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[Jon Levatte]

Thephoto above is the writing desk of novelist Charles Dickens. I took the shot a number of years ago in London when I visited his historic home. That photo has inspired me ever since because of what it represents. We know him mostly for writing 15 novels (10 are longer than 800 pages), but he also wrote plays, essays, magazine articles, letters, and individual stories. It was an incredible level of productivity, but it only happened because he created the atmosphere he needed for his best work. He wanted quiet, so he installed a double door to keep out the noise, moved his desk next to a window, had his favorite writing tools nearby, and perhaps most importantly, he showed up on a regular schedule.

While I believe that everyone is creative, the truth is that real breakthrough creativity is rare because it takes work, skill, and courage. However, many pursue it, and as a result, there are thousands of websites, social media feeds, books, and other resources on creativity. From my perspective, Charles Dickens understood the greatest secret for breakthrough creativity.

Bundled against the freezing wind, my lawyers and I were about to reach the courthouse door when two news photographers launched into a perp-walk shoot. As a reporter, I had witnessed this classic scene dozens of times, watching in bemusement from the sidelines while frenetic photographers and TV crews did their business. I never thought I would be the perp, facing those whirring cameras.

As I walked past the photographers into the courthouse that morning in January 2015, I saw a group of reporters, some of whom I knew personally. They were here to cover my case, and now they were waiting and watching me. I felt isolated and alone.

My case was part of a broader crackdown on reporters and whistleblowers that had begun during the presidency of George W. Bush and continued far more aggressively under the Obama administration, which had already prosecuted more leak cases than all previous administrations combined. Obama officials seemed determined to use criminal leak investigations to limit reporting on national security. But the crackdown on leaks only applied to low-level dissenters; top officials caught up in leak investigations, like former CIA Director David Petraeus, were still treated with kid gloves.

I was worried, but I felt certain that the hearing would somehow complete the long, strange arc I had been living as a national security investigative reporter for the past 20 years. As I took the stand, I thought about how I had ended up here, how much press freedom had been lost, and how drastically the job of national security reporting had changed in the post-9/11 era.

I started covering the CIA in 1995. The Cold War was over, the CIA was downsizing, and CIA officer Aldrich Ames had just been unmasked as a Russian spy. A whole generation of senior CIA officials was leaving Langley. Many wanted to talk.

I was the first reporter many of them had ever met. As they emerged from their insular lives at the CIA, they had little concept of what information would be considered newsworthy. So I decided to show more patience with sources than I ever had before. I had to learn to listen and let them talk about whatever interested them. They had fascinating stories to tell.

As part of my legal case, my lawyers filed Freedom of Information Act requests with several government agencies seeking documents those agencies had about me. All the agencies refused to provide any documents related to my current leak case, but eventually the FBI began to turn over reams of documents about old leak investigations that had been conducted years earlier on other stories I had written. I was stunned to learn of them.

When I called the CIA for comment, then-CIA Director George Tenet called me back personally to ask me not to run the story. He told me the disclosure would threaten the safety of the CIA officers in Afghanistan. I agreed.

My experience with that story and subsequent ones made me much less willing to go along with later government requests to hold or kill stories. And that ultimately set me on a collision course with the editors at the New York Times, who were still quite willing to cooperate with the government.

In March 2003, I flew to Dubai to interview a very nervous man. It had taken weeks of negotiations, through a series of intermediaries, to arrange our meeting. We agreed on a luxury hotel in Dubai, the modern capital of Middle Eastern intrigue.

But it was worth it. He told me the story of how Qatar had given sanctuary to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in the 1990s, when he was wanted in connection with a plot to blow up American airliners. Qatari officials had given KSM a government job and then had apparently warned him when the FBI and CIA were closing in, allowing him to escape to Afghanistan, where he joined forces with bin Laden and became the mastermind behind the 9/11 plot.

