Understanding U.S. Propaganda & Foreign Policy

My opinion, based on long term research, experience and critical thinking, is that past and current U.S. government foreign policy and military actions are determined by the Military Industrial Complex: the CIA, AIPAC, U.S. defense contractors and their Congressional lobbyists, U.S. State Dept., National Security Council members and Washington, D.C. area pro-war think tanks.

After World War Two Washington anti-communists soon realized they could reap great profits via U.S. military contracts by demonizing the old Soviet Union and promoting a “Soviet threat” that could destroy the United States in dozens of nuclear fireballs if Congress didn’t sufficiently fund U.S. defense contractors to “counter the Soviet threat” with a massive military buildup.

Decades later we found out that the old Soviet Union never had any intention of launching a nuclear first strike against the U.S., but Kruschev did warn the U.S. of a full retaliatory nuclear strike if the United States launched a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union.

In the fifties those American anti-Communists found themselves aligned with Israeli Zionists who also shared a dream of destroying and toppling the old Soviet Union.

CIA founder President Truman established the CIA in 1947.

President Truman perceived a great need for a U.S. President to receive daily briefings from a single intel source; thus the CIA was created by President Truman.

On November 22, 1963 President Kennedy was assassinated and 30 days later President Truman wrote an article that was published in the Washington Post detailing how Truman had intended the CIA to be an information gathering operation – not an autonomous “loose cannon.”

The CIA morphed into a rogue agency from what President Truman designed, founded and intended in 1947.

Limit CIA Role To Intelligence
by Harry S. Truman
December 22, 1963
The Washington Post, page A11

I have compiled content and information supporting a claim that the CIA

Over the past year, the Democratic Party and leading American media outlets have been monomaniacally focused on unsubstantiated allegations that the 2016 US elections were undermined by Russian interference.

It is worth considering these claims as one assesses the response to the decision of Russian officials to block Alexei Navalny from participating in the upcoming presidential election. The move has been met with self-righteous denunciations in the American and international press. Newspapers have run articles lauding Navalny as an “anti-corruption crusader” and the “democratic” face of “popular opposition” to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The Washington Post published an editorial condemning the move to bar Navalny. It declared that Navalny’s “real offenses were helping to lead opposition” to Putin’s “authoritarian” government and “bringing out tens of thousands of followers in cities across Russia this year to denounce the regime.”

The hypocrisy and cynicism here are breathtaking. While the alleged Russian “meddling” in the US elections consists of several tens of thousands of dollars in Facebook advertising, Navalny is almost entirely a creature of the US State Department.

A graduate of the Yale World Fellows Program, Navalny is listed on Yale’s website as a cofounder of the Democratic Alternative Movement, an organization shown in a leaked diplomatic cable to have received funding from the US government-backed National Endowment for Democracy, a fact it had concealed for “fear of appearing compromised by an American connection.”

The World Socialist Web Site gives no support to the Putin government’s crackdown on political opposition, but the posturing of the US press in defense of “human rights” and “democracy” is preposterous. The United States, the most unequal and undemocratic developed country in the world, the leading force for war and dictatorship worldwide, is in no position to lecture others about “democracy.”

There is no other country that intervenes in the political affairs of foreign states so directly, regularly and shamelessly as the United States. American foreign policy is one massive intervention in the politics of other countries, running the gamut from propaganda, destabilization, financing of opposition parties, electoral fraud and coups to military bombardment and occupation, all of which taken together have killed more people than any government since Nazi Germany.https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/1MGIQxPf0Ig?rel=0An appeal from David North: Donate to the WSWS todayWatch the video message from WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North.DONATE TODAY

Professor Dov Levin of Carnegie Mellon University has assembled a database documenting as many as 81 occasions between 1946 and 2000 when Washington interfered in elections in other countries. This number does not include military coups or regime-change operations following the election of candidates the US opposed, as in Iran, Congo, Guatemala, Chile and many other nations.

The intervention of the US government and President Bill Clinton personally to secure the reelection of Boris Yeltsin in the 1996 Russian election was so brazen that Time magazine featured on its July 15, 1996 cover a caricature of Yeltsin holding an American flag, accompanied by the headline “Yanks to the Rescue.”

For its part, the US electoral system—with the vast influence exerted by billionaires and corporations and the maze of antidemocratic rules that impose huge hurdles for third-party candidates—blocks the overwhelming majority of the US population from having their voices heard.

Reporting on his visit to the United States this month, the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights declared, “There is no other developed country where so many voters are disenfranchised…and where ordinary voters ultimately have so little impact on political outcomes.”

Despite substantial evidence that the entire Navalny campaign represents an effort by the US intelligence agencies to intervene in Russian politics, the US press has found a way to tie Putin’s moves against Navalny to the claim that the Kremlin is subverting American democracy.

“Even as he outlaws political competition in Russia, Mr. Putin continues to oversee attempts to undermine and tilt elections in the West,” wrote the Washington Post in its editorial. “For him, democratic contests are a vulnerability, to be avoided at home and exploited abroad. In that sense, Western governments and Russia’s democrats have a common cause in countering Mr. Putin.”

According to the intelligence agencies for which the Post is a mouthpiece, the Russian government sought to intervene in the US election by promoting third-party candidates. Last week, the Senate Intelligence Committee announced that it is investigating Jill Stein, the Green Party’s 2016 presidential candidate, on the grounds that her campaign received coverage on RT, the Russian-based TV network. This can be seen as nothing other than an effort to intimidate third parties and their supporters.

Through an incredible sleight of hand, the Post denounces the suppression of a third-party candidate in Russia while legitimizing efforts to brand supporters of the Green Party in the United States as traitors.

There is another problem with the official presentation of Navalny as the voice of popular opposition to the Russian oligarchy—the fact that he is a right-wing extremist who enjoys only marginal support among the Russian electorate.

While masking his right-wing politics behind the catchall of opposition to corruption, Navalny has a long history of extreme nationalism, connections to neo-Nazi groups, and the promotion of racist conceptions. In one YouTube video, he compares minorities within Russia to “cockroaches,” adding that while cockroaches can be killed with a slipper, for humans he recommends a pistol. During the 2008 Russian-Georgian war, Navalny repeatedly called Georgians “rodents” and demanded the eviction of all Georgians from Russia.

Writing in Salon, Danielle Ryan noted that while the US-aligned press hails Navalny as a hero, “What is reported less often about Navalny are his nationalist leanings, ties to neo-Nazi groups, xenophobic comments and extreme anti-immigrant views. References to Navalny’s nationalism in the West are usually buried or brushed off, while the headlines sing his praises.”

The State Department’s money is indeed backed up by overwhelmingly uncritical support in the US and international press. The New York Times has published 387 articles referencing Navalny, the Washington Post has published 344 and the Financial Times has run 299.

Despite the international coverage his campaign receives, and broad popular hostility to social inequality, which is almost as high in Russia as it is in the United States, Navalny has the support of just two percent of the electorate, according to a recent independent poll.

The political conflict between Putin and Navalny ultimately represents a struggle within the Russian kleptocracy, into which the United States is forcefully intervening. It is up to the working class of Russia to sweep away Putin and the oligarchy for which he speaks, not the US State Department and intelligence agencies.

E.O. 12958: DECL: 11/30/2016 TAGS: PGOV [Internal Governmental Affairs], PINR [Intelligence], PREL [External Political Relations], RS [Russia; Wrangel Islands] SUBJECT: A GUIDE TO RUSSIAN POLITICAL YOUTH GROUPS: PART 1 OF 2 REF: MOSCOW 12311 Classified By: Acting PolMin Counselor Colin Cleary: Reason 1.4(b/d) 1. (C) SUMMARY. This is part one of a two-part message describing Russian political youth groups. This cable contains a summary of the major political youth movements in Russia. Russian political youth groups can be broadly divided into two categories: grassroots organizations driven by idealism, and Kremlin-sponsored organizations aimed at marginalizing those groups and avoiding an “Orange Revolution” in Russia. The groups most likely to have an effect on Russian politics are the Movement Against Illegal Immigration (DPNI) and the Kremlin-sponsored Molodaya Gvardiya. More radical groups like the Young Bolsheviks, while small in number, get attention because of their penchant for direct action, such as storming government buildings. Russia’s youth is overwhelmingly apolitical; most youth groups are, and will likely remain, a sideshow in Russian politics. END SUMMARY. —————— Ideological Groups —————— ¶2. (U) The nationalists/skinheads, democrats, and communists are very different in their beliefs, but all possess characteristics of authentic grassroots movements. They vary widely in their organization, level of activism, and political goals. In general, the democrats strive for a place in the political firmament, the nationalists strive to influence policy, and the communists appear to be lost in the past. Nationalists and Skinheads ————————– ¶3. (U) Nationalist groups are xenophobic and rally around the slogan “Russia for Russians.” The most popular and active nationalist groups are the Movement Against Illegal Immigration (DPNI) with 2,000 members, the Russian All-People Union (RONS), the Russian National Unity (1,500 members), People’s National Party, Slavic Union, and the National Socialist Society. DPNI, led by 30 year-old Aleksandr Belov, has been growing in popularity and recognition. He figured most recently in the November 4 Russia March (reftel). Although both the federal and Moscow city governments prohibited the march, Belov assembled more than 1,000 people in Moscow. While this was only a fraction of his stated goal of 10,000, it is large in comparison with the meager crowds that other grassroots youth groups have been able to produce. ¶4. (U) Skinheads in Russia lack any formal national organization. Russian law prohibits them from distributing extremist literature, and prohibits Russian internet providers from hosting their webpages. Estimates of the number of skinheads vary. The Moscow Human Rights Bureau projects 50,000 skinheads in 85 cities in Russia. Skinheads are especially active in the Moscow suburbs (estimated 10,000), St. Petersburg (estimated 1,000), Nizhniy Novgorod, Yaroslavl, and Voronezh. Vladimir Pribylovskiy of the Panorama Information Center told us that the St. Petersburg skinheads are fewer in number but more violent than their Moscow brethren. “In Moscow, they beat up immigrants, in St. Petersburg, they murder them.” Democratic Groups —————– ¶5. (C) Youth Yabloko (300-1000 members) was created in 1995 by the Yabloko party. It works closely with the party, which provides a majority of its funding. It is led by the 23 year-old Ilya Yashin, who claims 1,000 active members in 10 different regions. Youth Yabloko holds protests, campaigns for Yabloko candidates, plans to hold a summer camp for activists with the like-minded DA!, and plans to publish a small newspaper called “Freedom Street.” While upbeat and animated, Yashin is not optimistic about the future of either the Yabloko party or himself. He will campaign in the March 2007 elections in St. Petersburg, but “if Yabloko does not win seats there, it will no longer be a political party, but just a movement.” He said that for himself, “the best-case scenario is that I’m not in jail four years from now.” ¶6. (U) Oborona (300 members) was an effort to combine the strengths of the liberal, pro-Western groups Yabloko and the Union of Rightist Forces (SPS). Oborona has been plagued by infighting and almost theological disagreements about democracy. Soon after they united, Yashin withdrew Yabloko from Oborona’s Moscow branch. SPS soon after pulled out of the St. Petersburg branch. Yashin told us that “Oborona is MOSCOW 00012709 002 OF 003 funded by oligarchs, and I don’t agree with (SPS youth leader) Koslovskiy on that.” According to Pribylovskiy, “In some places, Oborona is SPS, and in some places it is Yabloko, but it doesn’t really matter because Oborona is dying.” ¶7. (C) DA!: Mariya Gaydar, daughter of former Prime Minister Yegor Gaydar, leads DA! (Democratic Alternative). She is ardent in her promotion of democracy, but realistic about the obstacles she faces. Gaydar said that DA! is focused on non-partisan activities designed to raise political awareness. She has received funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, a fact she does not publicize for fear of appearing compromised by an American connection. She told us that DA! was a complement to Oborona, not a competitor, and is an effort to widen the democratic base. “People who would want to join Oborona would not want to join DA! and vice versa, but we work together for a common goal.” Gaydar told us that DA! was more a forum for open discussion than a political movement. She has organized a series of debates among people with controversial viewpoints. She is also planning to hold a summer camp in 2007 to train up to 2000 students in the ways of democratic activism. Communists ———- ¶8. (U) The communists are also divided. The Union of Communist Youth (SKM) (700 members), is the official youth movement of the KPRF. They claim over 500,000 members, but Pribylovskiy told us that number is misleading since every member of the KPRF under the age of 28 is automatically registered in SKM. Vasily Koltashov of SKM told us that very few SKM members are active, and those who are active often disagree with the KPRF and are attracted to other communist movements. SKM has held joint actions with other communist groups, but they have no formal association. ¶9. (U) Other communist groups are more radical than SKM. The Vanguard of the Red Youth (AKM) (500 members), the National Bolshevik Party (NBP) (1,000 members in Moscow), and the National Bolshevik Front (NBF) are the most significant. The NBP, led by Eduard Limonov, is known for direct action, such as storming government ministries. Both NBP and AKM are becoming less confrontational. In the past, AKM activists sprayed water at Gorbachev, handcuffed themselves to form human chains and blocked traffic. Lately, they have cooperated with liberal groups against common opponents, as they did when they protested against the Russia March. The NBF, founded by Aleksandr Dugin, is an offshoot of the NBP. Dugin’s goal is to thwart an overthrow of the government by “fugitive oligarchs together with liberal remnants and ultra-nationalists and Chekhists in the presidential entourage.” ———————— Kremlin-Sponsored Groups ———————— ¶10. (U) Some youth movements are linked to the Kremlin, and the United Russia party boasts three: Nashi (“Ours”), Molodaya Gvardiya (“Young Guards”), and Mestnye (“Locals”). According to Vladimir Pribylovskiy, Director of the Panorama Research Institute, the groups reflect divisions within United Russia, and the leaders of Nashi and Molodaya Gvardiya strongly dislike each other. Molodaya Gvardiya —————– ¶11. (U) Molodaya Gvardiya is the most polished of any Russian youth group, which is a testament to its budget, marketing, and Kremlin backing. It appeals to Russian youth by emphasizing fun activities and sanctioned protests, often with an anti-American or pro-Putin flavor. In the last year, for example, it organized a July 4th “Independence from America” demonstration across the street from the Embassy, an anti-Yushchenko protest in front of the Ukrainian embassy, and an anti-Saakashvili protest following the arrest of four Russian army officers in Georgia. Although TV personality Ivan Demidov is the face of Molodaya Gvardiya, the organization is led by the up-and-coming Andrey Turchak, the son of Anatoliy Turchak, a friend of Putin’s from St. Petersburg, former Chairman of St. Petersburg’s Nash Dom Rossiya party, and now Director General of Leninets, a defense avionics company. According to Pribylovskiy, other Molodaya Gvardiya leaders are similarly connected — they are the sons and daughters of the elite. ¶12. (U) Molodaya Gvardiya has also been successful in actually helping young people become active in politics. MOSCOW 00012709 003 OF 003 During the last year, Molodaya Gvardiya has held a series of contests called Politzavod (“Political Factory”) to find and develop candidates. In this successful combination of entertainment and politics, contestants participate in a “Survivor”-type contest where they organize public events and compete in speech contests before a voting audience. United Russia offers winners a position on their legislative party lists. In the October regional elections, United Russia fulfilled its pledge to fill 20 percent of its regional party lists with candidates under age 28 by using the winners of Politzavod. Thirty-one United Russia candidates between 21 and 28 years of age were elected. Nashi (3,000 members) ——————— ¶13. (C) United Russia, which created Nashi, describes it as “a counterbalance to radical youth movements from the left and the right like those in Kiev and Tbilisi.” According to Pribylovskiy, Nashi is the client organization of Vladislav Surkov, the Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration. Surkov funds Nashi, whose leader Yakimenko is a relative of Surkov’s wife. Nashi generally opposes Moscow Mayor Yuriy Luzhkov, but “they will support Luzhkov if directed to do so.” The members of Nashi are generally younger and less wealthy than their Molodaya Gvardiya cousins. “Nashi members are not connected, but they want to become connected, and they are trying to work their way into the system,” Pribylovskiy told us. According to several of our contacts, most Nashi protesters are paid (reportedly 100-300 rubles) to participate in protests. Mestnye (1,000 members) ———————– ¶14. (U) Mestnye is lead by army veteran Sergey Fateyev and advertises itself as the “movement for young political ecologists of the Moscow suburbs.” The name, along with its symbol of three trees on a green shield, is misleading since the group rarely addresses ecological issues. Instead, it focuses on opposing grassroots youth movements, often by imitating successful protests. For example, following a Youth Yabloko protest against the military draft, Mestnye staged a counter-protest. They claimed that they also favored some military reforms, but in general, they supported Putin. Mestnye has also been used to support Russian foreign policy by conducting protests at the U.S. and Georgian embassies. BURNS

In fact, for more than two decades during the Cold War, the public was bombarded by an enormous publicity campaign to shape American views of Russia and its foreign policy. Advertisements appeared on every TV network, on radio stations across the country and in hundreds of newspapers. The campaign may have been the largest and most consistent source of political advertising in American history. And it was orchestrated by a big, powerful intelligence service: the Central Intelligence Agency.

It all began as a cover story. As the Cold War was getting underway, the C.I.A. wanted to take the fight into Russia’s backyard. So, in 1950, it created Radio Free Europe, a government-sponsored broadcasting station. Ostensibly, it provided unbiased news for Eastern Europeans, but in fact the agency used it to wage a subversive campaign to weaken Communist governments behind the Iron Curtain.

But how to hide the agency’s hand? How to account for the millions of C.I.A. dollars pouring into the broadcasting station? Simple: pretend that ordinary Americans are paying the bills.

The C.I.A.’s freewheeling spymaster, Frank Wisner, created a well-heeled and well-connected front group, the National Committee for a Free Europe. Each year it ran an enormous fund-raising campaign called the Crusade for Freedom (later renamed the Radio Free Europe Fund) that implored Americans to donate “freedom dollars” to combat Kremlin lies, complete with annual appeals resembling a hybrid of World War II war bond campaigns and contemporary NPR pledge drives.

Every president from Harry Truman to Richard Nixon endorsed the campaign. So did hundreds of governors, mayors, celebrities, editors and executives. Entertainers like Ronald Reagan, Rock Hudson, Jerry Lewis and the Kingston Trio pleaded for donations on radio and television. The Hollywood producers Darryl Zanuck and Cecil B. DeMille amplified those messages, as did powerful media figures like Bill Paley, the president of CBS; C. D. Jackson, the publisher of Fortune; and the media mogul Henry Luce. Even newspaper delivery boys played a part, soliciting donations from subscribers on their paper routes.

Then there was the Ad Council, the same industry organization that turned Smokey Bear into a cultural icon. The council sponsored the crusade as a public service, arranging for broadcasters to run ads without charge. The Ad Council’s sponsorship translated into as much as $2 billion worth of free advertising over the campaign’s history, in 2017 dollars.

The message was simple: Russia was aggressive; Communism was awful. The enemy couldn’t be trusted. Typical ads conveyed a brutalized vision of life behind the Iron Curtain: “a strip of Communist-controlled hell-on-earth,” one read. Donating a few bucks would save Czechs, Poles, Hungarians and others from this tyranny. Many thousands of Americans took the bait. They dutifully wrote checks to Radio Free Europe, and their contributions were magnified by gifts from many of the country’s biggest corporations, yielding, on average, about $1 million annually.

It wasn’t enough: The donations barely covered the cost of running the “fund-raising drives,” to say nothing of Radio Free Europe’s $30 million annual budgets. But that wasn’t the point.

Declassified documents reveal that almost from the start, the C.I.A. saw that it could exploit the fund-raising campaign as a conduit for domestic propaganda. It was a way to rally public support for the Cold War by dramatizing Communist repression and stoking fears of a worldwide menace. The plight of Eastern Europe brought moral clarity to the Cold War, and it cemented the region as a vital national interest in American domestic politics.

Its impact outlived the campaign itself. Even though the pleas for donations ended in 1971, when the C.I.A. was exposed and stopped funding the station, they cemented anti-Communist hostility that animated conservative opposition to détente in the 1970s. It provided the leitmotif for Reagan’s denunciations of the “evil empire” in the 1980s. One can even hear echoes in Donald Trump’s recent speech to the United Nations: His long digression on the evils of socialism seems drawn from the heated rhetoric of ads gone by.

So, too, does our post-truth media environment carry voices from this past. The crusade blasted all information from enemy sources as lies and deceit — fake news, we could say. This counter-propaganda sought to inoculate the public from being receptive to anything said by the other side. It’s a tactic we’ve seen play out in real time on the president’s Twitter feed.

And almost certainly, Radio Free Europe itself — which continues to operate out of its headquarters in Prague — has shaped Vladimir Putin’s worldview. Russia has long tried to claim Eastern Europe as its sphere of influence. Moscow hated the station for its meddling. As a K.G.B. officer, Mr. Putin no doubt spent many hours fretting over its activities in the Soviet bloc. It was a major irritant. He may even see the 2016 election hack as a way to even the score. If so, it’s payback indeed.

Some facts about Navalny :

– He is a far-right Neo-Nazi advocating the killing of Chechens. Below is the video of him in an extreme racist speech against Chechens.

– He is very marginal in Russia, he received only 2% of votes in the last elections. Most Russians don’t know about him

– He is a graduate of Yale World Fellow Program, Navalny is listed on Yale’s website as a cofounder of the Democratic Alternative Movement, an organization shown in a leaked diplomatic cable have received funding from the US government-backed National Endowment for Democracy. The sinister organization that took over the covert operation of CIA for regime change/colored revolutions.

There is an agenda to demonize Putin, no more real journalism out there, just anti-China, anti-Russia propaganda.

They already tried with the Skripal supposed poisoning and it was all pure lies and they are back with another insignificant

puppet chosen by EU and USA.

Leaked diplomatic cable https://web.archive.org/…/www…/cable.php…

French political analyst on Navalny (in French)

Asselineau https://youtu.be/xiX9YQ0Dem0

Full article (2017) from World socialist Website : https://wsws.org/en/articles/2017/12/27/pers-d27.html

Video of Navalny’s racist speech about Chechens :

More US propaganda:

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/alexei-navalny-is-a-russian-nationalist-but-he-may-still-be-good-news-for-ukraine/

Official U.S. government propaganda:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9281276/

Western intelligence agencies, namely the US Central Intelligence Agency, are working with blogger Alexey Navalny, Russian Presidential Spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Thursday.

“It’s not the patient [Navalny] that is working with Western intelligence agencies but Western intelligence agencies are working with him,” Peskov said.

“Indeed, there is information about it and I can specify that experts from the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency are working with him,” the Kremlin spokesman emphasized.

According to Peskov, it’s not the first time that contacts between Navalny and foreign intelligence agencies have been detected. “It’s not the first time that they are giving instructions to him,” he noted. “There is information that instructors [from Western intelligence agencies] are working with him and the patient is clearly getting instructions, we have seen it many times before,” the Kremlin spokesman noted.

Russian State Duma (the lower house of parliament) Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin said earlier that Navalny worked with Western intelligence and state agencies and acted in their interests.

Not long after John Kenneth Galbraith, the Harvard economist, arrived in India in 1961 to take up his new post as American Ambassador, he became aware of a curious political journal called Quest that was floating around the Asian subcontinent.

The following article is based on reporting by John M. Crewdson and Joseph B. Treaster. It was written by Mr. Crewdson – Original Link NYT

“It had a level of Intellectual and political competence that was sub‐zero,” Mr. Galbraith recalled in an interview. “It would make you yearn for the political sophistication of The National Enquirer.”

Though an English‐language publication, “it was only in some approximation to English,” he said. “The political damage it did was nothing compared to the literary damage.”

Then the new Ambassador discovered that Quest was being published with money from the Central Intelligence Agency. At his direction the C.I.A. closed it down.

Though perhaps less distinguished than most, Quest was one of dozens of English and foreign language publications around the world that have been owned, subsidized or influenced in some way by the C.I.A. over the past three decades.

Although the C.I.A. has employed dozens of American journalists working abroad, a three‐month inquiry by a team of reporters and researchers for The New York Times has determined that, with a few notable exceptions, they were not used by the agency to further its worldwide propaganda campaign.

In its persistent efforts to shape world opinion, the C.I.A. has been able to call upon a• separate and far more extensive network of newspapers, news services, magazines, publishing houses, broadcasting stations and other entities over which it has at various times had some control.

C.I.A.: Secret Shaper Of Public Opinion Second of a Series

A decade ago, when the agency’s cormmunications empire was at its peak, embraced more than 800 news and public information organizations and individuals. According to one C.I.A. official, they ranged in importance “from Radio Free Europe to a third‐string guy in Quito who could get something in the local paper.”

Although the network was known officially as the “Propaganda Assets Inventory,” to those inside the C.I.A. it was “Wisner’s Wurlitzer.” Frank G. Wisner, who is now dead, was the first chief of the agency’s covert action staff.

Almost at the push of a button, or so Mr. Wisner liked to think, the “Wurlitzer” became the means for orchestrating, in almost any language anywhere in the world, whatever tune the C.I.A. was in a mood to hear.

Much of the Wurlitzer is now dismantled. Disclosures in 1967 of some of the C.I.A.’s financial ties to academic, cultural and publishing organizations resulted in some cutbacks, and more recent disclosures of the agency’s employment of American and foreign journalists have led to a phasing out of relationships with many of the individuals and news organizations overseas.

A Worldwide Network for Dissemination of Propaganda Was Built by the C.I.A. 

A smaller network of foreign journalists remains, and some undercover C.I.A. men may still roam the world, disguised as correspondents for obscure trade journals or business newsletters.

The C.I.A.’s propaganda operation was first headed by Tom Braden, who is now a syndicated columnist, and was run for many years by Cord Meyer Jr., a popular campus leader at Yale before he joined. the C.I.A.

Mr. Braden said in an interview that he had never really been sure that “there was anybody in charge” of the operation and that “Frank Wisner kind of handled it off the top of his head.” Mr. Meyer declined to talk about the operation.

However, several other former C.I.A. officers said that, while the agency was wary of telling its American journalistagents what to write, it never hesitated to manipulate the output of its foreignbased “assets.” Among those were number of English‐language publications read regularly by American correspondents abroad and by reporters and editors in the United States.

Most of the former officers said they had been concerned about but helpless to avoid the potential “blow‐back’—the possibility that the C.I.A. propaganda filtered through these assets, some of it purposely misleading or downright false,’ might be picked up by American reporters overseas and included in their dispatches to their publications at home.

The thread that linked the C.I.A. and its propaganda assets was money, and the money frequently bought a measure of editorial control, often complete control. In some instances the C.I.A. simply created a newspaper or news service and paid the bills through a bogus corporation. In other instances, directly or indirectly, the agency supplied capital to an entrepreneur or appeared at the right moment to bail out a financially troubled organization.

It gave them something to do,” one C.I.A. man said. “It’s the old business of Parkinson’s Law, a question of people having too much idle time and too much idle money. There were a whole lot of people who were underemployed.”

According to an agency official, the C.I.A. preferred where possible to put its money into an existing organization rather than found one of its own. “If a concern is a going concern,” the official said, “it’s a better cover, The important thing is to have an editor or someone else who’s receptive to your copy.”

Postwar Aid for Journals

The C.I.A., which evolved from the Office of Strategic Services of World War II, became involved in the mass communications field in the early postwar years, when agency officials became conterned that influential publications in ravaged Europe might succumb to the temptation of Communist money. Among the organizations subsidized in those early years, a C.I.A. source said, was the French journal Paris Match.

No one associated with Paris Match in that period could be reached for comment.

Recalling the concerns of those early clays, one former C.I.A. man said that :here was “hardly a left‐wing newspaper in Europe that wasn’t financed directly from Moscow.” He went on: “We knew when the courier was coming, we knew how much money he was bringing.”

One of the C.I.A.’s first major ventures was broadcasting, Although long suspected, it was reported definitively only a few years ago that until 1971 the agency supported both Radio Free Europe, which continues, with private financing, to broadcast to the nations of Eastern Europe, and Radio Liberty, which is beamed at the Soviet Union itself.

The C.I.A.’s participation in those operations was shielded from public view by two front groups, the Free Europe Committee and the American Committee for Liberation, both of which also engaged in a variety of lesser‐known propaganda operations.

