The moment I entered the newsroom I sensed a buzz out among the desks—as people saw me and whispered to one another that I had arrived—and then a terrible hush. As I made my way toward Weiss’s office, the whole place seemed to stop working. It was a long distance, past so many staring faces. I was powerfully ashamed. “They’ve been looking for you!” whispered Lynn Frenzel as I rounded the foreign desk. “What did you do?” asked one of the news aides. Everybody in the newsroom seemed to know I was in some kind of trouble, and that the paper had been trying to find me for the past twenty-four hours.

“Oh my God!” said Peggy Moran when I neared Weiss’s office. “He’s here!” She called into the office for Weiss, who stuck his head out the door and thundered: “Get in here!”

I had seen Weiss angry at other people many times over the years. He had a famously explosive temper, and it was not uncommon for him, when he was truly angry, to scream at people and even throw things. I’d heard that the assistant managing editors sometimes had to hang up on him when he was shouting at them over the phone about something he didn’t like. But I had never seen Weiss angry at me.

As soon as I entered his office, he slammed the door shut. Bézy’s photographs were laid on top of his desk. Weiss’s face was red; the muscles around the sides of his eyes were twitching. He was glaring at me.

“How the fuck could you do this?” He picked up one of the photographs and waved it at me. “How, God damn it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “At the time, I thought I was doing the right thing.”

That brief response only pushed him to a higher level of fury.

“The right thing? How could working with the CIA be the right thing? Are you out of your mind? Do you have any idea how much this is going to hurt the paper? Do you know that the editor of the Times is already calling me, asking me about this god-awful mess? The right thing! Jesus Christ. You’re worse off than I thought. You are pathetic, Truell.”

“Calm down, Ed.”

“Fuck you! I want your resignation, now. The hell with that. I’m not going to let you resign. This is a firing offense. It says so in the style book. You’re fired!”

“Do you want to hear my explanation, or do you just want to scream at me?”