In 2006, Risen won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting about warrantless wiretapping by the National Security Agency. His story would have come out right before the 2004 presidential election of President Bush over John Kerry. It might have changed the outcome of that election. But under government pressure, The New York Times refused to publish the story for more than a year, until James Risen was publishing a book that would have had the revelations in it. He’s since been pursued by both the Bush and Obama administrations in a six-year leak investigation into that book, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration.
James Risen now faces years in prison if he refuses to testify at the trial of a former CIA officer accused of giving him classified information. In June, the Supreme Court turned down his appeal of a court ruling forcing him to testify in the criminal trial of ex-CIA analyst Jeffrey Sterling, who prosecutors believe gave him information on the agency’s role in disrupting Iran’s nuclear program. In State of War, Risen showed that instead of hampering Iran’s efforts, the CIA effectively gave Iran a blueprint for designing a bomb. James Risen has vowed to go to jail rather than testify at Sterling’s trial, which is set to begin in January.
the Obama administration must now decide if it will try to force James Risen’s testimony and risk sending one of the nation’s most prominent national security journalists to jail. President Obama has already developed a reputation as the most aggressive in history when it comes to targeting whistleblowers. His Justice Department has brought eight cases so far, more than all previous administrations combined. On Friday, federal prosecutors hinted they may decide not to press for Risen’s testimony, under new guidelines issued earlier this year that make it harder to subpoena journalists for their records.
James Risen talking:
since 9/11. We’ve paid an enormous price in the name of what we—we started this war after 9/11, this global war on terror, in order to seek justice or retribution or whatever you—however you want to characterize the attitude of America right after 9/11. But today it’s become essentially a search for cash, and there’s lots of people involved in the war on terror today who are doing it because they’re ambitious, because they want status or power or money. And I think of it kind of in the historical sense. The historical context is kind of like in the Middle Ages when you had the Thirty Years’ War or the Hundred Years’ War in Europe, where you developed a whole new class of mercenary soldiers, who all they did their entire careers is go from one country to another to fight wars for money.
It’s my job. You know, it’s what keeps me sane, is to keep going. If I just gave in to them, then I would be, you know, failing in what I want to do. I want to keep finding out the truth. It’s the thing I’ve tried to do my whole life, is be a reporter and be a writer. It’s the only thing I know how to do.
We, in 2004, Eric Lichtblau and I, had a number of different sources who began to tell us early on in 2004 that they were very—they knew something really big, they knew the biggest secret in the government, but they couldn’t tell us, because they were so nervous. They were very tortured by what they knew. And it took months of kind of patience and talking and reporting for Eric and I to figure out exactly what it was that they were talking about, and finally we were able to piece it all together. And in the fall of 2004, we had the story ready to go.
I had a great confrontation over the telephone with Michael Hayden, who you just saw, where I read him the—I got him on the phone kind of by bluffing the PR person at the NSA and said, “I need to talk to him right now.” And I was shocked that he got on the phone. And I read him the top of the draft of the story, and he goes, “[gasps].” And that’s when I knew we had it. And so, we had the story ready. But then, by, you know, then, Hayden and the government started to crack down on The New York Times and pressured them to hold the story ’til—even though it was ready about two or three weeks before the election, in mid-October 2004.
usually what they ask is for us to go to them. The first meeting was between—I think it was probably early October, late September of 2004, between me and the Washington bureau chief at the time, Phil Taubman, and John McLaughlin, who was then the acting CIA director, and his chief of staff, John Moseman. And we met at the CIA director’s downtown office at the old executive office building. And it was a very funny meeting, because at that time they didn’t want to acknowledge that the story was right. They didn’t want to officially acknowledge. And so, they had all these hypothetical—we had this very weird hypothetical conversation, where they kept saying, “Well, if you were to—if the government was doing what you say they were doing, it would be very bad for you to reveal that.” And then they—then, that was just the beginning of a whole series of meetings with the editors and us, the reporters, in which they said that this is the crown jewel of the U.S. counterterrorism operation, and that if you reveal this, this will damage national security. And so, that was essentially the argument that they used then and they used throughout the entire process.
it kept going higher and higher and higher. they met with Taubman and Keller. And then we had—you know, we in the newspaper, the editors and reporters—met to discuss the story, and Bill Keller decided to hold it. so he decided to not run it before the election.
Basically, the story was that we found out that the U.S. was spying on Americans—the NSA was spying on Americans electronically, listening to their phone calls, international phone calls, back and forth with people overseas, and gathering lots of—doing lots of data mining on their phone and email, and also getting the content of their email, and doing that without court approval. They were going around the FISA court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, which had been set up specifically for that purpose of providing secret warrants for spying on—for eavesdropping on spies and terrorists or suspected spies and terrorists. And the government had decided to go around the law, go around the courts, and not tell anyone else that they were doing that, except a couple hand-picked people in Congress, who were like the chairmen of the intelligence committees. And they were keeping this secret from everyone so they could do it on a vast scale. And we believed that what we were—the people who talked to us about it believed that it was unconstitutional. And that’s why we were pursuing it.