The American Committee for Liberation financed a Munich‐based group, the Institute for the Study of the U.S.S.R., a publishing and research house that, among other• things, compiles the widely used reference volume “Who’s Who in the U.S.S.R.” The Free Europe Committee published the magazine East Europe, distributed in this country as well as abroad, and also operated the Free Europe Press Service.

Far more obscure were two other C.I.A. broadcasting ventures, Radio Free Asia and a rather tenuous operation known as Free Cuba Radio. Free Cuba Radio, established in the early 1960’s, did not broadcast from its own transmitters but purchased air time from a number of commercial radio stations in Florida and Louisiana.

Its propaganda broadcasts against the Government of Prime Minister Fidel Castro were carried over radio stations WMIE and WGBS in Miami, WKWF in Key West and WWL in New Orleans. They supplemented other C.I.A. broadcasts over a short‐wave station, WRUL,

with offices in New York City, and Radio Swan, on a tiny island in the Caribbean.

The managements of those stations are largely changed, and it was not possible to establish whether any of them were aware of the source of the funds that paid for the programs. But sources in the Cuban community in Miami said it was known generally at the time that funds from some Federal agency were involved.

One motive for establishing the Free Cuba radio network, a former C.I.A. official said he recalled, was to have periods of air time available in advance in case Radio Swan, meant to be the main communications link for the Bay of Pigs invasion, was destroyed by saboteurs.

Radio Swan’s cover was thin enough to warrant such concern. The powerful station, whose broadcasts could be heard over much of the Western Hemisphere, was operated by a steamship company in New York that had not owned a steamship for some time.

Radio Swan was also besieged by potential advertisers eager to take advantage of its strong, clear signal. After months of turning customers away, the C.I.A. was finally forced to begin accepting some business to preserve what cover Radio Swan had left.

Radio Free Asia began broadcasting to mainland China in 1951 from an elaborate set of transmitters in Manila. It was an arm of the Committee for Free Asia, and the C.I.A. thought of it as the beginning of an operation in the Far East that would rival Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty.

The Committee for Free Asia, according to former C.I.A. officials, was founded as the Eastern counterpart of the Free Europe Committee. It later changed its name to the Asia Foundation. It still exists, though its ties to the C.I.A. were severed a decade ago.

The Asia Foundation was headed for years by the ‘ late Robert Blum, who, several sources said, resigned from the C.I.A. to take it over. The foundation provided cover for at least one C.I.A. operative and carried out a variety of media‐related ventures, including a program, begun in 1955, of selecting and paying the expenses of Asian journalists for a year of study in Harvard’s prestigious Neiman Fellowship program.

It was only after Radio Free Asia’s transmitters were operating, according to sources familiar with the case, that the C.I.A. realized that there were almost no radio receivers in private hands in mainland China. An emergency plan was drawn up.

Balloons, holding small radios tuned to Radio Free Asia’s frequency, were lofted toward the mainland from the island of Taiwan, where the Chinese Nationalists had fled after the Communist takeover of the mainland in 1949. The plan was abandoned when the balloons were blown back to Taiwan across the Formosa Strait.

Radio Free Asia went off the air in 1955.

The C.I.A.’s involvement in the field of publishing extended around the world and embraced a wide variety of periodicals, some of them obscure and many of them now defunct. In some instances, sources said, there was no effort to mold editorial policy despite sizable subsidies, but in others policy was virtually dictated.

One of the C.I.A.’s ventures in this country involved the subsidization of several publications whose editors and publishers had fled from Havana to Miami after the Castro Government came to power in 1959. The subsidies — in some cases they amounted to several million dollars — were passed to the publica tions through a C.I.A. front in New York called Foreign Publications Inc.

The dozen recipients of these subsidies reportedly included Avance, El Mundo, El Prensa Libre, Bohemia and El Diario de las Americas. In addition, the C.I.A. is said to have financed AIP, a radio news agency in Miami that produced programs sent free of charge to more than 100 small stations in Central and Latin America.

The C.I.A. intially intended to clandestinely distribute copies of the subsidized publications into Cuba, but that plan was dropped after the Cuban exiles who had agreed to take them by boat refused in the last minutes to approach the Cuban shore.

The subsidies continued anyway, and the publications were widely read in the Cuban community in Miami and, in the case of Bohemia,‐a weekly magazine that reecived more than $3 million altogether, throughout Latin America as well.

The intelligence agency’s onetime support of Encounter, the British journal, has been reported, but agency sources said that the Congress of Cultural Freedom, the Paris‐based group through which the C.I.A. channeled the funds, also supported a number of other publications, many of them now out of business.

Ties to Agency Were Cut

The congress, which was founded in 1950 as a response to a conference of Soviet writers that year in Berlin, has since cut its ties to the American agency, reconstituted itself and changed its name. But during the years when was a C.I.A. conduit, it provided financial support to the French magazine Preuves, Forum in Austria, Der Monat in West Germany, El Mundo Nuevo in Latin America and, in India, the publications Thought and Quest.

In the United States, Atlas magazine, digest of the world press, occasionally used translators employed by the C.I.A.

African Forum and Africa Report were published with C.I.A. money passed to the American Society of African Culture and the African‐American Institute. In Stockholm the publication Argumenten received C.I.A. funds through a channel so complex that even its editor was unaware of the source of the money. So did Combate, a Latin American bimonthly.

In Nairobi, Kenya, the C.I.A. set up The East African Legal Digest, less as a propaganda organ than as a cover for one of its operatives. In the United States, the Asia Foundation published newspaper, The Asian Student, that was distributed to students from the Far East who were attending American universities.

In Saigon, the Vietnam Council on Foreign Relations, modeled after the American version and financed entirely by the C.I.A., published a slick, expensively produced magazine that was distributed during the Vietnam War to the offices of all senators and representatives in Washington.

Among the more unusual of the C.I.A.’s relationships was the one it shared with a Princeton, N.J., concern called the Research Council. The council, founded by Hadley Cantril, the late chairman of the Princeton University psychology department, and his associate, Lloyd Free, derived nearly all its income from the C.I.A. in the decade in which it was active.

“They were considered an asset because we paid them so much money,” a former C.I.A. man said. Mr. Free confirmed that he 2nd Dr. Cantril, an acknowledged pioneer in public opinion polling, had “just sort of run” the council for the C.I.A.

The council’s activities, Mr. Free said, consisted of extensive public opinion surveys conducted in other countries on questions of interest to the C.I.A. Some, he said, were conducted inside Eastern Europe, the Soviet bloc.

The governments of the countries, Mr. Free said, “didn’t know anything about the C.I.A.” Nor, apparently, did Rutgers University Press, which published some of the results in a 1967 volume called “Pattern of Human Concerns.”

Book Publishing Ventures

The C.I.A.’s relationship with Frederick Praeger, the book publisher, has been reported in the past. But Praeger was only one of a number of publishing concerns, including some of the most prominent in the industry, that printed or distributed more than 1,000 volumes produced or subsidized in some way by the agency over the last three decades.

Some of the publishing houses were nothing more than C.I.A. “proprietaries.” Among these were Allied Pacific Printing, of Bombay, India, and the Asia Researcn Centre, one of several agency publishing ventures in Hong Kong, which was described by an agency source as “nothing but a couple of translators.”

Other, legitimate publishers that received C.I.A. subsidies according to former and current agency officials, were Franklin Books, a New York‐based house that specializes in translations of academic works, and Walker & Co., jointly owned by Samuel Sloan Walker Jr., a onetime vice president of the Free Europe Committee, and Samuel W. Meek, a retired executive of the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency and a man with close ties to the C.I.A.

A spokesman at Franklin confirmed that the publisher had received grants from the Asia Foundation and “from another small foundation for an African project, both of which were exposed in 1967 as being supported by C.I.A.” The spokesman added, “Franklin was unaware of that support then.”

Mr. Walker said through a secretary that his concern had never “printed books on behalf of the C.I.A. nor published any book from any source which was not worthy of publication on its merits.”

Other publishing houses that brought out books to which the C.I.A. had made editorial contributions included Charles Scribner’s Sons, which in 1951 published “The Yenan Way,” by Eudocio Ravines, from a translation supplied by William F. Buckley Jr., who was a C.I.A. agent for several years in the early 1950’s. Also in 1951, G. P. Putnam’s Sons published “Life and Death in Soviet Russia,” by Valentin Gonzalez, the famous “El Campesino” of the Spanish Civil War.

According to executives of both houses, Putnam and Scribner’s were unaware of any agency involvement in those books, as was Doubleday & Company, which in 1965 brought out, under the title “The Penkovskiy Papers,” what purported to be a diary kept by Col. Oleg Penkovsky, the Soviet double agent. The book even used C.I.A. style in the transliteration of the colonel’s name.

Also unaware of the C.I.A. connection was Ballantine Books, which published a modest volume on Finland, “Study in Sisu,” written by Austin Goodrich, an undercover C.I.A. man who posed for years in Scandinavia as a freelance author researching a book about Finland.

Authorship Used as Cover

Another C.I.A. operative who employed the cover of a freelance author in search of a book was Edward S. Hunter, who roamed Central Asia for years collecting material for a work on Afghanistan that eventually was published by the prestigious house of Hodder & Stoughton of London.

Other C.I.A. men worked abroad while writing books, including Lee White, an employee of the Middle Eastern Division who wrote a biography of General Mohammed Neguib of Egypt, and Peter Matthiessen, the writer and naturalist who began work on a novel, “Partisans,” while with the C.I.A. in Paris from 1951 until 1953, where he also helped George Plimpton found The Paris Review.

As with Mr. Hunter, Mr. White and Mr. Matthiessen used their careers as authors only as covers for their intelligence activities. There is no evidence that the C.I.A. attempted to control what they wrote or that it atempted through Mr. Matthiessen to influence the Paris Review.

Several C.I.A. efforts in book publishing were well received by critics, and a few were commercial successes. “At least once,” according to a report by the Senate intelligence committee, “a book review for an agency book which appeared in The New York Times was written by a C.I.A. writer under contract” to the agency.

The report did not identify the volume or the reviewer, but the book is said to have been “Escape from Red China,” the story of a defector from China published by Coward, McCann and Geoghegan. Jack Geoghegan, president of the company, said he never knew that the book had been prepared for publication by the C.I.A.

The book was reviewed by The Times on Sunday, Nov. 11, 1962, by Richard L. Walker, who is now director of the Institute of International Studies at the University of South Carolina and is a frequent book reviewer for the newspaper. Professor Walker said in a telephone interview that he had been under contract to the C.I.A. as a consultant and lecturer before and after the review appeared, but not at the time he wrote it. Nor, he said, did he know that the book had been produced by the C.I.A.

Another successful book that intelligence sources said was published in 1962 with the assistance of the C.I.A. is “On the Tiger’s Back” by Aderogba Ajao, a Nigerian who had studied at an East German University and returned home to write about his disillusionment.

The Praeger organization, which was purchased by Encyclopaedia Brittanica in 1966, first became involved with the C.I.A. in 1957 when it published “The New Class,” a landmark work by Milovan Djilas, a disillusioned official of the Yugoslav Government who wrote extensively about his personal rejection of Communism.

Mr. Praeger said that he had appealed to II friend in the American Government (though not in the C.I.A.) for assistance in obtaining the final pages. The manuscript was eventually carried from Belgrade to Vienna by Edgar Clark, then a correspondent for Time magazine, and his wife, Katherine.

Mr. Clark said that neither he nor his wife had ever had anything to do with the C.I.A. But the manuscript ultimately reached the hands of’ a C.I.A. officer named Arthur Macy Cox. Mr. Cox, who later worked under Praeger cover in Geneva, set in motion an effort by the agency to have the book translated into a variety of languages and distributed around the world.

“It was my first contact with the 1 C.I.A.,” Mr. Praeger said, but he added that at the time he had “no idea there even was a C.I.A.”

Mr. Praeger said that he later published 20 to 25 volumes in which the C.I.A. had had an interest, either in the writing, the publication itself or the postpublication distribution.

The agency’s involvement, he said, might have been manifested in a variety of ways—reimbursing him directly for the expenses of publication or guaranteeing, perhaps through a foundation of some sort, the purchase of enough copies to make publication worthwhile.

Among the Praeger books in which the C.I.A. had a hand were “The Anthill,” work about China by the French writer Suzanne Labin, and two books on the Soviet Union by Giinther Nollau, a member of the West German security service and later its chief. Mr. Nollau was identified in a New York Times review only as “a West German lawyer who fled some years ago from East Germany.”

Dozens of foreign- language newspapers, news services and other organizations were financed and operated by the C.I.A.—two of the most prominent were said to have been DENA, the West German news agency, and Agenda Orbe Latino American, the Latin American feature service.

The C.I.A.’s Newspapers

In addition, the C.I.A. had heavy investments in a variety of English-language news organizations. Asked why the agency had had a preference for these, a former senior official of the agency explained that it was less difficult to conceal the ownership of publications that had ostensible reasons for belonging to an American and easier to place American agents in those publications as reporters and editors.

The Rome Daily American, which the C.I.A. partly owned from 1956 to 1964, when it was purchased by Samuel W. Meek, a J. Walter Thompson executive, was only one of the agency’s “’proprietary” English‐language newspapers.

There were, it was said, such “proprietaries” in other capitals, including Athens and Rangoon. They usually served a dual role—providing cover fur intelligence operatives and at the same time publishing agency propaganda.

But the C.I.A.’s ownership of newspapers was generally viewed as costly and difficult to conceal, and all such relationships are now said to have been ended.

The Rome Daily American was taken over by the C.I.A., it was said, to keep it from failing into the hands of Italian Communists. But the agency eventually tired of trying to maintain the fiction that the newspaper was privately owned and, as soon as the perceived threat from the Communists had passed, sold it to Mr. Meek.

Even after the agency sold the newspaper, however, it was managed for several years by Robert H. Cunningham, C.I.A. officer who had resigned from the agency and had been rehired as a contract employee.

A former C.I.A. official said that the agency passed up an opportunity to purchase another English‐language newspaper, The Brussels Times, which was being run by a C.I.A. man but had no other ties to the agency. The official said the agency responded to the offer by saying that it was “easier to buy a reporter, which we’ve done, than to buy a newspaper.”

In addition to the C.I.A.’s “proprietary” newspapers in Athens, Rangoon and Rome, agency sources said it had also had investments in The Okinawa Morning Star, used more for cover purposes than for propaganda; The Manila Times and The Bangkok World, now both defunct, and The Tokyo Evening News in the days before it was purchased by Asahi, the publishing organization.

“We ‘had’ at least one newspaper in every foreign capital at any given time,” one C.I.A. man said, and those that the agency did not own outright or subsidize heavily it infiltrated with paid agents or staff officers who could have stories printed that were useful to the agency and not print those it found detrimental.

Agents Placed on Staffs

In Santiago, Chile, The South Pacific Mail, though apparently never owned by the C.I.A, provided cover for two operatives: David A. Phillips, who eventually rose to become chief of the C.I.A.’s Western Hemisphere Division, and David C. Hellyer, who resigned as Latin American editor for the Copley newspaper organization to join the C.I.A.

Other newspapers on whose staffs the C.I.A. is said to have placed agents over the years included The Guyana Chronicle, The Haiti Sun, The Japan Times, The Nation of Rangoon, The Caracas Daily Journal and The Bangkok Post.

And before the 1959 revolution The Times of Havana, owned by a former C.I.A. man, contributed to the “cover” of Mr. Phillips by signing him on as columnist.

The C.I.A. reportedly had agents within a number of foreign news services, including LATIN, a Catin American agency operated by the British news agency, Reuters, and the Ritzhaus organization in Scandanavia.

Although there were C.I.A agents in the overeas bureaus of The Associated Press and United Press International, the C.I.A. is said to have had none in Reuters because that agency is British and thus a potential target of the British Secret Intelligence Service.

But sources familiar with the situation said that the C.I.A occasionally “borrowed” British “assets” inside Reuters for the purpose of planting news articles. Asked about the much‐publicized assertion by William E. Colby, the former Di‘ rector of Central Intelligence, that the agency never “manipulated” Reuters, one official replied that “it wasn’t manipulation because Reuters knew” that the stories were being planted by the C.I.A. and that some were bogus.

Desmond Manerly, Reuters’s managing editor for North America, has said that such charges were “old‐hat stuff to us.” He noted that Reuters’s managing director, for Gerald Long, had asked for evidence of such manipulation but that none had been forthcoming.

A number of news agencies were owned outright or were heavily financed by the C.I.A. One, the Foreign News Service, produced articles written by a group of journalists who had been exiled from Eastern European nations. In the early 1960’s the articles were sold to as many as 300 newspapers around the world, including The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor and The New York Herald Tribune.

Boleslaw Wierzbianski, a former Polish Minister of Information and the onetime head of the news service, said that as far as he knew, the C.I.A.’s only involvement was financial and the agency never tried to control the service’s output or use it as a cover.

Press Credentials Supplied

By contrast, an outright C.I.A. proprietary was the Continental Press Service, which had headquarters in Washington and was run by a C.I.A. man named Fred Zusy. One of its principal functions was to supply official — looking, laminated press credentials to agency operatives in urgent need of cover.

Editors Press Service was an established feature news service with clients throughout Latin America when, accordmg to two former C.I.A. officials and third authoritative source, it became channel of dissemination for agency-inspired propaganda. One former C.I.A. man said that the service, owned at the time by Joshua B. Powers Sr„ was an outlet for what he called “cliché stories, news stories prepared by the agency or for the agency.”

Mr. Powers acknowledged that for years he was a close friend of the late Col. J. C. King, longtime chief of the agency’s Western Hemisphere Division; that he had served as an officer of the C.I.A.financed Henry Clay foundation, and that it was he who had purchased The South Pacific Mail from David A. Phillips and owned it during the period, in the mid1960’s, when it was being used for cover by David Hellyer.

Mr. Powers could recall only a single connection, however, between Editors Press and the C.I.A. He said that in the mid‐1960’s he had used C.I.A. funds to finance the Latin American travels of one of his writers, Guillermo Martinez Marquez, the exiled editor of a Cuban newspaper. Mr. Marquez said that he had never known that the money he received from Mr. Powers had come team the C.I.A.

Perhaps the most widely circulated of the C.1.A.‐owned news services was Forum World Features, founded in 1958 as a Delaware corporation, Forum Information Service, with offices in London. Forum was ostensibly owned during much of its life by John Hay Whitney, the publisher of The New York Herald Tribune, which ceased publication in 1966. According to several C.I.A. sources, Mr. Whitney was “witting” of the agency’s true role.

A secretary to Mr. Whitney said that he was too ill to respond to questions about his involvement with Forum.

Also aware of a C.I.A. role, according to former and current agency officials, was Brian Crozier, the conservative British journalist who the officials said had been a contract employee of the agency, and Robert G. Gately. Mr. Gately, Forum’s executive director in the early 1960’s, was a career C.I.A. man who went on to hold cover jobs with Newsweek, as Far Eastern business manager, and with Asia Magazine in Tokyo.

Newsweek executives, like those of nearly all the major news‐gathering organizations said to have been involved with the C.I.A., have said that while they are certain that no one presently employed has any ties to the agency, there is no way to be certain that no such connections existed in the past.

U.S. Papers Among Clients

Though the C.I.A. has insisted that never attempted directly to place its propaganda in the American press, at one time Forum World Features had 30 domestic newspapers among its clients, including The Washington Post, and tried, without success, to sell its material to The New York Times.

The sale of Forum’s material to The Washington Post and other American newspapers, one C.I.A. official said, “put us in a hell of a dilemma,” The sales, he went on, were considered necessary to preserve the organization’s cover, and they occasioned a continuing and somewhat frantic effort to insure that the domestic clients were given only legitimate news stories.

Another major foreign news organization that C.I.A. officials said they once subsidized was Vision, the weekly news magazine that is distributed throughout Europe and Latin America. However, none of those associated with the founding of Vision or its management over the years Said they had ever had any indication that the C.I.A. had put money intp the magazine.

Next: The C.I.A.’s Network of Correspondents.

Associated Press

The legislative charter of the Central Intelligence Agency has been interpreted as prohibiting the direct propagandizing of American citizens, according to agency officials and former officials.

However, these officials say, no opinion has ever been sought or provided on the legality or propriety of the “replay” in this country of agency propaganda disseminated abroad.

The foundation of the C.I.A. charter Is the National Security Act of 1947. Much of the legislative history that surrounds that act remains classified today, as do the various executive orders to carry out the law and the C.I.A.’s internal legal opinions and directives that are based upon it.

WASHINGTON, Dec. 28—Four longtime correspondents told a House intelligence subcommittee today that any relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency beyond ari exchange of information violated the ethics of their profession.

The four, all with experience as reporters abroad, also agreed that the agency’s new directive barring any contractual relations between that agency and American journalists would not be likely to allay suspicions in other countries that American correspondents, like those of many other nations, sometimes performed intelligence duties on the side.

The witnesses, who appeared tegether before the Oversight Subcommittee of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, were Joe Fromm, deputy editor of U.S. News & World Report; Herman Nickel, for 20 years a Time magazine correspondent; Tad. Szulc, a former correspondent for The New York Times and now a freelance writer, and Ward Just, a former correspondent for The Washington Post and now also a freelance writer.

“How effective the directive will be in allaying questions raised around the world by stories that literally hundreds of United States journalists have secretly worked for the C.I.A. is another question,” said Mr. Nickel, who is now an editor of Fortune magazine. He added:

“When someone you suspect of being a spy gives you his ‘Boy Scout’s honor’ that he isn’t one, you don’t necessarily believe him. The insidious thing about the change is that it sows suspicions which are impossible to disprove.”

WASHINGTON, Jan. 27—A draft copy of a report by the House Select Committee on Intelligence last week said that 11 full‐time officers of the Central Intelligence Agency were posing as journalists overseas in connection with their intelligence work. The report said further that until 1978 live agents posed as full‐time correspondents with organizations that have “major general news impact.” Moreover, the report said, some 15 news organizations had cooperated with the C.I.A. in providing “cover” for C.I.A. operatives.

News Analysis

This is not the first time that C.I.A. infiltration of news organizations has been charged. But it is the most authoritative ‘report on the subject yet and it has caused widespread suspicion in the national press, corps.

However, the main concern here is that readers, viewers and listeners will begin to believe that their news is colored by the C.I.A.

Also, new organization and reporters. in pressing the Government for disclosure of many; of its previously secret activities, must be doubly certain themselves to mage public any: secret arrangements they may have knowingly had with such Government agencies as the C.I.A.

Disclaimer by Colby

William E. Colby, who steps down this week as Director of Central Intelligence, has reportedly said in private sessions of the committee that the C.I.A. never intended to manipulate the news flowing to Americans.

Mr. Colby has said on several occasions that the C.I.A. no longer has covert relationships with staff members of major general‐service news organizations. This practice, he said, was ended in 1973. But he said that the C.I.A. still did not feel that there was anything wrong with hiring “stringers,” or part‐time correspondents, who sell their information to news organizations in this country.

The agency, he and others contend, simply recognized that a journalist was a very good cover job for a spy. A journalist can travel about asking questions, even snapping photographs, and justify his activities by saying he is on a story.

But using an American press card for cover, even if the intelligence officer is not going to write misleading articles for American readers, creates peculiar problems in the United States. Press freedom here is protected from Government intrusion under the First Amendment to the Constitution and thus a reader, viewer or listener has the right to expect that the news will not be slanted to conform to a governmental position

An agent reporting from abroad to the United States would face an impossible task in sorting out his allegiance to his real employer, the C.I.A., from that to his news organization and its readers.

Moreover, if American journalists are thought to be spies then they are bound to face greater distrust and, in some countries, greater danger than they would normally.

C.I.A. Bars Disclosure

Many senior intelligence officers at the C.I.A. acknowledge that infiltrating or manipulating organizations that distribute news here runs counter to the concept of a free press. But these officials and the C.I.A. have formally refused to make public the names of which American news agencies in the past, or currently, “cooperate” with the C.I.A., which ones allowed themselves to be used as a cover and the names of the newsmen who secretly worked for the C.I.A.

In November 1973, The Washington Star reported that about three dozen American journalists, including five full‐time correspondents, were working abroad on the C.I.A.’s payroll. According to Mr. Colby, that article, which gave no names, had resulted from a discussion he had had with the paper’s editorial board in which he conceded that the agency had infiltrated news organizations. (Mr. Colby assured The New York Times that same month, in response to a question, that nobody connected with The Times was involved.)

C.I.A. officials argue that to disclose the names of individuals involved would endanger their lives, hold them up to ridicule and censure if they are still in journalism and destroy them as sources of information if they are still active in intelligence.

The agency has refused to disclose the names of the news organizations on the ground that if these names were made public the individuals could be easily identified.

In this vacuum, however, suspicion is rapidly rising. On Capitol Hill, virtually every major news organization is rumored to have been a cover for the C.I.A.

Newsmen who have risen quickly to prominence, are conservative or were once C.I.A. employees are under suspicion. Newsmen who have served in certain foreign posts are suspect because they did, and others are suspect because they did not.

Last Friday, Sam Jaffe, a former television newsman who admits he was an informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said he had been told that Walter Cronkite of CBS, John Chancellor of NBC and William Sheehan, persident of ABC News, were on a list of 20 to 200 journalists who were paid by the C.I.A.

Denials Issued

Mr. Cronkite and Mr. Chancellor denied any C.I.A. links and ABC issued a similar denial for Mr. Sheehan. Before the day was out the C.I.A. had discounted the story and staff members of both Congressional committees investigating intelligence activities said they had no evidence there was such a list.

Senator Frank Church, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told newsmen at a breakfast several weeks ago that he would release the names of news organizations that had been infiltrated, if they disseminated news to Americans.

But late last week, though he said his committee was pressing for the names and details, he said that he would favor releasing the details only “if we find that this was intended by the C.I.A. in order to influence American opinion within our own country.”

Privately, members of the committee’s staff are worried that the disclosure of names and organizations might harm a news agency unfairly, destroy or harm the career of a reporter unfairly and whether the news media really want to know who in their midst secretly compromised objectivity to provide cover for Government agencies.

There is no question that broad disclosure about relations between news organizations and the C.I.A. may be painful for some. Already several well‐known newsmen who served as intelligence officers before entering journalism have been hurt by suspicion.

But interviews with newsmen on all levels in Washington showed that most thought an authoritative disclosure would end the suspicion, permit the news organizations involved to make a statement on their future policy and remove suspicion from the hundreds of reporters and dozens of news organizations that have no questionable connection with the C.I.A.

The entire western political-media class are currently rending their garments about the prison death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and are being joined by the propaganda-addled citizenry of the western empire. Meanwhile Julian Assange’s last-ditch effort to appeal against extradition to the United States is coming up in a few days with a tiny fraction of the attention.

I really could not have a lower opinion of people who would rather talk about Navalny’s persecution in a far away country that has nothing to do with them than Julian Assange being persecuted at the hands of their own government. It’s the most pathetic, bootlicking behavior imaginable.

Ooh yeah, you’re so brave self-righteously shaking your fist at some country on the other side of the planet which has zero power over your own country while refusing to oppose the power structure you actually live under as it slowly kills a journalist for exposing its war crimes. Groveling, power-worshipping bootlicker. Absolutely sickening.

If you’re in a country whose government has had a hand in the persecution of Julian Assange, then you can go ahead and shut the fuck up about Navalny. Whenever I see people screaming about the persecution of journalists and political prisoners in other countries when they themselves live in a nation whose government is persecuting Julian Assange, I can’t help but think of Matthew 7:4–5,

“How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”

What could be Assange’s final appeal effort against US extradition happens February 20th and 21st in London. Free Julian Assange.

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Egypt has reportedly begun constructing a walled camp in the Sinai Desert just south of the Gaza border in order to absorb Palestinians who get pushed out by the Israeli assault on Gaza, a major capitulation to a plan Israel has been pushing since the early days of the onslaught.

It sure is a crazy coincidence how every single step of Israel’s “response to October 7” has looked exactly the same as it would look if Israel was just carrying out agendas it’s wanted to carry out for many years.

