The Family Jewels (30 page)

Relationships could become delicate, with ties close enough to impugn journalistic integrity. The case of Cyrus L. Sulzberger is a good illustration. Sulzberger, the nephew of
New York Times
publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, proved quite a good reporter in his own right. “Cy,” as he liked to be called, made his reputation reporting from Europe on the eve of World War II and became the chief foreign correspondent for the
New York Times
late in 1944. A couple of years later Sulzberger, based in Paris until 1954, established himself as perhaps the best-informed American journalist, a reputation he sustained as a newspaper columnist until his 1977 retirement. Sulzberger's published diaries make clear that CIA officers, even chiefs of station, were frequent contributors to his knowledge.

Some scholars who have surveyed Sulzberger's private papers found that the agency's connection with Sulzberger was closer than that.
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The
New York Times
project for an extensive series on the CIA in 1966 led to a break between Sulzberger, who opposed the inquiry, and his good friend Harrison Salisbury, who had written for the
Times
from London and Moscow and worked under chief correspondent Sulzberger's general direction for six years. The Year of Intelligence provoked intense public curiosity about Langley's journalistic connections, and developments that began then threatened Cy's relationship with the agency.

The year ended with the December 1975 murder of David Welch, the CIA station chief in Athens, by Greek revolutionaries. In its zeal to exploit this incident to obtain curbs on
the press, Langley openly misrepresented the source of the assassins' information on Welch. American media were given a contrived version, while the CIA suppressed knowledge of its own security failings. The station chief had not only failed to take elementary precautions, and lived in a home that had been used by his predecessors—well known in Athens (even included on tour bus routes)—he had ignored headquarters' warnings to take care. The CIA blamed the magazine
Counterspy
for revealing Welch's identity, but in fact his name and post appeared in an article in the
Athens News
a month before the murder.

Disturbingly, agency officer Duane R. Clarridge later recounted that Langley actually suspected the Greek intelligence service of blowing Welch's cover to
Athens News
reporters. The Greek KYP had been fighting CIA over differences on Cyprus and issues of cooperation.
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In December 1977 and after, when the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence held hearings on the CIA and the press, the agency continued to purvey its
Counterspy
misinformation.
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The Greek killers were in fact apprehended many years later and confirmed their targeting of Welch had had nothing whatever to do with the leftist magazine the agency blamed. This represented a clear instance of a CIA effort to influence a domestic audience in violation of its charter.

On one level the Welch affair represented a goad to reporters. It invited journalistic counterattack, for the Fourth Estate had often cooperated with the CIA in the past and now the spooks were tarring it. The agency's ties to the media became controversial—particularly in the conventional sense of its using news outlets to disguise officers. The renowned Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein picked up this thread and, after long research, in 1977 published the seminal piece on CIA-media links.
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Among other things, Bernstein wrote that Cyrus Sulzberger had been a CIA asset. The
Times
asked Cy
to issue a denial. He refused. The heat aroused here factored in the columnist's decision to retire.

Whether or not they were CIA assets, good journalists appreciated the value of contacts within the CIA and worked to cultivate agency officers. Richard Helms had been a reporter before he became a spy, his most notable scoop an interview with Adolf Hitler at the time of the 1936 Olympics. Helms's papers, right through his career as a CIA officer and then its director, are full of letters from journalists drawing attention to assorted issues they felt should command his attention. David A. Phillips, a CIA officer who rose to lead its Latin America Division, had also been a journalist before joining, and he had worked under journalistic cover in Chile and Cuba. Phillips would argue there is a natural affinity between spooks and pressmen.
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He retired in 1975 to form the Association of Former Intelligence Officers expressly to get the CIA some of the positive publicity it lacked during the Year of Intelligence.

