A simple majority in either chamber would be sufficient to change the present system of CIA oversight. As much as the agency wants to keep its activities secret, it would have little choice but to comply with serious congressional demands for more information and more supervision. The power of the purse gives the legislative branch the means to enforce its will on a reluctant CIA, and even one house standing alone could use this power as a control mechanism. That is, assuming that Congress is willing to accept the responsibility.
CIA and the Press
In a recent interview, a nationally syndicated columnist with close ties to the CIA was asked how he would have reacted in 1961 if he had uncovered advance information that the agency was going to launch the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. He replied somewhat wistfully, "The trouble with the establishment is that I would have gone to one of my friends in the government, and he would have told me why I shouldn't write the story. And I probably wouldn't have written the story."
It was rather fitting that this columnist, when queried about exposing a CIA operation, should have put his answer in terms of the "establishment" (of which he is a recognized member), since much of what the American people have learned-or have not learned-about the agency has been filtered through an "old-boy network" of journalists friendly to the CIA. There have been exceptions, but, by and large, the CIA has attempted to discourage, alter, and even suppress independent investigative inquiries into agency activities.
The CIA's principal technique for fending off the press has been to wrap itself in the mantle of "national security." Reporters have been extremely reluctant to write anything that might endanger an ongoing operation or, in Tom Wicker's words, "get an agent killed in Timbuktu." The CIA has, for its part, played upon these completely understandable fears and used them as a club to convince newsmen that certain stories should never be written. And many reporters do not even have to be convinced, either because they already believe that the CIA's activities are not the kind of news that the public has a right to know or because in a particular case they approve of the agency's aims and methods.
For example, on September 23, 1970, syndicated columnist Charles Bartlett was handed, by a Washington-based official of ITT, an internal ITT report sent in by the company's two representatives in Chile, Hal Hendrix and Robert Berrellez. This eight-page document-marked PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL -- said that the American ambassador to Chile had received the "green light to move in the name of President Nixon ... [with] maximum authority to do all possible-short of a Dominican Republic-type action-to keep Allende from taking power." It stated that the Chilean army "has been assured full material and financial assistance by the U.S. military establishment" and that ITT had "pledged [its financial] support if needed" to the anti-Allende forces. The document also included a lengthy rundown of the political situation in Chile.
With the material for an expose in his hands, Bartlett did not launch an immediate investigation. Instead, he did exactly what ITT hoped he would do: he wrote a column about the dangers of a "classic Communist-style assumption of power" in Chile. He did see some hope that "Chile will find a way to avert the inauguration of Salvador Allende," but thought there was little the United States could "profitably do" and that "Chilean politics should be left to the Chileans." He did not inform his readers that he had documentary evidence indicating that Chilean politics were being left to the CIA and ITT.
Asked why he did not write more, Bartlett replied in a 1973 telephone interview, "I was only interested in the political analysis. I didn't take seriously the Washington stuff-the description of machinations within the U.S. government. [The ITT men who wrote the report] had not been in Washington; they had been in Chile." Yet, by Bartlett's own admission, his September 28 column was based on the lIT report-in places, to the point of paraphrase. He wrote about several incidents occurring in Chile that he could not possibly have verified in Washington. Most reporters will not use material of this sort unless they can check it out with an independent source, so Bartlett was showing extraordinary faith in the reliability of his informants. But he used their material selectively -to write an anti-Allende scare piece, not to blow the whistle on the CIA and ITT.
An ITT official gave the same report to Time's Pentagon correspondent, John Mulliken. Mulliken covered neither the CIA nor Chile as part of his regular beat, and he sent the ITT document to Time's headquarters in New York for possible action. As far as he knows, Time never followed up on the story. He attributes this to "bureaucratic stupidity-the system, not the people." He explains that Time had shortly before done a long article on Chile, and New York "didn't want to do any more."
Thus, the public did not learn what the U.S. government and ITT were up to in Chile until the spring of 1972, when columnist Jack Anderson published scores of ITT internal documents concerning Chile. Included in the Anderson papers, as one of the most important exhibits, was the very same document that had been given eighteen months earlier to Bartlett and Time magazine.
