The Family Jewels (29 page)

Jack Anderson had had some reason to suspect the Federal Bureau of Investigation as his persecutor. Most surveillance of reporters during the Nixon years was in fact carried out by the FBI—its White House–ordered wiretaps became infamous during Watergate—but one more CIA case needs mention because it figured in the original Family Jewels documents. By this time, wiretaps had been illegal for four years, and CIA physical surveillance of American citizens a borderline case (potentially justified almost exclusively in the case of an agency employee spying for a foreign power).

Most often the spy barons merely ruminated on how to counter stories. Talk of specific journalists and their articles
was a recurrent topic at the director's staff meetings. Among those whom Helms and his top managers discussed, in addition to Anderson and Getler, were William Beecher, Tad Szulc, John Crewdson, David Burnham, James Reston, Robert A. Wright, and Seymour Hersh of the
New York Times
; David Kraslow of the
Los Angeles Times
; Stanley Karnow and Sanford Unger of the
Washington Post
; Thomas B. Ross of the
Washington Star
(who had earlier been in the CIA's crosshairs for
The Invisible Government
); Nicholas Horrock of
Newsweek
; Hugh Sidey of
Time
; plus syndicated columnists Joseph Alsop, Rowland Evans, and Robert Novak. Among the subjects that exercised agency officials were real intelligence matters, but more often such things as the Pentagon Papers case, the White House Plumbers (before Watergate), Watergate itself as it related to the agency, revelations of CIA cooperation with local police across the nation, allegations of CIA surveillance of the Democratic Party (inaccurate, given our information at this writing), and the agency's role in the Chile covert operation and such associated matters as the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation affair, or a break-in at the Chilean embassy in Washington.

Langley knew that Seymour Hersh was working the CIA domestic abuse angle long before the story hit the paper. In fact, Helms and his colleagues discussed Hersh's inquiries on January 18, 1973,
before the Family Jewels documents were even created
. And Hersh knew the CIA was witting. Expecting his story would come under attack, the reporter approached Senator Edmund S. Muskie. Hersh wanted to prep someone to defend the
New York Times
revelations and offered to show Muskie his evidence. Not wanting to be drawn in, the senator refused. The story appeared and the furor was instantaneous—numerous officials attacked the
Times
for using the word “massive” in connection with the government domestic spying. But the same night Hersh learned he was all right—his friend David Wise called with the message. “Sammy
the Fish Man says you're okay,” Wise reported, alluding to his best CIA source.
³²

The Year of Intelligence and the Family Jewels marked only a waypoint in a continuing conflict between journalists—and their sources—and the CIA, other intelligence agencies, and the White House. Because of the interests of government, the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, and the mission of the Fourth Estate to report and illuminate public policy, a staple of the government-press dynamic has been a kind of love-hate relationship. The press is important to the CIA in more ways than one—it can be used to promote the agency's message and its mission, provide a vehicle for information the government
wants
to put before the public, and serve as a mechanism to be employed in the war of leaks that forms part of the environment in which policy is hammered out. At the same time, the press follows its own drummer in seeking out stories and reporting them—and those stories often prove embarrassing, especially to the Central Intelligence Agency. The result is a natural tension between spooks and gumshoe reporters. When officials are not congratulating themselves on the coup of placing certain information in the media, they are often denouncing the press for covering stories the spy mavens would prefer not to see in print or on broadcasts. Even though the United States lacks a shield law at the national level to protect reporters, the First Amendment guarantees their freedom of speech, and effectively suppressing unwanted reporting has proven supremely difficult.

This does not mean government—and the intelligence agencies—have given up the fight. The surveillance operations just recounted show the use of one tool in the battle. Surveillance and investigation inevitably have a chilling effect on reporters' activities. Another tool—legal
proceedings—has proven much more difficult to employ. The CIA did not go after Seymour Hersh for the Family Jewels. But it did consider moving against him for another CIA story he publicized, the agency's Project Azorian, the attempt to use a specially designed deep-sea mining ship, the
Glomar Explorer
, to raise a sunken Russian submarine from the bottom of the sea. The Ford administration Justice Department, Ford's NSC, and the CIA circulated papers, but could find no viable legal strategy for a prosecution.