I have a chapter in my new book about the NSA whistleblowers early on, including William Binney and Diane Roark and Tom Drake and some of the others. And it’s remarkable what happened to them at the NSA. What we found out, years later—I did not know Bill, I didn’t know Diane or Tom. They were never our sources. But what we found out was, the government thought that they were our sources for our New York Times story, and they were persecuted as a result, even though they had never come to the press. And I detail in the new book, Diane Roark, in particular, suffered amazing persecution. And she tried—even though she tried to go through the channel—
Diane Roark—along with Bill, Diane Roark was the House Intelligence Committee staffer in charge of oversight of the NSA, and right at the time of 9/11. And Bill, right after he found out about this new program, went to her, her house in suburban Washington, and told her what he had heard about. And Diane was outraged and shocked, and she couldn’t believe that it was authorized. She thought this must be some kind of rogue program that nobody really knew about. And so, she went to the chairman of the—she went to her bosses, the staff director of the House Intelligence Committee and the minority staff director, to warn them that they’ve got to tell the chairman and the vice chairman of the committee what’s going on.
And then she gets this message back: “Don’t talk about this anymore. Don’t investigate it. And keep your mouth shut.” And she realizes that the chairman and the vice chairman already know about it and are keeping it secret. And so, she then tries to—goes on this long odyssey within the government of going to all these powerful people that she knows inside the government to try to warn them about this illegal and unconstitutional program. And every time she goes to someone that she respects and who is very powerful, she realizes they already know, they’re in on the secret, and they’re keeping their mouths shut. And finally, about a year later—a couple years later, after our story comes out, the government thinks that she’s our source, and they raid her house, and they raid Bill’s house and a few other people, like Tom Drake.
we convinced the editors, well, if you’re not going to run it now, let us try again after the election. And so, after the election, they said OK. And so Eric and I go start working on the story again. We get it re-edited by our editor, Rebecca Corbett, and we have it all ready to go again. You know, we do a lot more reporting. I remember we, Eric and I, knocked on doors, and we went to this one guy who we knew, at his house late at night right before Christmas—we knew he knew about this, and we knock on his door, and he just starts yelling at us for bothering him. And he was clearly scared. He didn’t want to talk. But we had the story ready to go by mid- to late December of 2004, and then the editors killed it again for the same reasons, that it’s national security.
And so, by that time, the story was dead. I knew it was—they were not going to run it at all. And so, I had a previously scheduled book leave to work on my book, State of War, and so I decided I’m going to put it in my book. And so I did. And then, when I came back from book leave in the summer—spring or summer of 2005, you know, and I finished the book throughout the summer, and I think by late summer, I told the editors, “It’s going to be in my book, so you should think about running it.”
we had lots of talks over about 14 months. And actually, their talks—you know, the talks we had, me and Eric had, with the editors were very high-minded. It was an interesting debate. And we debated kind of this issue of national security versus civil liberties in a lot of ways. I always thought afterwards, you know, you could have put those debates we had inside the paper on television. They were pretty interesting. But ultimately, what really, I think, convinced Bill was, in the fall of 2005, when they were—after I told them it was going to be in my book, and they decided to re-engage on the story—
It’s going to be very embarrassing— as their top national security reporter reveals his revelations not in the pages of the Times, but in a book.
what they said was, “We’ll think about putting”—after I told them it was going to be in my book, in the late summer of 2005, what they said was, “OK, we’ll think about putting it in the paper.” But they weren’t committed to it. They wanted to negotiate again with the government. And so, there were a whole series of new meetings with the government, and which was very frustrating to me. What the government told them that fall was: “Risen and Lichtblau have it wrong. We’re not listening to anybody’s phone calls. We’re only getting the metadata, you know, the calling data.” And when the editors came back and told us that, we told—Eric and I said, “They’re lying to you.” And finally, after a while, Eric and I were able to convince them, you know, that they were being lied to, and I think that had a major impact on their final decision to run the story.
There was another story, a CIA operation involving the Iran nuclear weapons program, in which the CIA had used a Russian defector to give nuclear blueprints to the Iranians. And the idea was that they were supposed to be flawed blueprints that would then send the Iranians down the wrong track on building a bomb. But the Russian told them immediately, “Oh, I can see the flaws,” because he was a scientist, he was a nuclear scientist. He says, “I can see the flaws. The Iranians are going to see the flaws.” And then he sent a letter. When he gave the blueprints to the Iranians, he gave a letter to the Iranians saying, “You’re going to see that there are problems in these blueprints.” And so, it’s quite possible that the Iranians were able to—by being tipped off, were able to find good information in them and ignore the bad information.
