Walter Pincus


Walter Haskell Pincus is a national security journalist. He reported for The Washington Post until the end of 2015. He has won several prizes including a Polk Award in 1977, a television Emmy in 1981, and shared a 2002 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting with five other Washington Post reporters, and the 2010 Arthur Ross Media Award from the American Academy for Diplomacy. Since 2003, he has taught at Stanford University's Stanford in Washington program.

Biography

Pincus was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Jewish parents Jonas Pincus and Clare Glassman. He attended South Side High School, Rockville Centre, New York and graduated from Yale University with a B.A. in 1954. Before being drafted into the U.S. Army in 1955, where he served in the Counterintelligence Corps in Washington, D.C. from 1955–1957, he worked as a copy-boy for The New York Times. Pincus also attended Georgetown University Law Center, graduating in 2001 with a Juris Doctor degree.
In September 1954 he married Betty Meskin, with whom he has a son. In May 1965, he married his second wife Ann Witsell Terry, who is from Little Rock, Arkansas, with whom he has one daughter and two sons.

Career

After his discharge from the Army, Pincus spied on American students abroad for the Central Intelligence Agency, writing an article which appeared in the San Jose Mercury News on February 18, 1967, the headline, "How I Traveled Abroad on C.I.A. Subsidy. "I had been briefed in Washington on each of them," he wrote "None was remotely aware of CIA's interest."

Involvement in the Plame affair

In October 2003, Pincus cowrote a story for the Washington Post which described a July 12, 2003 conversation between an unnamed administration official and an unnamed Washington Post reporter. The official told the reporter that Iraq war critic Joe Wilson's wife Valerie Plame worked for the Central Intelligence Agency's nonproliferation division, and suggested that Plame had recommended her husband to investigate reports that Iraq's government had tried to buy uranium in Niger.
It later became clear that Pincus himself was the Post reporter in question. Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald issued a grand jury subpoena to Pincus on August 9, 2004, in an attempt to discover the identity of Pincus' secret informant. On August 20, 2004, the Post filed a motion to quash the subpoena, but after Pincus' source came forward to speak with investigators, Pincus gave a deposition to Fitzgerald on September 15, 2004; he recounted the 2003 conversation to Fitzgerald but still did not name the administration official. In a public statement afterward, Pincus said that the special prosecutor had dropped his demand that Pincus reveal his source. On February 12, 2007, Pincus testified in court that it was then White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, swerving off topic during an interview, who had told him of Plame's identity. Pincus was interviewed about his involvement in the Plame affair, and his refusal to identify his source, in the first episode of Frontline's "News War".

Criticism

Pincus has been criticised by other journalists, including colleagues at the Washington Post, for factual inaccuracies in his reporting and in particular for failing to adequately address inaccuracies, even in cases where he has seemingly acknowledged the errors himself.
In July 2013 Pincus wrote a highly speculative article about National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden prompting Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald to write an open letter to Pincus regarding what he described as "blatant, easily demonstrated falsehoods" including:
1) Pincus stated that I wrote an article about Poitras "for the WikiLeaks Press's blog" Pincus claimed Assange "previewed" my first NSA scoop in a Democracy Now interview a week earlier by referencing the bulk collection of telephone calls Pincus strongly implied that Snowden had worked for the NSA for less than 3 months by the time he showed up in Hong Kong with thousands of documents when, in fact, he had worked at the NSA continuously for 4 years."

Greenwald and others noted that Pincus also failed to follow standard journalistic best practice in not approaching him for comment or to fact-check his allegations which led his own colleague at the Washington Post to speculate that "Pincus was sticking up for his killer sources in the national security community" - something Pincus denied despite his widely known ties to and background in the military and intelligence communities.
Following sustained pressure from Greenwald and others the Washington Post eventually published a lengthy correction to the article.
When unionized Washington Post reporters in The Newspaper Guild withheld bylines to protest a company contract offer, Pincus refused to join his fellow reporters and allowed his byline to be published.

Honors and awards

Pincus has won several newspaper prizes including the 1961 Page One award for magazine reporting in The Reporter, the George Polk Award in 1977 for stories in the Washington Post exposing the neutron warhead, a television Emmy for writing on the 1981 CBS News documentary series, "Defense of the United States", and in 1999 he was awarded the first Stewart Alsop Award given by the Association of Foreign Intelligence Officers for his coverage of national security affairs. In 2002 he was one of six Washington Post reporters who won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, and in 2010 the Arthur Ross Media Award from the American Academy for Diplomacy.