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It's been three years since The New York Times first broke the news of the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program, based on information provided by an anonymous source.

Today the identity of the Times' Deep Throat is finally revealed to be a 56-year-old former prosecutor in the Justice Department named Thomas Tamm, whose "passion for justice" led him to make a fateful call to the Times one day in 2004 from a phone booth in a Washington, D.C., subway station.

The information is reported in a fascinating tale published not by the Times, but by Newsweek.

Newsweek describes how Tamm discovered the secret program and agonized about what to do before finally making the call to reporter Eric Lichtblau at the Times. It also details the depression and constant fear he's faced since then, knowing that he could be arrested any day and charged with a felony for revealing classified information.

Tamm was not the Times' only source, but was the first to come forward with news of the surveillance program. He was motivated by a need to do what was "right," and was stunned that someone higher up than him didn't speak up about the program. Tamm thought Congress and the public should know about the spying to debate its lawfulness. He was also motivated by anger over the administration's introduction of the controversial "enhanced" interrogation methods of prisoners at Guantanamo and elsewhere.

He hails from a family of high-ranking FBI officials (his father and uncle were top aides to former FBI leader J. Edgar Hoover; his brother was an FBI agent and investigator for the 9/11 Commission), and he held a Top Secret/SCI clearance at the Justice Department's Office of Intelligence Policy and Review, where he was tasked with processing national security wiretaps in cases targeting suspected spies and terrorists.

That's where he learned that some wiretap requests never made it to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for review and approval. Instead, he discovered, they went straight to Attorney General John Ashcroft and the FISA court's chief judge. These requests, he learned, related to something that people in his office called simply "the program."

Tamm told Times reporters Eric Lichtblau and James Risen about the program's existence, but provided no operational details because he didn't know how the program worked. Those details were provided to the Times by other sources.

Some revelations from the piece:

These days Tamm is self-employed as a sometimes-public defender, and is struggling with $30,000 in debt. He suffers from depression and waits in anguish to find out what will happen to him. A Justice Department prosecutor has told his lawyer that the department will wait to decide whether to prosecute him until the Obama administration takes office.

As* Newsweek* notes, the case presents a dilemma for Obama and his new attorney general, Eric Holder, since both condemned the warrantless wiretapping program when it came to light and now will have to decide whether Tamm is a hero or a traitor.