Jack Anderson is very much a maverick among Washington journalists, and he will write about nearly anything he learns-and can confirm-about the U.S. government and the CIA. With a few other notable exceptions, however, the great majority of the American press corps has tended to stay away from topics concerning the agency's operations. One of the reasons for this is that the CIA, being an extremely secretive organization, is a very hard beat to cover. Newsmen are denied access to its heavily guarded buildings, except in tightly controlled circumstances. No media outlet in the country has ever assigned a full-time correspondent to the agency, and very few report on its activities even on a part-time basis. Except in cases where the CIA wants to leak some information, almost all CIA personnel avoid any contact whatsoever with journalists. In fact, agency policy decrees that employees must inform their superiors immediately of any and all conversations with reporters, and the ordinary operator who has too many of these conversations tends to become suspect in the eyes of his co-workers.
For the general view in the CIA (as in some other parts of the federal government) is that the press is potentially an enemy force -albeit one that can be used with great success to serve the agency's purposes. Former Deputy Director for Intelligence Robert Amory was speaking for most of his colleagues when in a February 26, 1967, television interview he said that press disclosures of agency funding of the National Student Association and other private groups were "a commentary on the immaturity of our society." With the pronounced Anglophile bias and envy of Britain's Official Secrets Act so common among high CIA officials, he compared the situation to our "free motherland in England," where if a similar situation comes up, "everybody shushes up in the interest of their national security and . . . what they think is the interest of the free world civilization."
Former CIA official William J. Barnds* was even more critical of journalistic probes of the agency in a January 1969 article in the influential quarterly Foreign Affairs:
The disclosure of intelligence activities in the press in recent years is a clear national liability. These disclosures have created a public awareness that the U.S. government has, at least at times, resorted to covert operations in inappropriate situations, failed to maintain secrecy and failed to review ongoing operations adequately. The public revelations of those weaknesses, even though they are now partially corrected, hampers CIA (and the U.S. government) by limiting those willing to cooperate with it and its activities. As long as such disclosures remain in the public mind, any official effort to improve CIA's image is as likely to backfire as to succeed.
Barnd's admission that the CIA has certain weaknesses is unusual coming from a former (or present) agency official, but very few in the CIA would disagree with his statement that press stories about intelligence operations are a "national liability."
The CIA's concern about how to deal with reporters and how to use the press to best advantage dates back to the agency's beginnings. During the 1950s the agency was extremely wary of any formal relations with the media, and the standard answer to press inquiries was that the CIA "does not confirm or deny published reports."
To be sure, there was a CIA press office, but it was not a very important part of the agency's organization. To CIA insiders, its principal function seemed to be to clip newspaper articles about the CIA and to forward them to the interested component of the agency. The press office was largely bypassed by Director Allen Dulles and a few of his chief aides who maintained contact with certain influential reporters.
Dulles often met his "friends" of the press on a background basis, and he and his Clandestine Services chief, Frank Wisner, were extremely interested in getting across to the American people the danger posed to the country by international communism. They stressed the CIA's role in combating the communist threat, and Dulles liked to brag, after the fact, about successful agency operations. The reporters who saw him were generally fascinated by his war stories of the intelligence trade. Wisner was particularly concerned with publicizing anti-communist emigre groups (many of which were subsidized or organized by the CIA), and he often encouraged reporters to write about their activities.
According to an ex-CIA official who worked closely with Wisner, the refugees from the "captive nations" were used by the CIA to give credence to the idea that the United States was truly interested in "rolling back the Iron Curtain." This same former CIA man recalls Dulles and Wisner frequently telling subordinates, in effect: "Try to do a better job in influencing the press through friendly intermediaries."
Nevertheless, the agency's press relations during the Dulles era were generally low-keyed. Reporters were not inclined to write unfavorable or revealing stories about the CIA, and the agency, for its part, received a good deal of useful information from friendly newsmen. Reporters like Joseph Alsop, Drew Pearson, Harrison Salisbury, and scores of others regularly sat down with CIA experts to be debriefed after they returned from foreign travels. These newsmen in no way worked for the agency, but they were glad to provide the incidental information that a traveler might have observed, such as the number of smokestacks on a factory or the intensity of traffic on a railroad line. The Washington bureau chief of a large newspaper remembers being asked, after he returned from Eastern Europe, "to fill in the little pieces which might fit into the jigsaw puzzle." This type of data was quite important to the intelligence analyst in the days before the technical espionage programs could supply the same information. The agency's Intelligence Directorate routinely conducted these debriefings of reporters, as it does today. Selected newsmen, however, participated in a second kind of debriefing conducted by the Clandestine Services. In these the emphasis was on the personalities of the foreign officials encountered by the newsmen (as part of the unending probe for vulnerabilities) and the operation of the internal-security systems in the countries visited.