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The Australian government is pushing through new authoritarian laws because someone leaked the contents of a WhatsApp group wherein Zionists plotted to ruin the lives of pro-Palestine voices, which is now being falsely framed as a Hitlerite “Jew list”. World Socialist Website’s Oscar Grenfell has more information.

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My favorite Israel apologist line is the one where they imply you must be an anti-semite because you’ve been uniquely focused on Israel’s crimes these last four months, as though Israel’s assault on Gaza isn’t self-evidently the worst thing happening in the world right now.

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The active genocide in Gaza is a much, much, much, MUCH more urgent and immediate concern than antisemitism, and should be treated as such. This is self-evident and shouldn’t be controversial to say.

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I used to follow a lot of teachers who talked about enlightenment and spiritual practice, and it’s insane how many of them now have nothing to say about Gaza, or are outright siding with Israel.

It’s like, what the hell was the point of all that inner work if it leads you to tacitly or explicitly endorse an active genocide? What good are all your insights and realizations if all they do is make you feel nice inside and don’t translate to any positive effects on the world outside your own skull? Who gives a fuck if you’ve had some shift in consciousness and some kundalini fireworks if you’re still a dogshit human being contributing to the disease and dysfunction of your species?

If your spirituality doesn’t lead to positive changes in yourself and your surroundings, it’s just glorified masturbation. If you’ve thrown yourself into self-realization and nondual awakening for decades at this point and you can’t even stand up against genocide and ethnic cleansing, then you’ve wasted your life on worthless endeavors. You’d have been better off throwing yourself into internet porn escapism or a nice wholesome opiate habit this entire time.

THE CIA AND THE MEDIA

How Americas Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up

BY CARL BERNSTEIN

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 in 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 of 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 for the following principal reasons:

■ The use of journalists has been among the most productive means of intelligence‑gathering employed by the CIA. Although the Agency has cut back sharply on the use of reporters since 1973 primarily as a result of pressure from the media), some journalist‑operatives are still posted abroad.

■ Further investigation into the matter, CIA officials say, would inevitably reveal a series of embarrassing relationships in the 1950s and 1960s with some of the most powerful organizations and individuals in American journalism.

Among the executives who lent their cooperation to the Agency were Williarn Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Henry Luce of Tirne Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the LouisviIle 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.

The CIA’s use of the American news media has been much more extensive than Agency officials have acknowledged publicly or in closed sessions with members of Congress. The general outlines of what happened are indisputable; the specifics are harder to come by. CIA sources hint that a particular journalist was trafficking all over Eastern Europe for the Agency; the journalist says no, he just had lunch with the station chief. CIA sources say flatly that a well‑known ABC correspondent worked for the Agency through 1973; they refuse to identify him. A high‑level CIA official with a prodigious memory says that the New York Times provided cover for about ten CIA operatives between 1950 and 1966; he does not know who they were, or who in the newspaper’s management made the arrangements.

The Agency’s special relationships with the so‑called “majors” in publishing and broadcasting enabled the CIA to post some of its most valuable operatives abroad without exposure for more than two decades. In most instances, Agency files show, officials at the highest levels of the CIA usually director or deputy director) dealt personally with a single designated individual in the top management of the cooperating news organization. The aid furnished often took two forms: providing jobs and credentials “journalistic cover” in Agency parlance) for CIA operatives about to be posted in foreign capitals; and lending the Agency the undercover services of reporters already on staff, including some of the best‑known correspondents in the business.

In the field, journalists were used to help recruit and handle foreigners as agents; to acquire and evaluate information, and to plant false information with officials of foreign governments. Many signed secrecy agreements, pledging never to divulge anything about their dealings with the Agency; some signed employment contracts., some were assigned case officers and treated with. unusual deference. Others had less structured relationships with the Agency, even though they performed similar tasks: they were briefed by CIA personnel before trips abroad, debriefed afterward, and used as intermediaries with foreign agents. Appropriately, the CIA uses the term “reporting” to describe much of what cooperating journalists did for the Agency. “We would ask them, ‘Will you do us a favor?’”.said a senior CIA official. “‘We understand you’re going to be in Yugoslavia. Have they paved all 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 …. Can you set up a meeting for is? Or relay a message?’” Many CIA officials regarded these helpful journalists as operatives; the journalists tended to see themselves as trusted friends of the Agency who performed occasional favors—usually without pay—in the national interest.

“I’m proud they asked me and proud to have done it,” said Joseph Alsop who, like his late brother, columnist Stewart Alsop, undertook clandestine tasks for the Agency. “The notion that a newspaperman doesn’t have a duty to his country is perfect balls.”

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. As Stuart Loory, former Los Angeles Times correspondent, has written in the Columbia Journalism Review: ‘If even one American overseas carrying a press card is a paid informer for the CIA, then all Americans with those credentials are suspect …. If the crisis of confidence faced by the news business—along with the government—is to be overcome, journalists must be willing to focus on themselves the same spotlight they so relentlessly train on others!’ But as Loory also noted: “When it was reported… that newsmen themselves were on the payroll of the CIA, the story caused a brief stir, and then was dropped.”

During the 1976 investigation of the CIA by the Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by Senator Frank Church, the dimensions of the Agency’s involvement with the press became apparent to several members of the panel, as well as to two or three investigators on the staff. But top officials of the CIA, including former directors William Colby and George Bush, persuaded the committee to restrict its inquiry into the matter and to deliberately misrepresent the actual scope of the activities in its final report. The multivolurne report contains nine pages in which the use of journalists is discussed in deliberately vague and sometimes misleading terms. It makes no mention of the actual number of journalists who undertook covert tasks for the CIA. Nor does it adequately describe the role played by newspaper and broadcast executives in cooperating with the Agency.

THE AGENCY’S DEALINGS WITH THE PRESS BEGAN during the earliest stages of the Cold War. Allen Dulles, who became director of the CIA in 1953, sought to establish a recruiting‑and‑cover capability within America’s most prestigious journalistic institutions. By operating under the guise of accredited news correspondents, Dulles believed, CIA operatives abroad would be accorded a degree of access and freedom of movement unobtainable under almost any other type of cover.

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.” Accordingly, the traditional line separating the American press corps and government was often indistinguishable: rarely was a news agency used to provide cover for CIA operatives abroad without the knowledge and consent of either its principal owner, publisher or senior editor. Thus, contrary to the notion that the CIA insidiously infiltrated the journalistic community, there is ample evidence that America’s leading publishers and news executives allowed themselves and their organizations to become handmaidens to the intelligence services. “Let’s not pick on some poor reporters, for God’s sake,” William Colby exclaimed at one point to the Church committee’s investigators. “Let’s go to the managements. They were witting.”  In all, about twenty‑five news organizations including those listed at the beginning of this article) provided cover for the Agency.

In addition to cover capability, Dulles initiated a “debriefing” procedure under which American correspondents returning from abroad routinely emptied their notebooks and offered their impressions to Agency personnel. Such arrangements, continued by Dulles’ successors, to the present day, were made with literally dozens of news organizations. In the 1950s, it was not uncommon for returning reporters to be met at the ship by CIA officers. “There would be these guys from the CIA flashing ID cards and looking like they belonged at the Yale Club,” said Hugh Morrow, a former Saturday Evening Post correspondent who is now press secretary to former vice‑president Nelson Rockefeller. “It got to be so routine that you felt a little miffed if you weren’t asked.”

CIA officials almost always refuse to divulge the names of journalists who have cooperated with the Agency. They say it would be unfair to judge these individuals in a context different from the one that spawned the relationships in the first place. “There was a time when it wasn’t considered a crime to serve your government,” said one high‑level CIA official who makes no secret of his bitterness. “This all has to be considered in the context of the morality of the times, rather than against latter‑day standards—and hypocritical standards at that.”

Many journalists who covered World War II were close to people in the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime predecessor of the CIA; more important, they were all on the same side. When the war ended and many OSS officials went into the CIA, it was only natural that these relationships would continue. Meanwhile, the first postwar generation of journalists entered the profession; they shared the same political and professional values as their mentors. “You had a gang of people who worked together during World War II and never got over it,” said one Agency official. “They were genuinely motivated and highly susceptible to intrigue and being on the inside. Then in the Fifties and Sixties there was a national consensus about a national threat. The Vietnam War tore everything to pieces—shredded the consensus and threw it in the air.” Another Agency official observed: “Many journalists didn’t give a second thought to associating with the Agency. But there was a point when the ethical issues which most people had submerged finally surfaced. Today, a lot of these guys vehemently deny that they had any relationship with the Agency.”

From the outset, the use of journalists was among the CIA’s most sensitive undertakings, with full knowledge restricted to the Director of Central Intelligence and a few of his chosen deputies. Dulles and his successors were fearful of what would happen if a journalist‑operative’s cover was blown, or if details of the Agency’s dealings with the press otherwise became public. As a result, contacts with the heads of news  organizations were normally initiated by Dulles and succeeding Directors of Central Intelligence; by the deputy directors and division chiefs in charge of covert operations—Frank Wisner, Cord Meyer Jr., Richard Bissell, Desmond FitzGerald, Tracy Barnes, Thomas Karamessines and Richard Helms himself a former UPI correspondent); and, occasionally, by others in the CIA hierarchy known to have an unusually close social relationship with a particular publisher or broadcast executive.1

James Angleton, who was recently removed as the Agency’s head of counterintelligence operations, ran a completely independent group of journalist‑operatives who performed sensitive and frequently dangerous assignments; little is known about this group for the simple reason that Angleton deliberately kept only the vaguest of files.

The CIA even ran a formal training program in the 1950s to teach its agents to be journalists. Intelligence officers were “taught to make noises like reporters,” explained a high CIA official, and were then placed in major news organizations with help from management. “These were the guys who went through the ranks and were told ‘You’re going to he a journalist,’” the CIA official said. Relatively few of the 400‑some relationships described in Agency files followed that pattern, however; most involved persons who were already bona fide journalists when they began undertaking tasks for the Agency.

The Agency’s relationships with journalists, as described in CIA files, include the following general categories:

■ Legitimate, accredited staff members of news organizations—usually reporters. Some were paid; some worked for the Agency on a purely voluntary basis. This group includes many of the best‑known journalists who carried out tasks for the CIA. The files show that the salaries paid to reporters by newspaper and broadcast networks were sometimes supplemented by nominal payments from the CIA, either in the form of retainers, travel expenses or outlays for specific services performed.  Almost all the payments were made in cash. The accredited category also includes photographers, administrative personnel of foreign news bureaus and members of broadcast technical crews.)

Two of the Agency’s most valuable personal relationships in the 1960s, according to CIA officials, were with reporters who covered Latin America—Jerry O’Leary of the Washington Star and Hal Hendrix of the Miami News, a Pulitzer Prize winner who became a high official of the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation. Hendrix was extremely helpful to the Agency in providing information about individuals in Miami’s Cuban exile community. O’Leary was considered a valued asset in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Agency files contain lengthy reports of both men’s activities on behalf of the CIA.

O’Leary maintains that his dealings were limited to the normal give‑and‑take that goes on between reporters abroad and their sources. CIA officials dispute the contention: “There’s no question Jerry reported for us,” said one. “Jerry did assessing and spotting [of prospective agents] but he was better as a reporter for us.” Referring to O’Leary’s denials, the official added: “I don’t know what in the world he’s worried about unless he’s wearing that mantle of integrity the Senate put on you journalists.”

O’Leary attributes the difference of opinion to semantics. “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. 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 they were more helpful to me than I was to them.” O’Leary took particular exception to being described in the same context as Hendrix. “Hal was really doing work for them,” said O’Leary. “I’m still with the Star. He ended up at ITT.” Hendrix could not be reached for comment. According to Agency officials, neither Hendrix nor O’Leary was paid by the CIA.

■ Stringers2 and freelancers. Most were payrolled by the Agency under standard contractual terms. Their journalistic credentials were often supplied by cooperating news organizations. some filed news stories; others reported only for the CIA. On some occasions, news organizations were not informed by the CIA that their stringers were also working for the Agency.

■ Employees of so‑called CIA “proprietaries.” During the past twenty‑five years, the Agency has secretly bankrolled numerous foreign press services, periodicals and newspapers—both English and foreign language—which provided excellent cover for CIA operatives. One such publication was the Rome Daily American, forty percent of which was owned by the CIA until the 1970s. The Daily American went out of business this year,

■ Editors, publishers and broadcast network executives. The CIAs relationship with most news executives differed fundamentally from those with working reporters and stringers, who were much more subject to direction from the Agency. A few executives—Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times among them—signed secrecy agreements. But such formal understandings were rare: relationships between Agency officials and media executives were usually social—”The P and Q Street axis in Georgetown,” said one source. “You don’t tell Wilharn Paley to sign a piece of paper saying he won’t fink.”

■ Columnists and commentators. There are perhaps a dozen well known columnists and broadcast commentators whose relationships with the CIA go far beyond those normally maintained between reporters and their sources. They are referred to at the Agency as “known assets” and can be counted on to perform a variety of undercover tasks; they are considered receptive to the Agency’s point of view on various subjects. Three of the most widely read columnists who maintained such ties with the Agency are C.L. Sulzberger of the New York Times, Joseph Alsop, and the late Stewart Alsop, whose column appeared in the New York Herald‑Tribune, the Saturday Evening Post and Newsweek. CIA files contain reports of specific tasks all three undertook. Sulzberger is still regarded as an active asset by the Agency. According to a senior CIA official, “Young Cy Sulzberger had some uses…. He signed a secrecy agreement because we gave him classified information…. There was sharing, give and take. We’d say, ‘Wed like to know this; if we tell you this will it help you get access to so‑and‑so?’ Because of his access in Europe he had an Open Sesame. We’d ask him to just report: ‘What did so‑and‑so say, what did he look like, is he healthy?’ He was very eager, he loved to cooperate.” On one occasion, according to several CIA officials, Sulzberger was given a briefing paper by the Agency which ran almost verbatim under the columnist’s byline in the Times. “Cycame out and said, ‘I’m thinking of doing a piece, can you give me some background?’” a CIA officer said. “We gave it to Cy as a background piece and Cy gave it to the printers and put his name on it.” Sulzberger denies that any incident occurred. “A lot of baloney,” he said.

Sulzberger claims that he was never formally “tasked” by the Agency and that he “would never get caught near the spook business. My relations were totally informal—I had a goodmany friends,” he said. “I’m sure they consider me an asset. They can ask me questions. They find out you’re going to Slobovia and they say, ‘Can we talk to you when you get back?’ … Or they’ll want to know if the head of the Ruritanian government is suffering from psoriasis. But I never took an assignment from one of those guys…. I’ve known Wisner well, and Helms and even McCone [former CIA director John McCone] I used to play golf with. But they’d have had to he awfully subtle to have used me.

Sulzberger says he was asked to sign the secrecy agreement in the 1950s. “A guy came around and said, ‘You are a responsible newsman and we need you to sign this if we are going to show you anything classified.’ I said I didn’t want to get entangled and told them, ‘Go to my uncle [Arthur Hays Sulzberger, then publisher of the New York Times] and if he says to sign it I will.’” His uncle subsequently signed such an agreement, Sulzberger said, and he thinks he did too, though he is unsure. “I don’t know, twenty‑some years is a long time.” He described the whole question as “a bubble in a bathtub.”

Stewart Alsop’s relationship with the Agency was much more extensive than Sulzberger’s. One official who served at the highest levels in the CIA said flatly: “Stew Alsop was a CIA agent.” An equally senior official refused to define Alsop’s relationship with the Agency except to say it was a formal one. Other sources said that Alsop was particularly helpful to the Agency in discussions with, officials of foreign governments—asking questions to which the CIA was seeking answers, planting misinformation advantageous to American policy, assessing opportunities for CIA recruitment of well‑placed foreigners.

“Absolute nonsense,” said Joseph Alsop of the notion that his brother was a CIA agent. “I was closer to the Agency than Stew was, though Stew was very close. I dare say he did perform some tasks—he just did the correct thing as an American…. The Founding Fathers [of the CIA] were close personal friends of ours. Dick Bissell [former CIA deputy director] was my oldest friend, from childhood. It was a social thing, my dear fellow. I never received a dollar, I never signed a secrecy agreement. I didn’t have to…. I’ve done things for them when I thought they were the right thing to do. I call it doing my duty as a citizen.

Alsop is willing to discuss on the record only two of the tasks he undertook: a visit to Laos in 1952 at the behest of Frank Wisner, who felt other American reporters were using anti‑American sources about uprisings there; and a visit to the Phillipines in 1953 when the CIA thought his presence there might affect the outcome of an election. “Des FitzGerald urged me to go,” Alsop recalled. “It would be less likely that the election could be stolen [by the opponents of Ramon Magsaysay] if the eyes of the world were on them. I stayed with the ambassador and wrote about what happened.”

Alsop maintains that he was never manipulated by the Agency. “You can’t get entangled so they have leverage on you,” he said. “But what I wrote was true. My view was to get the facts. If someone in the Agency was wrong, I stopped talking to them—they’d given me phony goods.” On one occasion, Alsop said, Richard Helms authorized the head of the Agency’s analytical branch to provide Alsop with information on Soviet military presence along the Chinese border. “The analytical side of the Agency had been dead wrong about the war in Vietnam—they thought it couldn’t be won,” said Alsop. “And they were wrong on the Soviet buildup. I stopped talking to them.” Today, he says, “People in our business would be outraged at the kinds of suggestions that were made to me. They shouldn’t be. The CIA did not open itself at all to people it did not trust. Stew and I were trusted, and I’m proud of it.”

MURKY DETAILS OF CIA RELATIONSHIPS WITH INDIVIDUALS and news organizations began trickling out in 1973 when it was first disclosed that the CIA had, on occasion, employed journalists. Those reports, combined with new information, serve as casebook studies of the Agency’s use of journalists for intelligence purposes. They include:

■ The New York Times. The Agency’s relationship with the Times was by far its most valuable among newspapers, according to CIA officials. From 1950 to 1966, about ten CIA employees were provided Times cover under arrangements approved by the newspaper’s late publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger. The cover arrangements were part of a general Times policy—set by Sulzberger—to provide assistance to the CIA whenever possible.

Sulzberger was especially close to Allen Dulles. “At that level of contact it was the mighty talking to the mighty,” said a high‑level CIA official who was present at some of the discussions. “There was an agreement in principle that, yes indeed, we would help each other. The question of cover came up on several occasions.  It was agreed that the actual arrangements would be handled by subordinates…. The mighty didn’t want to know the specifics; they wanted plausible deniability.

A senior CIA official who reviewed a portion of the Agency’s files on journalists for two hours onSeptember 15th, 1977, said he found documentation of five instances in which the Times had provided cover for CIA employees between 1954 and 1962. In each instance he said, the arrangements were handled by executives of the Times; the documents all contained standard Agency language “showing that this had been checked out at higher levels of the New York Times,” said the official. The documents did not mention Sulzberger’s name, however—only those of subordinates whom the official refused to identify.

The CIA employees who received Times credentials posed as stringers for the paper abroad and worked as members of clerical staffs in the Times’ foreign bureaus. Most were American; two or three were foreigners.

CIA officials cite two reasons why the Agency’s working relationship with the Times was closer and more extensive than with any other paper: the fact that the Times maintained the largest foreign news operation in American daily journalism; and the close personal ties between the men who ran both institutions.

Sulzberger informed a number of reporters and editors of his general policy of cooperation with the Agency. “We were in touch with them—they’d talk to us and some cooperated,” said a CIA official. The cooperation usually involved passing on information and “spotting” prospective agents among foreigners.

Arthur Hays Sulzberger signed a secrecy agreement with the CIA in the 1950s, according to CIA officials—a fact confirmed by his nephew, C.L. Sulzberger. However, there are varying interpretations of the purpose of the agreement: C.L. Sulzberger says it represented nothing more than a pledge not to disclose classified information made available to the publisher. That contention is supported by some Agency officials. Others in the Agency maintain that the agreement represented a pledge never to reveal any of the Times’ dealings with the CIA, especially those involving cover. And there are those who note that, because all cover arrangements are classified, a secrecy agreement would automatically apply to them.

Attempts to find out which individuals in the Times organization made the actual arrangements for providing credentials to CIA personnel have been unsuccessful. In a letter to reporter Stuart Loory in 1974, Turner Cadedge, managing editor of the Times from 1951 to 1964, wrote that approaches by the CIA had been rebuffed by the newspaper. “I knew nothing about any involvement with the CIA… of any of our foreign correspondents on the New York Times. I heard many times of overtures to our men by the CIA, seeking to use their privileges, contacts, immunities and, shall we say, superior intelligence in the sordid business of spying and informing. If any one of them succumbed to the blandishments or cash offers, I was not aware of it. Repeatedly, the CIA and other hush‑hush agencies sought to make arrangements for ‘cooperation’ even with Times management, especially during or soon after World War II, but we always resisted. Our motive was to protect our credibility.”

According to Wayne Phillips, a former Timesreporter, the CIA invoked Arthur Hays Sulzberger’s name when it tried to recruit him as an undercover operative in 1952 while he was studying at Columbia University’s Russian Institute. Phillips said an Agency official told him that the CIA had “a working arrangement” with the publisher in which other reporters abroad had been placed on the Agency’s payroll. Phillips, who remained at the Times until 1961, later obtained CIA documents under the Freedom of Information Act which show that the Agency intended to develop him as a clandestine “asset” for use abroad.

On January 31st, 1976, the Times carried a brief story describing the ClAs attempt to recruit Phillips. It quoted Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the present publisher, as follows: “I never heard of the Times being approached, either in my capacity as publisher or as the son of the late Mr. Sulzberger.” The Times story, written by John M. Crewdson, also reported that Arthur Hays Sulzberger told an unnamed former correspondent that he might he approached by the CIA after arriving at a new post abroad. Sulzberger told him that he was not “under any obligation to agree,” the story said and that the publisher himself would be “happier” if he refused to cooperate. “But he left it sort of up to me,” the Times quoted its former reporter as saying. “The message was if I really wanted to do that, okay, but he didn’t think it appropriate for a Times correspondent”

C.L. Sulzberger, in a telephone interview, said he had no knowledge of any CIA personnel using Times cover or of reporters for the paper working actively for the Agency. He was the paper’s chief of foreign service from 1944 to 1954 and expressed doubt that his uncle would have approved such arrangements. More typical of the late publisher, said  Sulzberger, was a promise made to Allen Dulles’ brother, John Foster, then secretary of state, that no Times staff member would be permitted to accept an invitation to visit the People’s Republic of China without John Foster Dulles’ consent. Such an invitation was extended to the publisher’s nephew in the 1950s; Arthur Sulzberger forbade him to accept it. “It was seventeen years before another Times correspondent was invited,” C.L. Sulzberger recalled.

■ The Columbia Broadcasting System. CBS was unquestionably the CIAs most valuable broadcasting asset. CBS President William Paley and Allen Dulles enjoyed an easy working and social relationship. Over the years, the network provided cover for CIA employees, including at least one well‑known foreign correspondent and several stringers; it supplied outtakes of newsfilm to the CIA3; established a formal channel of communication between the Washington bureau chief and the Agency; gave the Agency access to the CBS newsfilm library; and allowed reports by CBS correspondents to the Washington and New York newsrooms to be routinely monitored by the CIA. Once a year during the 1950s and early 1960s, CBS correspondents joined the CIA hierarchy for private dinners and briefings.

The details of the CBS‑CIA arrangements were worked out by subordinates of both Dulles and Paley. “The head of the company doesn’t want to know the fine points, nor does the director,” said a CIA official. “Both designate aides to work that out. It keeps them above the battle.” Dr. Frank Stanton, for 25 years president of the network, was aware of the general arrangements Paley made with Dulles—including those for cover, according to CIA officials. Stanton, in an interview last year, said he could not recall any cover arrangements.) But Paley’s designated contact for the Agency was Sig Mickelson, president of CBS News between 1954 and 1961. On one occasion, Mickelson has said, he complained to Stanton about having to use a pay telephone to call the CIA, and Stanton suggested he install a private line, bypassing the CBS switchboard, for the purpose. According to Mickelson, he did so. Mickelson is now president of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, both of which were associated with the CIA for many years.

In 1976, CBS News president Richard Salant ordered an in‑house investigation of the network’s dealings with the CIA. Some of its findings were first disclosed by Robert Scheer in the Los Angeles Times.) But Salant’s report makes no mention of some of his own dealings with the Agency, which continued into the 1970s.

Many details about the CBS‑CIA relationship were found in Mickelson’s files by two investigators for Salant. Among the documents they found was a September 13th, 1957, memo to Mickelson fromTed Koop, CBS News bureau chief  in Washington from 1948 to 1961. It describes a phone call to Koop from Colonel Stanley Grogan of the CIA: “Grogan phoned to say that Reeves [J. B. Love Reeves, another CIA official] is going to New York to be in charge of the CIA contact office there and will call to see you and some of your confreres. Grogan says normal activities will continue to channel through the Washington office of CBS News.” The report to Salant also states: “Further investigation of Mickelson’s files reveals some details of the relationship between the CIA and CBS News…. Two key administrators of this relationship were Mickelson and Koop…. The main activity appeared to be the delivery of CBS newsfilm to the CIA…. In addition there is evidence that, during 1964 to 1971, film material, including some outtakes, were supplied by the CBS Newsfilm Library to the CIA through and at the direction of Mr. Koop4…. Notes in Mr. Mickelson’s files indicate that the CIA used CBS films for training… All of the above Mickelson activities were handled on a confidential basis without mentioning the words Central Intelligence Agency. The films were sent to individuals at post‑office box numbers and were paid for by individual, nor government, checks. …” Mickelson also regularly sent the CIA an internal CBS newsletter, according to the report.

Salant’s investigation led him to conclude that Frank Kearns, a CBS‑TV reporter from 1958 to 1971, “was a CIA guy who got on the payroll somehow through a CIA contact with somebody at CBS.” Kearns and Austin Goodrich, a CBS stringer, were undercover CIA employees, hired under arrangements approved by Paley.

Last year a spokesman for Paley denied a report by former CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr that Mickelson and he had discussed Goodrich’s CIA status during a meeting with two Agency representatives in 1954. The spokesman claimed Paley had no knowledge that Goodrich had worked for the CIA. “When I moved into the job I was told by Paley that there was an ongoing relationship with the CIA,” Mickelson said in a recent interview. “He introduced me to two agents who he said would keep in touch. We all discussed the Goodrich situation and film arrangements. I assumed this was a normal relationship at the time. This was at the height of the Cold War and I assumed the communications media were cooperating—though the Goodrich matter was compromising.

At the headquarters of CBS News in New York, Paley’s cooperation with the CIA is taken for granted by many news executives and reporters, despite tile denials. Paley, 76, was not interviewed by Salant’s investigators. “It wouldn’t do any good,” said one CBS executive. “It is the single subject about which his memory has failed.”

Salant discussed his own contacts with the CIA, and the fact he continued many of his predecessor’s practices, in an interview with this reporter last year. The contacts, he said, began in February 1961, “when I got a phone call from a CIA man who said he had a working relationship with Sig Mickelson. The man said, ‘Your bosses know all about it.'”  According to Salant, the CIA representative asked that CBS continue to supply the Agency with unedited newstapes and make its correspondents available for debriefingby Agency officials. Said Salant: “I said no on talking to the reporters, and let them see broadcast tapes, but no outtakes.  This went on for a number of years—into the early Seventies.”

In 1964 and 1965, Salant served on a super-secret CIA task force which explored methods of beaming American propaganda broadcasts to the People’s Republic of China. The other members of the four‑man study team were Zbigniew Brzezinski, then a professor at Columbia University; William Griffith, then professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology., and John Haves, then vice‑president of the Washington Post Company for radio‑TV5. The principal government officials associated with the project were Cord Meyer of the CIA; McGeorge Bundy, then special assistant to the president for national security; Leonard Marks, then director of the USIA; and Bill Moyers, then special assistant to President Lyndon Johnson and now a CBS correspondent.

Salant’s involvement in the project began with a call from Leonard Marks, “who told me the White House wanted to form a committee of four people to make a study of U.S. overseas broadcasts behind the Iron Curtain.” When Salant arrived in Washington for the first meeting he was told that the project was CIA sponsored. “Its purpose,” he said, “was to determine how best to set up shortwave broadcasts into Red China.” Accompanied by a CIA officer named Paul Henzie, the committee of four subsequently traveled around the world inspecting facilities run by Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty both CIA‑run operations at the time), the Voice of America and Armed Forces Radio. After more than a year of study, they submitted a report to Moyers recommending that the government establish a broadcast service, run by the Voice of America, to be beamed at the People’s Republic of China. Salant has served two tours as head of CBS News, from 1961‑64 and 1966‑present. At the time of the China project he was a CBS corporate executive.)

