The Road to Damascus

What happens when a terrorist has a change of heart?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. I have a theory that the most interesting autobiographies
are the ones written by second tier people. I'm not
using second tier in a derogatory sense like second rate.
I mean it in a sense of hierarchy. When the
people on the top tier tell their story, it's invariably boring.

(00:39):
They have too much to lose by being honest. Their
public statue works against them on the page because they know.
Anything they write that's even vaguely controversial or opinionated, in
other words, anything interesting, it's going to get dissected and
distorted by the media. But the memoir of the person
under the general or the president or the CEO, the

(01:00):
person you've never heard of, that person has a lot
less to lose, and their memoirs are where the gold lies.
Not long ago, I picked up a book called Company Man,
Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA. It
was by a man named John Rizzo. I checked the

(01:21):
book Flap for Rizzo's bio. He wasn't the director of
the CIA, or the deputy director, or even the Head
of Operations, which is the person who runs all the spies. No.
Rizzo was an attorney in the agency's legal Department, eventually
rising to acting General counsel. When I saw Rizzo's book,

(01:41):
I thought, BINGO, I have to read this. I was
not disappointed. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to
Revisionist History, my podcast about Things Overlooked and Misunderstood. This
episode is about a story John Rizzotel's on page one

(02:03):
forty eight of his autobiography. It's a story about a spy,
a very good one, and what happened to him. Right
after I read it, I got in touch with Rizzo.
I asked him if I could interview him about the
story of the spy. He said, of course. Then in
his email he added a PostScript, PS, interesting that you

(02:26):
focused on that episode. When I finished the manuscript, I
figured that if any single anecdote in the book would
garner a public attention, that would be the one. As
it turned out, I don't remember anyone ever asking me
or otherwise talking about it, which I found puzzling. Yes,

(02:48):
it's puzzling. I mean it's probably forty maybe. As I say,
I saw pictures of him, photos of them. At the time.
I'm sitting at Rizzo's kitchen table at his house in Washington, DC,
he's telling me about the spy he mentioned in his autobiography.
And he looked like al Pacino ne circa godfather too.

(03:10):
He was at Europe, I mean, he was European looking.
He's still a young man, and I think he reached
sort of, you know, a stage in his life that
he felt remorse guilt about what he had done in
his youth and his formative years. You know, simple and
confounding as that. I mean, I don't, honestly, I don't

(03:32):
recall another instance of an asset coming to us under
those kinds of circumstances. An asset is CIA speak for
a source, someone on the inside. This asset, the man
who looked like al Pacino was a terrorist. Do you
know the details of his how he approached the CIA

(03:54):
to say, I've had a change of heart. I you know,
I believed he just fall and carried his services. And
I think he just walked into an embassy and what
was what do we know about the quality of the
information he was providing. It was very good. You know.
He was considered the highly reliable and he didn't want

(04:17):
much money. That was the other interesting thing. He didn't
want money. I mean, it wasn't you know, most assets
and want money. Why didn't he want money because he
said that he was doing this for his conscience, to
make up and it was an active expiation, an act
of expiation. You will want to take sides when you

(04:40):
finish this story. My advice to you is don't. If
you make a list of the greatest investigative reporters of
a last generation, There's Bob Woodward at the time, There's
Mark Bowden, who wrote Black Hawk Down, Seymour Hirsch who

(05:01):
wrote for the New York Times for many years, and
then The New Yorker, Steve Cole, Jane Mayer. There's a
guy who I set next two when I first started
my career at the Washington Post many years ago, Mike Issakoff,
who was a bulldog. And somewhere in that top cluster
of investigative reporters is Tim Weiner. He's one of the
few journalists ever to have won both a Pulitzer Prize

(05:25):
and a National Book Award. In the nineteen eighties, Weiner
worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer, and his first foreign assignment
was covering the overthrow of the Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcus.
When Weiner came back he convinced his editor to send
him to Afghanistan, where the CIA was then secretly funding
the Mujahadeen in their battle against the Soviet occupation. I

