The call from the FBI was as plain as a white sock in a brown shoe.
The bureau invited me into their Garden City offices for a chat. Clearly they had the wrong name and number. On the professional side, I was a reporter. On the personal side, years of the FBI’s group-targeting had conditioned in me a sense of unease if not outright hostility toward police authority. Yet here were the agents of Director J. Edgar Hoover inviting me in for a chat.
It was not hard to figure out what the FBI wanted from me. Patty Hearst had been kidnapped and chief among those identified as her abductors were Donald David DeFreeze and his former prison mate, Thero Wheeler. Snooping around the Berkeley underground had convinced me that Wheeler was not involved and I printed this fact.
I assumed that if I had discovered this fact, so, too, had the FBI with some 300 agents working the Hearst kidnapping. The Bureau, for its part, figured that since I knew the location of Wheeler, the nonkidnapper, perhaps I also knew the location of the actual kidnappers. I did not, but felt disinclined to discuss what I knew about this breaking national case with the FBI.
My belief, firmly held, was that journalists do not work with the government. My reporting about Wheeler, for example, came from confidential sources the FBI might well have arrested on sight. Yet the public had a right to these facts. This and subsequent information — more sensitive still — never would have been given to me without assurances that I wouldn’t reveal who shared it with me. Furthermore, had I wanted to work for the police I would have joined a law-enforcement agency, so-called — and not a public trust dedicated to informing the citizenry about current affairs, political malfeasance and the conduct of law enforcement officials.
To my surprise, a more senior reporter at the newspaper advised me to cooperate with the FBI. The hand of the journalist, he felt, could wash the hand of the FBI. He had built his not insignificant career by trading information with the authorities, though there is no record of his giving up confidential news sources. I granted my colleague’s point about receiving information from law enforcement authorities, in fact, informing the public seemed part of their jobs. I ran aground, however, on his insistence that journalists, as a quid pro quo, should also funnel raw information to the authorities other than what’s published in their reports.
Working as a fact-gatherer for the government is a violation of the letter and the spirit of the vital role journalists serve in a free society. I refused to meet with that FBI agent on the Patty Hearst case. This voluntary decision, however, was not the end of it. The FBI periodically tapped my phones, monitored my clandestine meetings and conducted surveillance of me in the Bay area and elsewhere.
In chilling fashion, the current rash of cases involving government pursuit of working journalists brought my Hearst experience back to mind. That journalists work for the interests of the public — not the government — is a point lost on judges and prosecutors now ordering some working reporters to disclose the names of confidential sources.
Technological tools available to these government pursuers — satellites, infrared cameras, and computers — make voluntary compliance a mere technicality.
These stunning blows to journalists and press freedom, in general, are all the heavier for those “safeguards” installed in wake of the 9/11 attacks. Chief among these changes, of course, is the Patriot Act, a government umbrella that blocks the sunlight of civil liberties — some constitutionally guaranteed.
More than two dozen subpoenas have been issued to force reporters to give up their confidential sources. The most spectacular of these cases involved the revelation of the name of an undercover CIA agent by syndicated columnist Robert Novak. In a move that could mean jail time, a federal appeals court last week rejected the pleas of Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper and Judith Miller of The New York Times.
The court action against the two reporters raises the divisive question about the culpability of Novak, the right-wing mouthpiece. In going after journalists of whatever stripe, prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is playing in the fields of the Constitution — and likely trampling upon the rights of a free press.
Lest we be confused, without a fair press informing the public about the misdeeds of government, the people would be at the mercy of the government’s words. This, alas, could bring the whole thing a-tumbling down.