FOR MORE THAN SIX MONTHS Casey had been dealing with another counterintelligence nightmare.
Before going back to the Soviets, KGB defector Yurchenko had helped uncover not only Howard but another spy, this one at the National Security Agency. Yurchenko had told his CIA handlers about an incident when he had served as chief KGB security officer at the Soviet Embassy in Washington from 1975 to 1980. There had been an important espionage catch for the Soviets from the NSA—a walk-in, someone who had just phoned the Soviet Embassy. Yurchenko did not know who it was, but recalled that he had spoken with the person by phone. The CIA passed this to the FBI, which dug back to old tape recordings made from the tapped phone lines into the Soviet Embassy. In a six-year-old tape, they heard an unidentified caller: “I have some information to discuss with you and to give to you….” With this, and Yurchenko’s tip that the caller had been from the NSA, the FBI zeroed in on the elite Soviet group of about 1,000 NSA employees. The tape was played for some of them. They recognized a former colleague, Ronald W. Pelton, who had worked for the NSA from 1965 to 1979, when he had resigned his $24,500-a-year post in the heart of the Soviet group. Voice analysis showed it was Pelton.
Although he had been a low-level staff man, Pelton had been positioned to have the broadest possible access to the sensitive compartmented and code-word information concerning the sixty Soviet coded signals or communications links targeted by NSA. He had done budgeting, equipment procurement, program-planning, problem-solving. Pelton, then thirty-eight, had been assertive, a good negotiator, a man with an exceptional memory. In other words, the Soviets had had a walk-in oracle. If they themselves had selected from among the thousands of NSA employees, they could not have done better. Pelton was one of those key low-level people in any bureaucracy who has both technical understanding and a broad overview.
The FBI had located Pelton working as a sailboat salesman in Annapolis, Maryland, in November 1985. Two agents interviewed him at the Annapolis Hilton Hotel, and Pelton acknowledged some of the spying. He had declared personal bankruptcy in 1979 while still at the NSA, but apparently no one there had known of it. After a series of business failures, he had gone to the Soviets in 1980 and later traveled to Vienna for a meeting with the KGB, once even staying in the Soviet ambassador’s residence for days. He had been paid $35,000 for information about tens of millions of dollars of espionage technology.
Pelton had been arrested immediately after he met with the two FBI agents, and had been charged with espionage. In court papers, the FBI said that Pelton had provided Soviet agents with information about “a United States intelligence-collection project targeted at the Soviet Union.” This generated speculation in the press that one of the NSA’s important operations might have been sold out.
At a bail hearing, Pelton’s court-appointed attorney mentioned the code name “Ivy Bells.” The magistrate cut off questioning and prohibited further exploration of the subject.
Though Ivy Bells dated back to the late 1970s when Turner had been DCI, it had been compromised in 1981. Only now, with Pelton exposed, had the NSA and Casey been able to put the pieces together. Deep in the Sea of Okhotsk to the east of the Soviet coast, on the seabed, a U.S. Navy and NSA team, operating from a submarine, had installed one of the most advanced, sophisticated miniaturized waterproof eavesdropping devices in existence—a large tap pod that fit over a Soviet underwater communications cable which connected key Soviet military and other communications lines. The pod had a wraparound attachment that “tapped” into the cable electronically without direct physical contact with the individual wires in the cable. If the cable had to be raised by the Soviets for inspection or maintenance, there would be no physical evidence of a tap on it; the pod would easily break away from the cable and remain on the ocean floor, undetected. Tapes in the pod recorded messages and signals on various channels or communications links for four to six weeks, and the pod had been installed for only two recording sessions a year.
One of the most hazardous aspects of the Ivy Bells system was retrieving the tapes with the stored communications. A specially equipped U.S. submarine had to return to the Sea of Okhotsk. Navy frogmen, using a minisub or even an underwater robot, had to locate the pod and change the tapes. The tapes were sent to the NSA for transcription and possible decoding. Though the messages that were gathered were months old, the operation had provided important data.