At the same time the CIA was debriefing newsmen, it was looking for possible recruits in the press corps or hoping to place a CIA operator under "deep cover" with a reputable media outlet. The identities of these bogus "reporters" were (and are) closely guarded secrets. As late as November 1973, according to Oswald Johnston's Washington Star-News report (confirmed by other papers), there were still about forty full-time reporters and free-lancers on the CIA payroll. Johnston reported that CIA Director Colby had decided to cut the "five full-time staff correspondents with general-circulation news organizations," but that the other thirty-five or so "stringers" and workers for trade publications would be retained. American correspondents often have much broader entree to foreign societies than do officials of the local American embassy, which provides most CIA operators with their cover, and the agency simply has been unable to resist the temptation to penetrate the press corps, although the major media outlets have almost all refused to cooperate with the CIA.
William Attwood, now publisher of Newsday, remembers vividly that when he was foreign editor of Look during the 1950s a CIA representative approached him and asked if Look needed a correspondent in New Delhi. The agency offered to supply the man for the job and pay his salary. Attwood turned the agency down.
Clifton Daniel, former managing editor of the New York Times and now that paper's Washington bureau chief, states that in the late 1950s "I was very surprised to learn that a correspondent of an obscure newspaper in an obscure part of the world was a CIA man. That bothered me." Daniel promptly checked the ranks of Times reporters for similar agency connections, but found "there did not seem to be any." He believes that one reason why the Times was clean was that "our people knew they would be fired" if they worked for the agency.
In 1955 Sam Jaffe applied for a job with CBS News. While he was waiting for his application to be processed, a CIA official whom Jaffe identifies as Jerry Rubins visited his house in California and told him, "If you are willing to work for us, you are going to Moscow" with CBS. Jaffe was flabbergasted, since he did not even know at that point if CBS would hire him, and he assumes that someone at CBS must have been in on the arrangement or otherwise the agency would never have known he had applied for work. Moreover, it would have been highly unusual to send a new young reporter to such an important overseas post. Rubins told Jaffe that the agency was "willing to release certain top-secret information to you in order that you try and obtain certain information for us." Jaffe refused and was later hired by CBS for a domestic assignment.
Before the CIA's successful armed invasion of Guatemala in 1954, a Time reporter dropped off the staff to participate, by his own admission, in the agency's paramilitary operations in that country. After the Guatemalan government had been overthrown, he returned to the Time offices in New York and asked for his old job back. According to another Time staffer, the managing editor asked the returned CIA man if he were still with the agency. The man said no. The managing editor asked, "If you were still really with the CIA and I asked you about it, what would you say?" The returned CIA man replied, "I'd have to say no." Time rehired him anyway. *
The Dulles years ended with two disasters for the CIA that newspapers learned of in advance but refused to share fully with their readers. First came the shooting down of the U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union in 1960. Chalmers Roberts, long the Washington Post's diplomatic correspondent, confirms in his book First Rough Draft that he and "some other newsmen" knew about the U-2 flights in the late 1950s and "remained silent." Roberts explains, "Retrospectively, it seems a close question as to whether this was the right decision, but I think it probably was. We took the position that the national interest came before the story because we knew the United States very much needed to discover the secrets of Soviet missilery."
Most reporters at the time would have agreed with Richard Bissell that premature disclosure would have forced the Soviets "to take action." Yet Bissell admitted that "after five days" the Soviets were fully aware that the spy planes were overflying their country, and that the secrecy maintained by the Soviet and American governments was an example "of two hostile governments collaborating to keep operations secret from the general public on both sides."
The whole U-2 incident may well have been a watershed event. For much of the American press and public it was the first indication that their government lied, and it was the opening wedge in what would grow during the Vietnam years into the "credibility gap." But as the Eisenhower administration came to an end, there was still a national consensus that the fight against communism justified virtually any means. The press was very much a part of the consensus, and this did not start to crack until it became known that the CIA was organizing an armed invasion of Cuba.
