Need a challenge? Try covering intelligence issues as a journalist. Like other beats in journalism, you are heavily reliant upon getting people to talk to you, in addition to any other detective work you can manage on your own. But unlike other beats, you are focusing on topics in which many people are actively trying to deny you information, or even steer you in the wrong direction.

The tug of war between governments and journalists over what information will be made public comes out most clearly in intelligence matters. The journalists want to be the first to let the public know what is going on, while the government wants to protect intelligence sources and methods.

When The New York Times exposed the government’s surveillance of U.S. citizens without obtaining warrants in 2005, then-President Bush was visibly unhappy and said the sources of the report had committed a “shameful act.”

But we have also seen just recently how The New York Times also agreed to a White House request for a delay in publishing its story on the capture of Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. For more information, check out this very interesting interview from the BBC.

I recently went to a book signing by Shane Harris, who wrote The Watchers: The Rise of America’s Surveillance State. He compared the challenge of uncovering truth and fact in the intelligence world with being asked to write a review of a play that is being performed in a theater which never raises its curtains.

“You hear footsteps behind the curtain, you hear people moving around, [and] you catch snatches of muffled dialogue,” he said, adding perhaps there will be a brief glimpse behind the curtain or someone involved in the production will whisper some information about the plot in your ear.

But that person is often followed by an official who says, “I know somebody just came out and told you what they thought was going on behind the curtain. That’s not what is going on at all. We’re not going to talk about what’s going on behind the curtain,” Harris said in his analogy.

As intelligence reporters, we are “constantly grabbing these fragments of a story where we can and then going back … and trying to fashion them into a mosaic in a narrative,” he said.

But, conversely, chroniclers like himself “often see the totality of a narrative that even the people in the play behind the curtain don’t always see.” He related how he once went to intelligence committee staff at the U.S. Congress to confirm bits of information he had gleaned from private and government sources. “Stop asking us these questions,” they told him. “Clearly, you know more about this story than we do.”

Suppose you were working on an article like the Mullah Baradar capture and were told by your government to delay it or to not publish it at all. Where would your “red lines” be in that type of scenario?