Throughout his career that stretched from the beginning to the end of the Cold War, Ben Bradlee made countless decisions on when and whether to report on military or national security matters.

		Bradlee, seen here entering France, continues to label national security as a "real big problem for journalists."

But even as he reflects on the issue, he still labels it a "real big problem for journalists, because no journalist worth his salt wants to endanger the national security."

The quandary for most reporters and editors stem from discerning, according to Bradlee, the difference between matters of national security versus reporting that may jeopardize the job security of the source.

Additionally, the balancing act that editors must strike as they tackle material that at least the government considers of a sensitive nature is a topic up for constant discussion.

After the CIA dismissed a senior official over the disclosure of secret agency prisons and other matters that some in the agency considered suspect, but the administration intended to keep out of the public arena, Scott Armstrong, an investigative journalist and executive director of Information Trust, outlined the tenuous situation many journalists find themselves in when dealing the national security.

"What determines it is the value to the public. What the news value is, is what the public needs to be informed about. It's weighed against questions that might damage the national security, and there is careful deliberation given," Armstrong told the Newshour in late 2005. "But it is basically the fact that the public needs to understand what is done in its name, in secret, as well as what is done in the public."

For Bradlee, who retired some 15 years before the current CIA security dustup, the story that captured the complexity of the issue was the Ivy Bells.

Ivy Bells was a code name for a surveillance system developed by the United States to monitor and record Soviet communications. In reality it was a bell-shaped contraption that American authorities lowered onto the Russian communication cables that ran along the floor of the ocean. For years the "bells" yielded vital information as the Cold War raged.

Bob Woodward of The Washington Post learned of the existence of the program and went to Bradlee to discuss it. Given the sensitive nature of the program and that fact it was ongoing, the Post took a pass on the story, choosing to err on the side of caution.

Then one day they got word the bell was gone.

"The last I heard it was still on display in Moscow," Bradlee wryly told Jim Lehrer in a recent conversation.

The Soviets had learned of Ivy Bells not from the Post, but from a low-level Pentagon employee, Ronald Pelton. Pelton had leaked the information to the Russians in 1980 when he was making $12/hour.

The Americans learned of the leak and caught Pelton, putting him on trial for espionage in 1985.

Once the Soviets were fully aware of the program, though, Bradlee and Woodward decided they could proceed with the story. But when word of their story reached the CIA and the White House, the phones at the Post started ringing.

Then-CIA Director Bill Casey traveled to the Post to tell Bradlee that publishing the Bells story would compromise national security and could give "aid and comfort to the enemy." Bradlee chafed at the criticism, pointing out that the Soviets would learn nothing new from the article.

		Bradlee and Post publisher Katherin Graham leave a courthouse after winning a victory in the Pentagon Papers case where the Nixon White House tried to claim national security to stop the paper's work.

"The White House got involved and called me and Woodward over," Bradlee recalled some 20 years later. "They said, you know, we're going to prosecute you, Section 18, blah blah blah. We had developed a rule that if anybody really threatened you like that... you'd withhold it for 24 hours and then run it.

"So we waited 24 hours and they persuaded us to wait for another 24 hours. And damned if it wasn't on NBC News the second night. Now, they didn't do much with it, because they didn't know as much as we did. But it was an example of just, you know, I think an excess of caution on our part that cost us the story."

The Post ran the story two days after the NBC News piece ran and just as the Pelton trial was getting underway. Pelton was convicted of spying less than a month later and sentenced to three life sentences plus 10 years for his role in helping the Soviets learn of the program.

In the end, Bradlee summed up the lessons of the Ivy Bells case in his 1995 autobiography, "A Good Life."

Much has changed since Ivy Bells. As officials and reporters grapple with the war on terror, many contend that security of the nation should more often than not trump the freedom to know about the programs used to combat terrorism.

"I think that the electronic surveillance story, though, illustrates something that's very new in the U.S., which is that since 9/11, we now have conflicts between important security issues and important issues of civil liberties and publishing that we didn't really face in many ways during the Cold War. In the last 30 years or so of the Cold War we got used to having security dealt with abroad and liberties, pretty much all that any modern society could have, we have here at home," James Woolsey, former CIA director said in a December 2005 NewsHour report.

"9/11 changed that. We now have things that conflict between liberty and security that we wish didn't. And these are hard calls."

But for Bradlee, the issue comes down to going with your gut. "I think the right instinct is when you're in doubt, pay attention to [the doubt]," he told Jim Lehrer.

-- Compiled by Lee Banville for the Online NewsHour