And that was in my book. I had written that for the paper in—before, and the editors had decided not to run it because the White House asked them not to on national security grounds. And after my book came out, the government began leak investigations of both the NSA story and other things in my book, including that story. I think they finally decided not to come after The New York Times on the NSA story, because it would have meant a major constitutional showdown. And I think they decided to find something else in my book to come after me on, to isolate me from The New York Times. And they picked the Merlin operation. they want to know who my sources are for that story.
I thought that once the Obama administration came into office, that the whole thing would be dropped. And I was very surprised that the Obama administration continued to pursue the case, when, in 2009, they issued a new subpoena. And they’ve continued to pursue this ever since.
President Obama is “the greatest enemy of press freedom in a generation”. I think that his record speaks for itself. He’s gone after—he’s prosecuted more whistleblowers and gone after more journalists than any president in history. He’s done—I think that record is going to be a major part of his legacy, of trying to erode press freedom in the United States.
you cannot have aggressive investigative reporting in America without confidential sources. And without aggressive investigative reporting, we can’t really have a democracy, because the only real oversight for the government is an independent and aggressive press. And I think that’s what the government really fears more than anything else, is an aggressive investigative reporting in which we shine a light on what’s going on inside the government. And we can’t do that without maintaining the confidentiality of sources.
to me, what the war on terror became, as I said earlier, this enormous search for power and status and cash. And I began to realize that what we had in the war on terror was we had deregulated national security. That’s essentially what Dick Cheney meant when he said the gloves come off. That means deregulating the whole national security apparatus, taking all the limits off of what we can do in national security. At the same time, we poured hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars into brand-new counterterrorism programs. And the FBI, the CIA and the new Homeland Security department, all the—and the Pentagon, they all had more money than they knew what to do with. And so, they began—to me, it’s kind of like the banking crisis. You had enormous money going into a deregulated industry, meaning the counterterrorism industry, and you had lots of unintended and bizarre consequences. And so, that’s what I’ve found, is the crazy programs that developed; the bizarre nature of the whole war on terror, if you pull up the hood and look inside of it, is just stunning.
And I open the book with this, to me, kind of a metaphor for everything that we have, what’s going on now, is, in 2009, there was a small ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery in Section 60, which is where the dead of the Iraq War lay buried. And it was a small group of pro-war people who were celebrating the sixth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad, and which they—what they call Iraq Liberation Day. It’s the day that the statue of Saddam was pulled down in Firdos Square. And I saw Paul Wolfowitz there. And the woman who ran that—who was sponsoring that day’s ceremony was Viola Drath, who was an aging Georgetown socialite. And she was very pro-Iraq War. And then, two years later, she was found murdered in her apartment—in her house in Georgetown. And her husband, who had been going around Washington dressed as a general in the Iraqi army, was arrested for her murder. He had claimed that he had been named a general in the Iraqi army by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. And after he was arrested, the police found a receipt from a printing place in Washington where he had counterfeited the letter and the certificate of being a general in the Iraqi army. And he was a total fraud. He’s now been convicted of her murder. And I thought that was a metaphor for the fact that this war on terror is—a lot of it is just a fabrication, that we are now trying to unravel and deal with.
And so, I began to look and to see all of the various things that have happened in this war. One of the first things I came across was how the United States had airlifted billions of dollars to Iraq for use by the Iraqi—the new Iraqi government, and billions had been stolen and moved to Lebanon by Iraqi leaders. It was stolen from Baghdad and moved secretly to a bunker in Lebanon, where it was being held by wealthy and powerful Iraqis, because they wanted to steal it and use it for themselves, and also probably with some Lebanese money launderers who were watching over it. it was actually Iraqi government money that had been held in the United States, but the U.S. government was airlifting it by the U.S. Air Force. So, it was just a—you know, no one was doing any oversight of any of these programs.
Then I began to look at the case of Dennis Montgomery. Dennis Montgomery is a fascinating character, who—he was a computer software person, self-styled expert, who developed what he said was special technology that would allow him to do things with computers that other people couldn’t do. One of the things that he developed was this imaging technology that he said he could find images on broadcast network news tapes from Al Jazeera. He said that he could read special secret al-Qaeda codes in the banners on the broadcasts of Al Jazeera. And the CIA believed this. And he was giving them information based on watching hours and hours of Al Jazeera tapes, saying that “I know where the next al-Qaeda attack is going to be based—is going to happen.” And the Bush administration and the CIA fell for this.
if you talk to him, he argues, well, they—that’s what they were looking for. You know, they convinced him to look for this. You know, it depends on who you talk to. But it was one of the great hoaxes of the war on terror, where they actually grounded planes in Europe, the Bush administration, based on information they were getting from Dennis Montgomery’s so-called decryption of Al Jazeera broadcasts.
