Via Christy Hardin Smith, Jeff Stein of CQ Politics has a must-read article of a prominent American journalist being eavesdropped by the government. Below is a lengthy excerpt of the piece, which leaves me very concerned about the ability of Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell to ensure that the intelligence community follows the law when it comes to spying on Americans.

U.S. intelligence tapped the telephone calls of Lawrence Wright, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower, starting in 2002…

The encounter came, mind you, amid the constant assurances from the Bush administration that the U.S. has not, and is not, “spying on Americans” or running a “warrantless domestic spying program.”
“Totally untrue!” McConnell told Wright, insisting that the conversations of American citizens with no connections to terrorists would be immediately discarded. U.S. intelligence is after al Qaeda, McConnell and others have repeatedly pledged, not innocent Americans.

“I’m telling you,” the former Air Force general said, “if you’re in the United States you have to have a warrant. Authorized by the court. Period!”

But Wright then told McConnell he had a more-than-professional interest in electronic surveillance.

“Let me make a disclosure,” he told the spy boss. “I have been monitored.”

One of his intelligence sources had revealed to him that he had “read a summary of a telephone conversation that I had from my home with a source in Egypt.”

McConnell said the eavesdropping must have been triggered by getting a call “from some telephone number that’s associated with some known outfit.”

The journalist, however, had originated the call.

What happened next bears repeating, not just because it has gone largely unreported, but because it’s the kind of encounter many more Americans can expect if they end up as a target of our distressingly sloppy — some would say incompetent — counterterrorism agencies, if Congress extends a law (PL 110-55) enacted last August, that expanded the government’s electronic surveillance authority….

In 2002 Wright was visited by two FBI agents after placing calls in the course of researching The Looming Tower, his Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the rise of al Qaeda and U.S. responses to it, as well as an article on al Qaeda’s number two leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

“They were members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force,” he recounted. “They wanted to know about phone calls made to a solicitor in England” who was upset that I was talking to some of her clients, who were jihadis, former members of Zawahiri’s terror organization in Egypt, and they wanted to know what we were talking about.”

What startled him, however, was that the visiting gumshoes thought that his daughter, Caroline, had made the calls.

“Our understanding is that these calls were placed by Caroline Wright,” they said.

But Wright’s daughter was off at college at the time. He now worries that “she’s now on the link chart as an al Qaeda connection.”…

Wright confronted McConnell with the FBI visit.

“Her name is not on any of our phones,’ he said, “so how did her name arise?”

“I don’t know,” the spy boss said.

“That troubles me,” Wright responded.

“It may be troublesome,” McConnell said. “It may not be. You don’t know.”

You can read the whole article at CQ Politics.

Cross posted at the CREDO Blog.