Leaks Make the Political World Go Round

Unlike the Titanic, the ship of state will not sink. For good reason--it is the only vessel that leaks from the top.

In the war of the leaks now reaching unprecedented levels in the nation’s capital, President Bill Clinton and his defenders are arrayed on the media battlefield against the army of Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr and his legions of lawyers and FBI agents. The weapons in this war include subpoenas and sound bites, a grand jury, public opinion, which, for the moment, heavily favors the president, Sunday television talk shows and, above all, news leaks.

Although “leak” is often regarded as a slightly dirty word, suggesting a furtive, back-alley transaction by seedy characters out of an Elmore Leonard novel, the deed is more likely to occur in Washington’s more exclusive clubs and upscale restaurants, or in the office of a high-level government official or member of Congress.

Leaks, in fact, are the currency of choice in Washington, an essential link in the constitutionally protected news-gathering process that informs the public. Without leaks, the press and public would be reduced to reading official handouts. For all the media frenzy and retracted false stories of the past several weeks, the alternative might be official press releases that would read something like this:

“President Clinton today announced that Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr, whose ties to right-wing conspirators are well-known, has unfairly tarnished the reputation of Monica S. Lewinsky, a fine, young, former White House intern whom the president does not recall meeting, ever. The president suggested that Mr. Starr resign and proceed directly to Pepperdine University. ‘Washington’s loss will be Malibu’s gain,’ the president declared.”

And from the independent counsel:

“Whitewater Counsel Kenneth W. Starr said today that although he will continue to investigate President Clinton until ‘our sex-crazed chief executive’ is driven from office, he declined to comment on published reports that he had attempted to wire Buddy the dog. ‘We never comment on our investigative methods,’ the distinguished prosecutor said.”

Most leaks, it should be added, are not against the law. There are two main exceptions, however. It is illegal for prosecutors to leak information about grand-jury proceedings. Violators can be held in contempt of court. Last Monday, David E. Kendall, the president’s lawyer, filed a sealed complaint in federal court here that reportedly accused Starr of disclosing secret grand-jury information about Clinton. Starr has asked the FBI to investigate whether grand-jury data has leaked from his office. Kendall has urged that another independent counsel be appointed to investigate the independent counsel.

In addition, leakers and reporters can be prosecuted under the espionage laws for passing or publishing information relating to the national defense. With narrow exceptions, it is not enough for the government to show that the information was classified, since the system for classifying documents is governed by an executive order, not by a law. Only one leaker, Samuel Loring Morison, a Navy intelligence analyst, was ever convicted. Morison sent secret spy-satellite photos of a Soviet aircraft carrier under construction on the Black Sea to a British magazine, which published them. He was sentenced to two years in prison.

President Ronald Reagan said during his first term that he had “thought of the guillotine” for government employees who leaked classified information to the press. But if his remedy were taken literally, it would just about depopulate Washington.

Other presidents have been aggravated by leaks, most notably Richard M. Nixon. His obsession with tracking down leakers in his administration ultimately led to his downfall in the face of certain impeachment. After the Pentagon Papers, the secret history of the Vietnam War, leaked to the New York Times and other newspapers, Nixon formed the famed “plumbers” unit to combat leaks. Operating from a basement office in the Executive Office Building across the street from the White House, the plumbers soon metamorphosed into the Watergate burglars. Two of the plumbers, former CIA officer E. Howard Hunt Jr. and G. Gordon Liddy, were leaders of the second-story team that broke into Democratic headquarters in the Watergate in 1972.

Nixon, with the help of his national-security advisor, Henry A. Kissinger, also wiretapped four reporters and 13 White House staff members, again in an effort to stem leaks. It didn’t work; presidents come and go, but the leaks march on.

There are many kinds of leaks, but they generally fall into two categories: authorized leaks, when a president or humbler official wants to float an idea or a program anonymously, and unauthorized leaks, the work of lower-level officials or whistle-blowers who have their own reasons. It is this second type of leak, the unauthorized disclosure to reporters, that drives presidents up the wall and leads, at times, to FBI and even congressional investigations.

When a leak takes place in a group setting, it is called a “backgrounder,” another Washington institution in which an official talks, often at great length, to correspondents with the understanding that the attribution must be to unnamed “administration officials,” “sources familiar with the investigation” or similar contortions. Occasionally, officials will only agree to talk on “deep background,” which means the reporters are free to state the information on their own, but with no attribution of any kind.

Reporters depend on leaks, although they realize they are being used. Seymour M. Hersh, a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and author of “The Dark Side of Camelot,” says: “The notion of the leak is offensive to a newspaper man. People say ‘Oh, it was leaked to you.’ In my view, I’m digging it out. It’s not being leaked to me. As I look at it with some distance, now that I am out of daily journalism, I realize many of the stories I wrote were leaks provided by people with a motive that I never got into. Reporters don’t worry about the motive of people who give them information.”

Commenting on the current furor in Washington, Hersh added: “In this kind of daily panic journalism, if I want to sell a reporter on the idea the moon is made of green cheese or sell a bridge in Brooklyn, this is the time. A panic like this engenders a lot of bad journalism.”

But Harvard’s Richard E. Neustadt once declared that “leaks play . . . a vital role in the functioning of our democracy.” Apparently, the framers of the Constitution agreed. Meeting in Philadelphia in 1787, they were concerned about rumors that they might be constructing a monarchy. In what might be termed the First Leak, they unofficially slipped a statement to the Pennsylvania Herald in August: “Tho’ we cannot, affirmatively, tell you what we are doing; we can, negatively, tell you what we are not doing--we never once thought of a king.”