“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 government for the U.S.” After years of sitting on the story, AP shares the details of a CIA spy mission gone wrong, and the scandal that followed: American missing in Iran was on unapproved mission.

+ By this morning, a lot of major newspapers followed AP’s lead and released their own versions of this story. Here’s the AP on why they decided to publish this story now.