Five months before the landing took place at the Bay of Pigs, the Nation published a secondhand account of the agency's efforts to train Cuban exiles for attacks against Cuba and called upon "all U.S. news media with correspondents in Guatemala," where the invaders were being trained, to check out the story. The New York Times responded on January 10, 1961, with an article describing the training, with U.S. assistance, of an anti-Castro force in Guatemala. At the end of the story, which mentioned neither the CIA nor a possible invasion, was a charge by the Cuban Foreign Minister that the U.S. government was preparing "mercenaries" in Guatemala and Florida for military action against Cuba. Turner Catledge, then the managing editor of the Times, declared in his book My Life and The Times: "I don't think that anyone who read the story would have doubted that something was in the wind, that the United States was deeply involved, or that the New York Times was onto the story."
As the date for the invasion approached, the New Republic obtained a comprehensive account of the preparations for the operation, but the liberal magazine's editor-in-chief, Gilbert Harrison, became wary of the security implications and submitted the article to President Kennedy for his advice. Kennedy asked that it not be printed, and Harrison, a friend of the President, complied. At about the same time, New York Times reporter Tad Szulc uncovered nearly the complete story, and the Times made preparations to carry it on April 7, 1961, under a four-column headline. But Times publisher Orvil Dryfoos and Washington bureau chief James Reston both objected to the article on national-security grounds, and it was edited to eliminate all mention of CIA involvement or an "imminent" invasion. The truncated story, which mentioned only that 5,000 to 6,000 Cubans were being trained in the United States and Central America "for the liberation of Cuba," no longer merited a banner headline and was reduced to a single column on the front page. Times editor Clifton Daniel later explained that Dryfoos had ordered the story toned down "above all, [out of] concern for the safety of the men who were preparing to offer their lives on the beaches of Cuba."
Times reporter Szulc states that he was not consulted about the heavy editing of his article, and he mentions that President Kennedy made a personal appeal to publisher Dryfoos not to run the story. Yet, less than a month after the invasion, at a meeting where he was urging newspaper editors not to print security information, Kennedy was able to say to the Times' Catledge, "If you had printed more about the operation, you would have saved us from a colossal mistake."
The failure of the Bay of Pigs cost CIA Director Dulles his job, and he was succeeded in November 1961 by John McCone. McCone did little to revamp the agency's policies in dealing with the press, although the matter obviously concerned him, as became evident when he reprimanded and then transferred his press officer, who he felt had been too forthcoming with a particular reporter. In McCone's first weeks at the agency, the New York Times got wind of the fact that the CIA was training Tibetans in paramilitary techniques at an agency base in Colorado, but, according to David Wise's account in The Politics of Lying, the Office of the Secretary of Defense "pleaded" with the Times to kill the story, which it did. In the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, President Kennedy again prevailed upon the Times not to print a story -- this time, the news that Soviet missiles had been installed in Cuba, which the Times had learned of at least a day before the President made his announcement to the country. *
Then, in 1964, McCone was faced with the problem of how to deal with an upcoming book about the CIA, and his response was an attempt to do violence to the First Amendment.
The book was The Invisible Government, by reporters David Wise of the New York Herald Tribune and Thomas Ross of the Chicago Sun-Times. Their work provided an example of the kind of reporting on the agency that other journalists might have done but had failed to do. In short, it was an example of investigative reporting at its best and, perhaps as a result, it infuriated the CIA.
McCone and his deputy, Lieutenant General Marshall Carter, both personally telephoned Wise and Ross's publisher, Random House, to raise their strong objections to publication of the book. Then a CIA official offered to buy up the entire first printing of over 15,000 books. Calling this action "laughable," Random House's president, Bennett Cerf, agreed to sell the agency as many books as it wanted, but stated that additional printings would be made for the public. The agency also approached Look magazine, which had planned to run excerpts from the book, and, according to a spokesman, "asked that some changes be made-things they considered to be inaccuracies. We made a number of changes but do not consider that they were significant."
The final chapter in the agency attack against The Invisible Government came in 1965 when the CIA circulated an unattributed document on "The Soviet and Communist Bloc Defamation Campaign" to various members of Congress and the press. This long study detailed the many ways used by the KGB to discredit the CIA, including the "development and milking of Western journalists. Americans figure prominently among these." The study singled out as an example of KGB disinformation a Soviet radio broadcast that quoted directly from The Invisible Government.