(05:47):
called up the CIA, which had an always has had
a public information office, and I said, hey, I'm going
to Afghanistan. I understand you people do country briefings from
time to time for foreign correspondence. How about it? And
he said absolutely not and hung up the phone. So

(06:09):
off I went to Afghanistan. I had a jolly old time.
Came back and I hadn't been back in Washington for
more than a day when my phone rang. It was
a public information officer from the CIA. This time he
was friendly. He said, why don't you come by for
that briefing. So off I went through the CIA, which
is in the woods, about eight miles outside of the

(06:29):
White House, checkpoint one, checkpoint two, checkpoint three, into the
lobby of the CIA, and up on the left hand wall,
in great gold letters, it says, from the Gospel of
John and ye shall know the Truth, and the truth
will make you free. So I'm hooked already. I go
up to the seventh floor, which is where the executive

(06:50):
suites were, and there are four CIA officers sitting around
a table for my quote briefing unquote, But they really
only wanted to know one thing from me, which was
what's it like? These were supposed to be the four
top CIX It's on Afghanistan. They'd never been to Afghanistan.

(07:15):
So I walked out of their thinking, I'm going to
devote the rest of my life to making a study
of this agency. I was completely fascinated. Winner went to
The New York Times in nineteen ninety three continued covering
the agency all throughout the nineteen nineties. He was very,

(07:36):
very good at it. Wyno was covering the CIA during
the Aldrich Ames affair. You may remember that Ames was
a senior CIA officer who worked there for more than
thirty years, and he ended up telling the KGB everything
he knew, including the names of the agency's assets inside
the Soviet Union. It was one of the most damaging
cases of espionage in American history. Ames is under arrest,

(08:01):
and I'm thinking I should go interview Ames. I wonder
where Ames is right now, and as it turned out,
he was in a county jail. So I go to
the county jail and I say I'd like to talk
to prisoner Alter James. I walked into the interview room
and there was Alter James. We talked, how long do

(08:23):
you talk to him? For about an hour? Wait? You
stopped after an hour? Did they stopped? Well, you know,
it's a visiting hour. This is the greatest scoop of
your it's a school. And I gave my phone number
and he called me collect you know, on a regular basis.

(08:45):
And I did a number of stories based on firsthand
interviews where he essentially confessed to everything he'd done and
gave me some rather vivid descriptions of life inside the CIA,
most of which were true and demonstrably true. Maybe you
have to have been a reporter to understand how fantastic
that story is. I was a reporter at the Washington

(09:06):
Post for ten years. I would have assumed that the
worst spy in American history was under triple lockdown, somewhere,
whisked away by helicopter to a black side. I would
have waited for the press release. But Weiner is a
kind of person who would assume that if the intelligence
establishment was naive and disorganized enough to have its clock
cleaned by a KGB mole, then it was probably naive

(09:29):
and disorganized enough to park that same mole unattended in
the county jail. And I covered them like you would
cover a courthouse or the cops, or Congress or the
White House. They're an arm of the government, like the
Internal Revenue Service or the post Office. They happened to
be a secret arm of government. Weiner would later write

(09:54):
a book called Legacy of Ashes. That's how he won
his National Book Award. It's an amazing book, easily the
best history of the CIA ever written. Some people within
the agency thought that was biased against them, that in
his reporting, and particularly in Legacy of Ashes, he went

(10:14):
on too long about what the agency had done wrong,
and that he said too little about what the agency
did right. I understand why they think that way, but
I'm not sure that assessment is fair. Weiner is not biased.
He's aggressive. You only have to meet him to understand
that he has one of those big, square, impressive heads,

(10:36):
barrel chest, the kind of self confidence that you have
to have if you're in his line of work. He's
a kind of relentlessness about him. I can't remember how
many times we talked on the phone and went back
and forth in emails before he agreed to sit down
with me. He kept it up for weeks, clarifying, probing,

(10:56):
why do you want to do this story? What are
your intentions? Weiner is aggressive because over the course of
his career, he needed to be aggressive. It's not like
the CIA puts out colorful brochures highlighting its latest initiatives.
It's a secret agency. There's a man named Jeffrey Smith

(11:18):
who will figure in this story as well. Smith used
to be the general counsel for the CIA. He's very
much a member of the intelligence establishment, genteel, bookish. He's
now in private practice that one of the most prestigious
of DC law firms, Arnold and Porter. And one of
the things that Smith says is it's a good thing
for the agency that reporters like Tim Weiner are aggressive.

