For insurance, Weiss added a kicker: he reminded his editor friend of the case of a former Times columnist who for many years had been helpful to the CIA. The problem, Weiss observed, was the fact that the agency had continued to use journalists for cover in operations, even when there was an executive order nominally forbidding them from doing so. The wisest course, Weiss said, would be for the two of them to meet privately with the director of Central Intelligence—and the president, too, if it came to that—and demand that the rules be changed so that a journalist would never again be subject to the intolerable risks and temptations that had destroyed Eric Truell’s career.

The Times editor called back a day later to say that he had talked with his publisher. The Times agreed that the Truell story involved sensitive national-security issues, and that it was probably best handled by internal disciplinary action at the Mirror. That was the end of it. The Times story died. Weiss called me on the phone to let me know. He was so pleased with himself. “I saved your ass,” he said. “I got the Times so tied up in knots they won’t be able to piss for a week.” Nothing pleased Weiss more than outsmarting the Times. For that moment, he was the meanest, toughest dog on the block.

I was happy for the paper, though it didn’t do me much good. The rumor circulating in New York and Washington was that I had been fired for plagiarizing material from the French press while I was a correspondent in Paris, and that Weiss had only recently discovered it. I suspected Weiss himself had set the rumor in motion. It deflected attention from my real transgressions—for which Weiss himself arguably bore some responsibility—while ensuring that I would never work for a major newspaper again.

Weiss was a master player. He might have been a buccaneer in another life, or an army general. He had that essential bloody-mindedness that is part of being a leader—the ability to persuade the troops to go over the top of the trench shouting “Die, you bastards!” just for the glory of it. A Union officer wrote a memoir after the Battle of Gettysburg in which he remarked that the single most important attribute of a good officer was that he must never show fear in the sight of his troops when his unit was under fire. That commendation applied to Ed Weiss. Even after what he’d done to me, I would still have followed him into battle.