And then there’s a whole number of other things, like Alarbus, which was this covert program at the Pentagon where a Palestinian involved in that was actually trying to use the bank account set up by the secret program, Pentagon program, to launder hundreds of millions of dollars. And the FBI investigated this, but then tried to keep the whole thing quiet.
U.S. government give Millions of dollars to Dennis Montgomery. And then he used—he was a heavy gambler and eventually, I think, had a lot of financial problems as a result of that. So, it’s a strange—to me, the Dennis Montgomery story is one of the strangest, because what it shows is, early on in the war on terror, as I said, the CIA and all these other agencies had so much money to spend on counterterrorism that they were willing to throw it at everything. They were so afraid of the next terrorist attack that they were willing to believe anybody who came up with some idea. And I called that chapter about Montgomery, you know, “The Emperor of the War on Terror,” because nobody wanted to say that the emperor had no clothes.
There were planes grounded. International flights between the United States and Europe and Mexico were grounded. There was talk at the White House even of shooting down planes based on this information. it was crazy. It was absolutely insane.
the U.S.—the CIA and the Bush administration didn’t want to tell anybody what was really happening, where they were getting this information. You know, “This supersecret information about Al Jazeera, we can’t tell you.” And finally, the French intelligence service and the French government said, “You know, you’re grounding our planes. You’ve got to tell us where you’re getting this information.” And they got—they finally shared the information with them, and the French got a French tech firm to look at this, and they said, “This is nuts. This is fabrication.” And after a while, the CIA was finally convinced maybe the French were right, and they stopped talking about it. They didn’t do anything else. They just like shut it down eventually, but never wanted to talk about what had really happened.
Dennis Montgomery actually got more contracts after that, with the Pentagon and other agencies. And he continued to operate for a long time. You know, he kind of went from one agency to the other.
[becoming a target, not only of the Bush administration, but of the Obama administration, for year after year, right through to today. He could face years in jail for not revealing a source on one of the stories that he has exposed around a program called Merlin and the U.S. giving flawed blueprints for a nuclear trigger to Iran. This issue of facing years in jail]
I’ve had a lot of time to think about it. And it bothered me a lot more at first. I was more nervous about it when it first started. But now it’s just like kind of background noise in my life, and so I’m just kind of used to it now, because I know exactly—I have no doubts about what I’m going to do, and so that makes it pretty easy.
[you’re covering the very people who could put you in jail.]
As I said earlier, that’s the only way to deal with this, is to keep going and to keep—the only thing that the government respects is staying aggressive and continuing to investigate what the government is doing. And that’s the only way that we in the journalism industry can kind of force—you know, push the government back against the—to maintain press freedom in the United States.
I really respect whistleblowers much more. They face much more than I ever do. They’re much more courageous, I think, than we reporters are, you know, especially me. I mean, Diane Roark, who I talked about a little bit before, is really one of my heroes. She went—she did everything that you would expect someone to do in the government. And to me, her case is a perfect example of why Edward Snowden had to do what he did, that he could never have gone through the system. People say, “Oh, why didn’t he go through the system?” She tried to go through the system and was persecuted for it.
Edward Snowden is a whistleblower, you know, and I think he’s in the same tradition of whistleblowers. it’s just a simple fact. He has revealed lots of information that’s led to a national debate about the extent of electronic surveillance in the United States, and has, you know, paid a heavy price for it. He’s had to go into exile. And I think anyone who thinks he could have done what he’s done and stayed in the United States is fooling themselves.
he has sparked a new national debate over the extent of surveillance. What I think he contributed was—you know, in our stories and other people’s stories early on about the NSA, we revealed the framework, the framework for what the Bush administration had done, that they had turned the NSA on the American people. What I think Snowden revealed, the basic thing that I think he revealed, is that under Obama and in the years since we had first written about it, the American people had become much more online, an online citizenry. We were now completely digital, with Facebook and Twitter and all of these things. And as a result, the NSA had grown dramatically in their ability to watch the online presence of Americans, much more than they had just a few years earlier in the Bush administration. And so, what I think he revealed was the dramatic expansion, in just a few short years, of the NSA’s ability to shadow the online presence of Americans. And that was a real contribution.
I want to have a free press. I want to have him—I want it to be where he can still develop sources and do aggressive reporting in the same way I did throughout my career. I don’t want young reporters to face a situation or a climate where they’re much more constrained in what they can write about than I had in my career.
I am willing to go to jail for this. I think that’s the one thing I can leave to my son.
— source democracynow.org
James Risen, an investigative journalist with The New York Times. In 2006, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his stories about warrantless wiretapping by the National Security Agency. He has been pursued by both the Bush and Obama administrations as part of a six-year leak investigation into his previous book, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration. His new book is Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War.