■ Time and Newsweek magazines. According to CIA and Senate sources, Agency files contain written agreements with former foreign correspondents and stringers for both the weekly news magazines.  The same sources refused to say whether the CIA has ended all its associations with individuals who work for the two publications. Allen Dulles often interceded with his good friend, the late Henry Luce, founder of Time and Life magazines, who readily allowed certain members of his staff to work for the Agency and agreed to provide jobs and credentials for other CIA operatives who lacked journalistic experience.

For many years, Luce’s personal emissary to the CIA was C.D. Jackson, a Time Inc., vice‑president who was publisher of Life magazine from 1960 until his death in 1964.While a Time executive, Jackson coauthored a CIA‑sponsored study recommending the reorganization of the American intelligence services in the early 1950s. Jackson, whose Time‑Life service was interrupted by a one‑year White House tour as an assistant to President Dwight Eisenhower, approved specific arrangements for providing CIA employees with Time‑Life cover. Some of these arrangements were made with the knowledge of Luce’s wife, Clare Boothe. Other arrangements for Time cover, according to CIA officials including those who dealt with Luce), were made with the knowledge of Hedley Donovan, now editor‑in‑chief of Time Inc. Donovan, who took over editorial direction of all Time Inc. publications in 1959, denied in a telephone interview that he knew of any such arrangements. “I was never approached and I’d be amazed if Luce approved such arrangements,” Donovan said. “Luce had a very scrupulous regard for the difference between journalism and government.”

In the 1950s and early 1960s, Time magazine’s foreign correspondents attended CIA “briefing” dinners similar to those the CIA held for CBS. And Luce, according to CIA officials, made it a regular practice to brief Dulles or other high Agency officials when he returned from his frequent trips abroad. Luce and the men who ran his magazines in the 1950s and 1960s encouraged their foreign correspondents to provide help to the CIA, particularly information that might be useful to the Agency for intelligence purposes or recruiting foreigners.

At Newsweek, Agency sources reported, the CIA engaged the services of’ several foreign correspondents and stringers under arrangements approved by senior editors at the magazine. Newsweek’s stringer in Rome in the mid‑Fifties made little secret of the fact that he worked for the CIA. Malcolm Muir, Newsweek’s editor from its founding in 1937 until its sale to the Washington Post Company in 1961, said in a recent interview that his dealings with the CIA were limited to private briefings he gave Allen Dulles after trips abroad and arrangements he approved for regular debriefing of Newsweek correspondents by the Agency. He said that he had never provided cover for CIA operatives, but that others high in the Newsweek organization might have done so without his knowledge.

“I would have thought there might have been stringers who were agents, but I didn’t know who they were,” said Muir. “I do think in those days the CIA kept pretty close touch with all responsible reporters. Whenever I heard something that I thought might be of interest to Allen Dulles, I’d call him up…. At one point he appointed one of his CIA men to keep in regular contact with our reporters, a chap that I knew but whose name I can’t remember. I had a number of friends in Alien Dulles’ organization.” Muir said that Harry Kern, Newsweek’s foreign editor from 1945 until 1956, and Ernest K. Lindley, the magazine’s Washington bureau chief during the same period “regularly checked in with various fellows in the CIA.”

“To the best of my knowledge.” said Kern, “nobody at Newsweek worked for the CIA… The informal relationship was there. Why have anybody sign anything? What we knew we told them [the CIA] and the State Department…. When I went to Washington, I would talk to Foster or Allen Dulles about what was going on. … We thought it was admirable at the time. We were all on the same side.” CIA officials say that Kern’s dealings with the Agency were extensive. In 1956, he left Newsweek to run Foreign Reports, a Washington‑based newsletter whose subscribers Kern refuses to identify.

Ernest Lindley, who remained at Newsweek until 1961, said in a recent interview that he regularly consulted with Dulles and other high CIA officials before going abroad and briefed them upon his return. “Allen was very helpful to me and I tried to reciprocate when I could,” he said. “I’d give him my impressions of people I’d met overseas. Once or twice he asked me to brief a large group of intelligence people; when I came back from the Asian‑African conference in 1955, for example; they mainly wanted to know about various people.”

As Washington bureau chief, Lindley said he learned from Malcolm Muir that the magazine’s stringer in southeastern Europe was a CIA contract employee—given credentials under arrangements worked out with the management. “I remember it came up—whether it was a good idea to keep this person from the Agency; eventually it was decided to discontinue the association,” Lindley said.

When Newsweek waspurchased by the Washington Post Company, publisher Philip L. Graham was informed by Agency officials that the CIA occasionally used the magazine for cover purposes, according to CIA sources. “It was widely known that Phil Graham was somebody you could get help from,” said a former deputy director of the Agency. “Frank Wisner dealt with him.” Wisner, deputy director of the CIA from 1950 until shortly before his suicide in 1965, was the Agency’s premier orchestrator of “black” operations, including many in which journalists were involved. Wisner liked to boast of his “mighty Wurlitzer,” a wondrous propaganda instrument he built, and played, with help from the press.) Phil Graham was probably Wisner’s closest friend. But Graharn, who committed suicide in 1963, apparently knew little of the specifics of any cover arrangements with Newsweek, CIA sources said.

In 1965‑66, an accredited Newsweek stringer in the Far East was in fact a CIA contract employee earning an annual salary of $10,000 from the Agency, according to Robert T. Wood, then a CIA officer in the Hong Kong station. Some, Newsweek correspondents and stringers continued to maintain covert ties with the Agency into the 1970s, CIA sources said.

Information about Agency dealings with the Washington Post newspaper is extremely sketchy. According to CIA officials, some Post stringers have been CIA employees, but these officials say they do not know if anyone in the Post management was aware of the arrangements.

All editors‑in‑chief and managing editors of the Post since 1950 say they knew of no formal Agency relationship with either stringers or members of the Post staff. “If anything was done it was done by Phil without our knowledge,” said one. Agency officials, meanwhile, make no claim that Post staff members have had covert affiliations with the Agency while working for the paper.6

Katharine Graham, Philip Graham’s widow and the current publisher of the Post, says she has never been informed of any CIA relationships with either Post or Newsweek personnel. In November of 1973, Mrs. Graham called William Colby and asked if any Post stringers or staff members were associated with the CIA. Colby assured her that no staff members were employed by the Agency but refused to discuss the question of stringers.

■ The Louisville Courier‑Journal. From December 1964 until March 1965, a CIA undercover operative named Robert H. Campbell worked on the Courier‑Journal. According to high‑level CIA sources, Campbell was hired by the paper under arrangements the Agency made with Norman E. Isaacs, then executive editor of the Courier‑Journal. Barry Bingham Sr., then publisher of the paper, also had knowledge of the arrangements, the sources said. Both Isaacs and Bingham have denied knowing that Campbell was an intelligence agent when he was hired.

The complex saga of Campbell’s hiring was first revealed in a Courier‑Journal story written by James R Herzog on March 27th, 1976, during the Senate committee’s investigation, Herzog’s account began: “When 28‑year‑old Robert H. Campbell was hired as a Courier‑Journal reporter in December 1964, he couldn’t type and knew little about news writing.” The account then quoted the paper’s former managing editor as saying that Isaacs told him that Campbell was hired as a result of a CIA request: “Norman said, when he was in Washington [in 1964], he had been called to lunch with some friend of his who was with the CIA [and that] he wanted to send this young fellow down to get him a little knowledge of newspapering.” All aspects of Campbell’s hiring were highly unusual. No effort had been made to check his credentials, and his employment records contained the following two notations: “Isaacs has files of correspondence and investigation of this man”; and, “Hired for temporary work—no reference checks completed or needed.”

The level of Campbell’s journalistic abilities apparently remained consistent during his stint at the paper, “The stuff that Campbell turned in was almost unreadable,” said a former assistant city editor. One of Campbell’s major reportorial projects was a feature about wooden Indians. It was never published. During his tenure at the paper, Campbell frequented a bar a few steps from the office where, on occasion, he reportedly confided to fellow drinkers that he was a CIA employee.

According to CIA sources, Campbell’s tour at the Courier‑Journal was arranged to provide him with a record of journalistic experience that would enhance the plausibility of future reportorial cover and teach him something about the newspaper business. The Courier‑Journal’s investigation also turned up the fact that before coming to Louisville he had worked briefly for the Hornell, New York, Evening Tribune, published by Freedom News, Inc. CIA sources said the Agency had made arrangements with that paper’s management to employ Campbell.7

At the Courier‑Journal, Campbell was hired under arrangements made with Isaacs and approved by Bingham, said CIA and Senate sources. “We paid the Courier‑Journal so they could pay his salary,” said an Agency official who was involved in the transaction. Responding by letter to these assertions, Isaacs, who left Louisville to become president and publisher of the Wilmington Delaware) News & Journal, said: “All I can do is repeat the simple truth—that never, under any circumstances, or at any time, have I ever knowingly hired a government agent. I’ve also tried to dredge my memory, but Campbell’s hiring meant so little to me that nothing emerges…. None of this is to say that I couldn’t have been ‘had.’”.Barry Bingham Sr., said last year in a telephone interview that he had no specific memory of Campbell’s hiring and denied that he knew of any arrangements between the newspaper’s management and the CIA. However, CIA officials said that the Courier‑Journal, through contacts with Bingham, provided other unspecified assistance to the Agency in the 1950s and 1960s. The Courier‑Journal’s detailed, front‑page account of Campbell’s hiring was initiated by Barry Bingham Jr., who succeeded his father as editor and publisher of the paper in 1971. The article is the only major piece of self‑investigation by a newspaper that has appeared on this subject.8

■ The American Broadcasting Company and the National Broadcasting Company. According to CIA officials, ABC continued to provide cover for some CIA operatives through the 1960s. One was Sam Jaffe who CIA officials said performed clandestine tasks for the Agency. Jaffe has acknowledged only providing the CIA with information. In addition, another well‑known network correspondent performed covert tasks for the Agency, said CIA sources. At the time of the Senate bearings, Agency officials serving at the highest levels refused to say whether the CIA was still maintaining active relationships with members of the ABC‑News organization. All cover arrangements were made with the knowledge off ABC executives, the sources said.

These same sources professed to know few specifies about the Agency’s relationships with NBC, except that several foreign correspondents of the network undertook some assignments for the Agency in the 1950s and 1960s. “It was a thing people did then,” said Richard Wald, president of NBC News since 1973. “I wouldn’t be surprised if people here—including some of the correspondents in those days—had connections with the Agency.”

■ The Copley Press, and its subsidiary, the Copley News Service. This relationship, first disclosed publicly by reporters Joe Trento and Dave Roman in Penthouse magazine, is said by CIA officials to have been among the Agency’s most productive in terms of getting “outside” cover for its employees. Copley owns nine newspapers in California and Illinois—among them the San Diego Union and Evening Tribune. The Trento‑Roman account, which was financed by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, asserted that at least twenty‑three Copley News Service employees performed work for the CIA. “The Agency’s involvement with the Copley organization is so extensive that it’s almost impossible to sort out,” said a CIA official who was asked about the relationship late in 1976. Other Agency officials said then that James S. Copley, the chain’s owner until his death in 1973, personally made most of the cover arrangements with the CIA.

According to Trento and Roman, Copley personally volunteered his news service to then‑president Eisenhower to act as “the eyes and ears” against “the Communist threat in Latin and Central America” for “our intelligence services.”  James Copley was also the guiding hand behind the Inter‑American Press Association, a CIA‑funded organization with heavy membership among right‑wing Latin American newspaper editors.

■ Other major news organizations. According to Agency officials, CIA files document additional cover arrangements with the following news‑gathering organizations, among others: the New York Herald‑Tribune, the Saturday‑Evening Post, Scripps‑Howard Newspapers, Hearst Newspapers Seymour K. Freidin, Hearst’s current London bureau chief and a former  Herald‑Tribune editor and correspondent, has been identified as a CIA operative by Agency sources), Associated Press,9 United Press International, the Mutual Broadcasting System, Reuters and the Miami Herald. Cover arrangements with the Herald, according to CIA officials, were unusual in that they were made “on the ground by the CIA station in Miami, not from CIA headquarters.

“And that’s just a small part of the list,” in the words of one official who served in the CIA hierarchy. Like many sources, this official said that the only way to end the uncertainties about aid furnished the Agency by journalists is to disclose the contents of the CIA files—a course opposed by almost all of the thirty‑five present and former CIA officials interviewed over the course of a year.

COLBY CUTS HIS LOSSES

THE CIA’S USE OF JOURNALISTS CONTINUED VIRTUALLY unabated until 1973 when, in response to public disclosure that the Agency had secretly employed American reporters, William Colby began scaling down the program. In his public statements, Colby conveyed the impression that the use of journalists had been minimal and of limited importance to the Agency.

He then initiated a series of moves intended to convince the press, Congress and the public that the CIA had gotten out of the news business. But according to Agency officials, Colby had in fact thrown a protective net around his valuable intelligence in the journalistic community. He ordered his deputies to maintain Agency ties with its best journalist contacts while severing formal relationships with many regarded as inactive, relatively unproductive or only marginally important. In reviewing Agency files to comply with Colby’s directive, officials found that many journalists had not performed useful functions for the CIA in years. Such relationships, perhaps as many as a hundred, were terminated between 1973 and 1976.

Meanwhile, important CIA operatives who had been placed on the staffs of some major newspaper and broadcast outlets were told to resign and become stringers or freelancers, thus enabling Colby to assure concerned editors that members of their staffs were not CIA employees. Colby also feared that some valuable stringer‑operatives might find their covers blown if scrutiny of the Agency’s ties with journalists continued. Some of these individuals were reassigned to jobs on so‑called proprietary publications—foreign periodicals and broadcast outlets secretly funded and staffed by the CIA. Other journalists who had signed formal contracts with the CIA—making them employees of the Agency—were released from their contracts, and asked to continue working under less formal arrangements.

In November 1973, after many such shifts had been made, Colby told reporters and editors from the New York Times and the Washington Star that the Agency had “some three dozen” American newsmen “on the CIA payroll,” including five who worked for “general‑circulation news organizations.” Yet even while the Senate Intelligence Committee was holding its hearings in 1976, according to high‑level CIA sources, the CIA continued to maintain ties with seventy‑five to ninety journalists of every description—executives, reporters, stringers, photographers, columnists, bureau clerks and members of broadcast technical crews. More than half of these had been moved off CIA contracts and payrolls but they were still bound by other secret agreements with the Agency. According to an unpublished report by the House Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired by Representative Otis Pike, at least fifteen news organizations were still providing cover for CIA operatives as of 1976.

Colby, who built a reputation as one of the most skilled undercover tacticians in the CIA’s history, had himself run journalists in clandestine operations before becoming director in 1973. But even he was said by his closest associates to have been disturbed at how extensively and, in his view, indiscriminately, the Agency continued to use journalists at the time he took over. “Too prominent,” the director frequently said of some of the individuals and news organizations then working with the CIA. Others in the Agency refer to their best‑known journalistic assets as “brand names.”)

“Colby’s concern was that he might lose the resource altogether unless we became a little more careful about who we used and how we got them,” explained one of the former director’s deputies. The thrust of Colby’s subsequent actions was to move the Agency’s affiliations away from the so‑called “majors” and to concentrate them instead in smaller newspaper chains, broadcasting groups and such specialized publications as trade journals and newsletters.

After Colby left the Agency on January 28th, 1976, and was succeeded by George Bush, the CIA announced a new policy: “Effective immediately, the CIA will not enter into any paid or contractual relationship with any full‑time or part‑time news correspondent accredited by any U.S. news service, newspaper, periodical, radio or television network or station” At the time of the announcement, the Agency acknowledged that the policy would result in termination of less than half of the relationships with the 50 U.S. journalists it said were still affiliated with the Agency. The text of the announcement noted that the CIA would continue to “welcome” the voluntary, unpaid cooperation of journalists. Thus, many relationships were permitted to remain intact.

The Agency’s unwillingness to end its use of journalists and its continued relationships with some news executives is largely the product of two basic facts of the intelligence game: journalistic cover is ideal because of the inquisitive nature of a reporter’s job; and many other sources of institutional cover have been denied the CIA in recent years by businesses, foundations and educational institutions that once cooperated with the Agency.

“It’s tough to run a secret agency in this country,” explained one high‑level CIA official. “We have a curious ambivalence about intelligence. In order to serve overseas we need cover. But we have been fighting a rear‑guard action to try and provide cover. The Peace Corps is off‑limits, so is USIA, the foundations and voluntary organizations have been off‑limits since ‘67, and there is a self‑imposed prohibition on Fulbrights [Fulbright Scholars]. If you take the American community and line up who could work for the CIA and who couldn’t there is a very narrow potential. Even the Foreign Service doesn’t want us. So where the hell do you go? Business is nice, but the press is a natural. One journalist is worth twenty agents. He has access, the ability to ask questions without arousing suspicion.”

ROLE OF THE CHURCH COMMITTEE

DESPITE THE EVIDENCE OF WIDESPREAD CIA USE OF journalists, the Senate Intelligence Committee and its staff decided against questioning any of the reporters, editors, publishers or broadcast executives whose relationships with the Agency are detailed in CIA files.

According to sources in the Senate and the Agency, the use of journalists was one of two areas of inquiry which the CIA went to extraordinary lengths to curtail. The other was the Agency’s continuing and extensive use of academics for recruitment and information gathering purposes.

In both instances, the sources said, former directors Colby and Bush and CIA special counsel Mitchell Rogovin were able to convince key members of the committee that full inquiry or even limited public disclosure of the dimensions of the activities would do irreparable damage to the nation’s intelligence‑gathering apparatus, as well as to the reputations of hundreds of individuals. Colby was reported to have been especially persuasive in arguing that disclosure would bring on a latter‑day “witch hunt” in which the victims would be reporters, publishers and editors.

Walter Elder, deputy to former CIA director McCone and the principal Agency liaison to the Church committee, argued that the committee lacked jurisdiction because there had been no misuse of journalists by the CIA; the relationships had been voluntary. Elder cited as an example the case of the Louisville Courier‑Journal. “Church and other people on the committee were on the chandelier about the Courier‑Journal,” one Agency official said, “until we pointed out that we had gone to the editor to arrange cover, and that the editor had said, ‘Fine.’”

Some members of the Church committee and staff feared that Agency officials had gained control of the inquiry and that they were being hoodwinked. “The Agency was extremely clever about it and the committee played right into its hands,” said one congressional source familiar with all aspects of the inquiry. “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 that 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.”

The Senate committee’s investigation into the use of journalists was supervised by William B. Bader, a former CIA intelligence officer who returned briefly to the Agency this year as deputy to CIA director Stansfield Turner and is now a high‑level intelligence official at the Defense Department. Bader was assisted by David Aaron, who now serves as the deputy to Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s national security adviser.

According to colleagues on the staff of the Senate inquiry, both Bader and Aaron were disturbed by the information contained in CIA files about journalists; they urged that further investigation he undertaken by the Senate’s new permanent CIA oversight committee. That committee, however, has spent its first year of existence writing a new charter for the CIA, and members say there has been little interest in delving further into the CIA’s use of the press.

Bader’s investigation was conducted under unusually difficult conditions. His first request for specific information on the use of journalists was turned down by the CIA on grounds that there had been no abuse of authority and that current intelligence operations might he compromised. Senators Walter Huddleston, Howard Baker, Gary Hart, Walter Mondale and Charles Mathias—who had expressed interest in the subject of the press and the CIA—shared Bader’s distress at the CIA’s reaction. In a series of phone calls and meetings with CIA director George Bush and other Agency officials, the senators insisted that the committee staff be provided information about the scope of CIA‑press activities. Finally, Bush agreed to order a search of the files and have those records pulled which deals with operations where journalists had been used. But the raw files could not he made available to Bader or the committee, Bush insisted. Instead, the director decided, his deputies would condense the material into one‑paragraph sum­maries describing in the most general terms the activities of each individual journalist. Most important, Bush decreed, the names of journalists and of the news organizations with which they were affiliated would be omitted from the summaries. However, there might be some indication of the region where the journalist had served and a general description of the type of news organization for which he worked.

Assembling the summaries was difficult, according to CIA officials who supervised the job. There were no “journalist files” per se and information had to be collected from divergent sources that reflect the highly compartmentalized character of the CIA. Case officers who had handled journalists supplied some names. Files were pulled on various undercover operations in which it seemed logical that journalists had been used. Significantly, all work by reporters for the Agency under the category of covert operations, not foreign intelligence.) Old station records were culled. “We really had to scramble,” said one official.

After several weeks, Bader began receiving the summaries, which numbered over 400 by the time the Agency said it had completed searching its files.

The Agency played an intriguing numbers game with the committee. Those who prepared the material say it was physically impossible to produce all of the Agency’s files on the use of journalists. “We gave them a broad, representative picture,” said one agency official. “We never pretended it was a total description of the range of activities over 25 years, or of the number of journalists who have done things for us.” A relatively small number of the summaries described the activities of foreign journalists—including those working as stringers for American publications. Those officials most knowledgeable about the subject say that a figure of 400 American journalists is on the low side of the actual number who maintained covert relationships and undertook clandestine tasks.

Bader and others to whom he described the contents of the summaries immediately reached some general conclusions: the sheer number of covert relationships with journalists was far greater than the CIA had ever hinted; and the Agency’s use of reporters and news executives was an intelligence asset of the first magnitude. Reporters had been involved in almost every conceivable kind of operation. Of the 400‑plus individuals whose activities were summarized, between 200 and 250 were “working journalists” in the usual sense of the term—reporters, editors, correspondents, photographers; the rest were employed at least nominally) by book publishers, trade publications and newsletters.

Still, the summaries were just that: compressed, vague, sketchy, incomplete. They could be subject to ambiguous interpretation. And they contained no suggestion that the CIA had abused its authority by manipulating the editorial content of American newspapers or broadcast reports.

Bader’s unease with what he had found led him to seek advice from several experienced hands in the fields of foreign relations and intelligence. They suggested that he press for more information and give those members of the committee in whom he had the most confidence a general idea of what the summaries revealed. Bader again went to Senators Huddleston, Baker, Hart, Mondale and Mathias. Meanwhile, he told the CIA that he wanted to see more—the full files on perhaps a hundred or so of the individuals whose activities had been summarized. The request was turned down outright. The Agency would provide no more information on the subject. Period.

The CIA’s intransigence led to an extraordinary dinner meeting at Agency headquarters in late March 1976. Those present included Senators Frank Church who had now been briefed by Bader), and John Tower, the vice‑chairman of the committee; Bader; William Miller, director of the committee staff; CIA director Bush; Agency counsel Rogovin; and Seymour Bolten, a high‑level CIA operative who for years had been a station chief in Germany and Willy Brandt’s case officer. Bolten had been deputized by Bush to deal with the committee’s requests for information on journalists and academics. At the dinner, the Agency held to its refusal to provide any full files. Nor would it give the committee the names of any individual journalists described in the 400 summaries or of the news organizations with whom they were affiliated. The discussion, according to participants, grew heated. The committee’s representatives said they could not honor their mandate—to determine if the CIA had abused its authority—without further information. The CIA maintained it could not protect its legitimate intelligence operations or its employees if further disclosures were made to the committee. Many of the journalists were contract employees of the Agency, Bush said at one point, and the CIA was no less obligated to them than to any other agents.

Finally, a highly unusual agreement was hammered out: Bader and Miller would be permitted to examine “sanitized” versions of the full files of twenty‑five journalists selected from the summaries; but the names of the journalists and the news organizations which employed them would be blanked out, as would the identities of other CIA employees mentioned in the files. Church and Tower would be permitted to examine the unsanitizedversions of five of the twenty‑five files—to attest that the CIA was not hiding anything except the names. The whole deal was contingent on an agreement that neither Bader, Miner, Tower nor Church would reveal the contents of the files to other members of the committee or staff.

Bader began reviewing the 400‑some summaries again. His object was to select twenty‑five that, on the basis of the sketchy information they contained, seemed to represent a cross section. Dates of CIA activity, general descriptions of news organizations, types of journalists and undercover operations all figured in his calculations.

From the twenty‑five files he got back, according to Senate sources and CIA officials, an unavoidable conclusion emerged: that to a degree never widely suspected, the CIA in the 1950s, ‘60s and even early ‘70s had concentrated its relationships with journalists in the most prominent sectors of the American press corps, including four or five of the largest newspapers in the country, the broadcast networks and the two major newsweekly magazines. Despite the omission of names and affiliations from the twenty‑five detailed files each was between three and eleven inches thick), the information was usually sufficient to tentatively identify either the newsman, his affiliation or both—particularly because so many of them were prominent in the profession.

“There is quite an incredible spread of relationships,” Bader reported to the senators. “You don’t need to manipulate Time magazine, for example, because there are Agency people at the management level.”

Ironically, one major news organization that set limits on its dealings with the CIA, according to Agency officials, was the one with perhaps the greatest editorial affinity for the Agency’s long‑range goals and policies: U.S. News and World Report. The late David Lawrence, the columnist and founding editor of U.S. News, was a close friend of Allen Dulles. But he repeatedly refused requests by the CIA director to use the magazine for cover purposes, the sources said. At one point, according to a high CIA official, Lawrence issued orders to his sub‑editors in which he threatened to fire any U.S. News employee who was found to have entered into a formal relationship with the Agency. Former editorial executives at the magazine confirmed that such orders had been issued. CIA sources declined to say, however, if the magazine remained off‑limits to the Agency after Lawrence’s death in 1973 or if Lawrence’s orders had been followed.)

Meanwhile, Bader attempted to get more information from the CIA, particularly about the Agency’s current relationships with journalists. He encountered a stone wall. “Bush has done nothing to date,” Bader told associates. “None of the important operations are affected in even a marginal way.” The CIA also refused the staffs requests for more information on the use of academics. Bush began to urge members of the committee to curtail its inquiries in both areas and conceal its findings in the final report. “He kept saying, ‘Don’t fuck these guys in the press and on the campuses,’ pleading that they were the only areas of public life with any credibility left,” reported a Senate source. Colby, Elder and Rogovin also implored individual members of the committee to keep secret what the staff had found. “There were a lot of representations that if this stuff got out some of the biggest names in journalism would get smeared,” said another source. Exposure of the CIA’s relationships with journalists and academics, the Agency feared, would close down two of the few avenues of agent recruitment still open. “The danger of exposure is not the other side,” explained one CIA expert in covert operations. “This is not stuff the other side doesn’t know about. The concern of the Agency is that another area of cover will be denied.”

A senator who was the object of the Agency’s lobbying later said: “From the CIA point of view this was the highest, most sensitive covert program of all…. It was a much larger part of the operational system than has been indicated.” He added, “I had a great compulsion to press the point but it was late …. If we had demanded, they would have gone the legal route to fight it.”

Indeed, time was running out for the committee. In the view of many staff members, it had squandered its resources in the search for CIA assassination plots and poison pen letters. It had undertaken the inquiry into journalists almost as an afterthought. The dimensions of the program and the CIA’s sensitivity to providing information on it had caught the staff and the committee by surprise. The CIA oversight committee that would succeed the Church panel would have the inclination and the time to inquire into the subject methodically; if, as seemed likely, the CIA refused to cooperate further, the mandate of the successor committee would put it in a more advantageous position to wage a protracted fight …. Or so the reasoning went as Church and the few other senators even vaguely familiar with Bader’s findings reached a decision not to pursue the matter further. No journalists would be interviewed about their dealings with the Agency—either by the staff or by the senators, in secret or in open session. The specter, first raised by CIA officials, of a witch hunt in the press corps haunted some members of the staff and the committee. “We weren’t about to bring up guys to the committee and then have everybody say they’ve been traitors to the ideals of their profession,” said a senator.

