Legacy of Secrecy (65 page)

accepted government pronouncements at face value. Former FBI agent

William Turner explained why even liberal and progressive media, more

often skeptical of official explanations, generally defended the Report at

the time and for years (sometimes even decades) afterward. When the

Warren Report was released, the ultra-conservative John Birch Society

and other far-right elements were pushing for Earl Warren’s impeach-

ment, due to his support for civil rights. For liberal publications to say

anything bad about Warren’s Commission would be like giving support

to the Birchers.

Despite those factors, one might have expected to see some skeptical

stories in the US mainstream press, but there were almost none. One

often overlooked factor in the Report’s almost universal acceptance by

the American media was the CIA—Richard Helms and E. Howard Hunt

in particular. Both Helms and Hunt played behind-the-scenes roles with

the press and publishers during 1964 and afterward, and that likely

applied to the reporting of matters relating to the CIA, Cuban exiles,

and JFK’s assassination. Helms used Hunt in two related roles—Cuban

operations, and dealing with publishers and the press—during 1964 and

for several years afterward. Hunt’s background made him well qualified

to take action if any word started to leak about covert CIA operations,

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from the Cubela plot to the CIA-Mafia plots to any hint of US involve-

ment with Almeida or his family.1

It’s important to put in context the work Hunt, Helms, and their CIA

associates did with the media, since it not only impacted the press’s and

the public’s initial reaction to the Warren Report, but also influenced

coverage of JFK’s assassination and related events for years to come—

especially when a wave of critical articles and books finally started

to appear in late 1966. By that time, the CIA’s effort to manage press

coverage about JFK’s assassination and the Warren Report would be

so extensive that Helms would have a fifty-three-page memo issued

detailing how CIA officials should bolster the “lone nut” theory in the

press.2 No CIA press files from 1964 about the Warren Report have been

declassified, but a brief review of the facts—including a documented

CIA attempt to suppress a 1964 book about its covert operations—

provides insights into what Helms, Hunt, and other CIA officials were

likely doing.

Richard Helms didn’t begin the CIA’s manipulation of the press

in America, which started long before he became its Director. But he

did perfect and apply those techniques not only while he headed the

Agency, but even decades after he left it, as he rebuilt his own legacy

and prevented journalists from digging too deeply into his unauthor-

ized 1963 Cuban operations. Helms’s exceptional abilities in this regard

were partly a product of his own background as a reporter for UPI in the

1930s, when his one notable achievement was scoring a meeting with

German dictator Adolf Hitler.

Helms had seen how the power of the press could be used to help

the CIA achieve its goals, as it did in Guatemala in 1954, when Hunt,

Morales, and former newspaper publisher David Atlee Phillips were

essentially able to stage a coup via the press, with what some claim

were only a few hundred casualties. However, Helms had also seen the

press go on the attack, as in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs disaster.

Though Helms had kept his distance from both of those operations, he

seemed determined to have the press on his side, and he was largely

successful.

Much of what we know today about the press and the CIA in the

1960s comes from the Senate Church Committee hearings of the mid-

1970s and a lengthy follow-up article by Carl Bernstein, which detailed

extensive information that then–CIA Director George H. W. Bush with-

held from the Committee. For example, the Church Committee was able

to uncover that “the CIA maintained covert relationships with about 50

American journalists or employees of US media organizations” from

the 1960s to the mid-1970s. However, Bernstein was able to document

that there were actually “400 journalists who maintained covert relation-

ships with the Agency.” Bernstein writes that even that figure “refers

only to those who were ‘tasked’ in their undercover assignments or

had a mutual understanding that they would help the Agency or were

subject to some form of CIA contractual control. It does not include even

larger numbers of journalists who occasionally traded favors with CIA

officers in the normal give-and-take that exists between reporters and

their sources.” In E. Howard Hunt’s final autobiography, published after

his death, Hunt confirmed Bernstein’s much higher figures and the other

information in his article.3

Bernstein found that “the CIA in the 1950s, ’60s, and even early ’70s

had concentrated its relationships with journalists in the most promi-

nent 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.” One CIA official told Bernstein that the

CIA’s “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.”4

The Church Committee was able to uncover approximately twenty-

five journalists employed by American firms who had “paid relation-

ships” with the CIA. The Agency’s practice of paying journalists (or, as

Bernstein points out, placing active CIA employees in private media

firms) persisted until well after Hunt and Helms had left the CIA. It

would not be banned until 1976, and even then, CIA Director George

H. W. Bush left key loopholes in place. However, then, as now, most

journalists cooperated with the CIA not for money, but to obtain infor-

mation, advance their careers, or out of patriotism.5

The Church Committee found that American journalists were just

part of a “network of several hundred foreign individuals around the

world who provide intelligence for the CIA and . . . attempt to influ-

ence foreign opinion through the use of covert propaganda.” However,

information that was spread to other countries sometimes found its way

back to the US, apparently intentionally. As one CIA official told the

Church Committee, “If you plant an article in some paper overseas,” it

could easily “be picked up and published by the Associated Press in this

country.” As Desmond FitzGerald stated in a CIA memo, that situation

was “inevitable and consequently permissible.” That meant CIA-backed

stories attacking Warren Commission critics could be planted overseas,

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then picked up by US publications, and we will shortly detail one such