The agency's message was not too subtle, but then the CIA never put its name on the document.
When Richard Helms took over the agency in 1966, press relations changed noticeably. Helms himself had been a reporter with United Press in Germany before World War II, and he thought of himself as an accomplished journalist. He would tell his subordinates, when the subject of the press came up in the agency's inner councils, that he understood reporters' problems, how their minds worked, what the CIA could and could not do with them. He had certain writing habits (which may have originated either with a strict bureau chief or a strict high-school English teacher) which set him apart from others in the clandestine part of the agency, where writing is considered a functional, as opposed to a literary, skill. For instance, he would not sign his name to any document prepared for him that included a sentence beginning with the words "however" or "therefore."
It soon became clear within the agency that Helms was intent on taking care of most of the CIA's relations with the press himself. Acutely aware that the agency's image had been badly tarnished by the Bay of Pigs and other blown operations during the early 1960s, he was determined to improve the situation. He later told a congressional committee, "In our society even a clandestine outfit cannot stray far from the norms. If we get ... the public, the press or the Congress against us, we can't hack it."
So Helms began to cultivate the press. He started a series of breakfasts, lunches, and occasional cocktail and dinner parties for individual reporters and groups of them. On days when he was entertaining a gathering of journalists, he would often devote part of his morning staff meeting to a discussion of the seating arrangements and make suggestions as to which CIA official would be the most compatible eating partner for which reporter. While a few senior clandestine personnel were invited to these affairs, Helms made sure that the majority came from the CIA's analytical and technical branches. As always, he was trying to portray the agency as a predominantly non-clandestine organization.
Helms' invitations were not for every reporter. He concentrated on what the New York Times' John Finney calls the "double-domes -the bureau chiefs, columnists, and other opinion makers." David Wise, who headed the New York Herald Tribune's Washington staff, has a similar impression: "In almost every Washington bureau, there's one guy who has access to the agency on a much higher level than the press officer. Other reporters who call up get the runaround." Finney states that Helms and his assistants would "work with flattery on the prestige of" these key journalists. CBS News' Marvin Kalb, who attended several of Helms' sessions with the press (and who was recently bugged by the Nixon administration), recalls that Helms "had the capacity for astonishing candor but told you no more than he wanted to give you. He had this marvelous way of talking, of suggesting things with his eyes. Yet, he usually didn't tell you anything."
Helms' frequent contact with reporters was not a sinister thing. He was not trying to recruit them into nefarious schemes for the CIA. Rather, he was making a concerted effort to get his and his agency's point of view across to the press and, through them, to the American public-a common activity among top government officials. Furthermore, Helms was an excellent news source-for his friends. Columnist Joseph Kraft (another Nixon-administration bugging victim) generally sums up the view of Helms by reporters who saw him frequently: "I wanted to see Helms a lot because he was talking with the top men in government. He was a good analyst -rapid, brief, and knowledgeable about what was going on." Kraft recalls that Helms was the only government official who forecast that South Vietnamese President Thieu would successfully block implementation of the Vietnamese peace accords until after the 1972 American election, and other reporters tell similar stories of Helms being among the most accurate high government sources available on matters like Soviet missiles or Chinese nuclear testing. He did not usually engage in the exaggerated talk about communist threats that so often characterizes "informed sources" in the Pentagon, and he seemed to have less of an operational ax to grind than other Washington officials.
The source of a news leak is not usually revealed in the newspapers. Yet when Helms, or any other government official, gives a "not-for-attribution" briefing to reporters, he always has a reason for doing so-which is not necessarily based on a desire to get the truth out to the American people. He may leak to promote or block a particular policy, to protect a bureaucratic flank, to launch a "trial balloon," to pass a message to a foreign government, or simply to embarrass or damage an individual. Most reporters are aware that government officials play these games; nevertheless, the CIA plays them more assiduously, since it virtually never releases any information overtly. The New York Times Washington bureau chief, Clifton Daniel, notes that although the agency issues no press releases, it leaks information "to support its own case and to serve its own purposes .... It doesn't surprise me that even secret bureaucrats would do that." Daniel says, however, that he "would accept material not-for-attribution if the past reliability of the source is good. But you have to be awfully careful that you are not being used."
