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What Were Editors & Execs at Dutton & Penguin Thinking?/Part III

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A few new developments with No Easy Day, the book on the Bin Laden raid by the ex-Navy Seal, whose pseudonymous cover of Mark Owen was blown by FOX News in the early days of this controversy:

  • Owen will have his first, and maybe only, broadcast interview tonight, on 60 Minutes. According to the book’s publicist at Dutton “security concerns” will make it impossible for him to do more media, at least for now. (Though his real name is being used in most media, I will not name him on this blog.) Update: I watched the 60M interview and will write about it more length later on.
  • The NY Daily News reports that the Navy Seal foundation to which Mark Owen has claimed he’ll donate proceeds from his book has announced they will refuse any money from him.
  • The Pentagon pushed back against what seemed to me a ludicrous claim made by Owen’s attorney Robert Luskin, that the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) Owen signed with the Navy didn’t require him to have the manuscript vetted by the government, and that the NDA only “invited” him to do so. Reuters’ Mark Hosenball reports that a Pentagon spokesman told reporters the former Navy SEAL’s actions appear “to potentially violate his obligation not to disclose ‘the contents of such preparation to any person not authorized to have access to SCI (Sensitive Compartmented Information) until I have received written authorization from the Department or Agency that last authorized my access to SCI that such disclosure was permitted.'”

Hosenball adds that the spokesman said this was a passage from “a standard Pentagon secrecy agreement which . . . was ‘identical’ to one [the author] had signed.” The spokesman pointed out “a paragraph in the secrecy agreement in which the signer acknowledges that the purpose of a pre-publication review was ‘to give the United States a reasonable opportunity to determine’ if any manuscript contained any sensitive classified information.” He highlighted a third section paragraph “which said that if the person signing the agreement was “uncertain about the classification status of information” they were “required to confirm from an authorized official that the information is unclassified before disclos[ing] it.”

In earlier posts, here (1) and here (2), I had written that editors and executives at Dutton and Penguin messed up badly by seemingly just accepting the opinion of an attorney hired by the author, who said that the manuscript did not disclose classified information. This shortcut meant the book went to press without complete vetting.

Even though No Easy Day has been on sale since September 4, the Pentagon has since ruled that the author’s in “material breach and violation of the non-disclosure agreements,” and that his book contains “classified” information, and they may still take legal action against the author. They had earlier warned him about possible seizure of “royalties, remunerations, and emoluments.” Penguin could also suffer a loss to its reputation or even financially, having brought out a book deemed harmful to national security. As I wrote in my first post on this situation, Penguin already had plenty of trouble with the Department of Justice, in the ebook agency pricing lawsuit, they could’ve done without this additional legal problem.

Reuters concludes its report: “Dutton said the review by the ‘former special operations attorney’ concluded the contents of No Easy Day were ‘without risk to national security.’ The publisher has not released further details regarding who reviewed the manuscript.”

I find this statement hard to believe, and so have a handful of questions:

1) Was Dutton on such a crash production schedule that they failed to build in adequate time for government review, and so decided to wing it with the one attorney? 2) Or, were Owen’s editors inexperienced and incurious and so failed to ask him if he had signed an NDA? 3) Did they know he’d signed one, but never read it? 4) Did Owen’s reported animus toward the Navy over his discharge from the service motivate him to bypass the vetting, and leave them little time to review the book? 5) Was Dutton hopeful that the whole flap would draw the Pentagon’s condemnation and provide them with a lot of free publicity?

I will close by saying that if anyone reading this blog believes they know what happened in the editing of Owen’s manuscript–why vetting was limited to the lone attorney–or has other information relevant to this story, I would like to hear from you through the contact button at the top of this website.
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What Were Editors & Execs at Dutton & Penguin Thinking?/Part II

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Because I’ve edited & published a number national security books* containing sensitive information that ended up being vetted by government agencies before publication, I’ve been following the ‘No Easy Day’ situation carefully. Yesterday I shared a blog post, questioning how Dutton and Penguin could’ve been so careless in seemingly just accepting the pseudonymous ex-Navy Seal author Mark Owen’s claim that a lawyer he’d hired had said his manuscript didn’t breach any disclosure rules. If that is what happened–and there’s a lot of murk here so one can’t be sure–that’s not the way publishing houses are supposed to deal with these books.

Today, another shoe dropped on the author. According to Bloomberg News, at a press conference today, chief Pentagon spox George Little told reporters, “Sensitive and classified information is contained in the book.” It was a judgment I’ve been waiting to hear rendered since last Friday when it was revealed the Pentagon had sent the author a letter, saying his book may have violated national security. I guess they took the weekend to read it.

Another nugget in the Bloomberg article is that the author’s attorney–Robert Luskin, defense attorney for Karl Rove in the Valerie Plame matter–claims his client’s agreement with the Navy merely “invites but by no means requires” him to provide his manuscript for vetting, that he’s not obliged to do so. Doesn’t sound like any non-disclosure agreement I’ve ever heard of.

While the Pentagon warning about possible seizure of “royalties, remunerations, and emoluments” has been directed to the author, Penguin could also suffer, having heedlessly brought out an unvetted book deemed harmful to nat’l security, and then being forced to pull it from distribution, or even defy the government. More from the Bloomberg story on the Pentagon press conference.

