The Questionable Cost of America’s Spy Games

by Stephen Engelberg
ProPublica, Yesterday, 1:59 p.m.

There's nothing like a spy story to get the journalistic juices flowing. They have all the elements. High stakes. Betrayal. And, if you're lucky, sexual intrigue.

The true import of spy stories is more difficult for readers to weigh. The facts are invariably spooned out by intelligence agencies whose interests lie mainly in covering up their secrets and obscuring their missteps. For understandable reasons, law enforcement officials seldom disclose exactly how they came to unmask the culprits. (If the National Security Agency were taping the cell phone calls of, say, Vladimir Putin, it would probably want to hide that fact.)