(11:40):
The agency needs a free press. It keeps you honest.
It's not unlike congressional oversight. If any government agency is
asked to do something or is considering something, the CIA,
you have to think, this is probably something that's going
to have to be reported to our two oversight committees.

(12:02):
How are they going to react and what happens if
it leaks? How do we explain doing And that question
comes up all the time, and without a press it
wouldn't come up. So you need CIA needs Yes, Does

(12:24):
the CIA always remember that? In the ranks, some people
don't don't see it that way. As you get more senior,
you do see it that way. And the senior people
have to explain to the younger people as are coming
up through the ranks why that's necessary. Why do we

(12:47):
put up with a hugely powerful agency like the CIA,
with a budget in the tens of billions, doing things
we know very little about, because we're confident that if
the CIA does something truly evil or stupid, the press
will find out and let us know. Weiner lives by
this idea. He devoted his career to it. What does

(13:10):
the CIA look like in the absence of free press,
It looks like the KGB. We have a uniquely American
problem here, Malcolm. We're trying to run a secret intelligence
service in an open, democratic society. The Russians don't do that,
the Chinese don't do that, not even the British do that.

(13:32):
We need to have a constant tug of war between
a free press, a cantankerous press, a skeptical press, and
the powerful institutions of our government. But they are going
to be arguments. Believe me, they were arguments. He's the

(13:54):
world's most wanted man, the son of a wealthy Venezuelan lawyer.
His profession is spreading terror worldwide. He has links with
groups like The most notorious terrorist of the nineteen seventies
and nineteen eighties was a man named Ilia Ramirez Sanchez,
also known as Carlos the Jackal. He was born in Venezuela,
but worked closely with a radical group called the Popular

(14:15):
Front for the Liberation of Palestine, setting bombs assassinating people.
He was thought to be responsible for the deaths of
more than eighty people. He played a role in the
massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games in
nineteen seventy two. Carlos the Jackal was almost as notorious
in his day as a Samoa Ben Lauden was in ours.

(14:36):
He was a subject of a massive international manhunt that
went on for years. Finally, in nineteen ninety four, he
was captured in Sudan by French intelligence. How did they
find him because of a tip from the CIA? Where
did the CIA get its information from a man who
was once high up in the same world as the Jackal.

(14:57):
The guy John Rizzo wrote about the asset who looked
like Alpuccino. His Rizzo again, Yeah, easily, your work case
offers a work potential, sources and assets for month years
before even pitching them to help. This guy just walked
I mean just just walked in. So yeah, I mean,

(15:17):
at the time his recruitment, there was a great excitement,
eagerness that this is one of the few guys, the
best guy we have inside the terrorist organization. So you
never met him, but you saw a picture of him, um,
and you say, you describe him as looking like Alpaccino.
There was something kind of glamorous about him, is that Yeah? Yeah, sleek,

(15:37):
dark hair, European looking. I mean he was not you know,
he was not your jihadi. I mean he was he
was Westernized. Alpaccino helped the CIA find Carlos the Jackal,
but by the following year, the summer of nineteen ninety five,

(15:58):
the CIA found itself in crisis. The Aldrich Aims scandal
had devastated the agency's reputation. What's more, the Cold War
was over, and since the CIA was essentially created to
fight the Cold War. Lots of people in Washington, serious
people wondered if the United States even needed the agency anymore.

