From W.N.Y.C. in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone. A few weeks ago, we offered an anatomy of an historic 40-year-old scoop, the uncovering of the Mili Massacre.

This week, we present a more recent one. In December of 2005, the New York Times published an article disclosing the existence

of the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program, earning Eric Leishblow and James

Reisen a Pulitzer Prize.

Leishblow's new book, Bush's Law, The Remaking of American Justice,

lays out how he got that story and how the White House tried to squelch it.

The story only increased the enmity of the government's law enforcement agencies toward Lishblow.

Once he had fans in the Justice Department,

so much so that he was even invited to private, no press-allowed, pick-up games of basketball with Attorney General John Ashcroft. But after his front-page story on the FBI's monitoring of

anti-war groups in 2003, his press pass at the Justice Department suddenly stopped working,

and an internal memo was sent to all of the FBI's field offices instructing officials to freeze him out.

Eric, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

So here you have this really lousy relationship with the Justice Department and you lay out the tail of getting extremely vague tips about what turned out to be the NSA warrantless wiretapping program.

And you suggest that the vagueness and the secrecy of your source, your unnamed source, was in fact inspired by all the president's men's depiction of deep throat.

Right. Like the famous credo from all the president's men, you know, follow the money.

They had seen that a few times and thought that they could just sort of tell reporters to go after a hot story and the reporters would ultimately get the story.

It doesn't always work that way.

Sources were describing programs that perhaps they only saw a sliver of and did not know the full picture.

And a lot of times we were just sort of left scratching our heads trying to figure out what we were really looking at here.

So it's 2002. You're at the New York Times. And in the bureau, you're seated across from fellow reporter James Risen. And the person who sat you there said that they were sorry.

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