Of particular interest were communications that involved Soviet ballistic-missile tests. Missiles from many such tests landed around the Kamchatka Peninsula near the Sea of Okhotsk, and Soviet communications about these missiles and tests were sent through the cable.
The Soviets thought their undersea communications cables or underground landlines were virtually impregnable to interception by the United States. Accordingly, less than the most advanced and highest-grade coding systems were used on some of the channels on the Sea of Okhotsk cable. On some channels the information was not even coded. The best Soviet coding systems were reserved for the most vulnerable communications links through the airwaves, whether standard radio, microwave or satellite.
The Sea of Okhotsk operation had worked until 1981. Then a U.S. satellite photo showed some dozen Soviet naval vessels assembled over the exact spot where the intercept pod was attached to the cable beneath the sea. One Soviet vessel used in deep-sea salvage had been tracked around the world to participate in the operation. Later when a U.S. submarine went in to collect and change the tapes, the pod was missing. NSA authorities surmised that the pod was in Soviet hands, and that the operation was compromised. The Navy studied all the intelligence, and a report was written which was so classified that only a handful of people were granted access. It ruled out coincidence or luck; clearly the Soviets knew what they were doing and had gone precisely to the location of the tap pod. There had to be a leak, almost certainly espionage. The Soviets had a human source the report concluded. But no one knew who or how.
The 1981 loss of the pod had been a mystery until Yurchenko provided the clues that had led to Pelton four years later.
Casey hoped that Pelton could be tried without revealing anything about Ivy Bells or other secret projects or their screw-up.
The major shortcoming of Ivy Bells had been the months that elapsed between the transmission of the Soviet messages and the time when they were retrieved by submarine. The head of Naval Intelligence, Admiral John L. Butts, and the head of Casey’s intelligence community staff, Vice-Admiral Edward A. Burkhalter, had become advocates for a bold solution to the problem of timeliness after the Ivy Bells operation had been compromised.
An undersea cable could be secretly run from Greenland into several tap pods that would be installed on key undersea cables on the north coast of the Soviet Union. The communications would then be available for instant use by the NSA. The distance from Greenland under the Arctic ice cap to the Soviet north coast was about 1,200 miles. The cable would have to be buried in the ocean floor at a cost of about $1 million a mile. Total cost, well over $1 billion—expensive but perhaps worth it, the two admirals had argued. The atmosphere in the congressional intelligence committees was just right. With all the skepticism and sniping about covert action, the legislators needed something that would demonstrate that they were serious about intelligence operations. Another proposal called for spending $1 billion to wire the world, using the same technology—to tap cables around the globe.
I had learned about the Ivy Bells undersea cable-tapping operation earlier in 1985, but we were not absolutely sure it had been compromised, so Bradlee had decided to hold off on a story. Right after Pelton’s arrest, we were able to confirm that one of the major intelligence-gathering projects he had sold out had been Ivy Bells. Since the Soviets had captured the tap pod and clearly could identify it as an eavesdropping device, Bradlee felt it would be legitimate to explain the details to demonstrate what damage could be done by one of thousands of clerks, technicians, translators and information processors who operated the latest spy technologies.
On December 5, Bradlee and Leonard Downie, Jr., the Post managing editor, went to see the Director of the NSA, Lieutenant General William Odom. Ten years earlier, as a lieutenant colonel, he had been brought into Carter’s National Security Council, and that had been the launching pad for his career. An intense, thin, stony man, Odom was a superhawk on the Soviets and a true believer in technical collection. Any story on Ivy Bells, he said, would tell the Russians something they did not know, but during thirty minutes of discussion he declined to say what. He conveyed a sense of alarm and suggested that great national-security issues were at stake.
Afterward, Downie said he thought Odom would try to learn our sources on Ivy Bells, and Bradlee said we should assume that our phones might be tapped.
Pat Tyler and I started some interviewing, none on the phone. Intelligence officials did not want Pelton’s upcoming trial to take place in the glare of publicity. One official remarked that the NSA strategy toward the press was often to delay and buy more time. No penetration or operation lasted forever; they lived day to day and were often thankful for an additional week. Despite Pelton’s sellout to the Soviets, this official said, it was possible the Soviets had missed something. U.S. intelligence officials had been amazed at what previous spies had failed to reveal to the Soviets or what the Soviets had failed to comprehend.