(16:19):
Then all kinds of stories broke about shady characters the
agency was mixed up with in Central America, murderers, drug dealers.
It was the last straw. President Clinton brought in a
new director, John Deutsch, with the mandate to clean house.
Deutsch ordered what's called an asset scrub, a review of
every spy, informant, an asset on the CIA payroll, with

(16:42):
a specific emphasis on ethical considerations. As the CIA's General Counsel,
Jeff Smith was in the middle of it, Were there
assets who had committed major felonies, human rights violations, or
had attacked Americans? And so we added that dimension to

(17:04):
the asset scrub that was currently underway. And one of
the files the agency reviewed was that of al Pacino.
John Rizzo was Jeff Smith's deputy. He was in the
middle of it as well. It was discovered that it
actually committed terrorist acts against Americans, bombings in Europe, and
that he had wounded some with his bombs. I mean,

(17:27):
obviously the intent was to kill them. Now that was
somehow missed. Now I don't know how it was, manister,
whether frankly it was just overlooked, but it should have
been a red flag. You can imagine what some people
inside the CIA thought of the asset scrub. The function

(17:48):
of a spy service is to find out what the
bad guys are doing, and the best way you find
out what the bad guys are doing is to have
another bad guy. I tell you right, So why would
you have a rule saying the CIA needs to be
extra careful about hiring bad guys, But at the same
time as a group that says, look, the agency is
a mess. We might not have a future unless we

(18:10):
clean up our act. We have to play by the rules.
So what that meant was, we've belatedly discovered that we
should have reviewed his record before entering into a relationship
with him, and we should have actually gone to the
law enforcement, the FBI, the Partment of Justice at the

(18:31):
outset before we even began a relationship. And I would
have been the guy to do it was to go
to justice the outset. We did not do that. In
the middle of all that handwringing, someone calls Tim Weiner,
So when do you first get wind of the retired terrorist.
As I recall, in the late spring or early summer

(18:53):
of nineteen ninety five, I get word from inside the
CI that we have a problem here, and I begin
to make inquiries. So somebody from the CIA, what is
their motivation for telling you this? The CIA has screwed up.

(19:17):
It has failed to inform the Justice Department that they
have an asset on their books, a foreign agent who
has again euphemistically American blood on his hands. So why
do they want to call the New York Times to
write a wrong because sometimes public disclosure is the only

(19:45):
way to write wrong. Do you think it's eat? Did
they think it would be easier for them to fulfill
their obligation to inform the Justice Department if they was
a kind of leak of this fact. First, there was
a battle royal going on inside the CIA over the scrub,

(20:09):
So Deutsch is pushing that, and within the agency is
a considerable amount of pushback, So they're anticipating this is
going to be a struggle. A considerable amount of pushback
is an understatement. There was fierce opposition. So I'm guessing
the people who call you are the ones who are
in favor of the scrub. The people who call me

(20:33):
are patriots who love their country and who are sworn
to uphold Let me rephrase that the people who called me,
I believe are patriots who love their country and are
motivated to live by their oath to uphold the Constitution

(20:57):
and obey the laws of the United States. Win or
Waits continues to ask around. Then, late in the summer
of nineteen ninety five, the CIA sides to take its medicine.
Rizzo goes to the Department of Justice and tells them good,
bad and ugly about their alpaccino. They're upset, you know, basically,

(21:20):
why are you just telling us this now? You know,
why didn't you tell us before you got in bed
with this guy? So yeah, they were upset, as I
knew they would be. You have to wait, this guy
is you know, gold against the fact that well, you know,
he's got he's got attempted murder of Americans on his resume.

