'Bush Fatigue' vs. 'Clinton Fatigue'

A Report on CIA Infiltration and Manipulation of the Mass Media

By Ashley Overbeck
September 1999

Should CIA agents be allowed to pose as journalists to further the aims of their clandestine activities?

Members of a Council on Foreign Relations task force on the future of U.S. intelligence in the post-Cold War world say yes, and a CIA official recently came forward to admit that the Agency already occasionally does so despite regulations barring the practice. But is this a breaking story or just the latest chapter in a spy story that traces its roots back to the 1950’s? While they may act like strangers in public, the press and the CIA have a sordid past that spans more than four decades.


The CIA-Press Connection in the 1950s and 60s

The CIA-press connection traces its roots back to the early days of the Cold War, when Allen Dulles (who became CIA director in 1953) began courting the nation’s most prestigious journalistic institutions for Agency operations. The mood of the day precluded the need for secretive infiltration, as Carl Bernstein points out in his 1977 expose on the topic. “American publishers, like so many other corporate and institutional leaders at the time, were willing to commit the resources of their companies to the struggle against global Communism,” he writes. “Accordingly, the line separating the American press corps was often indistinguishable.”

That’s not to say that reporters acted as spies in the James Bond sense. Media outlets offered services that fell into the broad categories of providing “cover” for CIA operatives (i.e. jobs and credentials) or sharing information gathered by reporters on staff.

While the Agency ran a formal training program in the 50’s that attempted to teach rank-and-file agents to be reporters, this was among the least common of the more than 400 relationships with the press described in CIA files. Most involved were journalists before their involvement with the CIA began.

Reporters, especially foreign correspondents, typically served as “eyes and ears” for the CIA. Often they were briefed by agents before a trip and debriefed when they returned; they shared their notebooks, relayed things that they had seen or overheard and offered their impressions. More complex arrangements found reporters planting misinformation for the Agency or serving as liaisons between agents and foreign contacts, often in return for information or access.

“In return for our giving them information, we’d ask them to do things that fit their roles as journalists but that they wouldn’t have thought of unless we put it in their minds,” one agent told Bernstein. “For instance, a reporter in Vienna would say to our man, ‘I met an interesting second secretary at the Czech Embassy.’ We’d say, ‘Can you get to know him? And after you get to know him, can you assess him? And then, could you put him in touch with us -- would you mind us using your apartment?’“

Another senior CIA official offered the following description of “reporting” by cooperating journalists: “We would ask them, ‘Will you do us a favor? We understand that you’re going to be in Yugoslavia. Have they paved the streets? Where did you see planes? Were there any signs of military presence? How many Soviets did you see? If you happen to meet a Soviet, get his name and spell it right.”

It was a symbiotic relationship: reporters got the scoop and the spooks got the dirt. Correspondents with Agency ties were highly valued by their bosses for the stories they brought home. And agents saw in the press a perfect vehicle for information gathering: who else besides a reporter enjoyed such free access in a foreign country, could cultivate so many sources among foreign governments and elites and ask lots of probing questions without arousing suspicion?

CIA-press operations in the 50’s and 60’s relied heavily on journalists working in Latin America and Western Europe. Members of the press were used as go-betweens to deliver messages and money to European Christian Democrats and also helped the Agency track the movements of people coming from Eastern Europe. Additionally, the CIA owned 40 percent of the Rome Daily American, a now-defunct English-language newspaper in Italy.

Reporters funneled CIA dollars to opponents of Salvador Allende in Chile and wrote anti-Allende propaganda stories for CIA proprietary publications in that country. By Bernstein’s account, two of the Agency’s most valuable relationships in the 60’s were with reporters who covered Latin America: Hal Hendrix, a Pulitzer Prize winner from the Miami News, and Jerry O’Leary of the Washington Star. CIA files on Hendrix (who went on to become a high-ranking official at ITT) detail information that he provided agents about Cuban exiles in Miami. O’Leary’s file lists him as a valued asset in both Haiti and the Dominican Republic, although he denies having a formal relationship with the Agency. “I might call them up and say something like, “Papa Doc has the clap, did you know that? and they’d put it in the file,” O’Leary told Bernstein. “I don’t consider that reporting for them. It’s useful to be friendly to them, and generally I felt friendly to them. But I think that they were more helpful to me than I was to them.”