The CIA dance with the media went right to the top. Allen Dulles and John McCone exploited their private contacts on numerous occasions. Richard Helms occasionally met reporters. Bill Colby took the practice to a new level, periodically hosting a changing array of them. Colby extolled this openness and used it to shape press coverage, with which he had some success until Sy Hersh blew the whistle on CIA domestic operations. Though Colby issued a regulation on CIA relations with journalism, it was he who would say both in public interviews and privately—for example, to Frank Snepp—that the CIA as an agency needed to “leak from the top.”
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Stansfield Turner, who headed U.S. intelligence during the Carter administration, expanded the previously tiny Office of Public Affairs. Reagan-era spy chieftain Bill Casey
quite consciously received
Washington Post
reporter Bob Woodward—Carl Bernstein's Watergate colleague—and treated him to a wide variety of inside information. Indeed, that relationship became notorious when Woodward, in a book on CIA in the Reagan years, claimed to have gotten information from Casey even on his deathbed.
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William Webster headed the CIA under the first President Bush. Webster would sit down with the editorial boards of major newspapers for wide-ranging tours of the intelligence horizon. By then the Cold War had begun to dissipate. In this climate his successor, Director Robert Gates, sought advice from journalists, think tank denizens, and political figures on how U.S. intelligence should refashion itself for the new age. Agency officer James R. Lilley, who had worked in Korea, Hong Kong, Laos, and China, felt comfortable admitting to a congressional panel the old Sulzberger truth—that he had had, and continued to have, a range of relations with journalists. It fell to John Deutch, one of President Bill Clinton's several intelligence directors, to hold a rare public news conference by a CIA chief. Predictably, that openness came with the agency again under assault, this time for allegedly running a covert operation that had imported drugs into Los Angeles.

As agency director, Bill Colby first codified the CIA relations with the media. After final massage, George Herbert Walker Bush issued that directive when he took charge in 1976. The instructions were renewed by Stansfield Turner. They remain on the books today. While the regulations prohibit the agency from using journalists for operational purposes, they explicitly
permit
open relationships with journalists and news media “to provide public information, answers to inquiries, and assistance in obtaining unclassified briefings on substantive matters.”
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Defining the point where public information ends and influence attempts begin is the question that will forever remain.

Meanwhile, the spooks also kept up their dance with historians and book authors, naturally including many journalists. Activity here invokes the question of influence. The CIA's formal book publication program aimed ostensibly at a foreign audience, but by their very nature, books potentially affected the opinions of Americans who happened to read them, and some had quite a pronounced domestic impact. Among these was
The Penkovskiy Papers
, purported to be the reflections of Oleg Penkovskiy, a Russian intelligence officer and one of the agency's most damaging spies inside the Soviet Union. Langley actually hired one of its own assets, the Soviet defector Peter Deriabin, to edit the manuscript, which was published in 1965. A book on Indochina was commissioned by CIA's Far East Division as early as 1954. Certain publishers in their 1950s and 1960s incarnations, such as Frederick A. Praeger (the company has moved on now and is an imprint of a different house), were CIA favorites in this publishing game, a subtle feature of Langley's political and psychological warfare venture. The Church Committee determined that “well over a thousand” books were subsidized by the CIA through 1967, with 200 that year alone, a quarter of them written in English. Publication in the United States then ceased. At least 250 more books appeared in foreign languages before 1975.

The agency was quite clear on its purposes in publishing operations. These were defined by the chief of the CIA Covert Action Staff in a 1961 paper:

Books differ from all other propaganda media, primarily because one single book can significantly change the reader's attitude and action to an extent unmatched by the impact of any other single medium. . . . this is, of course, not true of all books at all times with all readers—but it is true significantly often enough to make books the most important weapon of strategic (long-range) propaganda.

The agency also had a fine understanding of the value of its contributions:

The advantage of our direct contact with the author is that we can acquaint him in great detail with our intentions; that we can provide him with whatever detail we want him to include and that we can check the manuscript at every stage.
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The Church Committee investigations did not end the publication program—literature smuggled into the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe had a role to play in the upheavals that confronted communism in the 1980s—but the program for the United States itself had ended during Lyndon Johnson's presidency. Yet the same principles that had governed formal propaganda efforts were subsequently applied to American writers on intelligence subjects. Those authors considered friendly got help, ones viewed as more critical were obstructed.