Bader, according to associates, was satisfied with the decision and believed that the successor committee would pick up the inquiry where he had left it. He was opposed to making public the names of individual journalists. He had been concerned all along that he had entered a “gray area” in which there were no moral absolutes. Had the CIA “manipulated” the press in the classic sense of the term? Probably not, he concluded; the major news organizations and their executives had willingly lent their resources to the Agency; foreign correspondents had regarded work for the CIA as a national service and a way of getting better stories and climbing to the top of their profession. Had the CIA abused its authority? It had dealt with the press almost exactly as it had dealt with other institutions from which it sought cover — the diplomatic service, academia, corporations. There was nothing in the CIA’s charter which declared any of these institutions off‑limits to America’s intelligence service. And, in the case of the press, the Agency had exercised more care in its dealings than with many other institutions; it had gone to considerable lengths to restrict its role to information‑gathering and cover.10

Bader was also said to be concerned that his knowledge was so heavily based on information furnished by the CIA; he hadn’t gotten the other side of the story from those journalists who had associated with the Agency. He could be seeing only “the lantern show,” he told associates. Still, Bader was reasonably sure that he had seen pretty much the full panoply of what was in the files. If the CIA had wanted to deceive him it would have never given away so much, he reasoned. “It was smart of the Agency to cooperate to the extent of showing the material to Bader,” observed a committee source. “That way, if one fine day a file popped up, the Agency would be covered. They could say they had already informed the Congress.”

The dependence on CIA files posed another problem. The CIA’s perception of a relationship with a journalist might be quite different than that of the journalist: a CIA official might think he had exercised control over a journalist; the journalist might think he had simply had a few drinks with a spook. It was possible that CIA case officers had written self‑serving memos for the files about their dealings with journalists, that the CIA was just as subject to common bureaucratic “cover‑your‑ass” paperwork as any other agency of government.

A CIA official who attempted to persuade members of the Senate committee that the Agency’s use of journalists had been innocuous maintained that the files were indeed filled with “puffing” by case officers. “You can’t establish what is puff and what isn’t,” he claimed. Many reporters, he added, “were recruited for finite [specific] undertakings and would be appalled to find that they were listed [in Agency files] as CIA operatives.” This same official estimated that the files contained descriptions of about half a dozen reporters and correspondents who would be considered “famous”—that is, their names would be recognized by most Americans. “The files show that the CIA goes to the press for and just as often that the press comes to the CIA,” he observed. “…There is a tacit agreement in many of these cases that there is going to be a quid pro quo”—i.e., that the reporter is going to get good stories from the Agency and that the CIA will pick up some valuable services from the reporter.

Whatever the interpretation, the findings of the Senate committees inquiry into the use of journalists were deliberately buried—from the full membership of the committee, from the Senate and from the public. “There was a difference of opinion on how to treat the subject,” explained one source. “Some [senators] thought these were abuses which should be exorcized and there were those who said, ‘We don’t know if this is bad or not.’”

Bader’s findings on the subject were never discussed with the full committee, even in executive session. That might have led to leaks—especially in view of the explosive nature of the facts. Since the beginning of the Church committee’s investigation, leaks had been the panel’s biggest collective fear, a real threat to its mission. At the slightest sign of a leak the CIA might cut off the flow of sensitive information as it did, several times in other areas), claiming that the committee could not be trusted with secrets. “It was as if we were on trial—not the CIA,” said a member of the committee staff. To describe in the committee’s final report the true dimensions of the Agency’s use of journalists would cause a furor in the press and on the Senate floor. And it would result in heavy pressure on the CIA to end its use of journalists altogether. “We just weren’t ready to take that step,” said a senator. A similar decision was made to conceal the results of the staff’s inquiry into the use of academics. Bader, who supervised both areas of inquiry, concurred in the decisions and drafted those sections of the committee’s final report. Pages 191 to 201 were entitled “Covert Relationships with the United States Media.” “It hardly reflects what we found,” stated Senator Gary Hart. “There was a prolonged and elaborate negotiation [with the CIA] over what would be said.”

Obscuring the facts was relatively simple. No mention was made of the 400 summaries or what they showed. Instead the report noted blandly that some fifty recent contacts with journalists had been studied by the committee staff—thus conveying the impression that the Agency’s dealings with the press had been limited to those instances. The Agency files, the report noted, contained little evidence that the editorial content of American news reports had been affected by the CIA’s dealings with journalists. Colby’s misleading public statements about the use of journalists were repeated without serious contradiction or elaboration. The role of cooperating news executives was given short shrift. The fact that the Agency had concentrated its relationships in the most prominent sectors of the press went unmentioned. That the CIA continued to regard the press as up for grabs was not even suggested.

Former ‘Washington Post’ reporter CARL BERNSTEIN is now working on a book about the witch hunts of the Cold War.

Footnotes:

1 John McCone, director of the Agency from 1961 to 1965, said in a recent interview that he knew about “great deal of debriefing and exchanging help” but nothing about any arrangements for cover the CIA might have made with media organizations. “I wouldn’t necessarily have known about it,” he said. “Helms would have handled anything like that. It would be unusual for him to come to me and say, ‘We’re going to use journalists for cover.’ He had a job to do. There was no policy during my period that would say, ‘Don’t go near that water,’ nor was there one saying, ‘Go to it!'” During the Church committee bearings, McCone testified that his subordinates failed to tell him about domestic surveillance activities or that they were working on plans to assassinate Fidel Castro. Richard Helms was deputy director of the Agency at the time; he became director in 1966.

2 A stringer is a reporter who works for one or several news organizations on a retainer or on a piecework basis.

3 From the CIA point of view, access to newsfilm outtakes and photo libraries is a matter of extreme importance. The Agency’s photo archive is probably the greatest on earth; its graphic sources include satellites, photoreconnaissance, planes, miniature cameras … and the American press. During the 1950s and 1960s, the Agency obtained carte‑blanche borrowing privileges in the photo libraries of literally dozens of American newspapers, magazines and television, outlets. For obvious reasons, the CIA also assigned high priority to the recruitment of photojournalists, particularly foreign‑based members of network camera crews.

4 On April 3rd, 1961, Koop left the Washington bureau to become head of CBS, Inc.’s Government Relations Department — a position he held until his retirement on March 31st, 1972.  Koop, who worked as a deputy in the Censorship Office in World War II, continued to deal with the CIA in his new position, according to CBS sources.

5 Hayes, who left the Washington Post Company in 1965 to become U.S. Ambassador to Switzerland, is now chairman of the board of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty — both of which severed their ties with the CIA in 1971.  Hayes said he cleared his participation in the China project with the late Frederick S. Beebe, then chairman of the board of the Washington Post Company.  Katharine Graham, the Post’s publisher, was unaware of the nature of the assignment, he said.  Participants in the project signed secrecy agreements.

6 Philip Geyelin, editor of the Post editorial page, worked for the Agency before joining the Post.

7 Louis Buisch, presidentof the publishing company of the Hornell, New York, Evening Tribune, told the Courier‑Journal in 1976 that he remembered little about the hiring of Robert Campbell. “He wasn’t there very long, and he didn’t make much of an impression,” said Buisch, who has since retired from active management of the newspaper.

8 Probably the most thoughtful article on the subject of the press and the CIA was written by Stuart H. Loory and appeared in the September‑October 1974 issue of Columbia Journalism Review.

9 Wes Gallagher, general manager of the Associated Press from 1962 to 1976, takes vigorous exception to the notion that the Associated Press might have aided the Agency. “We’ve always stayed clear on the CIA; I would have fired anybody who worked for them. We don’t even let our people debrief.” At the time of the first disclosures that reporters had worked for the CIA, Gallagher went to Colby. “We tried to find out names. All he would say was that no full‑time staff member of the Associated Press was employed by the Agency. We talked to Bush. He said the same thing.” If any Agency personnel were placed in Associated Press bureaus, said Gallagher, it was done without consulting the management of the wire service. But Agency officials insist that they were able to make cover arrangements through someone in the upper management levelsof Associated Press, whom they refuse to identify.

10 Many journalists and some CIA officials dispute the Agency’s claim that it has been scrupulous in respecting the editorial integrity of American publications and broadcast outlets.

After leaving The Washington Post in 1977, Carl Bernstein spent six months looking at the relationship of the CIA and the press during the Cold War years. His 25,000-word cover story, published in Rolling Stone on October 20, 1977, is reprinted below.

THE CIA AND THE MEDIA

How Americas Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up

BY CARL BERNSTEIN

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 in 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 of America’s leading news organizations.

WORKING PRESS — CIA STYLE

To understand the role of most journalist‑operatives, it is necessary to dismiss some myths about undercover work for American intelligence services. Few American agents are “spies” in the popularly accepted sense of the term. “Spying” — the acquisition of secrets from a foreign government—is almost always done by foreign nationals who have been recruited by the CIA and are under CIA control in their own countries. Thus the primary role of an American working undercover abroad is often to aid in the recruitment and “handling” of foreign nationals who are channels of secret information reaching American intelligence.

Many journalists were used by the CIA to assist in this process and they had the reputation of being among the best in the business. The peculiar nature of the job of the foreign correspondent is ideal for such work: he is accorded unusual access by his host country, permitted to travel in areas often off‑limits to other Americans, spends much of his time cultivating sources in governments, academic institutions, the military establishment and the scientific communities. He has the opportunity to form long‑term personal relationships with sources and—perhaps more than any other category of American operative—is in a position to make correct judgments about the susceptibility and availability of foreign nationals for recruitment as spies.

“After a foreigner is recruited, a case officer often has to stay in the background,” explained a CIA official. “So you use a journalist to carry messages to and from both parties”

Journalists in the field generally took their assignments in the same manner as any other undercover operative. If, for instance, a journalist was based in Austria, he ordinarily would be under the general direction of the Vienna station chief and report to a case officer. Some, particularly roving correspondents or U.S.‑based reporters who made frequent trips abroad, reported directly to CIA officials in Langley, Virginia.

The tasks they performed sometimes consisted of little more than serving as “eyes and ears” for the CIA; reporting on what they had seen or overheard in an Eastern European factory, at a diplomatic reception in Bonn, on the perimeter of a military base in Portugal. On other occasions, their assignments were more complex: planting subtly concocted pieces of misinformation; hosting parties or receptions designed to bring together American agents and foreign spies; serving up “black” propaganda to leading foreign journalists at lunch or dinner; providing their hotel rooms or bureau offices as “drops” for highly sensitive information moving to and from foreign agents; conveying instructions and dollars to CIA controlled members of foreign governments.

Often the CIA’s relationship with a journalist might begin informally with a lunch, a drink, a casual exchange of information. An Agency official might then offer a favor—for example, a trip to a country difficult to reach; in return, he would seek nothing more than the opportunity to debrief the reporter afterward. A few more lunches, a few more favors, and only then might there be a mention of a formal arrangement — “That came later,” said a CIA official, “after you had the journalist on a string.”

Another official described a typical example of the way accredited journalists (either paid or unpaid by the CIA) might be used by the Agency: “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. 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, can you put him in touch with us—would you mind us using your apartment?”‘

Formal recruitment of reporters was generally handled at high levels—after the journalist had undergone a thorough background check. The actual approach might even be made by a deputy director or division chief. On some occasions, no discussion would he entered into until the journalist had signed a pledge of secrecy.

“The secrecy agreement was the sort of ritual that got you into the tabernacle,” said a former assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence. “After that you had to play by the rules.” David Attlee Phillips, former Western Hemisphere chief of clandestine services and a former journalist himself, estimated in an interview that at least 200 journalists signed secrecy agreements or employment contracts with the Agency in the past twenty‑five years. Phillips, who owned a small English‑language newspaper in Santiago, Chile, when he was recruited by the CIA in 1950, described the approach: “Somebody from the Agency says, ‘I want you to help me. 1 know you are a true‑blue American, but I want you to sign a piece of paper before I tell you what it’s about.’ I didn’t hesitate to sign, and a lot of newsmen didn’t hesitate over the next twenty years.”

“One of the things we always had going for us in terms of enticing reporters,” observed a CIA official who coordinated some of the arrangements with journalists, “was that we could make them look better with their home offices. A foreign correspondent with ties to the Company [the CIA] stood a much better chance than his competitors of getting the good stories.”

Within the CIA, journalist‑operatives were accorded elite status, a consequence of the common experience journalists shared with high‑level CIA officials. Many had gone to the same schools as their CIA handlers, moved in the same circles, shared fashionably liberal, anti‑Communist political values, and were part of the same “old boy” network that constituted something of an establishment elite in the media, politics and academia of postwar America. The most valued of these lent themselves for reasons of national service, not money.

The Agency’s use of journalists in undercover operations has been most extensive in Western Europe (“That was the big focus, where the threat was,” said one CIA official), Latin America and the Far East. In the 1950s and 1960s journalists were used as intermediaries—spotting, paying, passing instructions—to members of the Christian Democratic party in Italy and the Social Democrats in Germany, both of which covertly received millions of dollars from the CIA. During those years “we had journalists all over Berlin and Vienna just to keep track of who the hell was coming in from the East and what they were up to,” explained a CIA official.

In the Sixties, reporters were used extensively in the CIA offensive against Salvador Allende in Chile; they provided funds to Allende’s opponents and wrote anti‑Allende propaganda for CIA proprietary publications that were distributed in Chile. (CIA officials insist that they make no attempt to influence the content of American newspapers, but some fallout is inevitable: during the Chilean offensive, CIA‑generated black propaganda transmitted on the wire service out of Santiago often turned up in American publications.)

According to CIA officials, the Agency has been particularly sparing in its use of journalist agents in Eastern Europe on grounds that exposure might result in diplomatic sanctions against the United States or in permanent prohibitions against American correspondents serving in some countries. The same officials claim that their use of journalists in the Soviet Union has been even more limited, but they remain extremely guarded in discussing the subject. They are insistent, however, in maintaining that the Moscow correspondents of major news organizations have not been “tasked” or controlled by the Agency.

The Soviets, according to CIA officials, have consistently raised false charges of CIA affiliation against individual American reporters as part of a continuing diplomatic game that often follows the ups and downs of Soviet‑American relations. The latest such charge by the Russians—against Christopher Wren of theNew York Timesand Alfred Friendly Jr., formerly ofNewsweek, has no basis in fact, they insist.

CIA officials acknowledge, however, that such charges will persist as long as the CIA continues to use journalistic cover and maintain covert affiliations with individuals in the profession. But even an absolute prohibition against Agency use of journalists would not free reporters from suspicion, according to many Agency officials. “Look at the Peace Corps,” said one source. “We have had no affiliation there and they [foreign governments] still throw them out”

The history of the CIA’s involvement with the American press continues to be shrouded by an official policy of obfuscation and deception for the following principal reasons:

■ The use of journalists has been among the most productive means of intelligence‑gathering employed by the CIA. Although the Agency has cut back sharply on the use of reporters since 1973 primarily as a result of pressure from the media), some journalist‑operatives are still posted abroad.

■ Further investigation into the matter, CIA officials say, would inevitably reveal a series of embarrassing relationships in the 1950s and 1960s with some of the most powerful organizations and individuals in American journalism.

Among the executives who lent their cooperation to the Agency were Williarn Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Henry Luce of Tirne Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of theNew York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of theLouisviIleCourier‑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,Newsweekmagazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, theMiami Heraldand the oldSaturday Evening PostandNew York Herald‑Tribune.

By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with theNew York Times,CBS and Time Inc.

The CIA’s use of the American news media has been much more extensive than Agency officials have acknowledged publicly or in closed sessions with members of Congress. The general outlines of what happened are indisputable; the specifics are harder to come by. CIA sources hint that a particular journalist was trafficking all over Eastern Europe for the Agency; the journalist says no, he just had lunch with the station chief. CIA sources say flatly that a well‑known ABC correspondent worked for the Agency through 1973; they refuse to identify him. A high‑level CIA official with a prodigious memory says that theNew York Timesprovided cover for about ten CIA operatives between 1950 and 1966; he does not know who they were, or who in the newspaper’s management made the arrangements.

The Agency’s special relationships with the so‑called “majors” in publishing and broadcasting enabled the CIA to post some of its most valuable operatives abroad without exposure for more than two decades. In most instances, Agency files show, officials at the highest levels of the CIA usually director or deputy director) dealt personally with a single designated individual in the top management of the cooperating news organization. The aid furnished often took two forms: providing jobs and credentials “journalistic cover” in Agency parlance) for CIA operatives about to be posted in foreign capitals; and lending the Agency the undercover services of reporters already on staff, including some of the best‑known correspondents in the business.

In the field, journalists were used to help recruit and handle foreigners as agents; to acquire and evaluate information, and to plant false information with officials of foreign governments. Many signed secrecy agreements, pledging never to divulge anything about their dealings with the Agency; some signed employment contracts., some were assigned case officers and treated with. unusual deference. Others had less structured relationships with the Agency, even though they performed similar tasks: they were briefed by CIA personnel before trips abroad, debriefed afterward, and used as intermediaries with foreign agents. Appropriately, the CIA uses the term “reporting” to describe much of what cooperating journalists did for the Agency. “We would ask them, ‘Will you do us a favor?’”.said a senior CIA official. “‘We understand you’re going to be in Yugoslavia. Have they paved all 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 …. Can you set up a meeting for is? Or relay a message?’” Many CIA officials regarded these helpful journalists as operatives; the journalists tended to see themselves as trusted friends of the Agency who performed occasional favors—usually without pay—in the national interest.

“I’m proud they asked me and proud to have done it,” said Joseph Alsop who, like his late brother, columnist Stewart Alsop, undertook clandestine tasks for the Agency. “The notion that a newspaperman doesn’t have a duty to his country is perfect balls.”

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. As Stuart Loory, formerLos Angeles Timescorrespondent, has written in theColumbiaJournalism Review: ‘If even one American overseas carrying a press card is a paid informer for the CIA, then all Americans with those credentials are suspect …. If the crisis of confidence faced by the news business—along with the government—is to be overcome, journalists must be willing to focus on themselves the same spotlight they so relentlessly train on others!’ But as Loory also noted: “When it was reported… that newsmen themselves were on the payroll of the CIA, the story caused a brief stir, and then was dropped.”

During the 1976 investigation of the CIA by the Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by Senator Frank Church, the dimensions of the Agency’s involvement with the press became apparent to several members of the panel, as well as to two or three investigators on the staff. But top officials of the CIA, including former directors William Colby and George Bush, persuaded the committee to restrict its inquiry into the matter and to deliberately misrepresent the actual scope of the activities in its final report. The multivolurne report contains nine pages in which the use of journalists is discussed in deliberately vague and sometimes misleading terms. It makes no mention of the actual number of journalists who undertook covert tasks for the CIA. Nor does it adequately describe the role played by newspaper and broadcast executives in cooperating with the Agency.

THE AGENCY’S DEALINGS WITH THE PRESS BEGAN during the earliest stages of the Cold War. Allen Dulles, who became director of the CIA in 1953, sought to establish a recruiting‑and‑cover capability within America’s most prestigious journalistic institutions. By operating under the guise of accredited news correspondents, Dulles believed, CIA operatives abroad would be accorded a degree of access and freedom of movement unobtainable under almost any other type of cover.

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.” Accordingly, the traditional line separating the American press corps and government was often indistinguishable: rarely was a news agency used to provide cover for CIA operatives abroad without the knowledge and consent of either its principal owner, publisher or senior editor. Thus, contrary to the notion that the CIA insidiously infiltrated the journalistic community, there is ample evidence that America’s leading publishers and news executives allowed themselves and their organizations to become handmaidens to the intelligence services. “Let’s not pick on some poor reporters, for God’s sake,” William Colby exclaimed at one point to the Church committee’s investigators. “Let’s go to the managements. They were witting.”  In all, about twenty‑five news organizations including those listed at the beginning of this article) provided cover for the Agency.

In addition to cover capability, Dulles initiated a “debriefing” procedure under which American correspondents returning from abroad routinely emptied their notebooks and offered their impressions to Agency personnel. Such arrangements, continued by Dulles’ successors, to the present day, were made with literally dozens of news organizations. In the 1950s, it was not uncommon for returning reporters to be met at the ship by CIA officers. “There would be these guys from the CIA flashing ID cards and looking like they belonged at the Yale Club,” said Hugh Morrow, a formerSaturday Evening Postcorrespondent who is now press secretary to former vice‑president Nelson Rockefeller. “It got to be so routine that you felt a little miffed if you weren’t asked.”

CIA officials almost always refuse to divulge the names of journalists who have cooperated with the Agency. They say it would be unfair to judge these individuals in a context different from the one that spawned the relationships in the first place. “There was a time when it wasn’t considered a crime to serve your government,” said one high‑level CIA official who makes no secret of his bitterness. “This all has to be considered in the context of the morality of the times, rather than against latter‑day standards—and hypocritical standards at that.”

Many journalists who covered World War II were close to people in the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime predecessor of the CIA; more important, they were all on the same side. When the war ended and many OSS officials went into the CIA, it was only natural that these relationships would continue. Meanwhile, the first postwar generation of journalists entered the profession; they shared the same political and professional values as their mentors. “You had a gang of people who worked together during World War II and never got over it,” said one Agency official. “They were genuinely motivated and highly susceptible to intrigue and being on the inside. Then in the Fifties and Sixties there was a national consensus about a national threat. The Vietnam War tore everything to pieces—shredded the consensus and threw it in the air.” Another Agency official observed: “Many journalists didn’t give a second thought to associating with the Agency. But there was a point when the ethical issues which most people had submerged finally surfaced. Today, a lot of these guys vehemently deny that they had any relationship with the Agency.”

From the outset, the use of journalists was among the CIA’s most sensitive undertakings, with full knowledge restricted to the Director of Central Intelligence and a few of his chosen deputies. Dulles and his successors were fearful of what would happen if a journalist‑operative’s cover was blown, or if details of the Agency’s dealings with the press otherwise became public. As a result, contacts with the heads of news  organizations were normally initiated by Dulles and succeeding Directors of Central Intelligence; by the deputy directors and division chiefs in charge of covert operations—Frank Wisner, Cord Meyer Jr., Richard Bissell, Desmond FitzGerald, Tracy Barnes, Thomas Karamessines and Richard Helms himself a former UPI correspondent); and, occasionally, by others in the CIA hierarchy known to have an unusually close social relationship with a particular publisher or broadcast executive.1

James Angleton, who was recently removed as the Agency’s head of counterintelligence operations, ran a completely independent group of journalist‑operatives who performed sensitive and frequently dangerous assignments; little is known about this group for the simple reason that Angleton deliberately kept only the vaguest of files.

The CIA even ran a formal training program in the 1950s to teach its agents to be journalists. Intelligence officers were “taught to make noises like reporters,” explained a high CIA official, and were then placed in major news organizations with help from management. “These were the guys who went through the ranks and were told ‘You’re going to he a journalist,’” the CIA official said. Relatively few of the 400‑some relationships described in Agency files followed that pattern, however; most involved persons who were already bona fide journalists when they began undertaking tasks for the Agency.

The Agency’s relationships with journalists, as described in CIA files, include the following general categories:

■ Legitimate, accredited staff members of news organizations—usually reporters. Some were paid; some worked for the Agency on a purely voluntary basis. This group includes many of the best‑known journalists who carried out tasks for the CIA. The files show that the salaries paid to reporters by newspaper and broadcast networks were sometimes supplemented by nominal payments from the CIA, either in the form of retainers, travel expenses or outlays for specific services performed.  Almost all the payments were made in cash. The accredited category also includes photographers, administrative personnel of foreign news bureaus and members of broadcast technical crews.)

Two of the Agency’s most valuable personal relationships in the 1960s, according to CIA officials, were with reporters who covered Latin America—Jerry O’Leary of theWashington Starand Hal Hendrix of theMiami News, a Pulitzer Prize winner who became a high official of the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation. Hendrix was extremely helpful to the Agency in providing information about individuals in Miami’s Cuban exile community. O’Leary was considered a valued asset in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Agency files contain lengthy reports of both men’s activities on behalf of the CIA.

O’Leary maintains that his dealings were limited to the normal give‑and‑take that goes on between reporters abroad and their sources. CIA officials dispute the contention: “There’s no question Jerry reported for us,” said one. “Jerry did assessing and spotting [of prospective agents] but he was better as a reporter for us.” Referring to O’Leary’s denials, the official added: “I don’t know what in the world he’s worried about unless he’s wearing that mantle of integrity the Senate put on you journalists.”

O’Leary attributes the difference of opinion to semantics. “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. 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 they were more helpful to me than I was to them.” O’Leary took particular exception to being described in the same context as Hendrix. “Hal was really doing work for them,” said O’Leary. “I’m still with theStar. He ended up at ITT.” Hendrix could not be reached for comment. According to Agency officials, neither Hendrix nor O’Leary was paid by the CIA.

■ Stringers2 and freelancers. Most were payrolled by the Agency under standard contractual terms. Their journalistic credentials were often supplied by cooperating news organizations. some filed news stories; others reported only for the CIA. On some occasions, news organizations were not informed by the CIA that their stringers were also working for the Agency.

■ Employees of so‑called CIA “proprietaries.” During the past twenty‑five years, the Agency has secretly bankrolled numerous foreign press services, periodicals and newspapers—both English and foreign language—which provided excellent cover for CIA operatives. One such publication was theRome Daily American,forty percent of which was owned by the CIA until the 1970s. TheDaily Americanwent out of business this year,

■ Editors, publishers and broadcast network executives. The CIAs relationship with most news executives differed fundamentally from those with working reporters and stringers, who were much more subject to direction from the Agency. A few executives—Arthur Hays Sulzberger of theNew York Timesamong them—signed secrecy agreements. But such formal understandings were rare: relationships between Agency officials and media executives were usually social—”The P and Q Street axis in Georgetown,” said one source. “You don’t tell Wilharn Paley to sign a piece of paper saying he won’t fink.”

■ Columnists and commentators. There are perhaps a dozen well known columnists and broadcast commentators whose relationships with the CIA go far beyond those normally maintained between reporters and their sources. They are referred to at the Agency as “known assets” and can be counted on to perform a variety of undercover tasks; they are considered receptive to the Agency’s point of view on various subjects. Three of the most widely read columnists who maintained such ties with the Agency are C.L. Sulzberger of theNew York Times,Joseph Alsop, and the late Stewart Alsop, whose column appeared in theNew York Herald‑Tribune,theSaturday EveningPost andNewsweek.CIA files contain reports of specific tasks all three undertook. Sulzberger is still regarded as an active asset by the Agency. According to a senior CIA official, “Young Cy Sulzberger had some uses…. He signed a secrecy agreement because we gave him classified information…. There was sharing, give and take. We’d say, ‘Wed like to know this; if we tell you this will it help you get access to so‑and‑so?’ Because of his access in Europe he had an Open Sesame. We’d ask him to just report: ‘What did so‑and‑so say, what did he look like, is he healthy?’ He was very eager, he loved to cooperate.” On one occasion, according to several CIA officials, Sulzberger was given a briefing paper by the Agency which ran almost verbatim under the columnist’s byline in theTimes. “Cycame out and said, ‘I’m thinking of doing a piece, can you give me some background?’” a CIA officer said. “We gave it to Cy as a background piece and Cy gave it to the printers and put his name on it.” Sulzberger denies that any incident occurred. “A lot of baloney,” he said.

Sulzberger claims that he was never formally “tasked” by the Agency and that he “would never get caught near the spook business. My relations were totally informal—I had a goodmany friends,” he said. “I’m sure they consider me an asset. They can ask me questions. They find out you’re going to Slobovia and they say, ‘Can we talk to you when you get back?’ … Or they’ll want to know if the head of the Ruritanian government is suffering from psoriasis. But I never took an assignment from one of those guys…. I’ve known Wisner well, and Helms and even McCone [former CIA director John McCone] I used to play golf with. But they’d have had to he awfully subtle to have used me.

Sulzberger says he was asked to sign the secrecy agreement in the 1950s.“A guy came around and said, ‘You are a responsible newsman and we need you to sign this if we are going to show you anything classified.’ I said I didn’t want to get entangled and told them, ‘Go to my uncle [Arthur Hays Sulzberger, then publisher of theNew York Times] and if he says to sign it I will.’” His uncle subsequently signed such an agreement, Sulzberger said, and he thinks he did too, though he is unsure. “I don’t know, twenty‑some years is a long time.” He described the whole question as “a bubble in a bathtub.”

