What qualifies her, or other editors, to make such decisions, I asked.

“The qualifications come from the First Amendment — that the founders believed that a free press was a crucial bulwark against” centralized government power, she said. This means that journalists are, in effect, given both the freedom and the responsibility to make difficult judgments. Ms. Abramson doesn’t consider herself an unflawed practitioner.

“I don’t think I have the editorial equivalent of perfect pitch,” she told me.

When a news organization knows something it won’t tell, things can get messy. As the website Gawker has pointed out, The Times has repeatedly and without attribution falsely described Mr. Levinson as being on a business trip to Iran when he was captured. Two of those mentions were glancing ones in editorials; one was in a news story. In other cases, The Times attributed the “business trip” reference to family members or to the government.

Ms. Abramson called the unattributed statements that appeared in The Times “regrettable.” She also said that she was struck by — and essentially agreed with — something that The A.P.’s executive editor, Kathleen Carroll, said about deciding to publish: that even when a story is withheld for good reasons, the time to publish may arrive. (One of the two reporters who wrote A.P.’s Levinson story, Adam Goldman, recently was hired by The Washington Post, and the Post’s story carried his byline. Martin Baron, the Post’s executive editor, in commenting on his paper’s Levinson article, said that such a story “shouldn’t be held forever.” He added, “Enough time has passed.”)

One can argue that the point of no return should have come much earlier. In 2008, after an internal investigation, several C.I.A. officials were pushed out and others disciplined for mishandling the Levinson case. At that point, the situation spilled over into official wrongdoing. That could have tipped the balance, but this significant intelligence scandal didn’t make its way into media reports.

“That was a chokepoint,” Ms. Abramson said. “I wish we had focused more discussion on it then.”

I also spoke to Barry Meier, the Times reporter who first learned of the Levinson story in 2007. He has never wavered in his belief that the decision to publish belonged primarily in the hands of the family, whose members, understandably, continued to fear that making public Mr. Levinson’s C.I.A. ties could result in his death.

“It’s very, very simple,” he said. “My access to the story depended on a relationship of trust with the Levinson family, the understanding that I would not do anything to jeopardize his safety.”