(21:42):
At the same time Rizzo's having that conversation, the head
of the CIA's counter Terrorism Center went to Capitol Hill
and briefed members of Congress about the asset scrub. They
weren't happy either. People all over Washington now knew about Alpaccino,
people in the Department of Justice, people in the White House,

(22:03):
people on the Hill, representatives, senators, staffers, and Winer's phone rings. Again,
my rule of thumb on a story like this is
and I want to have three sources, and I want
to make sure that the second source is not the
first source, in which case I have one source. Right,

(22:25):
So I had two sources. I did get a call.
The call was a call to have a conversation outside
of the normal circuits of the telephone lines. The conversation

(22:50):
was with a member of Congress. At this point, I
have three sources. Subsequently, there was a fourth who is
an American diplomat. Was an American diplomat at the time.
Winder calls the CIA Press office and talks to the
agency's FOLKSMI at the time, Dennis Box. I met Box

(23:12):
in a restaurant in northern Virginia, and it was at
that point where they said, this is not good, Um,
this is this is really gonna put somebody at risk.
And I said, said, well, let's invite him in and
try to lay out for him. You know what's gonna

(23:33):
what the risk is. He said, he said, in my
office with the head of account Terrorism Center. Yeah, and
what was do you remember much? What was the what
was the nature of the conversation. Well, it was pretty straightforward.
It was he's got a fairly mild demeanor. He's not
at least with us. He you know, he wasn't aggressive
or abrasive. I mean, he was just kind of laying out,

(23:56):
here's here's what I have, here's what I've been told.
But it was the detail. It was the details of
this particular asset that got our folks worked up. This
particular asset meaning Alpaccino, Bach says, the head of the
counter Terrorism Center explained all the specific things that if published,

(24:18):
would put Alpaccino in danger. He tried to interest Weiner
instead in a broader story about the asset scrub, which
wasn't really a secret at that point. These kinds of
conversations between reporters and government officials are not unusual. This
is how Washington works. In the United Kingdom, there is

(24:39):
something commonly known as a d notice, which is a
government order issued to a media organization saying you shouldn't
publish what you want to publish because it endangers national security.
If this story we're taking place in the United Kingdom.
The minute winer called to say, I know about Alpaccino.
The British government would have slapped a D notice on him,

(25:01):
end of story. But the United States doesn't have dnotices.
It has a constitutional right to freedom of the press.
So what happens instead is in negotiation, the reporter comes in,
he or she gets briefed. Maybe the head of the
CIA calls the editor of the Washington Post or the
New York Times and says, look, we're really uncomfortable with this.

(25:24):
Here's why. Just as I was writing this episode, the
Washington Post reported that in a meeting with Russian officials,
President Trump let slip some very sensitive intelligence from an ally.
It was about the intention of Middle EA's terrorists to
use laptops as bombs. Huge story, but if you read

(25:46):
the initial news accounts closely, it's obvious that the reporters
held some information back. They didn't tell us which American
ally gave us that information. It seems like they knew
the location of the spy, but they didn't tell us
that either. This is what I'm talking about. Somewhere along
the line, there was clearly a conversation between those report

(26:09):
and the CIA and the reporters listened and then said,
we're going to disclose what we think is necessary to
make the point about the recklessness of the president, but
we're willing to withhold details that you tell us might
damage national security. Jeff Smith says he's been involved in
lots of these conversations, both on the government end and

(26:30):
now on the media end, because he has media organizations
among his clients. One of the things I fought the
government is too frequently the government just says, well, harm
could result, let them leaves my clients, while on the
client side in the terrible dilemma of saying, well, what's
the harm, we can't tell you. But Smith, as you

(26:50):
can imagine, can see the government's side as well. If
you're the CIA trying to convince a reporter or an
editor not to spill a secret, you have to tell
them enough about the secret so that they understand what's
at stake. What you don't want to do is reveal
even more the secret than what has already been revealed.
And all of this wi respecting the fact that the

(27:10):
press in America can, at least in principle, do pretty
much whatever it wants. What the government tries to do
is indicate gradations of harm. You know this is really bad,
this is less bad, and leaving the editorial judgments to
the press. But the government should not be in the

(27:33):
business of saying, we agree, you can print this. It's
tricky from the national security side. You have to trust
the editors of the publishers or whomever you're talking to,
and tell them why, as specific as you can what
the harm would be, so that they can make a judgment.

