From the late 1990s until very recently, James Ryzen was a national intelligence reporter for the New York Times, a Pulitzer-winning sleuth who focused his sleuthing, mainly on the CIA.

Maybe his most famous story, reported along with colleague Eric Lishblow, revealing the George W. Bush administration's

massive wireless surveillance program, is one the New York Times waited 13 months to run. It was also a

story with extraordinary ramifications for the public, the law, the security state, the practice of

journalism, and Risen's own life.

But that narrative cannot be separated from events that preceded it,

from tectonic geopolitical ones to Risen's pesky habit of unearthing embarrassing secrets.

In a recent piece in The Intercept, where he now works,

Risen revisits the conflict, the intrigue, the lies, the institutional failures surrounding

that 2005 bombshell, and the fraught but occasionally symbiotic relationship between the

secret keepers and the secret revealers.

It's a cautionary tale and a complicated one, worth exploring in depth, so we called

Risen last week and asked him to begin at the beginning, and that begins with the ritual

tantrums from spy agencies and the Congress in the wake of any big

intelligence scoop.

The government would not really ever crack down on leaks. They would announce that they were

really upset about a story, or they would call you and get really angry and yell at you.

There certainly weren't big prosecutions. Leak investigators went through the motions and inquiries never really went anywhere.

I think in exchange, there was an understanding in the press that when there was a sensitive story

that involved highly classified information, the editors and the reporters would go to the government and get their comment.

And then if the government had concerns about certain parts of those stories, the editors and the reporters were willing to negotiate with the government on what to keep out and what to print.

And that informal, mutually beneficial arrangement served him well. For a time, over the years,

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