I was later able to confirm the story, which was especially significant because Qatar was home to the forward headquarters of U.S. Central Command, the military command in charge of the invasion of Iraq.

That spring, just as the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq began, I called the CIA for comment on a story about a harebrained CIA operation to turn over nuclear blueprints to Iran. The idea was that the CIA would give the Iranians flawed blueprints, and Tehran would use them to build a bomb that would turn out to be a dud.

The problem was with the execution of the secret plan. The CIA had taken Russian nuclear blueprints it had obtained from a defector and then had American scientists riddle them with flaws. The CIA then asked another Russian to approach the Iranians. He was supposed to pretend to be trying to sell the documents to the highest bidder.

But the design flaws in the blueprints were obvious. The Russian who was supposed to hand them over feared that the Iranians would quickly recognize the errors, and that he would be in trouble. To protect himself when he dropped off the documents at an Iranian mission in Vienna, he included a letter warning that the designs had problems. So the Iranians received the nuclear blueprints and were also warned to look for the embedded flaws.

Several CIA officials believed that the operation had either been mismanaged or at least failed to achieve its goals. By May 2003, I confirmed the story through a number of sources, wrote up a draft, and called the CIA public affairs office for comment.

The next day, Abramson and I went to the West Wing of the White House to meet with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. In her office, just down the hall from the Oval Office, we sat across from Rice and George Tenet, the CIA director, along with two of their aides.

Rice stared straight at me. I had received information so sensitive that I had an obligation to forget about the story, destroy my notes, and never make another phone call to discuss the matter with anyone, she said. She told Abramson and me that the New York Times should never publish the story.

Just after Abramson and I met with Tenet and Rice, the Jayson Blair scandal erupted, forcing Raines into an intense battle to save his job. Blair may have been the immediate cause of the crisis, but among the staff at the Times, Blair was merely the trigger that allowed resentment that had built up against Raines over his management style to come out into the open.

Without thinking about the long-term consequences, many in the media cheered Fitzgerald on, urging him to aggressively go after top Bush administration officials to find out who was the source of the leak. Anti-Bush liberals saw the Plame case and the Fitzgerald leak investigation as a proxy fight over the war in Iraq, rather than as a potential threat to press freedom.

Fitzgerald, an Inspector Javert-like prosecutor whose special counsel status meant that no one at the Justice Department could rein him in, started subpoenaing reporters all over Washington and demanding they testify before a grand jury.

In the spring of 2004, just as the Plame case was heating up and starting to change the dynamics between the government and the press, I met with a source who told me cryptically that there was something really big and really secret going on inside the government. It was the biggest secret the source had ever heard. But it was something the source was too nervous to discuss with me. A new fear of aggressive leak investigations was filtering down. I decided to stay in touch with the source and raise the issue again.

The source told me that the NSA had been wiretapping Americans without search warrants, without court approval. The NSA was also collecting the phone and email records of millions of Americans. The operation had been authorized by the president. The Bush administration was engaged in a massive domestic spying program that was probably illegal and unconstitutional, and only a handful of carefully selected people in the government knew about it.

The NSA had lived by strict rules against domestic spying for 30 years, ever since the Church Committee investigations of intelligence abuses in the 1970s had led to a series of reforms. One reform measure, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, made it illegal for the NSA to eavesdrop on Americans without the approval of a secret FISA court. My source had just revealed to me that the Bush administration was secretly ignoring the law requiring search warrants from the FISA court.

As I worked to find more people to talk to about the story, I realized that the reporter sitting next to me in the Washington bureau, Eric Lichtblau, was hearing similar things. Lichtblau covered the Justice Department. When he first came to the paper in 2002, I had been jealous of his abilities as a reporter, especially his success at developing sources. I sometimes let my resentment get the better of me; I recall one meeting with Abramson in which I was openly dismissive of an exclusive story Lichtblau was working on. But he never held it against me, and we struck up a friendship and started working on stories together.

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