(27:55):
It's then incumbent upon the editors to take that seriously.
This is exactly the kind of elaborate dance Weiner and
the head of the counter Terrorism Center are having in
the summer of nineteen ninety five. In Rizzo's book, he
says that some of the things the counter terrorism chief
tolb Winer, left him bug eyed with shock. Winer says,

(28:18):
that's nonsense. But the point is this the conversation. Wasn't
the CIA giving instructions to the New York Times. That's
not how the balance between a free press and a
clandestine service works. Did the counter terrorism chief say to you,
don't mention this guy at all. It was a strong

(28:40):
preference of the counter terrorism chief that certain identifying details
that were known to me stay out of the public realm,
and I agreed with that. I mean, what is the

(29:03):
point of publishing the guy's country of origin, the intelligence
service he worked for, the specific time and date and
place of the attacks. Does the reader need to know that? No,
the story is about the balancing test. I knew who
we worked for, I knew the specific time and place
of the attacks, and I knew how grievous the attacks

(29:25):
had been. Every detail of that was scrubbed of my
own free will and volition from that story, based on
my principle that I do not want to publish anything
that can get anybody hurt. But Winer made it clear

(29:46):
to the CIA that he wasn't going to leave al
Pacino out of the story entirely. He was going to
reveal that al Pacino was the source who helped find
Carlos the jackal that Paccino had and I'm quoting from
the story. Winer eventually wrote a brutal resume. He had
been involved in two bombings in Western Europe in the
mid nineteen eighties that had injured Americans, and he had

(30:09):
only broken with his terrorist group in nineteen eighty seven.
Four separate people someone inside the CIA, a congressman, a diplomat,
and someone else in the know had told Winer about Alpuccino.
Al Pacino was the person about whom the agency had
failed to tell Congress and the Justice Department. From Winer's perspective,

(30:31):
al Pacino was the story. Jeff Smith says that when
he realized what Winer intended to publish, his heart sank.
What was that? In general? The feeling within the agency
about the possibility of this story being written, anger, anger

(30:54):
that it had leaked so quickly, and then a real
desire it that we do all we're good to not
have the details of what this individual had told us
and what happened to come out. When you say what happened,
do you mean are you talking specifically about this individual's
involvement with fingering or how did define comments check to

(31:18):
your mind? That was the identifying Yes. Yes. The agency
scrambled to get in touch with al Paccino. They had
to warn him, here's the rizzo again. You can't just
call up an assent and said made me, You made
me in the cafe around the corner of an hour,
I mean, locate him. A signal emergency meeting was necessary.

(31:41):
I think the meeting actually took place, either it just
immediately before the story came out, or on the day
the story came out. And what did the assets say
during the meeting when told this, Well, I was told
that he was flabbergast, felt absolutely betrayed. How could this happen?

(32:01):
How could you do this to me? I'm a dead man,
you know. And our case officer broken news to him,
offered a mediate evacuation, safe haven, get him the hell
out of there, and he refused. He just walked away.
You've betrayed me, and that was it. He just walked.

(32:31):
The story ran on August twenty first, nineteen ninety five,
on the front page of the New York Times CIA
re examines hiring of X terrorists as agent. He was
also translated and ran in newspapers around the world. Alpaccino's
case officer put a copy of the Greek version on
his wall, and when the case officer was asked why,

(32:51):
I'm told, he said, I do this because it is
a reminder to all of us in this division about
the consequences of breaking faith with your asset. One of
the most famous of all New Testament stories is what
happened to Aul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus.

(33:13):
Saul was a strong opponent of the early Christian Church.
He persecuted the early Christians, the Bible says beyond measure.
He stood by and watched as one of the earliest
of Jesus's followers, Stephen, was stone to death. And then
one day, on the road to Damascus, Saul had a
vision of the resurrected Jesus and converted to Christianity. Saul

(33:38):
became Paul, cornerstone of the early Christian Church. Saul was
allowed to become Paul. That's the point of the story
of Paul's epiphany. He had been the sworn enemy of
the early Church, and then he said that he had
changed his mind, that he regretted his previous acts, and
he was forgiven. That idea that we are allowed to