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The Church Committee Investigation

A flurry of public attention began to cast doubts upon the ethics of a press wedded to the Central Intelligence Agency after a Washington Star-News story by Oswald Johnson reported that the CIA had three dozen American newsmen on its payroll at that time (November 1973). Then-CIA director William Colby (CFR) leaked this information to Johnson, fearing an embarrassing fallout after both the Star-News and New York Times approached him to ask if any of their staff members were receiving payments from the Agency. (A Times investigation four years later showed the number of CIA-funded journalists to be closer to 50; Bernstein’s expose in Rolling Stone that same year claimed it was more like 400.)

By now, the times they had a-changed: In a 1974 article in the Columbia Journalism Review, former reporter Stuart Loory chastised fellow journalists for their history of chumming it up with the CIA and for their lax coverage of the issue once it came to light. “There is little question that if even one American overseas carrying a press card is paid by the CIA, then all Americans with those credentials are suspect,” he wrote. “We automatically... consider Soviet and Chinese newsmen as mouthpieces and informants for their governments, while at the same time congratulating ourselves for our independence. Now we know that some of that independence has, with the stealth required of clandestine operations, been taken away from us -- or given away.”

In 1975, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence headed by Frank Church (the Church Committee) focused its attention on the Agency’s use of American news outlets. The CIA went to great lengths to curtail this part of the committee’s investigation, though, and some members of the committee later admitted that the Agency was able to get the upper hand. Colby and his successor, George Bush (CFR, TC), were able to convince the Senate that a full inquiry would cripple their intelligence-gathering capabilities and would unleash a “witch-hunt” on the nation’s reporters, editors and publishers.

“The Agency was extremely clever about it and the committee played right into its hands,” one congressional source told Carl Bernstein. “Church and some of the other members were much more interested in making headlines than in doing serious, tough investigating. The Agency pretended to be giving up a lot whenever it was asked about the flashy stuff -- assassinations and secret weapons and James Bond operations. Then, when it came to things they didn’t want to give away, that were much more important to the Agency, Colby in particular called in his chits. And the committee bought it.”

Former intelligence officer William Bader (who returned to the Agency as a deputy to Stansfield Turner) and David Aaron (who later served as deputy to President Carter’s national security advisor) supervised the committee’s investigation of the CIA-press angle. CIA director Bush balked at all of Bader’s requests for specific information about the scope of the Agency’s media activities. Under pressure from the entire committee, Bush finally agreed to pull records on journalists and have his deputies condense them into one-paragraph summaries. The Agency would not make the raw files available, and neither the names of journalists nor their affiliations would be included. More than 400 summaries were compiled (a number that officials acknowledge was probably on the low side) in an attempt to give committee members “a broad, representative picture.”

“We never pretended it was a total description of the range of activities over 25 years, or the number of journalists that have done things for us,” one official conceded. Still, even these sketchy details were enough for the committee to conclude that the CIA’s relationships with the press were of a far greater magnitude than they had expected -- and that they needed to know more.

But Bush was intransigent. Heated confrontations produced a bizarre agreement: Bader and director of the committee staff William Miller (CFR) could have access to 25 “sanitized” files from among the 400 (still without journalists’ identities). Church and committee vice-chairman John Tower would see five unsanitized files to verify that the CIA had included all but the names. No information on current CIA-press relationships would be divulged, and the whole deal was contingent upon Bader, Miller, Church and Tower’s promises not to reveal the files’ contents to the other committee members.

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The CIA and the Media

by Carl Bernstein

Rolling Stone, Oct. 20, 1977

In 1953, Joseph Alsop, then one of America?s leading syndicated columnists, went to the Philippines to cover an election. He did not go because he was asked to do so by his syndicate. He did not go because he was asked to do so by the newspapers that printed his column. He went at the request of the CIA.

Alsop is one of more than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty-five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters.

Some of these journalists? relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services -- from simple intelligence gathering to serving as go-betweens with spies in Communist countries. Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadors-without-portfolio for their country. Most were less exalted: foreign correspondents who found that their association with the Agency helped their work; stringers and freelancers who were as interested it the derring-do of the spy business as in filing articles, and, the smallest category, full-time CIA employees masquerading as journalists abroad. In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements America?s leading news organizations.

The history of the CIA?s involvement with the American press continues to be shrouded by an official policy of obfuscation and deception . . . .

Among the executives who lent their cooperation to the Agency were William Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Henry Luce of Time Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the Louisville Courier-Journal and James Copley of the Copley News Service. Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include the American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company, the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, The Miami Herald, and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald-Tribune. By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with The New York Times, CBS, and Time Inc.

... From the Agency?s perspective, there is nothing untoward in such relationships, and any ethical questions are a matter for the journalistic profession to resolve, not the intelligence community ... .

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