Secret Finger-Pointing over Danny Pearl's Death

What did the Wall Street Journal know about Daniel Pearl, and when did it know it?

For weeks during the ordeal of Pearl's captivity -- and the uncertainty about whether he was dead or alive -- Wall Street Journal senior editors privately debated amongst themselves whether they somehow had put Pearl in harm's way. And not in any general, existential sense, but whether the paper's controversial decision to hand over an al Qaeda laptop computer to the Department of Defense and the CIA late last year had blown back on them.

Journal editors have never made public their doubts about their handling of the laptop affair, which was lost in the avalanche of concern and publicity over Pearl's abduction. Instead, Journal editors have publicly avoided connecting the fate of Pearl with their handling of the laptop. Yet there remains within the Journal a concern that sharing a source of data with the U.S. government contributed to the dangers Pearl faced.

To be sure, the Islamic militants who seized and murdered Pearl may have chosen him at random. They may never have read the Wall Street Journal or known anything about the paper's stance towards assisting the government in a time of war. But Journal editors worried about this possibility, though they avoided raising it in their public pleas for Pearl's release.

The Journal's worries stemmed from a chance purchase of a laptop computer by Alan Cullison, a foreign correspondent for the paper. Cullison, who ordinarily works out of the Moscow bureau, purchased a laptop in Kabul from a computer dealer late last year when his own laptop broke. The laptop turned out to contain many al Qaeda files on its hard-drive -- files describing plans and movements of terrorists.

Cullison's instincts -- and that of his boss, Andrew Higgins, the Journal's Moscow bureau chief -- was to run with what seemed like a tremendous exclusive. But they were overruled by Paul Steiger, the paper's managing editor, who decided that the government should be privy to the information some weeks prior to the Journal's readers. At Steiger's insistence -- and over the objections of Higgins, a Pulitzer Prize winner -- the Journal turned the laptop over to the Department of Defense and the CIA, ostensibly to receive help in interpreting the information. But they also did it -- as the Journal's foreign editor pointedly declared to the New York Times two days before Pearl's abduction -- to assist in the war on terrorism.

U.S. officials later confirmed that they widely distributed the contents of the laptop files to numerous government agencies. But when the Journal published its own stories -- two front page articles -- it failed to tell readers that it first shared the contents of the laptop with the government. Only when the New York Times prepared an article on this departure from standard practice did the Journal come clean. Steiger defended sharing the laptop in an interview with the New York Times. "In moral terms, we would have been devastated if we had withheld information that could have saved the lives of our servicemen or of civilians," he said.

What about Danny Pearl's life? Could the laptop affair have contributed to his death? Could al Qaeda have sought revenge on the Journal for becoming -- at least in this instance -- an informal arm of the government?

Andrew Higgins, who co-wrote the laptop stories with Cullison, dismisses the possibility that al Qaeda targeted the Journal for revenge. He also says that no Journal editor ever raised the possibility that Cullison was in danger if he stayed in Afghanistan after the publication of the first article, which appeared on Dec. 31. Higgins says the Journal neither asked Cullison to leave Afghanistan for his own safety nor did Cullison fear for his safety.