"I doubt that the NYT is more capable of learning our secrets than any intelligence gathering group."

It's not a secret to most intelligent gathering groups and it's pretty obvious that these terrorist groups don't have much skill in gathering intel. I mean all they needed to do was read history and they would knew that flying planes into the World Trade Center was a very bad idea. They also would known that America isn't a paper tiger- it never was. America does have tendency to avoid war. We do have the tendency to "appear" like a paper tiger. Many people have said that America should aviod appearing like a paper tiger- because there clowns in power who keep on making this error that we are actually a paper tiger.

And it's not as though NYT are particular good at finding intel, but they get lots of walkin- people come to them to give information. There are number reasons why people in intelligence area, or in Administration, or in Congress will expose state secrets.

It's very easy to tell these secrets to American newspaper- this one reason why all the conspiracies theories are 99.99% of time are bullshit. It's very tough to keep secrets and probably impossible if they were actually something not in the Americans interest to keep a secret. Whereas it would nearly impossible for someone to tell these secret directly to the terrorists- though could fairly easily do so via the internet, but the person doing this would obtain little benefit from doing this, nor would this source be a trustable source for the terrorists. And that person could tracked down and wouldn't have the NYT protecting it. And if put on trial would most likely spent decades in prison or simply be executed.
If you tell the NYT, there many benefits, and even if caught at worse you might serve little bit of time in prison or simply lose your job- and could re-hired immediately, and actually given more money working for the NYT- or "writing your story".