(34:00):
transform ourselves has been central to our culture ever since.
The man we've been calling al Pacino was a sworn
enemy of the West. He helped plant bombs in Western
Europe that killed and injured innocent people. And then he
had an epiphany. He walked into an American embassy. He said,

(34:22):
I don't want money, I just want to atone for
the evil that I have done. But in Alpacino's case,
we did not allow him to transform himself. The CIA
went to Congress and the Department of Justice to confess
they had hired an ex terrorist with a terrible past,
even though he was an ex terrorist who only came

(34:44):
to us because he had repudiated his terrible past. The
Justice Department says, why didn't you tell us before you
got in bed with this guy? As if he were
still the guy you would never want to get in
bed with. The headline to Winer's story says, CIA re
examines hiring of ex terrorist as agent as if the

(35:06):
central fact about al Pacino was his pas past associations,
his brutal resume. As Weiner put it, a resume is
a list of accomplishments. But Alpaccino did not consider his
past record an accomplishment. He wanted to repudiate it. That
was the whole point of him walking into an embassy
and offering us everything he knew. Remember what Rizzo said

(35:29):
about why Alpaccino did not want money. He said he
was doing this for his conscience. It was an act
of expiation. Expiation is the act of making amends or
reparation for guilt or wrongdoing, atonement. He asked for atonement,
We pretended to give it to him, then we took

(35:52):
it away. What's wrong with us? So what happened to Alpuccino?
I think you can guess. Very soon after the New
York Times story ran, he was killed by his former
terrorist colleagues. They identified him, they tracked him down. When

(36:16):
I said at the beginning that you would feel the
urge to take sides, and that you shouldn't, I was
talking about this moment. We can argue all day about
what is and is not an appropriate leak, or about
who's to blame when negotiations break down between the government
and the press over a sensitive story. But if you

(36:39):
get too lost in picking aside in that argument, you
lose track of Alpuccino, whoever he was, this man who
risked his life for a country other than his own,
asking only in return that he be granted absolution. I
never found out anything more about Alpaccino. There is apparently

(37:02):
a long story about what happened to him and how
he was killed, but it's still classified. The CIA people
were only free to talk about Tim Winer. Tim Winer
only wanted to talk about the CIA. I think there's
a problem with that story as Rizzo tells it, just
as he thinks there's a problem with my story is published.

(37:25):
I respect his right to his opinion to winer Rizzo
was just blaming him for a problem of the CIA's
own creation. They were the ones who opened up al
Pacino's file. If they hadn't screwed up their own procedures
and arguably violated a presidential directive on how you handle
a problem like this, then they wouldn't have had to

(37:47):
go to the FBI and Capitol Hill, and I wouldn't
have gotten my third and eventually my fourth source on
this story. Where's the leak? Here? The leak is because
the CIA violated its own guidelines and practices, And mister Rizzo,
who is a good lawyer and a capable lawyer, you know,

(38:11):
has made a false and arguably defamatory argument here, which
is the New York Times got an asset killed. False
and defamatory. One side puts the front page of The
New York Times up on the wall. The other side says,
don't blame me, I'm just the messenger. Can we at

(38:33):
least agree that we should have forgiven Alpaccino his sins,
and that, however it happened, he was wronged. And maybe
if you run a front page story about a man
one day and right after he gets killed, even if
you don't think it was your fault exactly, maybe you
should run a little explanation of what happened, or even
just have a moment of silence, a little bit of remorse.

(38:57):
What was the reaction in house of the New York
Times the story? Do you remember the reaction in house
at the New York Times. There were a lot of
page one stories about the CIA in that era, and
I don't think that there was a major reaction. Law

(39:20):
what happens after the story runs? Life goes on. Revisionist

(39:41):
History is produced by mil La Belle and Jacob Smith,
with Camille Baptista, Stephanie Daniel, and Cilmara Martinez wife. Our
editor is Julia Barton. Flawn Williams is our engineer. Original
music by Luis Guera. Special thanks to Andy Bowers and
Jacob Weisberger Panoplin. I'm Malcolm Gladwell,