Walter Pincus
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Walter Haskell Pincus (born December 24, 1932) is a national security journalist for The Washington Post. He has won several prizes including a Polk Award in 1977, a television Emmy in 1981, and a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in association with four other Post reporters.
[edit] Career
Pincus was born in Brooklyn, NY, the son of Jonas Pincus and Clare Glassman. After graduating from Yale University in 1954, he worked as a copyboy for The New York Times. Drafted into the U.S. Army in 1955, Pincus served in the Counterintelligence Corps in Washington from 1955-1957. After his discharge, he worked at the copy desk of The Wall Street Journal's Washington edition. He left in 1959 to become Washington correspondent for three North Carolina newspapers. In 1963, he moved to the Washington Star before joining The Washington Post, where he worked from 1966 to 1969. From 1972 to 1975, he was executive editor of The New Republic. He covered the Watergate Senate hearings, the House impeachment hearings of Richard Nixon and the Watergate trial, writing articles for the magazine and op-ed pieces for The Washington Post. In 1975, he returned to the Post to write for the national staff of the newspaper.
When he resumed writing for the newspaper, he also was permitted to work as a part time consultant to NBC News and later CBS News, developing, writing or producing television segments for network evening news, magazine shows and hour documentaries.
At The Washington Post, Pincus has written about a variety of national news subjects ranging from nuclear weapons and arms control to political campaigns to the American hostages in Iran to investigations of Congress and the Exeucutive Branch. For six years he covered the Iran-contra affair. He covered the intelligence community and its problems arising out of the case of confessed spy Aldrich Ames, allegations of Chinese espionage at the nuclear weapons laboratories.
Pincus attended Georgetown Law School part-time beginning in 1995 and graduated in 2001, at the age of sixty-eight.
[edit] Involvement in the Plame affair
In October of 2003, Pincus cowrote a story for The Washington Post which described a July 12, 2003 conversation between an unnamed administration official and an unnamed Post reporter. The official told the reporter that Iraq war critic Joe Wilson's wife Valerie Plame worked for the CIA'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, 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; Pincus 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 admitted to Scooter Libby's lawyer, William Jeffress Jr, that it was former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer that told him of the identity of Valerie Plame and her job with the CIA. Pincus was interviewed about his involvement in the Plame affair, and his refusal to identify his source, in the first episode of Frontline's [1] "News War".
