor Cassini — whose fashion-designer brother, Oleg, made dresses for Jackie Kennedy — to push the White House to reinstate his country’s sugar quotas.
Pincus nailed that story in part with the help of an anti-Trujillo politician who brought documents to him each evening. Pincus would stay up all night photographing the documents with a special camera, and then his source would smuggle the documents back to his office the following morning. “I was down there with a microfilm camera,” he says. “This went on for five or six days. And then word came back that the U.S. ambassador had heard we were doing this . . . and so the embassy staff decided they had better get me out of there. They escorted me to the plane the next day.”
On the Fulbright committee, and in his subsequent work on nuclear weapons, Iran-contra, and the Iraq war, Pincus has primarily been a document man — metaphorically, the guy with the microfilm camera, not the guy in the parking garage in Arlington. “Sy and Woodward, to some degree, get enormous amounts of stuff over the transom,” he says. “But most of what I do starts with reading. I don’t have big secret meetings.”
During the run-up to the Iraq war, Pincus had new material in the paper almost daily, often working in conjunction with his colleague Karen DeYoung. Pincus spent hours squinting at documents, making his way through Iraq’s 1993 “final declaration” of its weapons programs and comparing its details to those in the 12,000-page accounting that Saddam Hussein released in December 2002. One great advantage that Pincus had during this period was his longstanding friendship with Hans Blix, then the United Nations’ chief weapons inspector, whom he had met at a youth conference in Ghana in 1960 on one of his CIA-related jaunts. Consequently, Pincus and DeYoung were able to offer a tremendous amount of detail about the tug-of-war between the UN weapons inspectors and the various arms of the Bush administration.
As 2003 began, Pincus’s coverage of the Bush administration’s weapons claims was not notably skeptical. Indeed, drawing partly on Blix, Pincus often recounted the long history of Iraq’s various weapons deceptions during the early 1990s. “There was no doubt in my mind,” Pincus says, “that there was something there. You couldn’t believe there was nothing.” By March, however, the UN inspectors had done enough new searching to suggest that, improbably, the Iraqi regime actually had done away with its weapons programs. “The information pouring in over the last few weeks before the war about there not being weapons was just enormous,” Pincus says. “But how do you prove a negative?”
On Sunday, March 16, three days before the war began, Pincus attempted to do just that, publishing a story that laid out the full case for doubt. In u.s. lacks specifics on banned arms, several unnamed intelligence officers and administration officials conceded that they lacked hard facts, and that much of the evidence they had compiled was circumstantial at best. It ran on page seventeen. (Leonard Downie Jr., the Post’s executive editor, would later express regret that the paper did not give more prominence to stories that were skeptical of the administration’s WMD claims.)
In future coverage, Pincus says, he will return to those crucial weeks in March 2003. He will most likely do so according to his longstanding personal rule of writing a sequence of short, 800-word articles, rather than saving his material for a gigantic Pulitzer-baiting opus. He learned that principle of incremental coverage in part, he says, from Andrew Lack, then of CBS News, in the early 1980s. “Andy came out of advertising,” he says, “and he got me thinking that what news stories on the nightly news were — if you think of them as ads — it’s the visuals, and the message, and it has to be repeated. That’s how things get through to people.”
Pincus says his reason for returning to the administration’s case about Iraq’s weapons is not to personalize the administration’s follies — “the point is not to prove yet again that Dick Cheney overstated the case” — but to help future administrations avoid similar errors. In a February 10 page-one story, Pincus revealed that Paul R. Pillar, a former high-level CIA officer who was responsible for the agency’s Iraq assessments during the prewar period, had accused the Bush administration of cherry-picking intelligence about Iraq’s weapons. The story ended by stressing Pillar’s wish that the CIA be restructured along the lines of the Federal Reserve, which would keep the agency in the executive branch but theoretically insulate it from political meddling. Where some people might look at the current political climate in D.C. of partisan attack and recrimination and see an abyss, Pincus sees an opportunity for reform.
Pincus has spent decades cultivating a reputation as someone who won’t burn sources, but that commitment has recently come under unprecedented strain. On June 12, 2003, Pincus wrote about a former ambassador who had gone on a fact-finding mission to Niger in early 2002. Expanding on earlier coverage by Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times, Pincus reported that the ambassador had found no evidence that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium there. Three weeks later, on July 6, the ambassador revealed his identity in an op-ed essay in The New York Times and in an interview with Pincus and Richard Leiby in the Post. For better or worse, the world had been introduced to Joseph Wilson.
Then, on July 12 — two days before the immortal column in which Robert Novak mentioned that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, worked for the CIA — Pincus was on the phone with a person he describes as an administration official (and not Lewis Libby). They were talking about a somewhat different topic, and then the official began to complain about the attention that Wilson’s arguments had been receiving. Didn’t Pincus know, the official said, that Wilson’s wife was at the CIA, and that she had cooked up the Niger trip? “It was, ‘Why are you writing about it? It’s a boondoggle. She arranged it,’” Pincus recalls.
