Jack Shafer

When Washington bureaucracies rumble, they often avoid directly savaging one another by using the press as proxies. By leaking selectively to news outlets they believe will give them the most sympathetic hearing, they hope to shape the news by making it. The strategy doesn’t always work. Sock puppetry revolts good reporters and some bad ones, too, because they know carrying tainted water for a source today may stain their reputations tomorrow.

The Benghazi story hasn’t turned any reporters into absolute dummies—yet—but as the tag-team match of blame being played by the White House, the State Department, a congressional committee, and the CIA escalates–and with the Romney campaign eager to pounce on anything that makes the administration look bad–don’t be surprised if unnamed sources start spinning the facts in a self-serving manner.

You shouldn’t feel bad if you’re confused about Benghazi and have no idea who should be sacked for not doing his job: Press accounts and comments from President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have all congealed into one murky, confusing stew. Now, clarity has arrived in a new ultra-narrative given yesterday to Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, the New York Times, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and others, sourced to a “senior administration official,” “senior intelligence officials,” “a senior American intelligence official,” “a senior U.S. intelligence official,” and “U.S. intelligence officials,” respectively.

It’s hard to believe these officials  are anyone other than CIA brass, something Ignatius’s column said quite literally when it was first posted with a headline reading, “CIA Offers Detailed Account of Attack in Libya.” Later, that headline was swapped out with the more generic “U.S. Offers Detailed Account of Attack in Libya,” as this screenshot tweeted by Jeremy Scahill attests.

In the time line put out by the CIA, the agency essentially takes the blame for the deaths of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi on Sept. 11. But it also takes credit for the rescue of 30-plus other U.S. officials. The Journal reports:

Every leak of classified information benefits somebody. With maybe one exception, I’d say that the recent sluice of leaks that has opened up and been reported in the press benefits you.

Let me explain. Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan recently theorized that the press disclosures about U.S. cyberattacks against Iran and about American drone warfare were leaked by the White House to portray Barack Obama as a decisive wartime president to aid in his re-election. That an administration might leak national security information for political advantage is no fantasy: In 2006, the Los Angeles Times documented several examples of President George W. Bush’s administration leaking classified material to change public sentiment in his favor.

But Noonan’s reductionist thinking fails to explain last month’s messy leak in the underwear bomber plot. That particular leak blew a double agent’s cover, endangering the agent’s life and benefiting the White House in no way.

Every leaker of information has an agenda. The leaker can be an honest whistleblower, a spinner, a junior Machiavelli, a nut job, a misinformed flunky or a combination of several of the above. But with every trickle of privileged information, the leaker invites other interested parties to leak their side of the story, setting institutions against institutions and publications against publications.

An extraordinarily well documented account of battling leaks appears in Marigold: The Lost Chance for Peace in Vietnam, a new book by George Washington University history professor James G. Hershberg. Professor Hershberg’s exhaustive book – and by exhaustive I mean 936 pages long – draws on declassified diplomatic cables, foreign archives, countless interviews, and reporters’ private notes to recount the breakdown of secret Polish-Italian efforts in 1966 – code-named “Marigold” – that hoped to coax the United States and North Vietnam into direct peace negotiations.

Like all history lessons, Marigold charges a high price for admission. If you’re not already a student of the Vietnam War or weren’t reading newspapers in the 1960s, the players will sound sketchy and the dispute ephemeral. But I promise a payoff: Marigold etches a template that can provide relief for today’s news consumers who find themselves perplexed by dueling accounts in competing publications. It teaches that sometimes the real news is often who is leaking, and that’s news that can’t often be found in newspapers.