An American in Pakistan

THE PUBLIC EDITOR

By ARTHUR S. BRISBANE

Published: February 26, 2011

“What is the purpose of this supposedly independent paper — to ask permission of the government before reporting what the government is doing?”

Kevin Maher, Geneva, Ill.

“The New York Times is now, quite obviously and by its own admission, in the business of concealment.”

Jessica Ostrower, San Clemente, Calif.

“Yet again the NYT has shown itself to be a willing pawn of the government’s propaganda ministry.”

A. Salzman, Fairfield, Vt.

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The Times’s disclosure on Monday that it withheld information about Raymond Davis’s connection to the Central Intelligence Agency has kicked up a powerful response, some of it as bitterly critical as these readers’ comments.

Mr. Davis was charged with murder after shooting two Pakistani men in Lahore on Jan. 27. The Times jumped on the story, but on Feb. 8, the State Department spokesman,P.J. Crowley, contacted the executive editor, Bill Keller, with a request. “He was asking us not to speculate, or to recycle charges in the Pakistani press,” Mr. Keller said. “His concern was that the letters C-I-A in an article in the NYT, even as speculation, would be taken as authoritative and would be a red flag in Pakistan.”

Mr. Crowley told me the United States was concerned about Mr. Davis’s safety while in Pakistani custody. The American government hoped to avoid inflaming Pakistani opinion and to create “as constructive an atmosphere as possible” while working to resolve the diplomatic crisis.

The agreement with United States news organizations, which included The Associated Press and The Washington Post as well as The Times, held together until early last week. But on Sunday, the British newspaper The Guardian, quoting an unnamed “senior Pakistani intelligence official,” reported that Mr. Davis worked for the C.I.A. and that American news organizations knew that “but have kept it under wraps at the request of the Obama administration.”

Even then, the State Department had one more request — that The Times and others wait 24 hours while the United States worked to secure Pakistani authorities’ commitment to place Mr. Davis in the “safest possible location.” The Times delayed further, but on Monday afternoon published a story saying Mr. Davis was a private contractor providing security to a “covert, C.I.A.-led team collecting intelligence and conducting surveillance on militant groups.”

In that story, The Times noted its agreement to “withhold information about Mr. Davis’s ties to the agency at the request of the Obama administration.”

As profoundly unpalatable as it is, I think the Times did the only thing it could do. Agreeing to the State Department’s request was a decision bound to bring down an avalanche of criticism and, even worse, impose serious constraints on The Times’s journalism. The alternative, though, was to take the risk that reporting the C.I.A. connection would, as warned, lead to Mr. Davis’s death.

In military affairs, there is a calculus that balances the loss of life against the gain of an objective. In journalism, though, there is no equivalent. Editors don’t have the standing to make a judgment that a story — any story — is worth a life. I find it hard to second-guess the editors’ assessment that the State Department’s warning was credible and that Mr. Davis’s life was at risk in a country seething with anti-American feeling.

Bob Woodward, who wrote about secret operations in Pakistan in his recent book“Obama’s Wars,” described for me the competing priorities in play in this situation. On one hand, he said, the Davis affair is just the “tip of the iceberg” of intensive secret warfare the United States is waging in the region. “I think the aggressive nature of the way all that is covered is good because you are only seeing part of the activity, ” said Mr. Woodward, who also is associate editor of The Washington Post.

“But you just don’t want to get someone killed,” he added. “I learned a long time ago, humanitarian considerations first, journalism second.”

The constraint plays havoc with coverage, obviously. For nearly two weeks, The Times tried to report on the Davis affair while sealing off the C.I.A connection. In practice, this meant its stories contained material that, in the cold light of retrospect, seems very misleading. Here’s an example from an article on Feb. 11 that referred to a statement issued by the American government:

“The statement on Friday night said that Mr. Davis was assigned as an ‘administrative and technical’ member of the staff at the American Embassy in Islamabad. But his exact duties have not been explained, and the reason he was driving alone with a Glock handgun, a pocket telescope and GPS equipment has fueled speculation in the Pakistani news media.”

How can a news outlet stay credible when readers learn later that it has concealed what it knows?

Ted Gup, author of several books on intelligence-gathering, notes that important aspects of the Davis story made it especially hard for news organizations to operate under such constraints.

In other cases, news media might be asked not to compromise intelligence operations by exposing an identity (an obvious example, in my view, would be the WikiLeaks stories). But in the Davis case, there was a dramatic incident, a volatile aftermath and continuing coverage — and that’s very different.

“In this instance, his affiliation might help explain what transpired,” said Mr. Gup, who is chairman of the journalism department at Emerson College. “In other words, you may not be able to tell this story without identifying him as agency or agency support.”

But The Times was stuck with trying to do that. “Obviously, there are some things that were withheld from some of our stories,” said Dean Baquet, the Washington bureau chief. “I would argue that, given the restriction, we tried our best not to be misleading.”

Mr. Baquet said it was difficult to say exactly when The Times could have reported the C.I.A. connection. On Feb. 8, at the time of the agreement with the State Department, The Times “probably” could have reported “mounting evidence of a C.I.A. connection” and that Pakistanis believed this to be the case, he said. For a more definitive report, Mr. Baquet said, it was “sometime before the 20th” before the paper was ready to go with it.

He added: “We have reported a big chunk of the heart of the story: he shot and killed two people. I don’t regret the judgment not to identify further. These are hard calls.”

It was a brutally hard call that, for some, damaged The Times’s standing. But to have handled it otherwise would have been simply reckless. I’d call this a no-win situation, one that reflects the limits of responsible journalism in the theater of secret war.