Stephen Jin-Woo Kim was an adviser to the State Department on Korean matters who, in 2009, leaked a classified report to Fox News reporter James Rosen. The report relied on sources in the North Korean government, and it revealed that the North Korean government was likely to react to renewed UN sanctions by conducting more nuclear weapons testing.
The potential for an outbreak of war on the Korean Peninsula is one of the world’s gravest concerns, precisely because it could lead to a nuclear exchange. North Korea’s nuclear program is also one of the world’s biggest nuclear proliferation risks. And North Korea is probably the world’s most closed-off country and the hardest to penetrate with spies.
When James Rosen reported on the leaked document, he did nothing to conceal the source of the intelligence (emphasis mine):
U.S. intelligence officials have warned President Obama and other senior American officials that North Korea intends to respond to the passage of a U.N. Security Council resolution this week — condemning the communist country for its recent nuclear and ballistic missile tests — with another nuclear test, FOX News has learned.
What’s more, Pyongyang’s next nuclear detonation is but one of four planned actions the Central Intelligence Agency has learned, through sources inside North Korea, that the regime of Kim Jong-Il intends to take — but not announce — once the Security Council resolution is officially passed, likely on Friday.
It’s important that the policy advisers and policymakers inside our government know if the intelligence they are reading is coming from straight inside the Pyongyang government. It is equally critical that the North Korean government not know that.
If someone in Pyongyang sticks their neck out to talk to the CIA, they should not be reading about it the next week on the Fox News web page. The government was basically forced to try to figure out who leaked that information, and the only thing that should be up for debate is how far the government should be able to go to solve the mystery.
We need to get our heads around the distinction between a whistleblower, who observes criminal or unethical behavior by government officials, and a criminal who leaks highly sensitive classified intelligence that burns sources and endangers our national security. Sometimes these two things can overlap, as when we learned that the NSA was conducting warrantless wiretaps in violation of current law. Bradley Manning revealed official wrongdoing, too, but he also did so with no discrimination.
Whether it’s Valerie Plame and her sources, or it’s our sources in North Korea, it’s a crime to reveal classified information that harms national security unless the main purpose and result of the leak is to reveal official wrongdoing. There is no protection for blowing the whistle on the identity or existence of intelligence officers or sources, nor should there be.
Reporters have a valid interest in obtaining classified information about what the government is doing, even when no crime is implicated, but they should know that their sources do not have the same valid interest in revealing that information. And, if the information proves to be damaging in nature, the government has a valid interest in finding the source.
We can get the policy right on this, but we have to be asking the right questions. Too many people are conflating leaking with whistleblowing.
As for, James Rosen, there was no good reason for him to divulge that his scoop was bolstered by sources in the North Korean government. He could have omitted that detail and protected our sources while still having a solid scoop. Reporters shouldn’t defer to our intelligence community in all things, but they should think before they report on sensitive information. The Associated Press, for example, would never have learned of the potential damage of their scoop on Yemen if they hadn’t first asked for comment from the CIA. In doing so, they avoided inadvertently getting our asset killed. It doesn’t appear that Mr. Rosen took any of the same precautions, since he reported what he’d learned only two hours after he learned it. That’s irresponsible.