In early 1968, Time magazine reporters were doing research on a cover story on the Soviet navy. According to Time's Pentagon correspondent, John Mulliken, neither the White House nor the State Department would provide information on the subject for fear of giving the Soviets the impression that the U.S. government was behind a move to play up the threat posed by the Soviet fleet. Mulliken says that, with Helms' authorization, CIA experts provided Time with virtually all the data it needed. Commenting on the incident five years later, Mulliken recalls, "I had the impression that the CIA was saying 'the hell with the others' and was taking pleasure in sticking it in." He never did find out exactly why Helms wanted that information to come out at that particular time when other government agencies did not; nor, of course, did Time's readers, who did not even know that the CIA was the source of much of the article which appeared on February 23, 1968.
From the days of Henry Luce and Allen Dulles, Time had always had. close relations with the agency. In more recent years, the magazine's chief Washington correspondent, Hugh Sidey, relates, "With McCone and Helms, we had a set-up that when the magazine was doing something on the CIA, we went to them and put it before them .... We were never misled."
Similarly, when Newsweek decided in the fall of 1971 to do a cover story on Richard Helms and "The New Espionage," the magazine, according to a Newsweek staffer, went directly to the agency for much of its information. And the article, published on November 22, 1971, generally reflected the line that Helms was trying so hard to sell: that since "the latter 1960s . . . the focus of attention and prestige within CIA" had switched from the Clandestine Services to the analysis of intelligence, and that "the vast majority of recruits are bound for" the Intelligence Directorate. This was, of course, written at a time when over two thirds of the agency's budget and personnel were devoted to covert operations and their support (roughly the same percentage as had existed for the preceding ten years). Newsweek did uncover several previously unpublished anecdotes about past covert operations (which made the CIA look good) and published at least one completely untrue statement concerning a multibillion-dollar technical espionage program. Assuming that the facts for this statement were provided by "reliable intelligence sources," it probably represented a CIA disinformation attempt designed to make the Russians believe something untrue about U.S. technical collection capabilities.
Under Helms, the CIA also continued its practice of intervening with editors and publishers to try to stop publication of books either too descriptive or too critical of the agency. In April 1972 this book -as yet unwritten-was enjoined; two months later, the number-two man in the Clandestine Services, Cord Meyer, Jr., visited the New York offices of Harper & Row, Inc., on another anti-book mission. The publisher had announced the forthcoming publication of a book by Alfred McCoy called The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, charging the agency with a certain degree of complicity in the Southeast Asian drug traffic. Meyer asked old acquaintances among Harper & Row's top management to provide him with a copy of the book's galley proofs. While the CIA obviously hoped to handle the matter informally among friends, Harper & Row asked the agency for official confirmation of its request. The CIA's General Counsel, Lawrence Houston, responded with a letter of July 5, 1972, that while the agency's intervention "in no way affects the right of a publisher to decide what to publish ... I find it difficult to believe ... that a responsible publisher would wish to be associated with an attack on our Government involving the vicious international drug traffic without at least trying to ascertain the facts." McCoy maintained that the CIA had "no legal right to review the book" and that "submitting the manuscript to the CIA for prior review is to agree to take the first step toward abandoning the First Amendment protection against prior censorship." Harper & Row apparently disagreed and made it clear to McCoy that the book would not be published unless first submitted. Rather than find a new publisher at that late date, McCoy went along. He also gave the entire story to the press, which was generally critical of the CIA.
The agency listed its objections to Harper & Row on July 28, and, in the words of the publisher's vice president and general counsel, B. Brooks Thomas, the agency's criticisms "were pretty general and we found ourselves rather underwhelmed by them." Harper & Row proceeded to publish the book-unchanged-in the middle of August.
The CIA has also used the American press more directly in its efforts against the KGB. On October 2, 1971, the week after the British government expelled 105 Soviet officials from England because of their alleged intelligence activities, the New York Times ran a front-page article by Benjamin Welles about Soviet spying around the world. Much of the information in the article came from the CIA, and it mentioned, among other things, that many of the Russians working at the United Nations were KGB operators. According to Welles, the agency specifically "fingered as a KGB man" a Russian in the U.N. press office, Vladimir P. Pavlichenko, and asked that he be mentioned in the article. Welles complied and included a paragraph of biographical information on the Russian, supplied by the CIA. Ten days later the Soviet Union made an official protest to the U.S. government about the "slanderous" reports in the American press concerning Soviet officials employed at the U.N.
