WaPo’s Next Editor, an Undercover Reporter and Stolen Secrets

Incoming Washington Post editor Robert Winnett earned the moniker of “rat boy” for his reporting across London newspapers. But as he’s set to take the helm of the storied D.C. newsroom later this year, the one where Woodward and Bernstein changed history by breaking Watergate, the shady methods he used to secure some of those scoops may come back to haunt him.

They included placing a reporter undercover in a government department where she removed official secrets which Winnett used to break stories. The reporter was arrested and could have been jailed.

Winnett was a reporter at The Sunday Times, a paper he joined in 1995 while still a student at Oxford. One of his colleagues at the time was David Leppard who, according to former Guardian reporter Nick Davies’ 2008 book Flat Earth News, tried to land the juiciest stories for Fleet Street through any means necessary.

Read more at The Daily Beast.