The Fed Who Blew the Whistle

The next few weeks were excruciating. Tamm says he consulted with an old law-school friend, Gene Karpinski, then the executive director of a public-interest lobbying group. He asked about reporters who might be willing to pursue a story that involved wrongdoing in a national-security program, but didn't tell him any details. (Karpinski, who has been questioned by the FBI and has hired a lawyer, declined to comment.) Tamm says he initially considered contacting Seymour Hersh, the investigative reporter for The New Yorker, but didn't know where to reach him. He'd also noticed some strong stories by Eric Lichtblau, the New York Times reporter who covered the Justice Department—and with a few Google searches tracked down his phone number.

Tamm at this point had transferred out of OIPR at his own initiative, and moved into a new job at the U.S. Attorney's Office. He says he "hated" the desk work at OIPR and was eager to get back into the courtroom prosecuting cases. His new offices were just above Washington's Judiciary Square Metro stop. When he went to make the call to the Times, Tamm said, "My whole body was shaking." Tamm described himself to Lichtblau as a "former" Justice employee and called himself "Mark," his middle name. He said he had some information that was best discussed in person. He and Lichtblau arranged to meet for coffee at Olsson's, a now shuttered bookstore near the Justice Department. After Tamm hung up the phone, he was struck by the consequences of what he had just done. "Oh, my God," he thought. "I can't talk to anybody about this." An even more terrifying question ran through his mind. He thought back to his days at the capital-case squad and wondered if disclosing information about a classified program could earn him the death penalty.

In his book, "Bush's Law: The Remaking of American Justice," Lichtblau writes that he first got a whiff of the NSA surveillance program during the spring of 2004 when he got a cold call from a "walk-in" source who was "agitated about something going on in the intelligence community." Lichtblau wrote that his source was wary at first. The source did not know precisely what was going on—he was, in fact, maddeningly vague, the reporter wrote. But after they got together for a few meetings ("usually at a bookstore or coffee shops in the shadows of Washington's power corridors") his source's "credibility and his bona fides became clear and his angst appeared sincere." The source told him of turmoil within the Justice Department concerning counterterrorism operations and the FISA court. "Whatever is going on, there's even talk Ashcroft could be indicted," the source told Lichtblau, according to his book.

Tamm grew frustrated when the story did not immediately appear. He was hoping, he says, that Lichtblau and his partner Risen (with whom he also met) would figure out on their own what the program was really all about and break it before the 2004 election. He was, by this time, "pissed off" at the Bush administration, he says. He contributed $300 to the Democratic National Committee in September 2004, according to campaign finance records.

It wasn't until more than a year later that the paper's executive editor, Bill Keller, rejecting a personal appeal and warning by President Bush, gave the story a green light. (Bush had warned "there'll be blood on your hands" if another attack were to occur.) BUSH LETS U.S. SPY ON CALLERS WITHOUT COURTS, read the headline in the paper's Dec. 16, 2005, edition. The story—which the Times said relied on "nearly a dozen current and former officials"—had immediate repercussions. Democrats, including the then Sen. Barack Obama, denounced the Bush administration for violating the FISA law and demanded hearings. James Robertson, one of the judges on the FISA court, resigned. And on Dec. 30, the Justice Department announced that it was launching a criminal investigation to determine who had leaked to the Times.

Not long afterward, Tamm says, he started getting phone calls at his office from Jason Lawless, the hard-charging FBI agent in charge of the case. The calls at first seemed routine. Lawless was simply calling everybody who had worked at OIPR to find out what they knew. But Tamm ducked the calls; he knew that the surest way to get in trouble in such situations was to lie to an FBI agent. Still, he grew increasingly nervous. The calls continued. Finally, one day, Lawless got him on the phone. "This will just take a few minutes," Lawless said, according to Tamm's account. But Tamm told the agent that he didn't want to be interviewed—and he later hired a lawyer. (The FBI said that Lawless would have no comment.)

In the months that followed, Tamm learned he was in even more trouble. He suspected the FBI had accessed his former computer at OIPR and recovered the e-mail he had sent to Wilkinson. The agents tracked her down and questioned her about her conversations with Tamm. By this time, Tamm was in the depths of depression. He says he had trouble concentrating on his work at the U.S. Attorney's Office and ignored some e-mails from one of his supervisors. He was accused of botching a drug case. By mutual agreement, he resigned in late 2006. He was out of a job and squarely in the sights of the FBI. Nevertheless, he began blogging about the Justice Department for liberal Web sites.

Early on the morning of Aug. 1, 2007, 18 FBI agents—some of them wearing black flak jackets and carrying guns—showed up unannounced at Tamm's redbrick colonial home in Potomac, Md., with a search warrant. While his wife, wearing her pajamas, watched in horror, the agents marched into the house, seized Tamm's desktop computer, his children's laptops, his private papers, some of his books (including one about Deep Throat) and his family Christmas-card list. Terry Tamm, the lawyer's college-age son, was asleep at the time and awoke to find FBI agents entering his bedroom. He was escorted downstairs, where, he says, the agents arranged him, his younger sister and his mother around the kitchen table and questioned them about their father. (Thomas Tamm had left earlier that morning to drive his younger son to summer school and to see a doctor about a shoulder problem.) "They asked me questions like 'Are there any secret rooms or compartments in the house'?" recalls Terry. "Or did we have a safe? They asked us if any New York Times reporters had been to the house. We had no idea why any of this was happening." Tamm says he had never told his wife and family about what he had done.