Stewart Alsop’s relationship with the Agency was much more extensive than Sulzberger’s. One official who served at the highest levels in the CIA said flatly: “Stew Alsop was a CIA agent.” An equally senior official refused to define Alsop’s relationship with the Agency except to say it was a formal one. Other sources said that Alsop was particularly helpful to the Agency in discussions with, officials of foreign governments—asking questions to which the CIA was seeking answers, planting misinformation advantageous to American policy, assessing opportunities for CIA recruitment of well‑placed foreigners.

“Absolute nonsense,” said Joseph Alsop of the notion that his brother was a CIA agent. “I was closer to the Agency than Stew was, though Stew was very close. I dare say he did perform some tasks—he just did the correct thing as an American…. The Founding Fathers [of the CIA] were close personal friends of ours. Dick Bissell [former CIA deputy director] was my oldest friend, from childhood. It was a social thing, my dear fellow. I never received a dollar, I never signed a secrecy agreement. I didn’t have to…. I’ve done things for them when I thought they were the right thing to do. I call it doing my duty as a citizen.

Alsop is willing to discuss on the record only two of the tasks he undertook: a visit to Laos in 1952 at the behest of Frank Wisner, who felt other American reporters were using anti‑American sources about uprisings there; and a visit to the Phillipines in 1953 when the CIA thought his presence there might affect the outcome of an election. “Des FitzGerald urged me to go,” Alsop recalled. “It would be less likely that the election could be stolen [by the opponents of Ramon Magsaysay] if the eyes of the world were on them. I stayed with the ambassador and wrote about what happened.”

Alsop maintains that he was never manipulated by the Agency. “You can’t get entangled so they have leverage on you,” he said. “But what I wrote was true. My view was to get the facts. If someone in the Agency was wrong, I stopped talking to them—they’d given me phony goods.” On one occasion, Alsop said, Richard Helms authorized the head of the Agency’s analytical branch to provide Alsop with information on Soviet military presence along the Chinese border. “The analytical side of the Agency had been dead wrong about the war in Vietnam—they thought it couldn’t be won,” said Alsop. “And they were wrong on the Soviet buildup. I stopped talking to them.” Today, he says, “People in our business would be outraged at the kinds of suggestions that were made to me. They shouldn’t be. The CIA did not open itself at all to people it did not trust. Stew and I were trusted, and I’m proud of it.”

MURKY DETAILS OF CIA RELATIONSHIPS WITH INDIVIDUALS and news organizations began trickling out in 1973 when it was first disclosed that the CIA had, on occasion, employed journalists. Those reports, combined with new information, serve as casebook studies of the Agency’s use of journalists for intelligence purposes. They include:

■The New York Times. The Agency’s relationship with theTimeswas by far its most valuable among newspapers, according to CIA officials. From 1950 to 1966, about ten CIA employees were providedTimescover under arrangements approved by the newspaper’s late publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger. The cover arrangements were part of a generalTimespolicy—set by Sulzberger—to provide assistance to the CIA whenever possible.

Sulzberger was especially close to Allen Dulles. “At that level of contact it was the mighty talking to the mighty,” said a high‑level CIA official who was present at some of the discussions. “There was an agreement in principle that, yes indeed, we would help each other. The question of cover came up on several occasions.  It was agreed that the actual arrangements would be handled by subordinates…. The mighty didn’t want to know the specifics; they wanted plausible deniability.

A senior CIA official who reviewed a portion of the Agency’s files on journalists for two hours onSeptember 15th, 1977, said he found documentation of five instances in which theTimeshad provided cover for CIA employees between 1954 and 1962. In each instance he said, the arrangements were handled by executives of theTimes; the documents all contained standard Agency language “showing that this had been checked out at higher levels of theNew York Times,” said the official. The documents did not mention Sulzberger’s name, however—only those of subordinates whom the official refused to identify.

The CIA employees who receivedTimescredentials posed as stringers for the paper abroad and worked as members of clerical staffs in theTimes’foreign bureaus. Most were American; two or three were foreigners.

CIA officials cite two reasons why the Agency’s working relationship with theTimeswas closer and more extensive than with any other paper: the fact that theTimesmaintained the largest foreign news operation in American daily journalism; and the close personal ties between the men who ran both institutions.

Sulzberger informed a number of reporters and editors of his general policy of cooperation with the Agency. “We were in touch with them—they’d talk to us and some cooperated,” said a CIA official. The cooperation usually involved passing on information and “spotting” prospective agents among foreigners.

Arthur Hays Sulzberger signed a secrecy agreement with the CIA in the 1950s, according to CIA officials—a fact confirmed by his nephew, C.L. Sulzberger. However, there are varying interpretations of the purpose of the agreement: C.L. Sulzberger says it represented nothing more than a pledge not to disclose classified information made available to the publisher. That contention is supported by some Agency officials. Others in the Agency maintain that the agreement represented a pledge never to reveal any of theTimes’dealings with the CIA, especially those involving cover. And there are those who note that, because all cover arrangements are classified, a secrecy agreement would automatically apply to them.

Attempts to find out which individuals in theTimesorganization made the actual arrangements for providing credentials to CIA personnel have been unsuccessful. In a letter to reporter Stuart Loory in 1974, Turner Cadedge, managing editor of theTimesfrom 1951 to 1964, wrote that approaches by the CIA had been rebuffed by the newspaper. “I knew nothing about any involvement with the CIA… of any of our foreign correspondents on theNew York Times. I heard many times of overtures to our men by the CIA, seeking to use their privileges, contacts, immunities and, shall we say, superior intelligence in the sordid business of spying and informing. If any one of them succumbed to the blandishments or cash offers, I was not aware of it. Repeatedly, the CIA and other hush‑hush agencies sought to make arrangements for ‘cooperation’ even withTimesmanagement, especially during or soon after World War II, but we always resisted. Our motive was to protect our credibility.”

According to Wayne Phillips, a formerTimesreporter, the CIA invoked Arthur Hays Sulzberger’s name when it tried to recruit him as an undercover operative in 1952 while he was studying at Columbia University’s Russian Institute. Phillips said an Agency official told him that the CIA had “a working arrangement” with the publisher in which other reporters abroad had been placed on the Agency’s payroll. Phillips, who remained at theTimesuntil 1961, later obtained CIA documents under the Freedom of Information Act which show that the Agency intended to develop him as a clandestine “asset” for use abroad.

On January 31st, 1976, theTimescarried a brief story describing the ClAs attempt to recruit Phillips. It quoted Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the present publisher, as follows: “I never heard of theTimesbeing approached, either in my capacity as publisher or as the son of the late Mr. Sulzberger.” TheTimesstory, written by John M. Crewdson, also reported that Arthur Hays Sulzberger told an unnamed former correspondent that he might he approached by the CIA after arriving at a new post abroad. Sulzberger told him that he was not “under any obligation to agree,” the story said and that the publisher himself would be “happier” if he refused to cooperate. “But he left it sort of up to me,” theTimesquoted its former reporter as saying. “The message was if I really wanted to do that, okay, but he didn’t think it appropriate for aTimescorrespondent”

C.L. Sulzberger, in a telephone interview, said he had no knowledge of any CIA personnel usingTimescover or of reporters for the paper working actively for the Agency. He was the paper’s chief of foreign service from 1944 to 1954 and expressed doubt that his uncle would have approved such arrangements. More typical of the late publisher, said  Sulzberger, was a promise made to Allen Dulles’ brother, John Foster,then secretary of state, that noTimesstaff member would be permitted to accept an invitation to visit the People’s Republic of China without John Foster Dulles’ consent. Such an invitation was extended to the publisher’s nephew in the 1950s; Arthur Sulzberger forbade him to accept it. “It was seventeen years before anotherTimescorrespondent was invited,” C.L. Sulzberger recalled.

■ The Columbia Broadcasting System. CBS was unquestionably the CIAs most valuable broadcasting asset. CBS President William Paley and Allen Dulles enjoyed an easy working and social relationship. Over the years, the network provided cover for CIA employees, including at least one well‑known foreign correspondent and several stringers; it supplied outtakes of newsfilm to the CIA3; established a formal channel of communication between the Washington bureau chief and the Agency; gave the Agency access to the CBS newsfilm library; and allowed reports by CBS correspondents to the Washington and New York newsrooms to be routinely monitored by the CIA. Once a year during the 1950s and early 1960s, CBS correspondents joined the CIA hierarchy for private dinners and briefings.

The details of the CBS‑CIA arrangements were worked out by subordinates of both Dulles and Paley. “The head of the company doesn’t want to know the fine points, nor does the director,” said a CIA official. “Both designate aides to work that out. It keeps them above the battle.” Dr. Frank Stanton, for 25 years president of the network, was aware of the general arrangements Paley made with Dulles—including those for cover, according to CIA officials. Stanton, in an interview last year, said he could not recall any cover arrangements.) But Paley’s designated contact for the Agency was Sig Mickelson, president of CBS News between 1954 and 1961. On one occasion, Mickelson has said, he complained to Stanton about having to use a pay telephone to call the CIA, and Stanton suggested he install a private line, bypassing the CBS switchboard, for the purpose. According to Mickelson, he did so. Mickelson is now president of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, both of which were associated with the CIA for many years.

In 1976, CBS News president Richard Salant ordered an in‑house investigation of the network’s dealings with the CIA. Some of its findings were first disclosed by Robert Scheer in theLos Angeles Times.) But Salant’s report makes no mention of some of his own dealings with the Agency, which continued into the 1970s.

Many details about the CBS‑CIA relationship were found in Mickelson’s files by two investigators for Salant. Among the documents they found was a September 13th, 1957, memo to Mickelson fromTed Koop,CBS News bureau chief  in Washington from 1948 to 1961. It describes a phone call to Koop from Colonel Stanley Grogan of the CIA: “Grogan phoned to say that Reeves [J. B. Love Reeves, another CIA official] is going to New York to be in charge of the CIA contact office there and will call to see you and some of your confreres. Grogan says normal activities will continue to channel through the Washington office of CBS News.” The report to Salant also states: “Further investigation of Mickelson’s files reveals some details of the relationship between the CIA and CBS News…. Two key administrators of this relationship were Mickelson and Koop…. The main activity appeared to be the delivery of CBS newsfilm to the CIA…. In addition there is evidence that, during 1964 to 1971, film material, including some outtakes, were supplied by the CBS Newsfilm Library to the CIA through and at the direction of Mr. Koop4…. Notes in Mr. Mickelson’s files indicate that the CIA used CBS films for training… All of the above Mickelson activities were handled on a confidential basis without mentioning the words Central Intelligence Agency. The films were sent to individuals at post‑office box numbers and were paid for by individual, nor government, checks. …” Mickelson also regularly sent the CIA an internal CBS newsletter, according to the report.

Salant’s investigation led him to conclude that Frank Kearns, a CBS‑TV reporter from 1958 to 1971, “was a CIA guy who got on the payroll somehow through a CIA contact with somebody at CBS.” Kearns and Austin Goodrich, a CBS stringer, were undercover CIA employees, hired under arrangements approved by Paley.

Last year a spokesman for Paley denied a report by former CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr that Mickelson and he had discussed Goodrich’s CIA status during a meeting with two Agency representatives in 1954. The spokesman claimed Paley had no knowledge that Goodrich had worked for the CIA. “When I moved into the job I was told by Paley that there was an ongoing relationship with the CIA,” Mickelson said in a recent interview. “He introduced me to two agents who he said would keep in touch. We all discussed the Goodrich situation and film arrangements. I assumed this was a normal relationship at the time. This was at the height of the Cold War and I assumed the communications media were cooperating—though the Goodrich matter was compromising.

At the headquarters of CBS News in New York, Paley’s cooperation with the CIA is taken for granted by many news executives and reporters, despite tile denials. Paley, 76, was not interviewed by Salant’s investigators. “It wouldn’t do any good,” said one CBS executive. “It is the single subject about which his memory has failed.”

Salant discussed his own contacts with the CIA, and the fact he continued many of his predecessor’s practices, in an interview with this reporter last year. The contacts, he said, began in February 1961, “when I got a phone call from a CIA man who said he had a working relationship with Sig Mickelson. The man said, ‘Your bosses know all about it.'”  According to Salant, the CIA representative asked that CBS continue to supply the Agency with unedited newstapes and make its correspondents available for debriefingby Agency officials. Said Salant: “I said no on talking to the reporters, and let them see broadcast tapes, but no outtakes.  This went on for a number of years—into the early Seventies.”

In 1964 and 1965, Salant served on a super-secret CIA task force which explored methods of beaming American propaganda broadcasts to the People’s Republic of China. The other members of the four‑man study team were Zbigniew Brzezinski, then a professor at Columbia University; William Griffith, then professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology., and John Haves, then vice‑president of the Washington Post Company for radio‑TV5. The principal government officials associated with the project were Cord Meyer of the CIA; McGeorge Bundy, then special assistant to the president for national security; Leonard Marks, then director of the USIA; and Bill Moyers, then special assistant to President Lyndon Johnson and now a CBS correspondent.

Salant’s involvement in the project began with a call from Leonard Marks, “who told me the White House wanted to form a committee of four people to make a study of U.S. overseas broadcasts behind the Iron Curtain.” When Salant arrived in Washington for the first meeting he was told that the project was CIA sponsored. “Its purpose,” he said, “was to determine how best to set up shortwave broadcasts into Red China.” Accompanied by a CIA officer named Paul Henzie, the committee of four subsequently traveled around the world inspecting facilities run by Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty both CIA‑run operations at the time), the Voice of America and Armed Forces Radio. After more than a year of study, they submitted a report to Moyers recommending that the government establish a broadcast service, run by the Voice of America, to be beamed at the People’s Republic of China. Salant has served two tours as head of CBS News, from 1961‑64 and 1966‑present. At the time of the China project he was a CBS corporate executive.)

■TimeandNewsweekmagazines. According to CIA and Senate sources, Agency files contain written agreements with former foreign correspondents and stringers for both the weekly news magazines.  The same sources refused to say whether the CIA has ended all its associations with individuals who work for the two publications. Allen Dulles often interceded with his good friend, the late Henry Luce, founder ofTimeandLifemagazines, who readily allowed certain members of his staff to work for the Agency and agreed to provide jobs and credentials for other CIA operatives who lacked journalistic experience.

For many years, Luce’s personal emissary to the CIA was C.D. Jackson, a Time Inc., vice‑president who was publisher ofLifemagazine from 1960 until his death in 1964.While aTimeexecutive, Jackson coauthored a CIA‑sponsored study recommending the reorganization of the American intelligence services in the early 1950s. Jackson, whose Time‑Life service was interrupted by a one‑year White House tour as an assistant to President Dwight Eisenhower, approved specific arrangements for providing CIA employees with Time‑Life cover. Some of these arrangements were made with the knowledge of Luce’s wife, Clare Boothe. Other arrangements forTimecover, according to CIA officials including those who dealt with Luce), were made with the knowledge of Hedley Donovan, now editor‑in‑chief of Time Inc. Donovan, who took over editorial direction of all Time Inc. publications in 1959, denied in a telephone interview that he knew of any such arrangements. “I was never approached and I’d be amazed if Luce approved such arrangements,” Donovan said. “Luce had a very scrupulous regard for the difference between journalism and government.”

In the 1950s and early 1960s, Timemagazine’s foreign correspondents attended CIA “briefing” dinners similar to those the CIA held for CBS. And Luce, according to CIA officials, made it a regular practice to brief Dulles or other high Agency officials when he returned from his frequent trips abroad. Luce and the men who ran his magazines in the 1950s and 1960s encouraged their foreign correspondents to provide help to the CIA, particularly information that might be useful to the Agency for intelligence purposes or recruiting foreigners.

AtNewsweek, Agency sources reported, the CIA engaged the services of’ several foreign correspondents and stringers under arrangements approved by senior editors at the magazine.Newsweek’sstringer in Rome in the mid‑Fifties made little secret of the fact that he worked for the CIA. Malcolm Muir,Newsweek’seditor from its founding in 1937 until its sale to the Washington Post Company in 1961, said in a recent interview that his dealings with the CIA were limited to private briefings he gave Allen Dulles after trips abroad and arrangements he approved for regular debriefing ofNewsweekcorrespondents by the Agency. He said that he had never provided cover for CIA operatives, but that others high in theNewsweekorganization might have done so without his knowledge.

“I would have thought there might have been stringers who were agents, but I didn’t know who they were,” said Muir. “I do think in those days the CIA kept pretty close touch with all responsible reporters. Whenever I heard something that I thought might be of interest to Allen Dulles, I’d call him up…. At one point he appointed one of his CIA men to keep in regular contact with our reporters, a chap that I knew but whose name I can’t remember. I had a number of friends in Alien Dulles’ organization.” Muir said that Harry Kern,Newsweek’sforeign editor from 1945 until 1956, and Ernest K. Lindley, the magazine’s Washington bureau chief during the same period “regularly checked in with various fellows in the CIA.”

“To the best of my knowledge.” said Kern, “nobody at Newsweek worked for the CIA… The informal relationship was there. Why have anybody sign anything? What we knew we told them [the CIA] and the State Department…. When I went to Washington, I would talk to Foster or Allen Dulles about what was going on. … We thought it was admirable at the time. We were all on the same side.” CIA officials say that Kern’s dealings with the Agency were extensive. In 1956, he leftNewsweekto runForeign Reports,a Washington‑based newsletter whose subscribers Kern refuses to identify.

Ernest Lindley, who remained atNewsweekuntil 1961, said in a recent interview that he regularly consulted with Dulles and other high CIA officials before going abroad and briefed them upon his return. “Allen was very helpful to me and I tried to reciprocate when I could,” he said. “I’d give him my impressions of people I’d met overseas. Once or twice he asked me to brief a large group of intelligence people; when I came back from the Asian‑African conference in 1955, for example; they mainly wanted to know about various people.”

As Washington bureau chief, Lindley said he learned from Malcolm Muir that the magazine’s stringer in southeastern Europe was a CIA contract employee—given credentials under arrangements worked out with the management. “I remember it came up—whether it was a good idea to keep this person from the Agency; eventually it was decided to discontinue the association,” Lindley said.

WhenNewsweekwaspurchased by the Washington Post Company, publisher Philip L. Graham was informed by Agency officials that the CIA occasionally used the magazine for cover purposes, according to CIA sources. “It was widely known that Phil Graham was somebody you could get help from,” said a former deputy director of the Agency. “Frank Wisner dealt with him.” Wisner, deputy director of the CIA from 1950 until shortly before his suicide in 1965, was the Agency’s premier orchestrator of “black” operations, including many in which journalists were involved. Wisner liked to boast of his “mighty Wurlitzer,” a wondrous propaganda instrument he built, and played, with help from the press.) Phil Graham was probably Wisner’s closest friend. But Graharn, who committed suicide in 1963, apparently knew little of the specifics of any cover arrangements withNewsweek, CIA sources said.

In 1965‑66, an accreditedNewsweekstringer in the Far East was in fact a CIA contract employee earning an annual salary of $10,000 from the Agency, according to Robert T. Wood, then a CIA officer in the Hong Kong station. Some,Newsweekcorrespondents and stringers continued to maintain covert ties with the Agency into the 1970s, CIA sources said.

Information about Agency dealings with theWashington Postnewspaper is extremely sketchy. According to CIA officials, somePoststringers have been CIA employees, but these officials say they do not know if anyone in the Post management was aware of the arrangements.

All editors‑in‑chief and managing editors of thePostsince 1950 say they knew of no formal Agency relationship with either stringers or members of thePoststaff. “If anything was done it was done by Phil without our knowledge,” said one. Agency officials, meanwhile, make no claim thatPoststaff members have had covert affiliations with the Agency while working for the paper.6

Katharine Graham, Philip Graham’s widow and the current publisher of thePost, says she has never been informed of any CIA relationships with eitherPostorNewsweekpersonnel. In November of 1973, Mrs. Graham called William Colby and asked if any Post stringers or staff members were associated with the CIA. Colby assured her that no staff members were employed by the Agency but refused to discuss the question of stringers.

■ TheLouisville Courier‑Journal.From December 1964 until March 1965, a CIA undercover operative named Robert H. Campbell worked on theCourier‑Journal.According to high‑level CIA sources, Campbell was hired by the paper under arrangements the Agency made with Norman E. Isaacs, then executive editor of theCourier‑Journal. Barry Bingham Sr., then publisher of the paper, also had knowledge of the arrangements, the sources said. Both Isaacs and Bingham have denied knowing that Campbell was an intelligence agent when he was hired.

The complex saga of Campbell’s hiring was first revealed in aCourier‑Journalstory written by James R Herzog on March 27th, 1976, during the Senate committee’s investigation, Herzog’s account began: “When 28‑year‑old Robert H. Campbell was hired as aCourier‑Journalreporter in December 1964, he couldn’t type and knew little about news writing.” The account then quoted the paper’s former managing editor as saying that Isaacs told him that Campbell was hired as a result of a CIA request: “Norman said, when he was in Washington [in 1964], he had been called to lunch with some friend of his who was with the CIA [and that] he wanted to send this young fellow down to get him a little knowledge of newspapering.” All aspects of Campbell’s hiring were highly unusual. No effort had been made to check his credentials, and his employment records contained the following two notations: “Isaacs has files of correspondence and investigation of this man”; and, “Hired for temporary work—no reference checks completed or needed.”

The level of Campbell’s journalistic abilities apparently remained consistent during his stint at the paper, “The stuff that Campbell turned in was almost unreadable,” said a former assistant city editor. One of Campbell’s major reportorial projects was a feature about wooden Indians. It was never published. During his tenure at the paper, Campbell frequented a bar a few steps from the office where, on occasion, he reportedly confided to fellow drinkers that he was a CIA employee.

According to CIA sources, Campbell’s tour at theCourier‑Journalwas arranged to provide him with a record of journalistic experience that would enhance the plausibility of future reportorial cover and teach him something about the newspaper business. TheCourier‑Journal’sinvestigation also turned up the fact that before coming to Louisville he had worked briefly for the Hornell, New York,Evening Tribune,published by Freedom News, Inc. CIA sources said the Agency had made arrangements with that paper’s management to employ Campbell.7

At theCourier‑Journal, Campbell was hired under arrangements made with Isaacs and approved by Bingham, said CIA and Senate sources. “We paid theCourier‑Journalso they could pay his salary,” said an Agency official who was involved in the transaction. Responding by letter to these assertions, Isaacs, who left Louisville to become president and publisher of the Wilmington Delaware)News & Journal, said: “All I can do is repeat the simple truth—that never, under any circumstances, or at any time, have I ever knowingly hired a government agent. I’ve also tried to dredge my memory, but Campbell’s hiring meant so little to me that nothing emerges…. None of this is to say that I couldn’t have been ‘had.’”.Barry Bingham Sr., said last year in a telephone interview that he had no specific memory of Campbell’s hiring and denied that he knew of any arrangements between the newspaper’s management and the CIA. However, CIA officials said that theCourier‑Journal, through contacts with Bingham, provided other unspecified assistance to the Agency in the 1950s and 1960s. The Courier‑Journal’s detailed, front‑page account of Campbell’s hiring was initiated by Barry Bingham Jr., who succeeded his father as editor and publisher of the paper in 1971. The article is the only major piece of self‑investigation by a newspaper that has appeared on this subject.8

■ The American Broadcasting Company and the National Broadcasting Company. According to CIA officials, ABC continued to provide cover for some CIA operatives through the 1960s. One was Sam Jaffe who CIA officials said performed clandestine tasks for the Agency. Jaffe has acknowledged only providing the CIA with information. In addition, another well‑known network correspondent performed covert tasks for the Agency, said CIA sources. At the time of the Senate bearings, Agency officials serving at the highest levels refused to say whether the CIA was still maintaining active relationships with members of the ABC‑News organization. All cover arrangements were made with the knowledge off ABC executives, the sources said.

These same sources professed to know few specifies about the Agency’s relationships with NBC, except that several foreign correspondents of the network undertook some assignments for the Agency in the 1950s and 1960s. “It was a thing people did then,” said Richard Wald, president of NBC News since 1973. “I wouldn’t be surprised if people here—including some of the correspondents in those days—had connections with the Agency.”

■ The Copley Press, and its subsidiary, the Copley News Service. This relationship, first disclosed publicly by reporters Joe Trento and Dave Roman inPenthousemagazine, is said by CIA officials to have been among the Agency’s most productive in terms of getting “outside” cover for its employees. Copley owns nine newspapers in California and Illinois—among them theSan Diego UnionandEvening Tribune.The Trento‑Roman account, which was financed by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, asserted that at least twenty‑three Copley News Service employees performed work for the CIA. “The Agency’s involvement with the Copley organization is so extensive that it’s almost impossible to sort out,” said a CIA official who was asked about the relationship late in 1976. Other Agency officials said then that James S. Copley, the chain’s owner until his death in 1973, personally made most of the cover arrangements with the CIA.

According to Trento and Roman, Copley personally volunteered his news service to then‑president Eisenhower to act as “the eyes and ears” against “the Communist threat in Latin and Central America” for “our intelligence services.”  James Copley was also the guiding hand behind the Inter‑American Press Association, a CIA‑funded organization with heavy membership among right‑wing Latin American newspaper editors.

■ Other major news organizations. According to Agency officials, CIA files document additional cover arrangements with the following news‑gathering organizations, among others: theNew York Herald‑Tribune, theSaturday‑Evening Post, Scripps‑Howard Newspapers, Hearst Newspapers Seymour K. Freidin, Hearst’s current London bureau chief and a former Herald‑Tribuneeditor and correspondent, has been identified as a CIA operative by Agency sources), Associated Press,9 United Press International, the Mutual Broadcasting System, Reuters and theMiami Herald. Cover arrangements with theHerald, according to CIA officials, were unusual in that they were made “on the ground by the CIA station in Miami, not from CIA headquarters.

“And that’s just a small part of the list,” in the words of one official who served in the CIA hierarchy. Like many sources, this official said that the only way to end the uncertainties about aid furnished the Agency by journalists is to disclose the contents of the CIA files—a course opposed by almost all of the thirty‑five present and former CIA officials interviewed over the course of a year.

COLBY CUTS HIS LOSSES

THE CIA’S USE OF JOURNALISTS CONTINUED VIRTUALLY unabated until 1973 when, in response to public disclosure that the Agency had secretly employed American reporters, William Colby began scaling down the program. In his public statements, Colby conveyed the impression that the use of journalists had been minimal and of limited importance to the Agency.

He then initiated a series of moves intended to convince the press, Congress and the public that the CIA had gotten out of the news business. But according to Agency officials, Colby had in fact thrown a protective net around his valuable intelligence in the journalistic community. He ordered his deputies to maintain Agency ties with its best journalist contacts while severing formal relationships with many regarded as inactive, relatively unproductive or only marginally important. In reviewing Agency files to comply with Colby’s directive, officials found that many journalists had not performed useful functions for the CIA in years. Such relationships, perhaps as many as a hundred, were terminated between 1973 and 1976.

Meanwhile, important CIA operatives who had been placed on the staffs of some major newspaper and broadcast outlets were told to resign and become stringers or freelancers, thus enabling Colby to assure concerned editors that members of their staffs were not CIA employees. Colby also feared that some valuable stringer‑operatives might find their covers blown if scrutiny of the Agency’s ties with journalists continued. Some of these individuals were reassigned to jobs on so‑called proprietary publications—foreign periodicals and broadcast outlets secretly funded and staffed by the CIA. Other journalists who had signed formal contracts with the CIA—making them employees of the Agency—were released from their contracts, and asked to continue working under less formal arrangements.

In November 1973, after many such shifts had been made, Colby told reporters and editors from theNew York Timesand theWashington Starthat the Agency had “some three dozen” American newsmen “on the CIA payroll,” including five who worked for “general‑circulation news organizations.” Yet even while the Senate Intelligence Committee was holding its hearings in 1976, according to high‑level CIA sources, the CIA continued to maintain ties with seventy‑five to ninety journalists of every description—executives, reporters, stringers, photographers, columnists, bureau clerks and members of broadcast technical crews. More than half of these had been moved off CIA contracts and payrolls but they were still bound by other secret agreements with the Agency. According to an unpublished report by the House Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired by Representative Otis Pike, at least fifteen news organizations were still providing cover for CIA operatives as of 1976.

