“That seems kind of strange, that the same story from the same source could win you a prize or get you fired, but I’ll take your word for it. The answer is, I don’t know who gave it to him. The only thing I really know is what I just told you. I doubt the organization has any details—they usually don’t know anything that anyone would really care about—but I can try to find out. As I told you before, I remain on the exalted badge table, so I have a license to prowl. And there’s the real stuff—Special Intelligence—though that would be a tad difficult to obtain in this case, since Mr. Bowman is what the lawyers call a ‘U.S. person.’ But I can see what’s gettable. How would that be?”

I thought for a moment: How would that be, if Rupert Cohen prowled around the intelligence community at my request, looking for information about one of my colleagues? Not good, but what was the alternative? I felt an obligation to get as much information as I could, and then tell somebody at the paper about it.

“Do it,” I said. “But be careful, and don’t tell anyone what you’re doing. If this goes wrong, I could get in serious trouble.”

I heard from Rupert two days later. He rang me at the office and told me to call him back at a number in McLean in fifteen minutes from a pay phone. I went downstairs to Connecticut Avenue. It was a cold February day; freezing rain was falling, coating the streets and sidewalks with ice. It was miserable; even the panhandlers and sidewalk vendors had disappeared. I slipped and slid up to the Farragut North metro entrance at L Street and went downstairs to one of the phones in the Food Court. The place smelled like French fries. I dialed the number Rupert had given me.

“Listen up!” he said. “Here’s the scoop, obtained with some difficulty by your intrepid colleague who had to explain more than once why he was browsing in this particular section of the local library.”

“I’m listening,” I said.

“The organization opened a 201 file on your esteemed colleague in the late 1960s, when he was covering the Vietnam war. Like many of your brethren in those bygone days, he met occasionally with LA officers. Your colleague passed along the kind of information journalists know: political gossip, speculation about people’s needs and vulnerabilities. He probably didn’t even realize what he was doing. He was an ‘unwitting asset,’ as we like to say. Which meant that when the LA officer finished a nice boozy lunch with Bowman at the Majestic, he’d run back and make notes of everything and send a cable back home. Just like journalists do. Ha! But I’m getting off the track.