Another journalist, Daniel Schorr of the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), also wriggled in the crosshairs. Schorr had earned official enmity as the man who revealed President Ford's admission the CIA had planned assassinations, deepening the intelligence crisis of 1975. When the Ford White House succeeded in suppressing the report of the congressional Pike Committee, it leaked anyway. Schorr was widely viewed as the culprit who had scaled the wall of official secrecy. In the superheated atmosphere, CBS executives backed away from him as the White House encouraged its allies in Congress to take aim at the reporter. A New York congressman proposed a special inquiry into the leak to be carried out by the House Ethics Committee in an unusual move approved by the full House of Representatives. The Ethics Committee subpoenaed Schorr, who refused to divulge his sources and risked a contempt of Congress citation. The inquiry faded, but Schorr nevertheless lost his CBS job.

Sy Hersh's neck was on the chopping block again after Gerald Ford handed the presidency over to Jimmy Carter. Hersh had continued to follow the CIA's secret war in Angola and had several stories in the
New York Times
revealing serious discrepancies in official disavowals of any CIA role, such as how the agency had recruited mercenaries in the face of its own denials of doing so. In the summer of 1978 Hersh wrote of a Carter administration decision to counter the growing
Cuban role in Africa by renewed covert operations on a wider scale. The CIA project began with propaganda efforts, and the journalist crafted a fairly accurate account. Heads hit the roof at Langley. Admiral Stansfield Turner, by then head of the agency, made Hersh's reporting a special target of denunciation in his secret briefings to the intelligence committees on Capitol Hill. But again the CIA had no legal recourse against the journalist.

In the spring of 1979, the Carter administration initiated a CIA covert operation aimed at Afghanistan and the Soviet forces helping their communist ally there. In December 1979 a meeting of an NSC subcommittee determined to broaden the Afghan effort by increasing U.S. propaganda programs aimed at Muslim citizens of the Soviet Union. Within days, journalist David Binder had a detailed account of the decision in the
Times
, complete with the names of the officials who had been at the White House with NSC intelligence staffer Paul Henze.

Furious at the leak, national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski at first focused on Henze, who assured his boss that his sole contact with Binder had been the latter's phone call soon after the meeting, in which Henze had refused comment. This flap continued for over two months, during which Henze was obliged to provide further assurances, polygraphs were used to question those involved, and officials considered putting Binder under surveillance. The investigation proved inconclusive.

The interesting point is that when the journalist first telephoned Paul Henze, he already had most of his story. It also happens that, in 1978, when Carter rebooted U.S. radio propaganda policy by fashioning a new department to coordinate better among the former CIA entities Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Voice of America, officials had used David Binder as a conduit for the administration to trumpet its accomplishments. Government helps create the
links between journalists and sources that, when it is a matter of a different story, lead to embarrassing disclosures.

Over the years the process has acquired much of the formalism of Japanese theater. The agency and White House nearly always know that a story is coming. President Lyndon Johnson knew enough about the
Times
CIA series of 1966 to try and shut it down. He heard of the CIA/National Student Association revelation in
Ramparts
sufficiently early to recall Richard Helms from a trip to the Nevada nuclear test site. The Carter White House knew of the Afghan radio story at least four days in advance. George W. Bush's people tried to spike the black prisons story at the CIA level, then, with all guns blazing, right at the White House—and with enough warning for the CIA to close up the black prison in Thailand and destroy the torture tapes. At a minimum, the government learns when the reporter calls to seek official reaction to his story. The Kabuki goes like this: journalists discover key information; government tries to squelch the story; media executives are pressured and respond, quite often by delaying the story or ensuring it avoids certain areas or some data; the revelation appears; government denounces the media regardless of the degree of cooperation it has received; then the CIA, FBI, or whatever department is involved investigates journalists' sources.