The Times' charges about espionage activities of the Soviets at the U.N. were almost certainly accurate. But, as a Washington-based media executive familiar with the case states, "The truth of the charges has nothing to do with the question of whether an American newspaper should allow itself to become involved in the warfare between opposing intelligence services without giving its readers an idea of what is happening. If the CIA wants to make a public statement about a Soviet agent at the U.N. or the U.S. government wants to expel the spy for improper activities, such actions would be legitimate subjects for press coverage-but to cooperate with the agency in 'fingering' the spy, without informing the reader, is at best not straightforward reporting."
The CIA has often made communist defectors available to selected reporters so news stories can be written (and propaganda victories gained). As was mentioned earlier, most of these defectors are almost completely dependent on the CIA, and are carefully coached on what they can and cannot say. Defectors unquestionably are legitimate subjects of the press's attention, but it is unfortunate that their stories are filtered out to the American people in such controlled circumstances.
David Wise remembers an incident at the New York Herald Tribune in the mid-1960s when the CIA called the paper's top officials and arranged to have a Chinese defector made available to reporters. According to Wise, CIA officials "brought him down from Langley [for the interview] and then put him back on ice." Similarly, in 1967 the agency asked the Times' Welles to come out to CIA headquarters to talk to the Soviet defector Lieutenant Colonel Yevgeny Runge. On November 10 Welles wrote two articles based on the interview with Runge and additional material on the KBG supplied by CIA officers. But Welles also included in his piece several paragraphs discussing the CIA's motivation in making Runge available to the press. The article mentioned that at least some U.S. intelligence officials desired "to counter the international attention, much of it favorable, surrounding the Soviet Union's 50th anniversary," which was then taking place. Publicizing the defection, Welles continued, "also gave United States intelligence men a chance to focus public attention on what they consider a growing emphasis on the use of 'illegal' Soviet agents around the world."
According to Welles, these paragraphs stating, in effect, that the CIA was exploiting Runge's defection for its own purposes infuriated the agency, and he was "cut off" by his CIA sources. He experienced "long periods of coolness" and was told by friends in the agency that Helms had personally ordered that he was to be given no stories for several months.
The CIA is perfectly ready to reward its friends. Besides provision of big news breaks such as defector stories, selected reporters may receive "exclusives" on everything from U.S. government foreign policy to Soviet intentions. Hal Hendrix, described by three different Washington reporters as a known "friend" of the agency, won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1962 Miami Daily News reporting of the Cuban missile crisis. * Much of his "inside story" was truly inside: it was based on CIA leaks.
Because of the CIA's clever handling of reporters and because of the personal views held by many of those reporters and their editors, most of the American press has at least tacitly gone along, until the last few years, with the agency view that covert operations are not a proper subject for journalistic scrutiny. The credibility gap arising out of the Vietnam war, however, may well have changed the attitude of many reporters. The New York Times' Tom Wicker credits the Vietnam experience with making the press "more concerned with its fundamental duty." Now that most reporters have seen repeated examples of government lying, he believes, they are much less likely to accept CIA denials of involvement in covert operations at home and abroad. As Wicker points out, "Lots of people today would believe that the CIA overthrows governments," and most journalists no longer "believe in the sanctity of classified material." In the case of his own paper, the New York Times, Wicker feels that "the Pentagon Papers made the big difference."
The unfolding of the Watergate scandal has also opened up the agency to increased scrutiny. Reporters have dug deeply into the CIA's assistance to the White House "plumbers" and the attempts to involve the agency in the Watergate cover-up. Perhaps most important, the press has largely rejected the "national security" defense used by the White House to justify its actions. With any luck at all, the American people can look forward to learning from the news media what their government-even its secret part-is doing. As Congress abdicates its responsibility, and as the President abuses his responsibility, we have nowhere else to turn.
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Notes:
* Colby's claim that these committees were informed conflicts directly with the 1971 statements of the late Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman, Allen Ellender (quoted later in this chapter), that he knew nothing about the CIA's 36,000-man"secret" army in Laos.
