Journalists keep burning leakers

With the arrest this week of U.S. Army veteran Courtney Williams, it has to be said: An underappreciated feature of classified leaks in the modern era is the frequency with which journalists unintentionally lead investigators straight to their sources.

In the last decade or so there have been at least a half-dozen such cases. Once or twice might be bad luck — more than that, however, and it begins to look like a trend.

On April 7, the FBI arrested the 40-year-old Williams and charged her with transmitting classified information to Rolling Stone contributing editor Seth Harp. What makes the matter striking is not so much the leaks themselves but the simplicity with which they were traced. Harp had previously named Williams in his reporting, quoted her at length, and, in some instances, used her likeness, such that federal investigators needed only to skim his reporting to find their culprit.

Harp, for his part, maintains that his source “has committed no crime,” which is interesting considering Williams told him specifically that she was “concerned about the amount of classified information being disclosed.”

Even wilder than this story — wilder than Harp having led the FBI directly to Williams — is that hers is not an isolated instance.

In 2018, the FBI arrested and charged former special agent Terry Albury for having passed classified intelligence to the Intercept. The bureau caught Albury with relative ease, largely because the news outlet itself had filed unusually precise Freedom of Information Act requests for the very papers the special agent had already given them. The requests contained exact document titles and details unavailable to the public. When the bureau later examined its own records, it found that Albury had accessed more than two-thirds of the documents highlighted by the Intercept’s reporting, and that he was the only agent to have done so while copying and pasting portions of the digital intel.

Albury pleaded guilty in 2018 to violations of the Espionage Act and served a little more than two years in federal prison.

Speaking of the Intercept, it had already been down this road, even before Albury. In 2017, it published a story based on a classified intelligence report on Russian election interference. The information had been mailed to the paper by then-NSA contractor Reality Winner.

To verify the intel, Intercept editors sent copies of the leaked information to the NSA. Unfortunately for Winner, the copies and photos shared with federal sources carried a multitude of clues — printer tracking dots and telltale creases revealing the documents had been printed and folded and carried out of a secure building. Investigators needed only a few days to connect the dots.

Winner confessed, was charged under the Espionage Act, and received a sentence of five years and three months.

There are other lesser examples, including when James Wolfe, the longtime director of security for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, was sentenced to two months in prison for lying to FBI agents during an investigation into whether he had leaked classified information to a reporter with whom he was having a not-so-secret extramarital affair.

There is also former Defense Intelligence Agency counterterrorism analyst Henry Frese. Federal investigators caught him with ease, because he was obviously responsible for the classified information that appeared in his live-in girlfriend’s reporting.

If you’re willing to look back a bit further, there is the 2012 David Petraeus scandal. The former general and CIA director was caught sharing classified intelligence with his mistress and biographer, Paula Broadwell. In an evident fit of paranoid, possessive rage, Broadwell sent threatening, anonymous emails to a friend of the Petraeus family that triggered an official FBI cyberstalking investigation. The investigation ultimately exposed that the general had been feeding classified information to his extramarital affair partner.

Aside from the obvious reminder that one shouldn’t sleep with one’s sources, there’s another thought: As a journalist, one ought to try, at least, to make it more difficult for investigators to pinpoint one’s sources. They should be teaching at J-schools that people in law enforcement and counterintelligence aren’t idiots. It doesn’t take Columbo to figure out that the reporter publishing leaked intel is probably getting her information from the boyfriend with the security clearance.

It is a good thing that men and women still come forward when they believe something gravely wrong is being done in secret. We should not wish to discourage them.

It is also a good thing that not all whistleblowers are so unlucky as the ones mentioned above. But when journalists repeatedly make it easy for investigators to determine the sources of leaks, whistleblowers may begin to think twice — not about speaking, but about to whom they speak.

T. Becket Adams is a journalist and commentator in Washington.

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