Other times the leaks are quite deliberate. A few weeks after the Afghan propaganda project flap began, the Soviet Union upped its stake in Afghanistan, intervening with major ground forces. Amid the flurry of Carter administration efforts to elaborate its response, Secretary of Defense Harold Brown suggested, in all seriousness, that the administration scrub some of its intelligence information and put it out to the public. The Reagan administration made an art of this kind of approach, cherry-picking the most alarming intelligence on Soviet military forces for a series of annual pamphlets and for special reports on the supposed threat
from Nicaragua, a variety of Cuban issues (most especially its links with Grenada), Afghanistan, and Soviet research on ballistic missile defense. In addition to these major projects were innumerable “tactical” leaks. For example, on May 11, 1983, President Reagan's CIA director, William J. Casey, shot a memo to his deputy for intelligence analysis, then Robert Gates, with an attached secret paper intended to provide a rationale for covert operations in Central America. Casey wanted his deputy's ideas on beefing up and improving the paper. The rationale, the CIA director noted, was that “I have been requested to give something like the attached to
Time
magazine.”
³³
The mother of all leak programs, of course, has been the second Bush administration's orchestration of leaks through 2002 designed to build public support for starting a war against Iraq. So much has been said and written on that subject that no comment here is required.

Thus, aside from being targets, journalists and authors could be subjects for cultivation—or denial. This mechanism served both to unveil stories the agency wanted out for policy or propaganda purposes and to shape those the agency found unfavorable. As the other side of the coin for anticipated negative coverage, this practice began very early. Columnist Joseph Alsop, quite close to the CIA, did favors for the agency, even a Far East trip on behalf of then–operations chief Frank Wisner in the early 1950s. Allen Dulles feared what the
New York Times
might reveal about Project PB/Success, the CIA's covert operation in Guatemala, so he turned around and leaked to journalists Richard and Gladys Harkness, providing them a rosy view of the agency they incorporated into a three-part series published in the
Saturday Evening Post
. Cued by Dulles, Dwight D. Eisenhower beamed at the coverage and satisfied himself as to CIA management. When the president commissioned a review
of CIA operations, carried out under retired general Jimmy Doolittle, he told the general that for all his flaws Allen Dulles was the best director the agency could have.

The dance with journalists could be done to any kind of music. Polish-born reporter Tad Szulc developed a special interest in Latin America. Szulc was among the first to follow the activities of Cuban Fidel Castro, whose revolutionary movement toppled the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. Szulc developed contacts among both Castro's supporters and the Cubans who went into exile after Batista's fall. The Eisenhower administration, disdaining Castro's migration toward communism, adopted a covert plan to overthrow the Cuban leader. It relied on the exiles. Tad Szulc famously worked his Cuban contacts to discover the plot and wrote about what became the Bay of Pigs invasion plan months ahead of President Kennedy's execution of the operation. Kennedy prevailed upon the
New York Times
to delay Szulc's story and then minimize it. Later, after the disaster, Kennedy called Szulc into the Oval Office to consult him on the desirability of assassinating Castro. Although Szulc had turned against the Cuban regime, he advised against any such move, but the journalist wrote and spoke in support of a coup that might unseat the Cuban leader. In the period after the Missile Crisis of 1962, with the CIA plotting just such a coup, it too consulted Szulc.
³⁴
The CIA, which considered him an adversary, never tried to recruit Szulc, but he discovered from his own agency file, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, that it kept detailed watch on his movements and writings.
³⁵

Consultation was—and remains—a CIA standard procedure. Reporters and newspaper columnists seek private briefings when taking up overseas assignments, and the agency might ask favors in return. Some of the intelligence the CIA relied upon to interpret goings-on in the Kremlin came from foreign correspondents on the Moscow beat.
³⁶
Some of the informed articles reporters wrote benefited from information provided by spooks. The account of the last days of the Vietnam war penned by former CIA officer Frank Snepp clearly shows reporters making extensive use of CIA information.
³⁷