Ex-CIA Columnist Suspects Interference by His Former Employer

 

By Jeff Stein | June 24, 2009 11:32 PM  

 

Stephen Lee, a former CIA operations manager who blogs for The Washington Examiner, suspects the spy agency's censors are trying to sabotage his new career.

Lee recently launched the critical "Examiner Spy" column for the Examiner newspaper chain, which has a D.C. daily edition.  He also pens a biting cartoon for his own Web site, NationalSecurityDrone.com, under the name Frank Naif.

"I believe I am being subjected to a campaign of low-level harrassment," Lee said Wednesday.

As required by his CIA secrecy agreement, he submits all his columns, and even his cartoons, to the agency's Publications Review Board, or PRB, for approval.

Since the Examiner expects him to write at least four pieces a week, he said, it's essential for the censors to return his manuscripts at a swift, or at least predictable, pace.  

An Army veteran who worked in counterterrorism for the CIA, Lee said he takes pains not to mention, or even hint at, material that he knows must remain secret. 

But like virtually all ex-CIA employees who have dealt with the PRB, he is sometimes mystified by what it chooses to censor.

In a June 19 piece, "Despite reform pledges, Panetta enables CIA's bad old habits," agency censors blacked out the name an al Qaeda suspect abducted by a CIA team in Italy in 2003, plus the name of the city where the snatch occurred, and the name of the CIA station chief in Rome -- all of which have been widely reported, based on publicly available court documents and sources.

Lee reworded that piece and then it was quickly approved, he said. The same went for his next two manuscripts.

But then, he says, the PRB "lost" the next three he turned in for review.

The first was a critical piece on former CIA Director Michael V. Hayden, acidly headlined, "CIA ex-chief Hayden blames bloggers for damage caused by his policies."

Lee says he submitted the piece for clearance on Friday, June 19. The weekend passed. Finally, at mid-morning on Tuesday, June 23, he learned the PRB had "lost" it.

He resubmitted the piece, and around 4 p.m. Tuesday, he got an answer: It was cleared.

Meantime, he says, two more of his articles had gone "missing." One was about CIA-related legislation in Congress, another a criticism of CIA recruiting and training.

Both were submitted Sunday night, June 21. On Tuesday, he learned that they, too, had been "lost."

The CIA censors, he said, "apologized."

Lee resubmitted them, and over the next 48 hours, they were cleared, he says.

Spooky writers

Scores of former CIA employees write books and articles every year, but Lee, 43, is maybe the first to write a daily newspaper column. 

The late William F. Buckley founded National Review and regularly wrote opinion pieces. And  Tom Braden, who died in April, wrote a syndicated column that appeared in The Washington Post. 

Both Buckley and Braden worked for the CIA in its very early years after World War Two. Neither were career CIA employees.

Ex-CIA Middle East operative Robert Baer, who writes regularly for Time magazine, says the CIA vets some of the facts he intends to use in a column. But he says he does not give the spies an opportunity to pass judgment on his editorial opinions or analyses.

"It's never been a problem so far," says Baer, who pens withering criticism of his former employer in his books and magazine pieces. 

"They turn it around in 24 -- or if needed -- a couple of hours," he told me.

CIA spokesman George Little denied the agency was singling out Lee.

"That's not true at all," Little said. "For former CIA officers with no contractual relationship with the agency, the sole yardstick for pre-publication review is classification."

But Washington attorney Mark Zaid, who specializes in pre-publication review cases - among other gripes of current and ex-CIA employees -- told me he's seen a trend toward more censorship.

"It's far more routine now that I have to challenge the PRB's censorship actions on behalf of my clients," Zaid said in an e-mail, "and the inconsistencies in its decisions are unbelievably frustrating and often incomprehensible at times."

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