Associated Press
The Associated Press announced Tuesday that two former reporters and an editor won the Anthony Shadid Award for Journalism Ethics for the December story about an American missing in Iran.
Reporters Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo, and editor Ted Bridis, won for their report in December on the disappearance of Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent who went missing while working in Iran in 2007.
The award was announced Tuesday by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Journalism Ethics. It is named for Anthony Shadid, a graduate and former Associated Press reporter who died in 2012 while reporting in Syria for The New York Times.
According to the AP, reporters first linked Levinson to the CIA in 2010, but held off on publishing the story “because the U.S. government said it was pursuing promising leads to bring Levinson home.”
From Goldman and Apuzzo’s original story, “The CIA paid Robert Levinson’s family $2.5 million to head off a revealing lawsuit. Three veteran analysts were forced out of the agency and seven others were disciplined.”
The U.S. publicly has described Levinson as a private citizen.
“Robert Levinson went missing during a business trip to Kish Island, Iran,” the White House said last month.
That was just a cover story. In an extraordinary breach of the most basic CIA rules, a team of analysts — with no authority to run spy operations — paid Levinson to gather intelligence from some of the world’s darkest corners. He vanished while investigating the Iranian regime for the U.S. government.
Apuzzo now works for The New York Times and Goldman works for The Washington Post.
Correction: An earlier version of this story included one reference to the FBI instead of the CIA.
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