In decades past, the CIA had reporters on its payroll. Now the press can inadvertently do its biddin

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“That’s one of the risks we run when we have stories not favorable to the administration or CIA or Pentagon,” says Jonathan Landay of McClatchy Newspapers. “If we give them too much time, they will leak their version to someone else and upstage you. We are very cautious about when we inform a government agency that we are writing a story that they might not like.… We can’t give them too much time to respond, because they will leak it to someone else.”

Mazzetti compared the CIA to “a big public high school” with “so many cliques and agendas and factions that when you are talking to someone it is hard to know which faction they are from and what axes they have to grind. So you have to treat [everything] with caution,” he says, estimating that reporters are lucky if they know even 20 percent of the facts behind a story. “That’s a disadvantage for a journalist, but 20 percent is critically important if your job is to let people know about what’s going on in secret.”

Knowing what is going on in secret is, of course, the primary directive of all national security reporters. But trying to gain access to such secrets puts the scoop-hungry Washington press corps in a position of perpetual subordination and supplication in relation to government intelligence agencies. Reporters offend their official sources at their peril, for they may be cut off from the morsels of leaked intelligence that are these beat journalists’ specialty.

Which is why the CIA no longer needs to recruit reporters and put them on its payroll. Instead, the agency simply relies on finely tuned relationships with a select group of elite reporters who are utterly dependent on the national security state for their professional survival.

As the radical scholar Peter Dale Scott puts it: “The CIA nowadays doesn’t really have to buy journalists. [They] step into line voluntarily.”

http://newsweek.com/cia-michael-dandrea-new-york-times-mark-mazzetti-drones-pakistan-al-qaeda-war-475180