Colby, who built a reputation as one of the most skilled undercover tacticians in the CIA’s history, had himself run journalists in clandestine operations before becoming director in 1973. But even he was said by his closest associates to have been disturbed at how extensively and, in his view, indiscriminately, the Agency continued to use journalists at the time he took over. “Too prominent,” the director frequently said of some of the individuals and news organizations then working with the CIA. Others in the Agency refer to their best‑known journalistic assets as “brand names.”)

“Colby’s concern was that he might lose the resource altogether unless we became a little more careful about who we used and how we got them,” explained one of the former director’s deputies. The thrust of Colby’s subsequent actions was to move the Agency’s affiliations away from the so‑called “majors” and to concentrate them instead in smaller newspaper chains, broadcasting groups and such specialized publications as trade journals and newsletters.

After Colby left the Agency on January 28th, 1976, and was succeeded by George Bush, the CIA announced a new policy: “Effective immediately, the CIA will not enter into any paid or contractual relationship with any full‑time or part‑time news correspondent accredited by any U.S. news service, newspaper, periodical, radio or television network or station” At the time of the announcement, the Agency acknowledged that the policy would result in termination of less than half of the relationships with the 50 U.S. journalists it said were still affiliated with the Agency. The text of the announcement noted that the CIA would continue to “welcome” the voluntary, unpaid cooperation of journalists. Thus, many relationships were permitted to remain intact.

The Agency’s unwillingness to end its use of journalists and its continued relationships with some news executives is largely the product of two basic facts of the intelligence game: journalistic cover is ideal because of the inquisitive nature of a reporter’s job; and many other sources of institutional cover have been denied the CIA in recent years by businesses, foundations and educational institutions that once cooperated with the Agency.

“It’s tough to run a secret agency in this country,” explained one high‑level CIA official. “We have a curious ambivalence about intelligence. In order to serve overseas we need cover. But we have been fighting a rear‑guard action to try and provide cover. The Peace Corps is off‑limits, so is USIA, the foundations and voluntary organizations have been off‑limits since ‘67, and there is a self‑imposed prohibition on Fulbrights [Fulbright Scholars]. If you take the American community and line up who could work for the CIA and who couldn’t there is a very narrow potential. Even the Foreign Service doesn’t want us. So where the hell do you go? Business is nice, but the press is a natural. One journalist is worth twenty agents. He has access, the ability to ask questions without arousing suspicion.”

ROLE OF THE CHURCH COMMITTEE

DESPITE THE EVIDENCE OF WIDESPREAD CIA USE OF journalists, the Senate Intelligence Committee and its staff decided against questioning any of the reporters, editors, publishers or broadcast executives whose relationships with the Agency are detailed in CIA files.

According to sources in the Senate and the Agency, the use of journalists was one of two areas of inquiry which the CIA went to extraordinary lengths to curtail. The other was the Agency’s continuing and extensive use of academics for recruitment and information gathering purposes.

In both instances, the sources said, former directors Colby and Bush and CIA special counsel Mitchell Rogovin were able to convince key members of the committee that full inquiry or even limited public disclosure of the dimensions of the activities would do irreparable damage to the nation’s intelligence‑gathering apparatus, as well as to the reputations of hundreds of individuals. Colby was reported to have been especially persuasive in arguing that disclosure would bring on a latter‑day “witch hunt” in which the victims would be reporters, publishers and editors.

Walter Elder, deputy to former CIA director McCone and the principal Agency liaison to the Church committee, argued that the committee lacked jurisdiction because there had been no misuse of journalists by the CIA; the relationships had been voluntary. Elder cited as an example the case of theLouisville Courier‑Journal. “Church and other people on the committee were on the chandelier about theCourier‑Journal,” one Agency official said, “until we pointed out that we had gone to the editor to arrange cover, and that the editor had said, ‘Fine.’”

Some members of the Church committee and staff feared that Agency officials had gained control of the inquiry and that they were being hoodwinked. “The Agency was extremely clever about it and the committee played right into its hands,” said one congressional source familiar with all aspects of the inquiry. “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 that 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.”

The Senate committee’s investigation into the use of journalists was supervised by William B. Bader, a former CIA intelligence officer who returned briefly to the Agency this year as deputy to CIA director Stansfield Turner and is now a high‑level intelligence official at the Defense Department. Bader was assisted by David Aaron, who now serves as the deputy to Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s national security adviser.

According to colleagues on the staff of the Senate inquiry, both Bader and Aaron were disturbed by the information contained in CIA files about journalists; they urged that further investigation he undertaken by the Senate’s new permanent CIA oversight committee. That committee, however, has spent its first year of existence writing a new charter for the CIA, and members say there has been little interest in delving further into the CIA’s use of the press.

Bader’s investigation was conducted under unusually difficult conditions. His first request for specific information on the use of journalists was turned down by the CIA on grounds that there had been no abuse of authority and that current intelligence operations might he compromised. Senators Walter Huddleston, Howard Baker, Gary Hart, Walter Mondale and Charles Mathias—who had expressed interest in the subject of the press and the CIA—shared Bader’s distress at the CIA’s reaction. In a series of phone calls and meetings with CIA director George Bush and other Agency officials, the senators insisted that the committee staff be provided information about the scope of CIA‑press activities. Finally, Bush agreed to order a search of the files and have those records pulled which deals with operations where journalists had been used. But the raw files could not he made available to Bader or the committee, Bush insisted. Instead, the director decided, his deputies would condense the material into one‑paragraph sum­maries describing in the most general terms the activities of each individual journalist. Most important, Bush decreed, the names of journalists and of the news organizations with which they were affiliated would be omitted from the summaries. However, there might be some indication of the region where the journalist had served and a general description of the type of news organization for which he worked.

Assembling the summaries was difficult, according to CIA officials who supervised the job. There were no “journalist files” per se and information had to be collected from divergent sources that reflect the highly compartmentalized character of the CIA. Case officers who had handled journalists supplied some names. Files were pulled on various undercover operations in which it seemed logical that journalists had been used. Significantly, all work by reporters for the Agency under the category of covert operations, not foreign intelligence.) Old station records were culled. “We really had to scramble,” said one official.

After several weeks, Bader began receiving the summaries, which numbered over 400 by the time the Agency said it had completed searching its files.

The Agency played an intriguing numbers game with the committee. Those who prepared the material say it was physically impossible to produce all of the Agency’s files on the use of journalists. “We gave them a broad, representative picture,” said one agency official. “We never pretended it was a total description of the range of activities over 25 years, or of the number of journalists who have done things for us.” A relatively small number of the summaries described the activities of foreign journalists—including those working as stringers for American publications. Those officials most knowledgeable about the subject say that a figure of 400 American journalists is on the low side of the actual number who maintained covert relationships and undertook clandestine tasks.

Bader and others to whom he described the contents of the summaries immediately reached some general conclusions: the sheer number of covert relationships with journalists was far greater than the CIA had ever hinted; and the Agency’s use of reporters and news executives was an intelligence asset of the first magnitude. Reporters had been involved in almost every conceivable kind of operation. Of the 400‑plus individuals whose activities were summarized, between 200 and 250 were “working journalists” in the usual sense of the term—reporters, editors, correspondents, photographers; the rest were employed at least nominally) by book publishers, trade publications and newsletters.

Still, the summaries were just that: compressed, vague, sketchy, incomplete. They could be subject to ambiguous interpretation. And they contained no suggestion that the CIA had abused its authority by manipulating the editorial content of American newspapers or broadcast reports.

Bader’s unease with what he had found led him to seek advice from several experienced hands in the fields of foreign relations and intelligence. They suggested that he press for more information and give those members of the committee in whom he had the most confidence a general idea of what the summaries revealed. Bader again went to Senators Huddleston, Baker, Hart, Mondale and Mathias. Meanwhile, he told the CIA that he wanted to see more—the full files on perhaps a hundred or so of the individuals whose activities had been summarized. The request was turned down outright. The Agency would provide no more information on the subject. Period.

The CIA’s intransigence led to an extraordinary dinner meeting at Agency headquarters in late March 1976. Those present included Senators Frank Church who had now been briefed by Bader), and John Tower, the vice‑chairman of the committee; Bader; William Miller, director of the committee staff; CIA director Bush; Agency counsel Rogovin; and Seymour Bolten, a high‑level CIA operative who for years had been a station chief in Germany and Willy Brandt’s case officer. Bolten had been deputized by Bush to deal with the committee’s requests for information on journalists and academics. At the dinner, the Agency held to its refusal to provide any full files. Nor would it give the committee the names of any individual journalists described in the 400 summaries or of the news organizations with whom they were affiliated. The discussion, according to participants, grew heated. The committee’s representatives said they could not honor their mandate—to determine if the CIA had abused its authority—without further information. The CIA maintained it could not protect its legitimate intelligence operations or its employees if further disclosures were made to the committee. Many of the journalists were contract employees of the Agency, Bush said at one point, and the CIA was no less obligated to them than to any other agents.

Finally, a highly unusual agreement was hammered out: Bader and Miller would be permitted to examine “sanitized” versions of the full files of twenty‑five journalists selected from the summaries; but the names of the journalists and the news organizations which employed them would be blanked out, as would the identities of other CIA employees mentioned in the files. Church and Tower would be permitted to examine theunsanitizedversions of five of the twenty‑five files—to attest that the CIA was not hiding anything except the names. The whole deal was contingent on an agreement that neither Bader, Miner, Tower nor Church would reveal the contents of the files to other members of the committee or staff.

Bader began reviewing the 400‑some summaries again. His object was to select twenty‑five that, on the basis of the sketchy information they contained, seemed to represent a cross section. Dates of CIA activity, general descriptions of news organizations, types of journalists and undercover operations all figured in his calculations.

From the twenty‑five files he got back, according to Senate sources and CIA officials, an unavoidable conclusion emerged: that to a degree never widely suspected, the CIA in the 1950s, ‘60s and even early ‘70s had concentrated its relationships with journalists in the most prominent sectors of the American press corps, including four or five of the largest newspapers in the country, the broadcast networks and the two major newsweekly magazines. Despite the omission of names and affiliations from the twenty‑five detailed files each was between three and eleven inches thick), the information was usually sufficient to tentatively identify either the newsman, his affiliation or both—particularly because so many of them were prominent in the profession.

“There is quite an incredible spread of relationships,” Bader reported to the senators. “You don’t need to manipulateTimemagazine, for example, because there are Agency people at the management level.”

Ironically, one major news organization that set limits on its dealings with the CIA, according to Agency officials, was the one with perhaps the greatest editorial affinity for the Agency’s long‑range goals and policies:U.S. News and World Report.The late David Lawrence, the columnist and founding editor ofU.S. News,was a close friend of Allen Dulles. But he repeatedly refused requests by the CIA director to use the magazine for cover purposes, the sources said. At one point, according to a high CIA official, Lawrence issued orders to his sub‑editors in which he threatened to fire anyU.S. Newsemployee who was found to have entered into a formal relationship with the Agency. Former editorial executives at the magazine confirmed that such orders had been issued. CIA sources declined to say, however, if the magazine remained off‑limits to the Agency after Lawrence’s death in 1973 or if Lawrence’s orders had been followed.)

Meanwhile, Bader attempted to get more information from the CIA, particularly about the Agency’s current relationships with journalists. He encountered a stone wall. “Bush has done nothing to date,” Bader told associates. “None of the important operations are affected in even a marginal way.” The CIA also refused the staffs requests for more information on the use of academics. Bush began to urge members of the committee to curtail its inquiries in both areas and conceal its findings in the final report. “He kept saying, ‘Don’t fuck these guys in the press and on the campuses,’ pleading that they were the only areas of public life with any credibility left,” reported a Senate source. Colby, Elder and Rogovin also implored individual members of the committee to keep secret what the staff had found. “There were a lot of representations that if this stuff got out some of the biggest names in journalism would get smeared,” said another source. Exposure of the CIA’s relationships with journalists and academics, the Agency feared, would close down two of the few avenues of agent recruitment still open. “The danger of exposure is not the other side,” explained one CIA expert in covert operations. “This is not stuff the other side doesn’t know about. The concern of the Agency is that another area of cover will be denied.”

A senator who was the object of the Agency’s lobbying later said: “From the CIA point of view this was the highest, most sensitive covert program of all…. It was a much larger part of the operational system than has been indicated.” He added, “I had a great compulsion to press the point but it was late …. If we had demanded, they would have gone the legal route to fight it.”

Indeed, time was running out for the committee. In the view of many staff members, it had squandered its resources in the search for CIA assassination plots and poison pen letters. It had undertaken the inquiry into journalists almost as an afterthought. The dimensions of the program and the CIA’s sensitivity to providing information on it had caught the staff and the committee by surprise. The CIA oversight committee that would succeed the Church panel would have the inclination and the time to inquire into the subject methodically; if, as seemed likely, the CIA refused to cooperate further, the mandate of the successor committee would put it in a more advantageous position to wage a protracted fight …. Or so the reasoning went as Church and the few other senators even vaguely familiar with Bader’s findings reached a decision not to pursue the matter further. No journalists would be interviewed about their dealings with the Agency—either by the staff or by the senators, in secret or in open session. The specter, first raised by CIA officials, of a witch hunt in the press corps haunted some members of the staff and the committee. “We weren’t about to bring up guys to the committee and then have everybody say they’ve been traitors to the ideals of their profession,” said a senator.

Bader, according to associates, was satisfied with the decision and believed that the successor committee would pick up the inquiry where he had left it. He was opposed to making public the names of individual journalists. He had been concerned all along that he had entered a “gray area” in which there were no moral absolutes. Had the CIA “manipulated” the press in the classic sense of the term? Probably not, he concluded; the major news organizations and their executives had willingly lent their resources to the Agency; foreign correspondents had regarded work for the CIA as a national service and a way of getting better stories and climbing to the top of their profession. Had the CIA abused its authority? It had dealt with the press almost exactly as it had dealt with other institutions from which it sought cover — the diplomatic service, academia, corporations. There was nothing in the CIA’s charter which declared any of these institutions off‑limits to America’s intelligence service. And, in the case of the press, the Agency had exercised more care in its dealings than with many other institutions; it had gone to considerable lengths to restrict its role to information‑gathering and cover.10

Bader was also said to be concerned that his knowledge was so heavily based on information furnished by the CIA; he hadn’t gotten the other side of the story from those journalists who had associated with the Agency. He could be seeing only “the lantern show,” he told associates. Still, Bader was reasonably sure that he had seen pretty much the full panoply of what was in the files. If the CIA had wanted to deceive him it would have never given away so much, he reasoned. “It was smart of the Agency to cooperate to the extent of showing the material to Bader,” observed a committee source. “That way, if one fine day a file popped up, the Agency would be covered. They could say they had already informed the Congress.”

The dependence on CIA files posed another problem. The CIA’s perception of a relationship with a journalist might be quite different than that of the journalist: a CIA official might think he had exercised control over a journalist; the journalist might think he had simply had a few drinks with a spook. It was possible that CIA case officers had written self‑serving memos for the files about their dealings with journalists, that the CIA was just as subject to common bureaucratic “cover‑your‑ass” paperwork as any other agency of government.

A CIA official who attempted to persuade members of the Senate committee that the Agency’s use of journalists had been innocuous maintained that the files were indeed filled with “puffing” by case officers. “You can’t establish what is puff and what isn’t,” he claimed. Many reporters, he added, “were recruited for finite [specific] undertakings and would be appalled to find that they were listed [in Agency files] as CIA operatives.” This same official estimated that the files contained descriptions of about half a dozen reporters and correspondents who would be considered “famous”—that is, their names would be recognized by most Americans. “The files show that the CIA goes to the press for and just as often that the press comes to the CIA,” he observed. “…There is a tacit agreement in many of these cases that there is going to be a quid pro quo”—i.e., that the reporter is going to get good stories from the Agency and that the CIA will pick up some valuable services from the reporter.

Whatever the interpretation, the findings of the Senate committees inquiry into the use of journalists were deliberately buried—from the full membership of the committee, from the Senate and from the public. “There was a difference of opinion on how to treat the subject,” explained one source. “Some [senators] thought these were abuses which should be exorcized and there were those who said, ‘We don’t know if this is bad or not.’”

Bader’s findings on the subject were never discussed with the full committee, even in executive session. That might have led to leaks—especially in view of the explosive nature of the facts. Since the beginning of the Church committee’s investigation, leaks had been the panel’s biggest collective fear, a real threat to its mission. At the slightest sign of a leak the CIA might cut off the flow of sensitive information as it did, several times in other areas), claiming that the committee could not be trusted with secrets. “It was as if we were on trial—not the CIA,” said a member of the committee staff. To describe in the committee’s final report the true dimensions of the Agency’s use of journalists would cause a furor in the press and on the Senate floor. And it would result in heavy pressure on the CIA to end its use of journalists altogether. “We just weren’t ready to take that step,” said a senator. A similar decision was made to conceal the results of the staff’s inquiry into the use of academics. Bader, who supervised both areas of inquiry, concurred in the decisions and drafted those sections of the committee’s final report. Pages 191 to 201 were entitled “Covert Relationships with the United States Media.” “It hardly reflects what we found,” stated Senator Gary Hart. “There was a prolonged and elaborate negotiation [with the CIA] over what would be said.”

Obscuring the facts was relatively simple. No mention was made of the 400 summaries or what they showed. Instead the report noted blandly that some fifty recent contacts with journalists had been studied by the committee staff—thus conveying the impression that the Agency’s dealings with the press had been limited to those instances. The Agency files, the report noted, contained little evidence that the editorial content of American news reports had been affected by the CIA’s dealings with journalists. Colby’s misleading public statements about the use of journalists were repeated without serious contradiction or elaboration. The role of cooperating news executives was given short shrift. The fact that the Agency had concentrated its relationships in the most prominent sectors of the press went unmentioned. That the CIA continued to regard the press as up for grabs was not even suggested.

Former ‘Washington Post’ reporter CARL BERNSTEIN is now working on a book about the witch hunts of the Cold War.

Footnotes:

1 John McCone, director of the Agency from 1961 to 1965, said in a recent interview that he knew about “great deal of debriefing and exchanging help” but nothing about any arrangements for cover the CIA might have made with media organizations. “I wouldn’t necessarily have known about it,” he said. “Helms would have handled anything like that. It would be unusual for him to come to me and say, ‘We’re going to use journalists for cover.’ He had a job to do. There was no policy during my period that would say, ‘Don’t go near that water,’ nor was there one saying, ‘Go to it!'” During the Church committee bearings, McCone testified that his subordinates failed to tell him about domestic surveillance activities or that they were working on plans to assassinate Fidel Castro. Richard Helms was deputy director of the Agency at the time; he became director in 1966.

2 A stringer is a reporter who works for one or several news organizations on a retainer or on a piecework basis.

3 From the CIA point of view, access to newsfilm outtakes and photo libraries is a matter of extreme importance. The Agency’s photo archive is probably the greatest on earth; its graphic sources include satellites, photoreconnaissance, planes, miniature cameras…and the American press. During the 1950s and 1960s, the Agency obtained carte‑blanche borrowing privileges in the photo libraries of literally dozens of American newspapers, magazines and television, outlets. For obvious reasons, the CIA also assigned high priority to the recruitment of photojournalists, particularly foreign‑based members of network camera crews.

4 On April 3rd, 1961, Koop left the Washington bureau to become head of CBS, Inc.’s Government Relations Department — a position he held until his retirement on March 31st, 1972.  Koop, who worked as a deputy in the Censorship Office in World War II, continued to deal with the CIA in his new position, according to CBS sources.

5 Hayes, who left the Washington Post Company in 1965 to become U.S. Ambassador to Switzerland, is now chairman of the board of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty — both of which severed their ties with the CIA in 1971.  Hayes said he cleared his participation in the China project with the late Frederick S. Beebe, then chairman of the board of the Washington Post Company.  Katharine Graham, the Post’s publisher, was unaware of the nature of the assignment, he said.  Participants in the project signed secrecy agreements.

6 Philip Geyelin, editor of thePosteditorial page, worked for the Agency before joining thePost.

7 Louis Buisch, presidentof the publishing company of the Hornell, New York,Evening Tribune,told theCourier‑Journalin 1976 that he remembered little about the hiring of Robert Campbell. “He wasn’t there very long, and he didn’t make much of an impression,” said Buisch, who has since retired from active management of the newspaper.

8 Probably the most thoughtful article on the subject of the press and the CIA was written by Stuart H. Loory and appeared in the September‑October 1974 issue ofColumbia Journalism Review.

9 Wes Gallagher, general manager of the Associated Press from 1962 to 1976, takes vigorous exception to the notion that the Associated Press might have aided the Agency. “We’ve always stayed clear on the CIA; I would have fired anybody who worked for them. We don’t even let our people debrief.” At the time of the first disclosures that reporters had worked for the CIA, Gallagher went to Colby. “We tried to find out names. All he would say was that no full‑time staff member of the Associated Press was employed by the Agency. We talked to Bush. He said the same thing.” If any Agency personnel were placed in Associated Press bureaus, said Gallagher, it was done without consulting the management of the wire service. But Agency officials insist that they were able to make cover arrangements through someone in the upper management levelsof Associated Press, whom they refuse to identify.

10 Many journalists and some CIA officials dispute the Agency’s claim that it has been scrupulous in respecting the editorial integrity of American publications and broadcast outlets.

WORKING PRESS — CIA STYLE

To understand the role of most journalist‑operatives, it is necessary to dismiss some myths about undercover work for American intelligence services. Few American agents are “spies” in the popularly accepted sense of the term. “Spying” — the acquisition of secrets from a foreign government—is almost always done by foreign nationals who have been recruited by the CIA and are under CIA control in their own countries. Thus the primary role of an American working undercover abroad is often to aid in the recruitment and “handling” of foreign nationals who are channels of secret information reaching American intelligence.

Many journalists were used by the CIA to assist in this process and they had the reputation of being among the best in the business. The peculiar nature of the job of the foreign correspondent is ideal for such work: he is accorded unusual access by his host country, permitted to travel in areas often off‑limits to other Americans, spends much of his time cultivating sources in governments, academic institutions, the military establishment and the scientific communities. He has the opportunity to form long‑term personal relationships with sources and—perhaps more than any other category of American operative—is in a position to make correct judgments about the susceptibility and availability of foreign nationals for recruitment as spies.

“After a foreigner is recruited, a case officer often has to stay in the background,” explained a CIA official. “So you use a journalist to carry messages to and from both parties”

Journalists in the field generally took their assignments in the same manner as any other undercover operative. If, for instance, a journalist was based in Austria, he ordinarily would be under the general direction of the Vienna station chief and report to a case officer. Some, particularly roving correspondents or U.S.‑based reporters who made frequent trips abroad, reported directly to CIA officials in Langley, Virginia.

The tasks they performed sometimes consisted of little more than serving as “eyes and ears” for the CIA; reporting on what they had seen or overheard in an Eastern European factory, at a diplomatic reception in Bonn, on the perimeter of a military base in Portugal. On other occasions, their assignments were more complex: planting subtly concocted pieces of misinformation; hosting parties or receptions designed to bring together American agents and foreign spies; serving up “black” propaganda to leading foreign journalists at lunch or dinner; providing their hotel rooms or bureau offices as “drops” for highly sensitive information moving to and from foreign agents; conveying instructions and dollars to CIA controlled members of foreign governments.

Often the CIA’s relationship with a journalist might begin informally with a lunch, a drink, a casual exchange of information. An Agency official might then offer a favor—for example, a trip to a country difficult to reach; in return, he would seek nothing more than the opportunity to debrief the reporter afterward. A few more lunches, a few more favors, and only then might there be a mention of a formal arrangement — “That came later,” said a CIA official, “after you had the journalist on a string.”

Another official described a typical example of the way accredited journalists (either paid or unpaid by the CIA) might be used by the Agency: “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. 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, can you put him in touch with us—would you mind us using your apartment?”‘

Formal recruitment of reporters was generally handled at high levels—after the journalist had undergone a thorough background check. The actual approach might even be made by a deputy director or division chief. On some occasions, no discussion would he entered into until the journalist had signed a pledge of secrecy.

“The secrecy agreement was the sort of ritual that got you into the tabernacle,” said a former assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence. “After that you had to play by the rules.” David Attlee Phillips, former Western Hemisphere chief of clandestine services and a former journalist himself, estimated in an interview that at least 200 journalists signed secrecy agreements or employment contracts with the Agency in the past twenty‑five years. Phillips, who owned a small English‑language newspaper in Santiago, Chile, when he was recruited by the CIA in 1950, described the approach: “Somebody from the Agency says, ‘I want you to help me. 1 know you are a true‑blue American, but I want you to sign a piece of paper before I tell you what it’s about.’ I didn’t hesitate to sign, and a lot of newsmen didn’t hesitate over the next twenty years.”

“One of the things we always had going for us in terms of enticing reporters,” observed a CIA official who coordinated some of the arrangements with journalists, “was that we could make them look better with their home offices. A foreign correspondent with ties to the Company [the CIA] stood a much better chance than his competitors of getting the good stories.”

Within the CIA, journalist‑operatives were accorded elite status, a consequence of the common experience journalists shared with high‑level CIA officials. Many had gone to the same schools as their CIA handlers, moved in the same circles, shared fashionably liberal, anti‑Communist political values, and were part of the same “old boy” network that constituted something of an establishment elite in the media, politics and academia of postwar America. The most valued of these lent themselves for reasons of national service, not money.

The Agency’s use of journalists in undercover operations has been most extensive in Western Europe (“That was the big focus, where the threat was,” said one CIA official), Latin America and the Far East. In the 1950s and 1960s journalists were used as intermediaries—spotting, paying, passing instructions—to members of the Christian Democratic party in Italy and the Social Democrats in Germany, both of which covertly received millions of dollars from the CIA. During those years “we had journalists all over Berlin and Vienna just to keep track of who the hell was coming in from the East and what they were up to,” explained a CIA official.

In the Sixties, reporters were used extensively in the CIA offensive against Salvador Allende in Chile; they provided funds to Allende’s opponents and wrote anti‑Allende propaganda for CIA proprietary publications that were distributed in Chile. (CIA officials insist that they make no attempt to influence the content of American newspapers, but some fallout is inevitable: during the Chilean offensive, CIA‑generated black propaganda transmitted on the wire service out of Santiago often turned up in American publications.)

According to CIA officials, the Agency has been particularly sparing in its use of journalist agents in Eastern Europe on grounds that exposure might result in diplomatic sanctions against the United States or in permanent prohibitions against American correspondents serving in some countries. The same officials claim that their use of journalists in the Soviet Union has been even more limited, but they remain extremely guarded in discussing the subject. They are insistent, however, in maintaining that the Moscow correspondents of major news organizations have not been “tasked” or controlled by the Agency.

The Soviets, according to CIA officials, have consistently raised false charges of CIA affiliation against individual American reporters as part of a continuing diplomatic game that often follows the ups and downs of Soviet‑American relations. The latest such charge by the Russians—against Christopher Wren of the New York Times and Alfred Friendly Jr., formerly of Newsweek, has no basis in fact, they insist.

CIA officials acknowledge, however, that such charges will persist as long as the CIA continues to use journalistic cover and maintain covert affiliations with individuals in the profession. But even an absolute prohibition against Agency use of journalists would not free reporters from suspicion, according to many Agency officials. “Look at the Peace Corps,” said one source. “We have had no affiliation there and they [foreign governments] still throw them out”

One day several years ago, a correspondent for a large Middle Western newspaper, arriving in Belgrade, was asked by some colleagues whether he would like to meet his newspaper’s local “stringer,”

The following article was written by John M. Crewdson and is based on reporting by him and Joseph B. Trees ter.

C.I.A.: Secret Shaper Of Public Opinion

Knowing that his newspaper did not employ anyone in Belgrade, or so he thought, the correspondent ascended the stairs of the stringer’s hotel, only to glimpse the man racing down another set of stairs on his way, he shouted, to catch an airplane for Prague.

The correspondent was puzzled, but said he learned later that the man had been an operative of the Central Intelligence Agency, fleeing to protect his “cover,” and that he had obtained his press credentials directly from the newspaper’s publisher.