** These provisions, along with Congress' practice of hiding the CIA's budget in appropriations to other government departments, may well violate the constitutional requirement that "No money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time." A legal challenge (Higgs et al. v. Helms et al.) to the CIA's secrecy in budgetary matters, based on these constitutional grounds, is currently pending in the federal court system.
* Over the last twenty-five years this body has also been called the Special Group, the 54-12 Group, and the 303 Committee. Its name has changed with new administrations or whenever its existence has become publicly known.
* In addition to Kissinger, they are currently the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, the Director of Central Intelligence, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
* Final approval for a covert-action program is normally given by the 40 Committee chairman-still Henry Kissinger, even since he has become Secretary of State. He, in turn, notifies the President of what has been decided, and if there is a matter on which the committee was in disagreement, the chief executive makes the final decision. Although the President either reviews or personally authorizes all these secret interventions in other countries' internal affairs, he never signs any documents to that effect. Instead, the onus is placed on the 40 Committee, and if he chooses, the President can "plausibly deny" he has been involved in any illegal activities overseas.
* In February 1974, the PFIAB's members in addition to Admiral Anderson were Dr. William Baker, Bell Telephone Laboratories' Vice President for Research; John Connally, former Governor of Texas and Secretary of the Navy and the Treasury; Leo Cherne, Executive Director of the Research Institute of America; Dr. John Foster, former Director of Defense Department Research and Engineering; Robert Galvin, President of Motorola; Gordon Gray, former Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs; Dr. Edwin Land, President of Polaroid; Clare Boothe Luce, former Congresswoman and ambassador; Nelson Rockefeller, former Governor of New York; and Dr. Edward Teller, nuclear physicist and "father" of the hydrogen bomb.
* (DELETED)
* Anderson's fears seemed partially justified, however, in 1971, when Mintoff precipitated a mini-crisis by expelling the N.A.T.O. commander from the island and by greatly increasing the cost to Britain of keeping its facilities there. In an incident reminiscent of Cyprus President Makarios' blackmail of U.S. intelligence several years before, the U.S. government was forced to contribute several million dollars to help the British pay the higher rent for the Maltese bases.
* Although Helms had been for many years providing current intelligence and estimates to congressional committees in secret oral briefings, the CIA officially opposed legislation introduced in 1972 by Senator John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky which would have provided the appropriate committees with the same sort of data in the form of regular CIA reports. The bill was favorably approved by the Foreign Relations Committee, but subsequently died in Armed Services. Director-designate William Colby told the latter committee in July 1973 that he thought this information could be supplied on an informal basis "without legislation."
* A relatively similar procedure is followed when an individual Senator or Congressman writes to the CIA about a covert operation. Instead of sending a letter in return, an agency representative offers to brief the legislator personally on the matter, on the condition that no staff members are present. This procedure puts the busy lawmaker at a marked disadvantage, since his staff is usually more familiar with the subject than he is -- and probably wrote the original letter.
* Seven years later, the same panel would investigate the 1971 assistance furnished by the Clandestine Services to E. Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy for their "plumbers" operations-assistance comprised of many of the same gadgets that amused the Senators in 1966.
* Barnds had been with the agency's Office of National Estimates until he joined the staff of the Council on Foreign Relations in the mid-1960s. In 1968 he was the secretary at the CFR session where Richard Bissell laid out his views on covert operations.
* More recently CIA men have turned up as "reporters" in foreign countries for little-known publications which could not possibly afford to pay their salaries without agency assistance. Stanley Karnow, formerly the Washington Post's Asian correspondent, recalls, "I remember a guy who came to Korea with no visible means of support. He was supposed to be a correspondent for a small paper in New York. In a country where it takes years to build up acquaintances, he immediately had good contacts, and he dined with the CIA station chief. It was common knowledge he worked for the agency."
• According to the Times' Max Frankel, writing in the Winter 1973 Columbia Forum, there was still a feeling that the paper had been "remiss" in withholding information on the Bay of Pigs, so the Times extracted a promise from the President that while the paper remained silent he would "shed no blood and start no war." Frankel notes that "no such bargain was ever struck again, though many officials made overtures. The essential ingredient was trust, and that was lost somewhere between Dallas and Tonkin."
* This is the same Hal Hendrix who later joined ITT and sent the memo saying President Nixon had given the "green light" for covert U.S. intervention in Chile. See p. 350 above.