In addition to Ivy Bells, it turned out, Pelton had probably compromised another seven code-word operations, among them one that was run out of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and another a joint U.S.-British operation. Another involved a new and effective clandestine way to intercept Soviet microwave transmissions, and still another involved equipment that relayed intercepted communications back to computers for instant analysis. Officials were concerned that a story on Ivy Bells would launch a competitive feeding frenzy in the news media for more information. A string of stories could follow, revealing a detail here and another there. There were delicate questions. What had Pelton remembered? Had he held back? What precisely had he told the Soviets? How had it been interpreted? Was it believed? Compromise didn’t always mean that a capability, a technique or a source was forever lost. News stories on Pelton could open the floodgates, rendering NSA fair game for reporters, no longer off limits as a house of dark arts.
Old newspaper clippings yielded some surprises. More than ten years earlier, on the front page of The New York Times, Seymour M. Hersh had reported controversial U.S. submarine operations close to the Soviet coast: “One source said that the submarines were able to plug into Soviet land communication cables strewn across the ocean bottom and thus were able to intercept high-level military messages and other communications considered too important to be sent by radio or other less secure means.”
The 1976 Pike Committee report on U.S. intelligence activities said: “[A] highly technical U.S. Navy submarine reconnaissance program, often operating within unfriendly water, has experienced at least 9 collisions with hostile vessels in the last ten years, over 110 possible detections, and at least three press exposures.” The committee said that the Navy’s own assessment of the program as “a ‘low risk’ venture” was inaccurate, and that Navy risk analysis was “ritualistic and pro forma.”
Tyler and I showed Bradlee the research. General Odom had implied to him that the cable-tapping capability of U.S. submarines or equipment was an absolute state secret; any mention in print could be disastrous. Bradlee called Odom.
“I hoped you wouldn’t find that,” the NSA Director said.
Bradlee said his reporters would be back on the case. He felt manipulated and was particularly upset by a recycling of the old New York Times cable-tapping reference in an article in a Harvard publication that had just come off the press.* If it could be printed there, why not in the Post?
On January 27, Bradlee, national editor Robert G. Kaiser and I went to the intelligence community headquarters to meet with Odom and two of his aides. We had a draft of a story on Ivy Bells that we planned to publish, and we hoped they would point out anything they felt might damage national security. The NSA officials huddled over the story draft, reading the eight pages as we waited. Odom was circumspect; his aides murmured. Bradlee inquired why, since the Soviets knew all about this, shouldn’t we publish? They had learned about it from Pelton, had scooped the Ivy Bells tap pod off the ocean floor, had it to take apart and examine. Now, with Pelton going to trial, why couldn’t this be told to the public?
Odom said they would take the copy, study it, weigh their options, sleep on it, and get back to Bradlee.
The next day, January 28—hours after the space shuttle Challenger blew up—Odom called Bradlee. Odom, the NSA and the U.S. government did not want to see the article published, he said. He was not going to help edit it or broker a “clean” version even if that were possible. Publication would generate attention, all destructive and unwanted, he said. Even if the Soviets knew, they did not know precisely what the United States knew about what they knew. That was something he was going to protect. So the entire subject was in limbo, and he wanted it kept there.
On February 7, Bradlee, Downie, Kaiser and I had lunch with one of the elders of the CIA, a former senior official long gone but keenly aware of the tensions between national security and the news media. Bradlee outlined what we knew about the Ivy Bells cable-tapping, the Pelton sellout and the upcoming trial. Why the resistance? he asked.
“A mother protecting her chick is nothing,” the former CIA man said, “compared to an intelligence officer protecting an operation.”
But the Soviets know, Bradlee said.
Ah, he asked, but precisely who? Which Soviets? There was no telling. The discovery of the “tap” may have been a sufficient triumph for the leaders to have been told. But the line had been tapped for some time. That might have been embarrassing to those in charge of the military or KGB. There might have been an internal Soviet cover-up.
