A Missing Spy and the Right to Know

NEW YORK TIMES readers expect, reasonably enough, that their newspaper will publish what it digs up in the way of news, especially news about the clandestine activities of the federal government.

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So, for those who are paying close attention, it disturbs and upsets them when they learn that that hasn’t always been the case. The most recent example came when The Associated Press published a story about Robert Levinson, a former F.B.I. agent missing since 2007. After years of withholding the information, The A.P. revealed that he had been working for the C.I.A., sent to Iran as a spy on a mission that went wrong.

Soon after The A.P. published its story, so did The Washington Post. And the next day, so did The Times. It turns out that The Times has known about the situation since 2007.

The flurry of attention, not only to the news about Mr. Levinson but also to the decisions to hold a story, caused some Times readers to wonder why this happened — and what else readers might not know.

One who wrote was Albrecht Funk, an adjunct history professor at Carnegie Mellon University. “I would like to know,” he wrote to me, “if you can tell the readers how many stories The New York Times currently holds back because the government claims that the ‘national security’ of the U.S.A. is at stake.”

I posed that question, and others, to the executive editor, Jill Abramson.

“At this point, I’m quite certain the answer is none,” Ms. Abramson said.

Holding a story entirely is “a very rare thing,” she said. “The more usual situation is to withhold a level of detail, and those decisions are excruciating.”

In this case, Ms. Abramson said, the reason for holding back the story was not because of a government request about national security, but in deference to Mr. Levinson’s family. “What caused us to hold the story was their profound worry that he would be killed.”

In these rare cases, Ms. Abramson said, editors must apply “a balancing test,” weighing newsworthiness and the public’s right to know against a potential danger to an individual or harm to national security.

What qualifies her, or other editors, to make such decisions, I asked.

“The qualifications come from the First Amendment — that the founders believed that a free press was a crucial bulwark against” centralized government power, she said. This means that journalists are, in effect, given both the freedom and the responsibility to make difficult judgments. Ms. Abramson doesn’t consider herself an unflawed practitioner.

“I don’t think I have the editorial equivalent of perfect pitch,” she told me.

When a news organization knows something it won’t tell, things can get messy. As the website Gawker has pointed out, The Times has repeatedly and without attribution falsely described Mr. Levinson as being on a business trip to Iran when he was captured. Two of those mentions were glancing ones in editorials; one was in a news story. In other cases, The Times attributed the “business trip” reference to family members or to the government.

Ms. Abramson called the unattributed statements that appeared in The Times “regrettable.” She also said that she was struck by — and essentially agreed with — something that The A.P.’s executive editor, Kathleen Carroll, said about deciding to publish: that even when a story is withheld for good reasons, the time to publish may arrive. (One of the two reporters who wrote A.P.’s Levinson story, Adam Goldman, recently was hired by The Washington Post, and the Post’s story carried his byline. Martin Baron, the Post’s executive editor, in commenting on his paper’s Levinson article, said that such a story “shouldn’t be held forever.” He added, “Enough time has passed.”)

One can argue that the point of no return should have come much earlier. In 2008, after an internal investigation, several C.I.A. officials were pushed out and others disciplined for mishandling the Levinson case. At that point, the situation spilled over into official wrongdoing. That could have tipped the balance, but this significant intelligence scandal didn’t make its way into media reports.

“That was a chokepoint,” Ms. Abramson said. “I wish we had focused more discussion on it then.”

I also spoke to Barry Meier, the Times reporter who first learned of the Levinson story in 2007. He has never wavered in his belief that the decision to publish belonged primarily in the hands of the family, whose members, understandably, continued to fear that making public Mr. Levinson’s C.I.A. ties could result in his death.

“It’s very, very simple,” he said. “My access to the story depended on a relationship of trust with the Levinson family, the understanding that I would not do anything to jeopardize his safety.”

And although the story was prepared for publication several times over the years, “I felt we could only run it if he died, if he came back or if the family said it’s time.” Mr. Meier questions whether the right time had come, especially given new conversations between the United States and Iran under President Hassan Rouhani, elected in June; that diplomatic initiative, he thinks, should have been given a chance.

Did The Times handle this situation well? Withholding an important story for six years, especially one involving a C.I.A. scandal, goes against every journalistic principle. But with a man’s life in the balance and with a reporter’s implicit promise to that man’s family, the equation changes.

In that situation, there is no good answer.

Mr. Meier agrees that holding a story for six years “defies normal journalistic conventions,” but he still believes The Times did the right thing. “I can’t conceive of our doing it any other way.”