Last week the White House told a lie. It was a small lie and, given the epic scale of this administration’s mendacity, an inconsequential one. It just happened to be about me.

On Thursday I interviewed Central Intelligence Agency Director Mike Pompeo on a public stage at the Aspen Security Forum. We covered everything from Russian meddling in the U.S. election to the war in Syria and the nuclear deal with Iran. The director also broke some policy ground with a veiled suggestion that the administration might pursue regime change in North Korea.

There was one sour moment. Midway through the interview, Pompeo abruptly slammed The New York Times for publishing the name last month of a senior covert C.I.A. officer, calling the disclosure “unconscionable.” The line was met with audience applause. I said, “You’re talking about Phil Agee,” and then repeated the name. Pompeo replied, “I don’t know that name,” and the interview moved on.

My startled rejoinder was not a reference to the covert C.I.A. officer unmasked by The Times, but rather a fumbled attempt to refer to the law governing such disclosures. Philip Agee, as Pompeo and everyone in the audience knew, was the infamous C.I.A. officer who went rogue in the 1970s, wrote a tell-all memoir, and publicly identified the names of scores of C.I.A. officers, front companies and foreign agents. His disclosures led Congress in 1982 to pass the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, a.k.a. the “Anti-Agee Act,” which made it a federal crime to reveal the names of covert agents. Agee died in Havana in 2008.