This July 12 conversation, Pincus says, was the first time he ever heard of Valerie Plame’s CIA employment. (In previous accounts, he has not been entirely explicit about that point.) He says he has no recollection of Woodward’s mentioning Plame in the newsroom the previous month. He also says that while he was reporting the lengthy June articles on prewar intelligence, he discussed Wilson’s Niger report with members of several federal agencies. Some of those sources criticized the report on various grounds, Pincus says, but “not one person mentioned Wilson’s wife.”
Pincus never wrote about Valerie Plame — in part, he says, because he already knew a fair amount about the origins of Wilson’s trip from various sources, including some in the CIA. He did not think it was true that Plame had arranged the trip; and even if that were so, he thought, it had little bearing on the merits or lack thereof of Wilson’s report. After Novak’s column ran, he says, “I talked to the agency people, and they said it wasn’t true.”
Pincus says that he did not tell anyone — including Post colleagues — about the July 12 conversation for three months, even after Novak’s column generated a firestorm and people began to wonder how extensive the administration’s whispering campaign had been. Only when it became clear that the federal investigation of the leak was a serious one, Pincus says, did he feel a need to come forward. On October 12, Pincus and Mike Allen wrote a story about the investigation (the tone of which reflected a certain skepticism that criminal laws had actually been violated). The article mentioned that “a Post reporter” had been told of Plame’s employment on July 12, but did not name Pincus himself as the reporter in question.
In mid-2004, Patrick Fitzgerald’s office issued subpoenas to Pincus and the Post, demanding details of the 2003 conversations. Pincus initially refused to cooperate, but Fitzgerald soon made clear that Pincus’s source was cooperating with the investigation, and that the source was willing for Pincus to speak to the prosecutors. “I have very strong feelings about protecting sources,” Pincus explains, “and particularly about protecting the identity of your sources. But once it’s clear that your source has come forward to the prosecutor, I don’t think you have a leg to stand on.” In an oft-repeated formulation, Pincus says, “It’s the source’s privilege, not the reporter’s.” Once his source had made it clear, through their attorneys, that it was okay for Pincus to talk, and after agreeing on some ground rules — including that the source’s name would not be disclosed publicly and that Fitzgerald would not explicitly ask Pincus to confirm the source’s identity — Pincus sat down to speak with Fitzgerald.
Pincus believes that the Bush administration acted obnoxiously when it leaked Valerie Plame’s identity, but he has never been convinced by the argument that the leaks violated the law. “I don’t think it was a crime,” he says. “I think it got turned into a crime by the press, by Joe” — Wilson — “by the Democrats. The New York Times kept running editorials saying that it’s got to be investigated — never thinking that it was going to turn around and bite them.” The entire Plame investigation, he says, has been a distraction from a more fundamental conversation about how the White House handled evidence before the war.
On January 26 of this year, Libby’s lawyers filed a motion asking for permission to subpoena the notes of reporters who crossed paths with Wilson. In the almost inevitable court battle over those notes, it seems clear that Libby’s lawyers will use Judge Collyer’s November ruling in the Wen Ho Lee matter as a road map for their arguments. There is even some personnel overlap, as one of Lee’s former criminal-defense attorneys, John Cline, is now representing Libby. In 2004, Cline joined the firm of Jones Day, which also happens to be the home of Brian Sun, the lead attorney in Lee’s civil suit.
Despite the chill being generated by the Plame and Lee cases — combined with the federal investigation of the leaks that led to the stories of James Risen and Eric Lichtblau in The New York Times on the National Security Agency — Pincus says he is not terribly alarmed that sources will dry up. “You never know who’s dissuaded during these periods when the government is more active in trying to stop leaks,” he says. “But in the national security field, people who get concerned find a way” to get the information out.
Pincus remains confident that his younger colleagues will manage to cultivate similar networks of high-level sources, even if the culture of Washington no longer encourages the clubby relationships that existed back when Robert Kennedy would gossip with reporters at the Occidental restaurant. But while he is not anxious about sources drying up, Pincus is generally unhappy with what he describes as the print media’s protracted retreat from serious news and analysis. “I think newspapers went wrong when they decided that in order to compete with television, they had to be more fuzzy and human-interest,” he says. “In the serious news area, you’ve got to tell people why what they saw or heard actually happened, or what it really means.”
Back in 1971, when he was hatching plans for the ill-fated Morning News, his idea was that his reporters would write two paragraphs at the end of each article in which they would explain, in italics, “what was really going on. It was based on the theory that the people who were writing were experts in what they were writing about. Even back then, I thought that news was being produced, managed, staged.”
It’s that kind of patient writing-in-italics — explaining how Washington’s systems function and malfunction, not going after people by name — that will probably mark Pincus’s legacy. That is the reason why sources, including the now-unnamed people who talked to Pincus about Plame and Lee, came to him. “If I worked in national security,” says his Post colleague Karen DeYoung, “I can’t imagine anything worse than having to talk to some reporter who doesn’t know what he’s talking about, or to be scared that this person is somehow going to burn you. To me, the reason people talk to Walter is that they know that he’s careful. They know that he knows what he’s talking about.”
David Glenn is a senior reporter at The Chronicle of Higher Education.
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