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, the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for National
Reporting in association with 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.
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 (CIA) 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.[9] In a public statement afterward,
Pincus said that the special prosecutor had dropped his demand that
Pincus reveal his source.[citation needed] 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".
