In dealing with journalists, the US government often asks stories not to be run on the grounds that they could damage national security. Is there a historical case of a news story ever damaging US national security?

by urkspleen

I mean this in the sense of exposing facts, not something like the famous "yellow journalism" that goaded the US into the Spanish-American war

CptBuck

Sure. This article in the CIA's Studies in Intelligence journal gives some historical examples:

Soviet ICBM testing, 1958.

A New York Times story on 31 January 1958 reported that the United States was able to monitor the eight-hour countdown broadcasts for Soviet missile launches from Tyuratam (now Baykonur), Kazakhstan, which provided enough lead time to dispatch US aircraft to observe the splashdowns and, thus, collect data used to estimate the accuracy of the intercontinental ballistic missiles. Following publication of the article, Moscow cut the countdown broadcasts to four hours, too little time for US aircraft to reach the landing area. Occurring in the midst of the missile-gap controversy, the publication of the press item left President Eisenhower livid, according to Wayne Jackson in Allen Welsh Dulles, Director of Central Intelligence (July 1973, declassified history, Volume IV, pp. 29-31, in Record Group 263, National Archives). According to the same source, some intelligence was lost forever, and, to recoup the remainder, the US Air Force had to rebuild an Alaskan airfield at a cost of millions of dollars.

Politburo conversations, 1971.

In a 16 September 1971 column in The Washington Post, Jack Anderson wrote that US intelligence was successfully intercepting telephone conversations from limousines used by members of the Soviet Politburo in Moscow. In his book, For the President’s Eyes Only (New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 1966, p. 359), British historian Christopher Andrew says that this US collection program producing highly sensitive information ended abruptly after Anderson’s revelations.

Soviet submarine, 1975.

The Los Angeles Times published a story on 7 February 1975 that the CIA had mounted an operation to recover a sunken Soviet submarine from the Pacific Ocean floor. The New York Times ran with its own version the next day. After this story broke, Jack Anderson further publicized the secret operation on national television on 18 March. In his memoir, Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA (London: Hutchinson, 1978, pp. 413-418), former DCI William Colby wrote: “There was not a chance that we could send the Glomar [Explorer] out again on an intelligence project without risking the lives of our crew and inciting a major international incident. . . . The Glomar project stopped because it was exposed.”

The article also explains why there is a perception by some in the public that such information might not be harmful. The fact is that much of the damage to national security is done by cumulative reporting of both secret and non-secret information.

That's one of the reasons why every intelligence agency in the world, including the CIA, spend so much time doing open source intelligence gathering, very often from media reporting.