At White House behest, NYT sat on scoop

When the New York Times published a front page story Sunday about the United States’ and Pakistan’s joint clandestine efforts to protect nuclear weapons, the newspaper offered a glimpse into a “highly classified program” the Bush administration long objected to seeing in print.

That is, apparently, until now.


In the article’s 11th paragraph, the Times disclosed that publication was delayed “for more than three years,” after the administration argued “that premature disclosure could hurt the effort to secure the weapons.”

So after several years, and previous objection, why did the piece now come off the shelf?

Times executive editor Bill Keller did not respond to several requests for comment about what influenced his decision to now publish the piece.

But David Sanger, the Times Chief Washington Correspondent, who co-authored the piece, told Politico that since 2004, Pakistani authorities have made statements “about elements of the program.”

Indeed, the Times disclosed in its Nov. 18 story that “late last year” the head of Pakistan’s nuclear safety effort “acknowledged receiving ‘international’ help.”

But that’s still a year-old revelation.

Sanger also said that “the new questions the turmoil in Pakistan raised about security of the arsenal warranted a reconsideration of our previous decisions to delay publication.”

So in the past couple weeks, Sanger, who’s currently on book leave, contacted Washington Bureau Chief Dean Baquet to revisit the matter

But this time around, as the Times disclosed, the “White House withdrew its request that publication be withheld.”

Gordon Johndroe, White House National Security Council spokesman, told the Politico that “it was determined in 2004 that publication of the information would be harmful.”

But subsequently, Johndroe said, details of the secret program have “slowly, over time, become more public.” For that reason, he added, “there was no point in still maintaining our objection to publication.”

“We have to be very careful in choosing when to ask a media outlet not to run something,” Johndroe said. “We have a responsibility not to hold them to an agreement when it is no longer necessary.”

Regarding this change of heart, Baquet said that he believes the administration now understood that “we were likely to report it anyway.”

“If they had maintained their objections, we would have just pushed them aside,” Baquet said. “I think the news value was just so powerful.”

Since Baquet’s tenure as bureau chief only stretches back to March 2007, he was not privy to the discussions in 2004 — which he described as “a completely different era.”

And while Baquet added that he doesn’t like “the idea of holding stories,” he said he is not in a position to judge the circumstances faced by his predecessor.

Of course, the Times’ three-paragraph disclosure was out of character for a newspaper that has twice publicly flouted similar administration requests.

Most notably, in late 2005, executive editor Bill Keller, publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., and then-Washington bureau chief Philip Taubman met in the Oval Office with President George W. Bush and high-ranking administration officials, shortly before publishing a contentious front-page story on the N.S.A.’s warrantless eavesdropping program.

And in June 2006, the Times reported that the government accessed millions of banking records kept in an international consortium known as Swift.

Keller discussed those decisions to publish against the administration’s wishes in a 2006 journalism lecture at the University of Michigan, ominously titled “Editors in Chains: Secrets, Security and the Press.”

In that lecture, Keller told the audience that the Times has gone the other direction and yielded to requests to withhold publication.

“My paper has held articles that, if published, might have jeopardized efforts to protect vulnerable stockpiles of nuclear materials,” Keller said at the time.