He and the publisher had agreed to keep the matter as their secret, apparently never anticipating that one of the newspaper’s legitimate correspondents might turn up unexpectedly.

That instance was but one of dozens uncovered during a three‐month inquiry by The New York Times into the C.I.A.’s three decades of Involvement with the communications industry at home and abroad, and especially its relationships with American journalists overseas.

In interviews with scores of past and present intelligence officers, journalists and others with knowledge of the situation, The Times checked the names of 200 individuals and organizations who had possible intelligence connections. Nearly 20 correspondents were found who said they had refused offers of

employment by the agency. But The Times also obtained the names of more than 30 American journalists

who have worked since World War Two as paid intelligence operatives; in most cases for the C.I.A. and at least a dozen other American reporters who, althouglh unpaid, were counted by the C.I.A. among its operational “assets.”

In addition, at least 12 full‐time C.I.A. officers have worked abroad over the last 30 years while posing as employees of American‐owned news organizations.

Of the more than 70 individuals identified by The Times as falling into one of these categories, several are dead and a score could not be located. But a number of the others confirmed their involvement, and several spoke freely about their experiences, though nearly all requested that their names not be used.

“I want to live over here in a country that I like without having to worry about getting a bomb through my window,” said one man, a former correspondent for ABC News who worked for the C.I.A. in the 1950’s.

At ABC, William Sheehan, a senior vice president, has said that the network is “satisfied there was no one on our staff in such a dual role.”

All of those interviewed, like one man who had been a Time stringer in Rome, insisted that they had been able, though in some cases at psychological cost to themselves, to maintain a separation between their intelligence work and their journalistic careers.

None said that the C.I.A. had ever encouraged them to slant their dispatches to suit its purposes or to compromise themselves journalistically in any other way.

Some expressed fear that publicity would cost them their jobs or make future employment more difficult. The C.I.A. made no financial provision to lessen the shock of separation when terminated relations with the last of its reporter‐agents last year, and one of them, until recently a CBS reporter in Europe, is wrapping packages in a Florida department store.

The Cold War Climate

Several of the journalists and C.I.A. officials interviewed made the point that during the height of the Cold War it was acceptable to cooperate with the agency in ways that both the C.I.A. and the journalistic community now deem inappropriate.

“The thing to do was to cooperate,” said one retired intelligence officer. “I guess that looks strange in 1977. But cooperation didn’t look strange then.”

Earlier this month, the C.I.A. made public a new executive order proscribing, except with the explicit approval of the Director of Central Intelligence, any paid or unpaid operational relationships with reporters for general circulation American news organizations.

The agency’s long‐standing relationship with American journalists was first called to public attention in 1973, when William E. Colby, then the Director of Central Intelligence, provided reporters in Washington with some of the details on background basis.

The Washington Star reported on the practice, and that led to investigations by two Congressional committees. One of the panels, the House Select Committee on Intelligence, will hold hearings on the subject beginning today, and its Senate counterpart is also considering a public inquiry.

The issue was renewed three months ago when Carl Bernstein, the freelance investigative reporter, wrote in Rolling Stone magazine that some 400 American journalists had “secretly carried out assignments” for the C.I.A. since the agency’s founding in 1947, in many cases with the knowledge and approval of top news executives.

However, all of the past and present C.I.A. officials who were interviewed in The Times’s investigation were unanimous in asserting that the number of journalists who have been on the C.I.A.’s payroll was, as one former official put it, “quite modest.”

“If you scan a history of 25 years, you could come up with totals like 40 or 50 people,” the former official said. Others put the total as high as 100.

In that time there have been literally thousands of correspondents for domestic news organizations working abroad.

Several former intelligence officers ° pointed out that the C.I.A. itself does not know precisely, and probably can never know, how many American journalists have been on its payroll over the years. Agency files are widely scattered and incomplete, they say, and some of the arrangements made abroad may never have been recorded at C.I.A. headquarters.

A Delayed Effect

As attention to the C.I.A.’s past attempts to use the press in its propaganda efforts has been renewed in recent months, correspondents overseas have reported that intensified suspicions among citizens of other countries have made news gathering more difficult.

A poll by The Times of its own foreign correspondents produced several reminders that in some parts of the world American journalists, like those of most other countries, have always been suspected of serving as intelligence operatives on the side.

But one correspondent cabled from India that “a rather new practice among some of us is to avoid public contacts with known C.I.A. people.” Such contacts, he wrote, “might only confirm suspicions.”

In all, the three‐month investigation by The Times found that at least 22 American news organizations had employed, though sometimes only on a casual .basis, American journalists who were also working for the C.I.A. In a few instances the organization’s were aware of the C.I.A. connection, but most of them appear not to have been.

The organizations, which range from some of the most influential in the nation to some of the most obscure, include ABC and CBS News, Time, Life and Newsweek magazines. The New York Times, The New York Herald Tribune, The Associated Press and United Press International.

Also included were the Scripps‐Howard chain of newspapers. The Christian Science Monitor, The Wall Street Journal, The Louisville Courier‐Journal and Fodor’s, a publisher of travel guides.

Among the lesser known organizations were the College Press Service, Business International, the McLendon Broadcasting Organization, Film Daily and a defunct underground newspaper published Washington, The Quicksilver Times.

Edward W. Estlow, president of Scripps‐Howard, said that although some of the organization’s correspondents might have had such connections “back in the old days, we combed our organization thoroughly about five years ago” and –could find none at that time.

For the most part, according to past and present C.I.A. officials, the journalists who worked for the agency were a mélange of stringers and freelance writers with a few staff correspondents thrown in.

Stringers and freelancers, the officials said, were free from the demanding schedules of the top foreign correspondents for major news‐gathering . organizations and were also more likely to be in need of the extra money that such service provided.

One former senior official said that he had always preferred “hard‐plodding” reporters with anti‐American reputations, men “who found not enough satisfaction in their jobs” rather than those seeking monetary rewards. “I wasn’t after mercenaries,” he said.

In general, the pay was not high. Several former station chiefs said that a local stringer who performed occasional chores might be paid as little as $50 month. For others more heavily engaged, the sum might increase to a few hundred dollars.

Where cover jobs were involved, the money was passed through the financial offices of the news organizations, but in most cases the agency preferred to pay its agents through accounts in large New York banks

Reporters for major publications likely to have better access to foreign officials and broader local contacts were sometimes offered amounts equal to their regular salaries, however. Wayne Phillips, while a reporter for The Times in New York in the early 1950’s, said he was offered $5,000 a year by the C.I.A. he agreed to work for them abroad.

Another man, a correspondent for Time magazine in Brazil, said he was offered a similar sum about the same time. Keyes Beech, the longtime Far Eastern correspondent for The Chicago Daily News, said he had been offered $12,000 a year by the C.I.A. “to make inquiries and leliver messages” as he made his rounds n Asia.

Mr. Beech and the Time correspondent said they declined the C.I.A.’s offers, and the arrangement with Mr. Phillips fell :hrough because of complications.

In nearly all of the organizations where employers were found to have aided the C.I.A., executives said, in some cases after conducting internal inquiries, that they had no knowledge of past relationships between their correspondents and the C.I.A.

Eugene Fodor acknowledged in an interview that he had allowed C.I.A. agents to “cover” themselves abroad by working as reporters for his series of travel guides. “They were all highly professional, high‐quality,” he said of the agents. “We never let politics be smuggled into the books.”

Another who acknowledged a connection was Elliott Haynes, with his father a co‐founder of Business International, a widely respected business information service. He said that his father, Eldridge Haynes, had provided cover for four C.I.A. employees in various countries between 1955 and 1960.

Employer Not Informed

In many instances, sources said, the management officials were unaware.that they had harbored C.I.A. agents or offi‐1 cers on their staffs, and several former agency officials said that in cases where a working reporter was recruited as an agent there was no requirement that his superiors be advised.

On occasions when he added an American journalist to his string of agents, one former official recalled, “I didn’t ask to what extent his employer knew about this activity.”

Most of the reporter‐agents, sources said, were asked to sign agreements pledging to keep secret any confidential information that came their way. But the agreements also bound the C.I.A. to pledge of confidentiality, and the former official said that most of the reporters “wanted it for their own protection.”

Only in instances where “cover” was supplied by a news organization for a legitimate C.I.A. officer, officials said, was the management of the organization certain to know of the arrangement.

In a number of such cases, the jobs they provided involved not the reporting of news but such subsidiary functions as advertising, circulation and distribution. Over an eight‐year period in the 1950’s, for example, three business managers in the Tokyo office of Newsweek were reporting to the C.I.A.

Edward Kosner, Newsweek’s executive editor, has said that the magazine’s policy “as long as I’ve been around here is that Newsweek employees work for Newsweek and Newsweek only.” But he added, “I can’t really go back into ancient history.”

But jobs as correspondents were provided as well, and in some instances the C.I.A. went so far as to reimburse the news organization for the added cost involved. “We might contribute money for an office, or the expansion of an office,” one former C.I.A. man said,

Even then, according to several sources, it was not likely that top news executives would be called upon to arrange the details, even though most C.I.A. directors, especially Richard Helms and the late Allen Dulles, have been close friends with the chief executives of some of the nation’s most influential news organizations.

Keeping a ‘Lofty’ Plane

When such men met, as they frequently did, it tended to be on what one C.I.A. official called a “lofty” plane. “They reviewed the world,” he said, adding that he had never heard a discussion of the recruiting of reporters or the providing of cover, “and I was there for brandy and cigars on several occasions.”

Mr. Dulles is dead. Mr. Helms, reached at his residence in Washington, said “I’ve decided that I won’t talk about this, ever.” Mr. Colby has consistently declined to comment in any detail.

But John A. McCone, who was Director of Central Intelligence from 1961 until 1965, confirmed the impressions of other agency officials about the absence of top‐level involvement.

In an interview at his Seattle home, Mr. McCone said: “As far as any top‐level discussion with Time or Newsweek or the Washington Post or The New York Times, saying, ‘Look, we need a stringer over in Brazil and we’d like him to be under Newsweek cover,’ there was none of that, to my knowledge.”

Mr. McCone said that there had also been no high‐level discussions of which he was aware that related to the C.I.A.’s employment of American Journalists abroad on a part‐time basis,

“I would think if there were any formal relationships,” Mr. McCone said, “they would have to be renewed.

I wouldn’t say any responsible publisher would say, ‘I’ve got an arrangement with Allen Dulles and it goes without saying that I have the same thing with John McCone.’ “

Asked whether anybody had come to him after he took over from Mr. Dulles to renew such an arrangement, Mr. McCone replied, “Nobody.”

Major Outlets Used Most

In The Times’s study it appeared that the C.I.A. relied on its connections with Time, Newsweek, CBS News and The Times itself more extensively than on its contacts with other news organizations.

Several sources said that there had been nothing in the files given by the C.I.A. to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence last year to indicate that such men as Henry Luce, the founder of Time Inc., or Arthur Hays Sulzberger, for many years the publisher of The New York Times, had ever been asked for or had ever given their’ personal approval for such arrangements.

The Times has said repeatedly that can find no record of such arrangements nor anyone on its staff with knowledge of them.

Edward S. Hunter, a retired C.I.A. man who was Newsweek’s Hong Kong correspondent in the late 1940’s, said he believed that only Harry Kern, then the magazine’s foreign editor, and not Malcolm Muir, the magazine’s founder, had been aware of his intelligence connections.

Mr. Kern said that if he ever had been aware of such a relationship he could not recall it, and Mr. Muir said he had never known that “Newsweek chaps” had been taking money from the C.I.A.

The situation with respect to William S. Paley, the chairman of CBS Inc., less clear. Sig Mickelson, a former president of CBS News, has said he was in Mr. Paley’s office some years ago when two C.I.A. representatives acknowledged that Austin Goodrich, the network’s Stockholm stringer, was working for the C.I.A.

CBS said in a statement that Mr. Paley did not recall that meeting, although he did remember a meeting with Mr. Mickleson and someone from the C.I.A. to discuss “arranging press credentials for C.I.A. agent to be assigned to an area of key interest to the agency, but of minor interest to CBS News.”

“No one currently at CBS,” the statement said, “knows whether these credentials were indeed arranged.”

When such arrangements were struck, one agency official said, they were most commonly worked out “at the middlemanagement level” within both the C.I.A. and the news organizations involved, but even then on an almost casual basis.

No Binding Contracts

“It was not formal, there were no contracts, nothing that would carry over,” the official said. “It was simply an understanding. There were meetings sometimes to talk. But it was never, never reduced to any kind of formal understanding.”

The official would not identify the middle‐level news executives who had participated in making such arrangements, some of whom are understood to still be active in the news business.

One C.I.A. agent who worked on an American newspaper, Robert Campbell, acquired a reporting job several years ago with The Courier‐Journal in Louisville, Ky. The C.I.A. had intended, one official said, to give Mr. Campbell some newspaper experience before sending him abroad under journalistic cover, but be-

cause of complications he never went overseas. Executives of The CourierJournal said that they never knew until after Mr. Campbell had resigned that he had been with the C.I.A.

One C.I.A. official said that the Ridder chain of newspapers, now part of the Knight‐Ridder organization, had agreed to take part in a similar arrangement, as had the San Diego‐based Copley News Service.

B. H. Ridder Jr., vice chairman of Knight‐Ridder and president of Ridder Publications, said: “If any such services were rendered they would have been rendered only at the request of the Government. I’m not at liberty to discuss these matters, frankly.”

Copley has said that none of Its executives had any knowledge of such arrangements with the C.I.A., and none of the sources interviewed could provide the names of any Copley correspondents who had ever simultaneously been on the C.I.A.’s payroll.

One former Copley correspondent recalled, however, that at important news events in Latin America over the years she would sometimes find herself surrounded by as many as a half‐dozen strangers bearing Copley credentials. Upon inquiring of editors in San Diego, she said, she was invariably told that she was the only Copley correspondent on the scene.

C.I.A. officers working under journalistic cover were not immune from the oftenconsiderable pressures faced by those of their colleagues who pose as American businessmen abroad or who work under other “non‐official” cover.

Equal attention must be paid to both careers. “Journalistic cover will not stand up for any period of time,” one former C.I.A. man said. “The local newspapermen will spot a phony, unless he is prepared to spend 99.9 percent of his time in bona fide work, in which case he’s just about useless to us.”

One such example is Robert G. Gately, a C.I.A. officer who took a job in the late 1950’s as Newsweek’s Far Eastern business manager In Tokyo. When his work for the magazine began.ko suffer, he could not tell his immediate superiors about the other matters that were occupying his attention and so lost his job.

He wound up in the Tokyo office of Asia Magazine, a regional newspaper supplement published in Hong Kong, only to lose that job as well for poor performance.

Reached at his home in suburban Washington, Mr. Gately declined to answer any questions about his past employment.

One indication of the general lack of knowledge among news executives about the industry’s ties to the C.I.A. was the astonishment recorded in the New York’ offices of The Times some years ago when the newspaper’s correspondent in Germany mentioned in a letter that Henry Pleasants, a stringer who reviewed music for the paper, was also chief of the C.I.A.’s Bonn station. After the disclosure…The Times terminated his work for the newspaper.

The same absence of knowledge at the highest levels appears to have been the case with other news organizations as well. Several’ of the editors closest to the late Henry Luce, for example, said he never gave them any indication, he knew it, that any of Time magazine’s reporters were on the C.I.A. payroll.

James Linen, for 11 years the publisher of Time, said that although he never knew for certain that any of his correspondents were working for the C.I.A., “I always assumed that some of them must have been.” But he said he never took steps to find out.

Assurance for Some

A number of major news organizations have asked the C.I.A. for information about any connections that their employees may have had with the agency, and in sonic cases partial assurances have been supplied.

For example, Benjamin Bradlee, executive editor of The Washington Post, said his newspaper had been told by the C.I.A. that records going back to 1965 did not disclose any ties with its staff correspondents, but that it was the agency’s policy ‘’not to comment on stringers.”

Even those news executives who had close working• relationships with the C.I.A. in this country might not be told which of their correspondents overseas were working for the agency.

Joseph G. Harrison, the longtime foreign editor of The Christian Science Monitor, said that he had been “happy to cooperate” with the C.I.A., in the 1950’s, providing the agency with letters and memorandums from correspondents that contained background information not included in their dispatches, and occasionally assigning a story in which the C.I.A. had expressed an interest.

But Mr. Harrison said he had never known that one of his reporters in the Far East was also serving as a C.I.A., political adviser to the Asian head of state about whom he was writing.

Not oll of the American journalists with intelligence connections were paid by the C.I.A. One, Panos Morphos, a war correspondent for Newsweek in Central Europe, was an agent of the Office of Strategic Services, the C.I.A.’s World War II predecessor.

A few others, according to C.I.A. officials, were believed to be paid agents of foreign intelligence services, some of them friendly and some not. One, a Time magazine correspondent in Eastern Europe, was working for a Soviet‐bloc intelligence service. But a former Time editor said the magazine had known of the connection and “considered it a kind of double bonus.”

At !cast one other journalist may have been a double agent. Edward K. Thompson, the former managing editor of Life magazine, said he had been told in 1960 by an American intelligence official that one of the magazine’s contributors was working simultaneously for the C.I.A. and a hostile foreign intelligence service. He said that Life never again employed the man.

Several former C.I.A. officials spoke of a minor “flap,” the agency’s term for a compromising situation, that they said occurred in the mid‐1950’s in the Mideast when the management of a major American news organization discovered that one of its correspondents had secretly been working for the agency.

Declining Practice

No formal directive was issued within the agency then or later requiring the approval of management in future cases. But the agency’s use of reporters for prominent news organizations began to decline, partly because approval from C.I.A. headquarters became harder to ob-

tain and partly because, as one former official put it, “it was felt that they would refuse you and that their bosses wouldn’t let you do it.”

Besides, the former official said, to take advantage of the local contacts of the principal correspondents in a foreign capital “all you really had to do was go to the cocktail parties they invited you to.”

Accordingly, the agency’s emphasis in recruiting began to shift away from the largest news organizations and toward I he less prominent ones. In Tokyo, where the Newsweek office alone had contained at least four C.I.A. employees during the 1950’s, a C.I.A., man named Glenn Ireton was sent out in the mid‐1960’s as a correspondent for Film Daily.

Mr. Ireton is dead and Film Daily out of business.

Before an offer of employment could he made to an American Journalist, agency sources said, it was necessary for C,T.A. investigators In the United States to quietly check the reporter back- ground for any signs that he or she might prove to be a security risk.

One agency official acknowledged that the investigations were carried out without the subject’s knowledge, but explained that under C.I.A., regulations “any time you have anything to do with a guy you’ve got to run a check on him.”

In most cases the investigations amounted to a formality, but one former station chief recalled that a married couple living in Mexico City, both distinguished correspondents whom he had considered prime candidates for recruitment, had failed to pass the background check because of purported left‐wing associations.

One former C.I.A. station chief talked about the reasons for approaching a local correspondent, whom he described as “the guy who knows where all the skeletons are, what’s the real story on so and so. The station chief, a new one, makes an appointment with him. They talk. The agency man has information to make him look good. If those meetings don’t prove fruitful to the agency man they will end. So it behooves the journalist to make them useful.”

While they did not qualify as agents of the C.I.A., such correspondents were often considered “assets” of the local C.I.A. station and catalogued in the agency’s files that way.

Not all of the relationships between journalists and the C.I.A. involved money, nor were all of them formed abroad. Many correspondents who have spent their careers in Washington have developed close friendships with senior C.I.A. officials.

Charles J. V. Murphy, while a writer for Reader’s Digest, was asked by Allen Dulles after the latter left the C.I.A. in 1961 to help him prepare his memoirs, and was actually given office space at the agency’s headquarters. The memoirs never appeared, and Mr. Murphy lost his office shortly after it was discovered by John McCone, Mr. Dulles’s successor.

New York Liaison

Several large American news organizations were themselves considered assets, though in a different sense, and in New York, where most of the major publishing’ and broadcasting organizations have their headquarters, one man in the C.I.A.’s Manhattan office was assigned as the liaison with several publications.

The man, who is still on active duty and asked that his name not be used, was a frequent visitor at Life magazine, where he viewed unpublished photographs taken by the magazine’s worldwide battalion of photographers.

He was also known as a frequent luncheon companion of editors at The New York Times, where his chief interest seemed to be which correspondents were soon to return to the United States on home leave and might be .available for debriefing.

Until a few years ago It was virtually common practice for American correspondents returning home or preparing to go abroad to spend time with the C.I.A.’s experts on their region of the world, and the practice continues, though less extensively than in the past.

Frequently, according to former agency officials, such reporters were asked to keep alert for certain items of information of interest to the C.I.A. when they reached their foreign posts, and many cooperated.

At yet another level of relationships, the C.I.A. would sometimes pay the expenses of a correspondent who agreed to undertake such tasks, especially if he were visiting an area where the agency was not well represented.

“If a guy was going to Iraq,” said one former ofticer, “the C.I.A. would say, ‘Will you stay a couple of extra days we pay your expenses?’” He said that many did.

One journalist who was said by a senior C.I.A. official to have accepted travel money was Hal Hendrix, who as a reporter for The Miami News won a Pulitzer Prize for his stories on the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

Mr. Hendrix said in an interview that he had never had anything beyond “normal journalistic relationship” with the C.I.A. and that he had never accepted money from the agency for any purpose.

Mr. Hendrix, the official said, was considered an asset by the agency, and part of the confusion over the number of journalists with past C.I.A. relationships may, be attributable to the distinction, clear to those inside the agency but not to many outside it, between the two.

“The essence of an agent,” one official said “is that he is under some degree of control and carries out assignments because you are paying him to so do.” An “asset,” on the other hand, can be anyone the C.I.A. finds useful as a source of information or in any other way.

Errands for the Agency

One such Individual, a C.I.A. official said, was Kennett Love, a former New York Times correspondent in the Middle East who, though never paid, had what the official described as ‘a cooperative relationship” with the C.I.A. in which he “ran errands.”

Reached at his home in California, Mr. Love said that shortly after the overthrow of Premier Mohammed Mossadegh of Iran in 1953, he helped the C.I.A. distribute copies of a declaration naming Ardeshir Zahedi as Mr. Mossadegh’s successor. But Mr. Love said he had not known at the time that Joseph C. Goodwin, the American official who had asked him for help, had been a C.I.A. man and that he had never knowingly done anything else for the C.I.A.

Another journalist said to have been an “asset” was Jules DuBois, the late Latin American correspondent for The Chicago Tribune, described by one former official as “well and favorably known” to the agency though never on its payroll.

When Harold G. Philby, the .British double agent, was living in Beirut in the years before he defected to the Soviet Union, the C.I.A., its suspicions aroused but not substantiated, kept a careful watch on his movements.

Several Americans in Beirut were engaged to help, officials said, including Sam Pope Brewer, then a correspondent for The New York Times who, by one authoritative account, had been an agent of the Office of Strategic Services while a Chicago Tribune reporter during World War II.

“We were all told to keep an eye on Philby, and Sam was one of us,” said former C.I.A. official, Mr. Brewer died last year.’

For several years In the 1950’s and 1960’s, former agency officials have said, the C.I.A. placed great stress on the num• her of assets “recruited” by each C.I.A. officer working abroad, As g result, one said, a number of people were listed as assets ‘’who didn’t even know they’d been recruited.”

In such instances, the official said, an individual might be entirely unaware that what he viewed as a social relationship with a C.I.A. officer was taken far more seriously by the agency.

Several longtime C.I.A. hands expressed considerable skepticism about the value of an American journalist as an intelligence agent, particularly in Africa, Asia or the Middle East, where he would be more likely to stand out.

“If you’re seriously it i.erested in espionage,” said one former station chief, “you clet’t run around with guys who are sailing through Jakarta for a couple of weeks. All they want to do is pick your brain. I would treat them like the plague. What can a white‐faced American journalist do for you, anyway?”

But others disagreed. In one case, a retired- C.I.A. man recalled that a correspondent “could do things for me. They were marginal, they were not clandestine. He would ask questions, snoop around. There was no money, no subversion. But he could do these things.”

Once a reporter had signed up, the C.I.A. would provide him with training in the “tradecraft” of espionage, the use of secret writing, how to conduct surveillance or• arrange for clandestine meetings and the like.

Training Varied

The training, another former station chief said, was “tailored to each case” and might last “a day, sometimes a week, sometimes longer.”

“In no case,” he added, “did we try to make real spies out of the media people. It doesn’t pay to give them the whole course.”

Far from approaching the adventures of James Bond, the assignments given journalists most commonly amounted to writing longer, more detailed versions of the dispatches they had filed to their news organizations.

Not infrequently, the reports to the C.I.A. were spiced with unprintable gossip and innuendo that might be helpful to the agency in gaining an advantage with a foreign political figure—’whose wife was jealous of what minister,” as one former C.I.A. man put it.

Another former officer said that oftentimes a reporter would be “immensely valuable to any intelligence‐gathering operation. He can move around town. He can open a post office box, he can open a safehouse, he knows how to get a telephone in a place where it sometimes takes three years.”

The value of such individuals, the man said, was more as “a support asset, not necessarily somebody you want to use as a spy.”

There were, however, some instances in which American journalists had considerable value as intelligence operatives, especially in Europe. “He could talk with people that the station and the Embassy couldn’t,” one C.I.A. man said. “He could identify and talk with Soviets, could travel places we couldn’t.” An example of this cited by the C.I.A. man was the Soviet Union. “It was considered much too risky to have deep‐cover men there,” he said. “The only person we had there for years was an economist.”

In rarer instances—there were at least two several years apart in Hong Kong and Beirut—the C.I.A. attempted, successfully in one case, to use American reporters for the tricky assignment of acting as an intermediary with a member of a foreign intelligence service who wanted to defect to the United States, a . delicate task usually reserved for skilled professionals.

At least once, the agency even used an American reporter in an unsuccessful effort to induce another reporter to “defect.” During the armistice talks in Korea, sources said, the C.I.A. persuaded Edward Hymoff, then a correspondent for the International News Service, to offer $100,000 to Wilfred Burchett, the Australian journalist who had formed a close relationship with the North Korean Communists.

Mr. Hymoff said he argued with C.I.A. officials that Mr. Burchett could not be won over, and that proved to be the case.

Other American reporters also recalled having done tasks for the C.I.A. that, they said, seemed somewhat silly to them at the time.

Flattery by the C.I.A.

Noel Busch, a reporter for Time magazine in the Far East, said he had been asked in the mid‐1950’s by the agency to interview an Asian political figure for an in‐depth profile.

Mr. Busch said he told the agency that the man was not of sufficient importance that Time or any other magazine could possibly be interested in such a story, but he said the C.I.A. agreed to pay him $2,000 for the article if no one else wanted it.

No one else did, and Mr. Busch said he later learned that the C.I.A. had simply wanted “to flatter this guy through an approach by an American correspondent.” He said he left Time soon afterward to join the Asia Foundation.

Perhaps more typical was the C.I.A. agent, a stringer for Time in a remote Asian capital, who was assigned to “circulate in local society and report what she heard.” The agent was finally let go after several years of reporting that there was nothing worthwhile to report.

Executives of several news organizations pointed cut that it was far more difficult for them to exercise control over the activities of their part‐time reporters, or “stringers.” than over those of staff correspondents.

Fred Taylor, executive editor of The Wall Street Journal, said that one of his European stringers had been an employee of the C.I.A. a decade ago and that he had never known it, nor could he confirm or deny it now. “Who the hell knows what stringers were up to?” he said.

The work was not without its serious, and even dangerous aspects, however. Darriel Berrigan, a New York Times stringer in Bangkok and a C.I.A. agent for many years, was murdered under mysterious circumstances in 1966,

Some intelligence officials believe that the C.I.A.’s new and more stringent regulations governing relationships with American Journalists will prove transitory, a pragmatic response to the current controversy over the agency’s past relations with the press.

“The pendulum will swing,” said one man who held a senior position in the C.I.A. for many years, “and srm•adiu, we’ll be recruiting journor.,,.s again.”

When that day comes, he added confidently, “I will have no problem ‘recruilp big I see a lot of them, and I know they’re ripe for the plucking.” kin

The New York Times United Press International John A. McCone, left, and Richard Helms, former directors of the C.I.A.

https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/hearings/ciasuseofjournal00unit.pdf