“Well, you never know, never know for sure,” he said. That was the dilemma. We were looking at it from the wrong angle. Look at it from the Soviet view: a quiet compromise some four or five years ago in some sea, a very quiet trial in the United States with no details released; end of the matter. But look at the alternative if you publish: a general alarm would go off in the Soviet military or the KGB requiring a full investigative response—the motherland had been the victim of espionage, specific place and time. This could be seen as a blow to Soviet nationhood. A search would begin for more espionage, spasmodic perhaps and clumsy no doubt, but the Soviets would go up on their toes. Precisely where the United States government did not want them. This might lead to the compromise of other U.S. operations, totally unrelated. He said that he didn’t know about this cable-tapping operation; what he was saying was hypothetical. The goal of the intelligence officer is to put the other side to sleep, make them feel confident, secure, inattentive. So of course U.S. intelligence didn’t want any story. It would alert the other side.
He lectured gently. A story in the Post could put the issue on the desk of the new Soviet leader, Gorbachev, in power now for only eleven months. Publication, he said, “would send the issue of U.S. espionage right up his rosy red rectum. He’d be on fire. They [the KGB] probably did not tell him—they conceal fuck-ups in the Soviet system just like ours, and that tap on their cable, even if they later did find it, was also a fuck-up, because it never should have been there in the first place.”
We later referred to this as the “Gorbachev impact statement”—the notion that before publishing a story we should assess what Gorbachev knew and when he knew it. In practical terms, there was no way to do this. We were very confident, certain that the information was already in the hands of some Soviets, maybe Gorbachev, maybe not. But the luncheon was sobering and served the purpose of reminding us that this story was not simple. It could have unintended consequences.
Now we found ourselves in the business of shopping the story around town to see whether we could get someone with impeccable authority to tell us it would be all right to publish. With both official and unofficial warnings in hand, Bradlee said he wanted to slow down to see clearly what might be coming. No one had yet told us what in the story might do damage. It was clear that the intelligence establishment didn’t want the news media mucking around in this area, perhaps for good reason as yet unspecified, perhaps because they didn’t want further examination or discussion of their intelligence-gathering operations or of their Pelton fiasco. We saw only yellow cautionary lights, not yet a red one.
I took the latest draft of the story to the White House, gave it to a well-placed official, and asked that he get some sort of answer for us; if there was still objection, we hoped we could learn what it was. Four minor details in the earlier draft shown to General Odom had already been removed because further reporting by us suggested it was conceivable that the Soviets might not know them. The draft said that Pelton “compromised a long-running U.S. Navy eavesdropping operation that tapped into an undersea Soviet communications cable.” It said that the compromise had taken place in 1981, and that the Ivy Bells operation had been on a cable in the Sea of Okhotsk. The White House man promised to make an effort.
On February 20, 1986, President Reagan flew to Grenada to celebrate the 1983 victory. On Air Force One, our draft story about Ivy Bells was raised by the White House official with Shultz, Weinberger, Poindexter and Don Regan. Their conclusion was unanimous: the latest version was most unacceptable. They concluded also, with some glee, that they had the Post on the ropes. The unusual act of presenting multiple drafts of the story to the NSA and the White House had revealed our hesitation and uncertainty. The officials determined that the story could harm the national security, not so much by revealing a secret as by harming the political relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union. The story, if taken by the Soviets as authoritative, could allow the Soviets to glean what General Odom feared—the Soviets would learn what the U.S. knew about what the Soviets knew. In addition, in NSA operations there were a series of interlocking secrets; it was difficult to rip out a single operation and discuss it in public without potential damage. But the chief concern was about the dynamics of U.S.-Soviet relations. The story might harm those relations, and this rightfully belonged in the category of national security if anything did.
The White House official reported back to us. “It’s as high a review as I can get you at my salary level,” he said. Bradlee should talk to Admiral Poindexter.
Downie was not convinced that we would not be telling the Russians something new, and we had to be certain we weren’t.
Bradlee said that there have been half a dozen drafts of the story, each succeeding one with fewer details. The first drafts could have caused trouble, he said. “We shouldn’t publish what others are prosecuted for treason for.” Remind me again, he asked, what social purpose is there in this story?