In response to reporters’ questions today, Little gradually toughened his statements, first saying the book contains “sensitive” information, and then saying it “probably” contains “classified” information before saying the Defense Department believes classified information is in the book and finally that it does contain such information. The Pentagon has consulted the Department of Justice about the book while reviewing all legal options, Little has said. “It is the height of irresponsibility not to have this kind of material checked for the possible disclosure” of classified information, Little said today. The need for a pre-publication review is “a no-brainer,” Little said. “This is common sense.”

*Among these national security books have been The Politics of Truth–A Diplomat’s Memoir: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity (Carroll & Graf, 2004) by Ambassador Joseph Wilson. For his book, which came out more than a year before his wife Valerie Plame brought out hers (with Simon & Schuster), Joe asked the State Dept. to vet it, even though it had been a number of years since his retirement from the diplomatic corps. Another title, mentioned in yesterday’s post, was On the Brink: An Insider’s Account of How the White House Compromised American Intelligence by Tyler Drumheller, former chief of CIA clandestine operations, Europe.
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What Were Editors & Executives at Dutton & Penguin Thinking?

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This post has been updated. New material in bold.

For more than a week I’ve been following coverage of the forthcoming book, No Easy Day, by the pseudonymous Mark Owen and a co-author, supposedly detailing the undercover mission Owen was part of that led to the death of Osama Bin Laden. While it seems that Penguin is going ahead with publication Sept. 4–and news organizations have been reporting on the book’s contents, after purchasing copies ahead of the official on-sale date–I am pretty much flabbergasted that editors and executives at Dutton, the Penguin division bringing out the book, evidently allowed the book to go to press even though the author had failed to submit the manuscript for the vetting required under his non-disclosure agreements with the military.

Reporter Husna Haq writes in the Christian Science Monitor, “According to the terms of Bissonnette’s non-disclosure agreements, he would have to submit any manuscript for pre-publication review and obtain permission before publishing it. . . . The book was not vetted by government agencies prior to publication. Disclosure of classified information is a crime and the US government may be entitled to all ‘royalties, remunerations, and emoluments’ from [the author]’s disclosures, the [Pentagon] letter warned.” To be clear, the Pentagon’s letter was addressed to the author, and not to his publisher. He stands to lose the most from all this, but if the Pentagon does rule in the next week that the book’s disclosures go beyond what he was entitled to reveal, and that they’re harmful to national security, Penguin will be under some pressure to cease distribution of the book. If they defy the government after that, they run some risk too, at least to their reputation, and maybe financially, as well.*

Eli Lake in the Daily Beast/Newsweek reports that a “spokeswoman for . . .  Dutton, said the book was vetted by a former special-operations attorney provided to the publishing house by the author. It was not, however, reviewed by the military, according to Pentagon spokesmen.”

This is really lame. So staff at Dutton decided to just accept the author’s representation that everything with the ms. was okay because he had shown it to an attorney of his own choosing who gave it a pass? If that is what happened, and multiple news accounts indicate it did, this was truly amateurish.

In my years editing and publishing topical nonfiction, I had a number of sensitive books that required careful handling with government agencies. One of them was On the Brink: An Insider’s Account of How the White House Compromised American Intelligence by Tyler Drumheller, former chief of CIA clandestine operations, Europe. Well in advance of publication in 2006, the author submitted the ms. to the agency’s Publications Review Board. After they read it, a two-way communication ensued and we edited the final ms. to accomodate their concerns. We didn’t necessarily like that this was necessary, but that was really beside the point. It had to be done, and it was. I should add, however, that even though the book was by implication and inference critical of the Bush administration, none of the edits requested had anything to do with political sensitivities; it was entirely about operations and maintaining security.

Let me make clear, so that there’s no doubt here. I’m not ‘siding’ with the government–I’m an editor and publisher by temperament and experience. I’m for information being shared as freely and openly as possible. But when an author has a prior legal agreement with any agency–be it governmental, corporate, or just between himself and another individual–as a publishing house you can’t just blunder forward, with some stupid ‘let the chips fall where they may’ attitude. The risks of non-compliance are too great.

Penguin/Dutton may get their big launch date this Tuesday, but they also may have sown an enormous hassle for themselves by failing to ensure that their author had had his manuscript properly vetted. I’d dare say Penguin has enough troubles with the Department of Justice right now, in the ebook agency pricing lawsuit, they didn’t need this one too.

* H/t Mike Shatzkin who suggested a helpful revision to this paragraph, clarifying that it’s the author who has the most exposure to the Pentagon’s claims. I had an email exchange with another publishing friend, who, feeling waggish, said maybe Dutton and Penguin planned all this, to get the book maximum publicity. Friends on Facebook, where I shared the first version of this piece have said the same thing. But I can’t conceive this is correct, though that may show my own risk-aversion and lack of imagination. I think the editing and publishing broke down and shows incompetence. Weirdly, publicity and sales of the book may even be fueled by the controversy, at least for a while, but if this has been a deliberate strategy, it seems a crazy, high-risk way of going about it all.

* H/t Mike Shatzkin who suggested a helpful revision to this paragraph, clarifying that it’s the author who has the most exposure to the Pentagon’s claims. I had an email exchange with another publishing friend, who, feeling waggish, said maybe Dutton and Penguin planned all this, to get the book maximum publicity. Friends on Facebook, where I shared the first version of this piece have said the same thing. But I can’t conceive this is correct, though that may show my own risk-aversion and lack of imagination. I think the editing and publishing broke down and shows incompetence. Weirdly, publicity and sales of the book may even be fueled by the controversy, at least for a while, but if this has been a deliberate strategy, it seems a crazy, high-risk way of going about it all.

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