In 1974, a magazine called Counter Spy identified Richard Welch as the CIA station chief in Athens, Greece. Eighteen months later, he was shot to death outside his home there.
Whether the magazine helped set the stage for Welch's murder, by a terrorist group called November 17, has never been established, and the magazine's editors denied responsibility. But the practice of exposing covert intelligence agents, which became something of a cottage industry in the 1970s, certainly led to enactment of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act in 1982.
That law, all but unused in the intervening decades, is today the basis for a grand jury investigation into the disclosure last year of the identity of Valerie Plame as a co-vert agent for the CIA. It was the subject of intense debate in the early 1980s, with many legal scholars and legislators arguing that it would damage the ability of journalists to report the news.
In the end, most legislators were convinced that the law was carefully drafted to protect the mainstream press. Yet now, like a time bomb set to go off two decades later, it has swept six journalists into the center of the Plame investigation.
One of them, Judith Miller of the New York Times, was ordered jailed on Thursday for refusing to name her confidential sources, although she has written no articles about Plame. Another journalist, the syndicated columnist Robert Novak, who was the first to publish Plame's name, refuses to say whether he has testified before the grand jury.
The trust legislators placed in the law not to turn mainstream reporters into criminals remains valid: Neither Miller nor Novak faces any serious threat of criminal prosecution. But it seems they can be jailed nonetheless for contempt of court if they refuse to identify the government officials who may themselves have broken that same law.
What trouble the journalists face arises from what they know, not what they have published. That explains why Miller, who conducted interviews for an article but did not write one, may be jailed if her appeal fails even though she has not written about Plame.
The law has two parts. One makes it a crime for people with authorized access to classified information -- government officials, not journalists -- to identify covert agents. The other part applies to people without such authorized access, like journalists. People in that second group can be punished only if they engage in a "pattern of activities intended to identify and expose covert agents" knowing "that such activities would impair or impede the foreign intelligence activities of the United States."
The law was thus meant to apply only to publications like Counter Spy and the books of Philip Agee, a former CIA agent who printed what he said were the names of more than 1,000 other agents.
Still, every disclosure by someone who was authorized to know Plame's identity to someone who was not is potentially a separate crime, at least until Novak made her identity common knowledge in his column on July 14 last year.
Reporters for Time magazine and the Washington Post later published articles saying they were also given information about Plame around that time.
They have given limited testimony with what they say were their sources' blessings. Time reporter Matthew Cooper has since received a second subpoena, which he is fighting.
The disclosures followed the publication on July 6 last year of an article in the New York Times by Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, a former diplomat, which was critical of the Bush administration.
In his column, Novak wrote that "two senior administration officials" identified Plame to him as "an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction."
If the "senior administration officials" who spoke to Novak were legally authorized to know Plame's identity, they probably committed a crime in passing that information along.
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