Pelton was one of the biggest spies the Russians ever had. He had given away crown-jewel intelligence-gathering operations, not just Ivy Bells. His job in the NSA placed him at the crossroads of information on all communications intelligence operations aimed at the Soviets. Pelton had been debriefed by the Soviets in Vienna for days on several trips over a period of several years. We were trying to find out, and tell our readers, what he had sold. The story would also show how easy it was to walk into the Soviet Embassy here and sell American secrets.
The editors remained uncertain. Bradlee said he would call Poindexter.*
In mid-March, a senior FBI official told us that the Justice Department had almost lost the battle to prosecute Pelton, because of fears that a trial would expose secrets.
Why should we not print what the Soviets already know?
It has to do with the atmospherics of intelligence operations, the official said. Any reporting on the nuts and bolts of how information is obtained raises consciousness all around the world. The best intelligence coups often occur because someone on the other side makes a mistake, overlooks something, fails to check. The biggest leaks may be staring them in the face. To push their nose into the issues of intelligence might uncork counterintelligence forces we want bottled up. “I’ll talk to the Attorney General if you like,” he said.
No need, though Meese was the only senior official who had not been consulted.
On Friday, March 21, I saw Casey at a large reception given by the New York Times publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger. The party was almost over, and the crowd at the downtown International Club of Washington was thinning. Casey was talking with a reporter from the Times. Hunched over, he was stirring a drink with his finger. I walked over and asked whether I could shake his hand.
“I’ve just talked to you,” he said, throwing his arm around me and pulling me close. “This is a great party you’re giving.”
A number of people in the room seemed as astonished as I was. Casey continued to refer to “your people here.”
Embarrassed—clearly he thought I was Punch Sulzberger—I said that I was from The Washington Post.
For a split second he seemed to think, That’s a fine joke, and he laughed. But then he reeled back and began looking around for and found Sulzberger. Apparently to let me know that he realized his mistake, Casey asked about my book on him and the CIA. He had known for more than a year that I was working on it, we had talked many times. He asked whether it could be given a security review to make sure I didn’t disclose something that should stay under wraps. I said that I’d listen to any ideas about how that might be done but that I doubted it would work.
“You go ahead and criticize me if you want,” he said. “It’s your book.”
Soon we were in a corner alone, and I asked why General Odom and others were giving us such a fit on the Pelton story and the Ivy Bells operation Pelton had sold to the Soviets.
“If you run that,” he said, holding his drink glass in both hands, “go with that, public opinion will build, could build, so we can’t do it. I’m letting Bill Odom handle it. He knows more about it.”
Public opinion?
Casey didn’t answer, leaving it unclear whether “it” was cable-tapping or submarine operations close to the Soviet coast. Or perhaps he meant both.
After the weekend, I told Bradlee about Casey’s assertion that the issue was “public opinion.” Bradlee made it clear that, for the moment, he was unhappy we were still pursuing the story. I wrote him a memo that evening saying that I thought it was a serious mistake to stop the inquiry, that somehow we had to untangle this.
Bradlee took me to lunch. A number of times over the last several years he had said about the CIA, “It’s really out of control, isn’t it?” I didn’t know, I said. Many intelligence people and others who use it are uneasy, I said, especially about Casey. They pose the possibility that the United States is pressing too much, not just through covert action but through covert intelligence-gathering. Some said the result was a declaration of a kind of intelligence war against the Soviets. The total of all this “passive” intelligence-gathering—a bug here, satellites there, eavesdropping all around, a submarine in some sea—could add up to more than the sum of its parts. The U.S. is way ahead of the Soviets in technology; the Soviets are scared of American technology. Add all this to the covert actions, and the total picture could be an intelligence war.
What is the social purpose of reporting this? Bradlee wanted to know. We can’t just publish any fact, any secret, Bradlee said.
I agreed. At some earlier point in the submarine operations conducted against the Soviets, the U.S. had plans to send a U.S. nuclear submarine not only into their territorial waters, but up one of their rivers.
Jesus, Bradlee said.
