On Sunday, November 17, 1985, a short article appeared on page A12 of the Washington Post under the headline “Managua Said to Get Military Copters.” The article stated that “Recently stepped-up shipments from Warsaw Pact countries to Nicaragua include at least two Polish Mi2 helicopters that can be used as gunships,” attributing this to “government officials with access to the latest intelligence reports.” The last of the story’s seven paragraphs clarified that just one of the Polish helicopters actually was “equipped with launchers for air-to-ground rockets.” This was about the hottest of hot political topics at the time: the battle between Nicaragua’s socialist Sandinista government and the U.S.-backed Contra brigades trying to overthrow it. While the Contras had been directly financed by the U.S. starting in 1981, the first year of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, after several years public pressure eventually forced Congress to cut off all military aid.

Sandinista soldiers guard an electrical substation in northern Nicaragua that was attacked by guerrilla Contras. Photo: Shepard Sherbell/Corbis/Getty Images

By 1985 the Reagan administration was desperate to get the spigot turned back on, and so obviously welcomed any news that a Warsaw Pact country was arming the Sandinistas. That’s what was happening in public. Thanks to the archive of documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, we now know this was happening backstage: When National Security Agency analyst Deborah Maklowski got into work the Monday after the Post’s article appeared, her branch chief jokingly asked her how much money she’d gotten for it. That’s because, as Maklowski recounted in 2004 for SIDtoday, the NSA’s internal newsletter, she’d just written a report on this subject and distributed it internally. “The only change” in the Post article from her analysis, according to Maklowski, “was the lack of classification. … The Post had not seen fit to edit my text at all!” (The Intercept is publishing Maklowski’s account today alongside 261 other articles from SIDtoday.) As Maklowski told the story, she had “been following a deal in the making between Cenzin, the Polish government entity that handled foreign military sales, and the pro-Soviet Sandinista government of Nicaragua. … When I got the specs on this one [helicopter] and saw that it would be equipped with rocket launchers, I put out a report.” Maklowski continued: “My guess is that the White House, which was looking for anything that would help make a case with Congress for support for the Contras, just unilaterally decided to release the SIGINT [signals intelligence] to the press, without asking and without sanitization, as yet one more piece of evidence of Soviet (well, sort of) support for the Sandinistas.” Maklowski’s supposition that the Reagan administration was the source of the leak is supported by the Post’s attribution to “government officials with access to the latest intelligence reports.” So what are the lessons of this brief glimpse behind the NSA curtain? First, that the Washington Post apparently believed that it was appropriate for it to be handed a government report by an official trying to push administration policy and then just publish it essentially verbatim — without telling their readers this was what they were doing. (The Post did not respond to a request for comment.) Second, that you can always ignore it when politicians tell us how terribly, terribly wrong it is for anyone to leak classified information.

Contra troops training in Honduras. Photo: Bill Gentile/Corbis/Getty Images