During the early 1970s, for example, author John Barron was given privileged access to intelligence case files for his exposé of the Soviet KGB, a book that may not have been part of the agency's publications program, but differed little from those that were.
⁴⁷
Barron's work proved so helpful the U.S. government later put him in touch with a defecting Soviet pilot, Lieutenant Viktor Belenko, and gave the author the information necessary to craft an authentic account of a topsecret Russian aircraft U.S. intelligence had been seeking to understand.
⁴⁸

The Church Committee era, meanwhile, had featured charges regarding CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton, whose fears of a Russian spy at Langley had roiled the CIA. Once the committee packed up its files, the CIA opened its—to journalist David Martin, whose requests for documents under the Freedom of Information Act were met
with amazing rapidity compared to the waits to which other requestors were subjected. Martin's account of the spy wars became the most revealing yet.
⁴⁹
Threatened with lawsuits, Martin nevertheless produced an account that has stood the test of time.

Late in the decade, Langley favored author Edward Jay Epstein, though the project actually began, again, with John Barron. The latter wanted to do a book on Soviet defector Yuri Nosenko, but had too much on his plate. Barron convinced Epstein to take on the project. The CIA gave Epstein direct access, making Nosenko available for a series of four interviews.
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But beforehand, the CIA's Office of Security investigated Epstein. Not much impressed by the Russian—something seemed off with him—Epstein inclined to the views of Angleton and his crowd, from whom the author received inside information on CIA interest in Lee Harvey Oswald. Langley itself became much less cooperative. Though it had no approval role in the manuscript, the agency's Publications Review Board opened a file on Epstein's book. This went to press with the same outfit that had handled John Barron's works. In all, the Epstein book proved a bit of a backfire for the CIA, but nevertheless was born of its own efforts.
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Langley's lesson was that it might be able to turn the spigot on or off, but it could not control the product.

During the late 1980s the agency made actual operational records available to Jerrold Schecter to reprise the Penkovskiy case. A journalist who had been National Security Council spokesman in the Carter White House, Schecter had cooperated with the CIA on such matters as propaganda strategy following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the public relations aspects of the cases of disaffected CIA officers Frank Snepp and Philip Agee (see
Chapter 8
). Langley clearly considered Schecter persona grata. It gave him access to actual audiotape recordings of its debriefing sessions with Penkovskiy, and teamed Schecter up with Peter Deriabin,
editor of its earlier book on the Russian spy and advisor to the Nosenko inquisitors. Their work was suitably impressive.
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In 1986, only months before becoming enmeshed in the Iran-Contra affair, Director Casey indulged David Wise, who had been so actively persecuted by John McCone, with a couple of hours-long conversations about CIA turncoat Edward Howard, on whom Wise was writing a book. The author had gained new cachet at Langley.

Over the next decade the agency made a number of its secret internal histories available to at least two reporters. Langley regards these “clandestine service histories” as “operational records,” exempt from release under an amendment to the Freedom of Information Act obtained in 1984. Former
Newsweek
stalwart Evan Thomas used these and other records for his history of the early CIA through the eyes of major figures in the clandestine service.
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After that the retired
New York Times
reporter Peter Grose gained the agency's confidence with a biography of Allen Dulles, and then he, too, was given the monographs for a study of early CIA covert operations.
⁵⁴
More recently a CIA official historian has utilized the same records in a series of papers on agency covert operations. In yet another sally of this kind, Langley provided journalist Benjamin Weiser with case files and clandestine message traffic—certainly operational records—to write the story of Polish agent Ryszard Kuklinski, who had been instrumental to the agency in discovering Soviet intentions in Poland during the last decade of the Cold War.
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