We had contradictory information on whether it had happened. Maybe it never happened, I said. Maybe it did. Imagine one of our submarines being caught up a Soviet river or in a Soviet harbor. It could make the 1968 Pueblo incident seem insignificant. The U.S. spy ship Pueblo had been thirteen miles off the coast of North Korea when it was seized.
Odom’s argument, I said, amounted to “Trust me.” Or, perhaps, “How dare you.” They were getting close to making the argument “Which side are you on?”
Was it under control? Bradlee asked again.
The NSA apparently was getting into non-Soviet undersea cables worldwide because the United States was involved in most of the large cable networks—Atlantic and Pacific. Again maybe it made sense, maybe not. In another, more public example, serious people were concerned that the U.S. allowed the Soviets to sweep up or vacuum up telephone conversations from microwave towers all over Washington. It was a massive invasion of the privacy of U.S. citizens. As well as I could piece it together there was a tacit understanding that, in return, the U.S. could operate electronic intelligence-gathering from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.
Bradlee wasn’t buying. Neither of us was qualified to really say, say for sure, absolutely, that we weren’t going to cross legitimate national security.
We agreed that Bradlee should talk directly with one of the sources of information on the story, a former senior intelligence official who knew as much about this as anyone currently in government. This was someone who could say confidently that the Ivy Bells story would not tell the Russians anything they did not know.
Most of April was consumed with the Libya bombing, and Bradlee did not get around to meeting with the former intelligence official on Ivy Bells until late in the month. The official convinced him that the story as now drafted would not tell the Soviets anything they did not already know. On Friday afternoon, April 25, about 3 P.M., Bradlee instructed me to call the White House and inform them that the story would be running in two days.
“We must object,” said the White House national-security spokesman, arguing once more that the story “in totality” would tell the Soviets things they didn’t know. And Bradlee owes General Odom a call before publication, the spokesman said. “Odom feels he has a commitment and it hasn’t happened.”
The next morning Odom called Bradlee, who had gone to Long Island for the weekend, to say he was unalterably opposed to publication.
“I have talked to people equal to you in rank and loyalty to the United States,” Bradlee said. “And they don’t see one thing in the story that the Soviets don’t know.”
Odom conceded that the story would not tell the Soviets anything new. He was really worried about other countries that didn’t know about the capability.
Bradlee said it seemed rather late in the game to abandon the Soviet argument and raise a new one.
Odom urged Bradlee to hold off his decision until they could talk.
Bradlee felt he had no choice, he didn’t want to go through the red light at long distance.
Meanwhile, some others in the various U.S. intelligence organizations tried to persuade Odom to tell Bradlee exactly what bothered him. Odom refused. He wasn’t going to start peeling the onion; it was dealing with the devil.
On May 1, Bradlee and Odom had breakfast. Odom, calmer, insisted it was these other countries, but he wouldn’t give an example. Bradlee pleaded. If there was some concrete reason, he needed to know.
Odom said he felt harassed, too much sensitive intelligence material was coming out. He and others were looking into the possibility of using a 1950 law that provides criminal penalties for anyone who “publishes” anything classified about communication intelligence.
Bradlee said he was going to publish.
Does that lance the boil? Odom asked. Would that be the final story on Ivy Bells?
Bradlee said he couldn’t be sure, but added that he was not going to devote his life to this, and the Post would not dribble out a detail here and another there. Bradlee left with the impression that Odom had folded his hand right there at the breakfast table.
Later in the day Bradlee said there was no stopping now. “I’ve crossed the bridge.” We took the draft and fine-tuned it again to run the coming Sunday.
If the argument that we should worry about its potential impact on Gorbachev had merit, it seemed like a good time, because the Soviet leader had more important things on his mind. The nuclear accident at Chernobyl had just occurred.
The next day, Friday, May 2, Casey visited D. Lowell Jensen, the head of the Justice Department Criminal Division, and proposed that the department consider bringing criminal charges under the 1950 law. He had a list of five news organizations that had published information from communications intercepts recently: the Post, The New York Times, The Washington Times, Time and Newsweek. The story he cited the Post for was one I had written on the intercepted Libyan cables showing Qaddafi’s responsibility for the West Berlin disco-bombing.