example.6

Helms and the CIA sometimes didn’t bother with such a circuitous

route, since they could go directly to the highest reaches of the American

media to get what they wanted. The Church Committee found that “not

only journalists but even some of America’s top editors, publishers, and

network presidents regularly cooperated with the CIA in promoting

or suppressing certain information.” Bernstein named many of them,

including the publishers of most of America’s top news magazines and

newspapers. In addition to confirming Bernstein’s list, E. Howard Hunt

later wrote that he “worked with some of these organizations” while

he was a CIA official, a fact that was often overlooked in the wake of

Watergate.7

Bernstein was able to cite an interesting source, who detailed how

some CIA media assets were recruited. He writes that:

David Atlee Phillips . . . 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. I 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.”8

The CIA refused to tell the senators on the Church Committee “the

names of its media agents or the names of the media organizations with

which they are connected,” and would instead provide only nameless

“summaries of their . . . work with the CIA.”9 According to Bernstein,

CIA Director Bush (acting for President Gerald Ford) ordered “the

names of journalists and of the news organizations with which they

were affiliated . . . omitted from the summaries.”10

In the intervening thirty-three years, the names of a few journalists

who were CIA assets have slipped out in declassified files. Ironically, one

such journalist was Tad Szulc, who assisted the CIA with the AMTRUNK

anti-Castro operation but seemed to specialize in exposing information

the CIA didn’t want to see printed. That may be why the CIA eventually

allowed Szulc’s name to be released, while still protecting others. By the

fall of 1964, Szulc was no longer working on covert Cuban operations,

as he had been when JFK was President. However, as Szulc would later

report, E. Howard Hunt was still involved in the plots to assassinate

Fidel Castro in 1964 and into 1965.

E. Howard Hunt’s deep-cover role in working with Manuel Artime

and the aftermath of the Almeida operation was linked to Hunt’s little-

known, more overt CIA role of working with publishers and the press.

Hunt was one of the few CIA officials who testified with much specificity

to the Church Committee about his actions in the 1960s with the press

and publishers. Because of Hunt’s Watergate conviction, the Church

Committee had leverage over him that it lacked over other current and

former CIA officials. Hunt later wrote that the Committee “identified me

as an important figure in the [CIA’s press] operation, pointing out [that]

one of my ongoing responsibilities [was] to get certain books reviewed

by particular writers who would be either sympathetic or hostile to

works we hoped to popularize or suppress.”

Though Hunt claimed, “Much of what I worked on [in the 1960s] was

exposed in revelations [by the] Senate investigation in 1975,” the CIA

and Hunt actually withheld much information about his activities from

the Committee. This included Hunt’s work on the JFK-Almeida coup

plan and with Artime on the Cubela plot to assassinate Castro. However,

by combining Hunt’s testimony with information from declassified files

and the few revelations he included in his most recent autobiography,

we can gain new insights into his and the CIA’s activities during the

mid- and late 1960s. These activities set the pattern for Hunt’s role in

Watergate, which stemmed from his work on AMWORLD and Helms’s

unauthorized plots to kill Castro.11

Once the Watergate investigations began, Helms ordered a CIA offi-

cial to claim that Hunt had no role in Cuban matters after he withdrew

from the Bay of Pigs operation, because he refused to work with exile

leader Manolo Ray. As Harry Williams and other Kennedy associates,

including Tad Szulc, confirmed, Hunt did continue to work on sensi-

tive Cuban operations. However, because of Hunt’s role in planning the

Bay of Pigs fiasco, and his well-known antipathy toward the Kennedy-

favored Ray, Hunt’s role in Cuban operations was on a highly covert,

“need to know” basis, even within the Agency.

Hunt’s official position in 1963, and his cover for his Cuba work,

was as the “Chief of Covert Action [for the CIA’s] Domestic Opera-

tions Division.” Hunt was an experienced writer and had helped former

CIA Director Allen Dulles write his book
The Craft of Intelligence
. Hunt

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admits, “Most of my work involved publishing and publications, in

which we supported an entire division of [one publisher] and subsidized

books that we felt the American public should read.” Hunt acknowl-

edges that the CIA “also ran a couple of national newswire services and

even published a popular series of travel books.”12

Hunt’s dealings with the press and publishers were useful for Richard

Helms, because they allowed Hunt to monitor and potentially control

leaks in the press about the JFK-Almeida coup plan, as well as about

Helms’s unauthorized Castro assassination operations. According to

Carl Bernstein, CIA Director John McCone said that he was out of the

loop regarding the CIA’s extensive use of the press in operations and

disseminating propaganda. McCone said he knew “nothing about any

arrangements for cover the CIA might have made with media organi-

zations [since] ‘Helms would have handled anything like that.’” Bern-