The Intercept Promised to Reveal Everything. But It Didn’t Protect a Source.

Ms. Reed and her deputy, Roger Hodge, gave the story to a pair of established television journalists: Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito. Mr. Cole, formerly of NBC, had collaborated with Mr. Greenwald on the Snowden stories and was on staff. Mr. Esposito, also a veteran of broadcast news at NBC News and ABC News, was brought in from outside and is now the top spokesman for the New York Police Department.

Ms. Reed told me she’d brought them in partly because The Intercept’s outsider posture had left it without the inside sources who could verify documents like Ms. Winner’s. But their reflex to reach out to national security officials carried its own risk.

“If you get a document that purports to be from the N.S.A., it should be a five-alarm fire,” a member of The Intercept’s high-powered security team, Erinn Clark, said in her interview for the internal inquiry. “Go to a secure room, with an editor, freeze where you are. You are not aware who you are exposing or putting at risk.”

Instead, Mr. Cole put the document in his bag and got on a train to New York.

One concern did cross his mind.

“I thought at the time there would be an audit if they printed on a government printer,” he said, according to the internal review notes. “I forgot about that thought.”

Later, he called a source in the intelligence community in an attempt to verify the document, and casually revealed its postmark.

”My source said something about, ‘How did it come to us?’ I said in the mail, from Georgia, and my source laughed about that,” he recalled during the internal investigation. Then, Mr. Cole mentioned that the postmark was Ford Gordon, Ga., which is home to the N.S.A.’s Cryptologic Center. “‘There’s a logic to that,’ the source said.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/13/business/media/the-intercept-source-reality-winner.html