Jensen was cool to the idea of prosecuting reporters. He wanted to avoid a First Amendment confrontation.
“You have to play tough with these bastards,” Casey said. He wanted Jensen to consider going to court to get an order to stop the Post from publishing the Ivy Bells story. Jensen didn’t think that would work, either. The government had lost the prior-restraint argument in the Supreme Court with the Pentagon Papers case.
Later that afternoon, Casey phoned Bradlee from his car. Let’s talk, he said, and proposed the bar at the University Club, right behind the Post and next to the Soviet Embassy.
Bradlee and Downie went over at 4 P.M. and handed Casey a copy of the story draft. He read slowly. Finally he looked up and tossed it to the side.
“There’s no way you run that story without endangering the national security,” Casey said. He sipped a scotch and water. “I’m not threatening you, but you’ve got to know that if you publish this, I would recommend that you be prosecuted.” This, of course, was not the only problem for the Post. “We’ve already got five absolutely cold violations.”
He explained that he was referring to the Post and the four other publications. He added matter-of-factly that he had just come from the Justice Department, where all five cases were pending upon his recommendation. He implied that the train had already left the station.
Bradlee asked if it was the 1950 law.
“Yeah, yeah,” Casey said. “I don’t practice law anymore. You know what I’m talking about.”
Bradlee and Downie attempted to get some specifics. What was the problem? First it was the Soviets, then other countries, and now what?
“Look,” Casey said, “hold the story for a week.” He was going to call the President, who was in Japan for an economic summit meeting. The President would talk to Bradlee.
“That important?” Bradlee asked.
Yes, Casey said, pulling out the final argument: lives could conceivably be in danger if that is published. He did not elaborate. On the way out, Casey said to Downie, “How you and Ollie getting along?” Downie had okayed a public identification of North by name as the active NSC officer who was aiding the contras, and North had objected in a letter to Downie. Casey knew all about it.
With this sudden escalation, Bradlee and Downie agreed not to publish on Sunday. Back at the office, the two editors huddled with lawyers. No one had ever really focused on the 1950 law, but it clearly specified that anyone who “publishes” communication intelligence information was subject to prosecution. The lawyers felt the law was of dubious constitutionality, but no one was certain. They urged caution.
Tyler and I were convinced that the story could not possibly cause damage. It had been laundered down to a mere rag. Quite likely Casey was bluffing. He wanted to stop the news media from writing about these matters. “The story creates an atmosphere ripe for deduction,” Tyler summarized, “and that’s what they want to avoid.”
Bradlee decided to get the issues out into the open. On Tuesday, May 6, he gave his notes of the Casey meeting to Post reporter George Lardner. If the dog that didn’t bark could tell you something, so could the story that didn’t run.
At 5:45, Bradlee received a phone call from Casey. The DCI said he had just had a call from Henry Grunwald, the editor in chief of Time, about a report that Time was about to be prosecuted. Did Bradlee know about it?
Sure did, Bradlee replied. He had assigned a reporter to write the story for the next day’s paper.
“I thought we were having a private conversation?”
You requested the meeting, Bradlee said, and no ground rules were set. Casey had made a statement of vital importance to the Post and, Bradlee presumed, to the other publications. The Post had to report that. It was news.
That ended the conversation, but a few minutes later Casey called back to ask what the next step was going to be. Am I going to be reading about that?
Yes, Bradlee said.
“I thought we were going to have more talks?” Casey said.
What more is there to say? Bradlee asked.
“When am I going to read about it?” Casey asked.
Tomorrow morning, Bradlee said.
“My name in there?”
Sure is.
Casey said that no reporter had called him.
A reporter called your people, starting early this morning, Bradlee said.
“First I’ve heard of it,” Casey said. “That ever happen to you?”
Not when you call, Bradlee said. Do you want to talk to our guy?
No.
The front-page story, “U.S. Weighs Prosecuting Press Leaks,” ran the next day, named the five news organizations on Casey’s list, and said that under threat of another prosecution the Post was holding back on “another story it has prepared concerning U.S. intelligence capabilities.”
