Shutting Off the Sources

When Daniel Schorr last month leaked a House committee report on intelligence agency abuses to the Village Voice, a Manhattan weekly, he had no idea it would come to this. The House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, commonly known as the ethics committee, last week began its preliminary inquiry into whether the CBS correspondent should be cited for contempt or otherwise disciplined by Congress. The Justice Department was pressing a parallel investigation to see if he had violated federal espionage statutes. CBS suspended Schorr from all reporting duties, and he began spending long hours with his network-paid attorney. As a tense and weary Schorr told a group of colleagues at the Washington Press Club: "The joys of martyrdom are considerably overrated."

Leak Insurance. The reporter's case was just one element in a debate that continued to swirl around a perennial issue: the relationship of reporters, leaks and security. The Schorr matter reached the ethics committee almost simultaneously with the arrival on Capitol Hill of the new intelligence reform proposals announced by President Ford (TIME, March 1). The measures would allow prosecution of any federal employee who without permission told any unauthorized person anything about U.S. intelligence "sources and methods."

Press critics of the bill point out that the amendment does not spell out what "sources and methods" might include, does not require that the leaked information actually be harmful to the nation's security, and does not even say that a leak must be deliberate to bring prosecution. "It's designed to kill our sources, frighten them away," complains Nicholas Horrock, who covers national intelligence agencies for the New York Times. Horrock reports that one intelligence source has already called him to say that "he was getting uncomfortable" because of the Ford proposals. Adds Washington Star Reporter Norman Kempster: "It will take an act of extreme heroism for a bureaucrat to blow the whistle on wrongdoing."

Not all journalists are as critical, recognizing that governments cannot operate without some privacy. The Washington Post, no laggard at uncovering government secrets, expressed mild support for the Ford proposal in an editorial. Said Post Editorial Page Editor Philip Geyelin: "It's not all that chilling. Governments are continually trying to keep people in line, and we keep trying to break through that."

Jail Threat. In fact, the Ford proposals would exempt journalists from prosecution. What worries many reporters is that if they receive embargoed information from a government source, they could be declared witnesses to a possible crime; they could then be called before a grand jury to divulge their sources and, if they refused, jailed for contempt. Predicts Los Angeles Times Editor William Thomas: "Not a hell of a lot of newspapers are going to take a chance, knowing what lies in store."

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