The day after, Casey had breakfast with the Post’s lawyer, Edward Bennett Williams. Later Williams laid it out to us. The government could prosecute, but Williams said he doubted they would. “I have lots of experience with their cowardice.” But now the Post and Casey were in two corners, fully painted in. Williams said to wait.
On Friday, The New York Times ran a story stating: “The CIA, according to officials, has argued within the Administration that publication of a story by The Washington Post would be damaging because it would authenticate and explain what the Soviet Union has already obtained from Mr. Pelton. They argued that the Soviet authorities at this point were not entirely certain of what they had learned from Mr. Pelton…”
To us that seemed to give the KGB all they would need to review everything Pelton had told them in his marathon debriefing sessions in Vienna.
The next day, Saturday, May 10, Katharine Graham, chairman of the board of the Washington Post Company, received a call from the President.
She congratulated him on the summit.
Reagan said that he had talked with Casey and that the story on Pelton would be damaging. This one is important, the President said, suggesting that priceless secrets were at stake. He said that good intelligence had prevented 125 terrorist incidents over the last year. It was a number Reagan had used at a recent press conference, but he left the impression that it was somehow tied up with Ivy Bells.
Graham told the President that Bradlee had been careful. She as the owner could say don’t publish, as could her son, Donald Graham, the Post publisher. Neither had said it. It would be better for all if Bradlee made this decision, she said.
Reagan seemed to understand. He said goodbye.
Graham told Bradlee that she was impressed with the President’s argument. She wondered why we had to write this story. If intelligence agencies were trying to overthrow governments, we probably should publish, but how could the United States gather too much intelligence? Listen too much? The Soviets did it to us. Even if we were ahead in the various technologies, should we wait for the Soviets to catch up?
Bradlee explained that our story was about an operation, Ivy Bells, that had been compromised by Pelton five years earlier, and nothing more. Graham said the President was worried about much more, and she hoped Bradlee would be extra careful.
Casey felt that he had the cards—Ronald Reagan and Katharine Graham.
The morning of May 19, when jury selection in Pelton’s espionage trial was to begin, NBC correspondent James Polk said on Today, “Pelton apparently gave away one of the NSA’s most sensitive secrets—a project with the code name ‘Ivy Bells,’ believed to be a top-secret underwater eavesdropping operation by American submarines inside Soviet harbors.”
Bradlee called Casey, who had not heard of the NBC broadcast, and asked, “Here you’ve been telling us not to publish this. What are you going to do?” That afternoon Casey issued a statement saying he was referring NBC’s broadcast to the Justice Department for possible prosecution.
It was now clear that we had to run our story, even if in truncated form. Headlined “Eavesdropping System Betrayed, High-Technology Device Disclosed by Pelton Was Lost to Soviets,” the story ran on May 21. It said that Pelton had compromised “a costly, long-running and highly successful U.S. operation that used sophisticated technology to intercept Soviet communications.” The operation, it said, used submarines and the device was retrieved and in the hands of the Soviets.
Casey issued a mild statement that our story was being reviewed to see whether prosecution would be initiated.
Pelton’s trial began the next day. Tyler and I began dropping more and more details about Ivy Bells into stories; the first day we identified the location of the Ivy Bells operation in the Sea of Okhotsk.
Five days later, Casey and Odom issued a joint public statement that “cautioned against speculation and reporting details beyond the information actually released at trial. Such speculations and additional facts are not authorized disclosures and may cause substantial harm to the national security.” This was quickly and universally hooted at; the notion of the government waging a war on “speculation” was absurd.
Casey told the Associated Press on May 29, in an effort to lower the noise level, “I think that certainly the press has been very hysterical about the thing, saying we’re trying to tear up the First Amendment and scuttle the freedom of the press. We’re not trying to do that.” As for his caution against “speculation,” Casey said, “If I had it to do over again, I might not use that word. I might use ‘extrapolation.’”
Casey called Bradlee. This was nearly their twentieth conversation so far that year.
The DCI said, “I don’t want a pissing match.”*