17d05d030193283f60ac573244de53e6 полностью

journalist of the early Cold War era to work closely with the CIA. After initially shying away from press contacts, the Agency under the directorship of Allen Dulles positively cultivated the news media. With their unrivaled ability to circulate overseas, journalists were excellent sources of intelligence, so much so that senior Agency officials, “flashing ID cards and looking like they belonged at the Yale Club” (as one reporter recalled), would greet returning foreign correspondents directly off the boat to debrief them about their travels.2 Moreover, friendly newspapermen like Alsop could be “tasked” for propaganda purposes, reporting stories that showed the United States—and sometimes the Agency itself—in a flattering light while keeping to themselves information Dulles did not want leaked. Although less image-conscious than his publicity-hungry Director, Frank Wisner was especially interested in this kind of news management. He would constantly confer with the likes of Alsop (not coincidentally, a prominent member of his Georgetown social set) and consult the wire-service tickers kept in a room across the hall from his office. “A story would come over and he’d get on the phone,” William Colby remembered. “Get something out! The Mighty Wurlitzer!”3 Many reporters shared the sense of insider status and civic obligation that motivated Alsop, while others were simply grateful for the scoops that privileged access to classified information could bring them. “We had formed a partnership over secrets,” Bob Woodward wrote of his relationship with 1980s DCI William Casey. “In entirely different ways, we were both obsessed with secrets.”4

Estimates of the number of U.S. reporters who carried out secret assign-ments for the CIA vary: in 1973, the Agency itself conceded, in the face of questioning from newspaper publishers, a figure of “some three dozen”; a congressional inquiry conducted in 1976 concluded that the total was

J O U R N A L I S T S

227

more like fifty; a year later, Carl Bernstein calculated that as many as four hundred American journalists had worked for the CIA since 1952.5

Whichever reckoning is most accurate, the incidence of individual reporters performing covert tasks was less significant than the larger pattern of institutional collaboration between the Agency and major news media that Bernstein and other investigators uncovered during the 1970s.6 Many of the United States’s best-known newspapers cooperated with the CIA as a matter of policy. Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times, was a good friend of Allen Dulles and signed a secrecy agreement with the Agency, although he delegated liaison duties to subordinates so as to give himself plausible deniability. Under the terms of this arrangement, the Times provided at least ten CIA officers with cover as reporters or clerical staff in its foreign bureaus, while genuine employees of the paper were encouraged to pass on information to the Agency about, for example, potential foreign agents.7 Another eminent news executive on friendly terms with Dulles was William Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System, whose news president, Sig Mickelson (later chief of Radio Free Europe), was in such constant telephone contact with CIA headquarters that, tired of leaving his offices to use a pay phone, he installed a private line that bypassed the CBS switchboard. Among the services provided the Agency by Paley and Mickelson was a “recruiting-and-cover capability” like that offered by the New York Times, the laundering of CIA funds by the William S. Paley Foundation, and the loan of the CBS broadcast booth at the United Nations to intelligence officers so that they could lip-read the whispered conversation of Soviet delegates during Nikita Khrushchev’s visit in 1959.8 The relationship was cemented by an annual New Year’s Day dinner at Washington’s exclusive Alibi Club, paid for by Dulles, and remembered by Mickelson for “top newsmen, top agency men, good talk and cigars, each side out for what it could get.”9 A third mechanism for disseminating CIA-approved stories was the syndicated news service, with the Agency using existing organizations such as Associated Press and United Press International for this purpose, as well as creating its own: Forum World Features.10

One organization not mentioned by Bernstein was the journalists’ trade union, the American Newspaper Guild (ANG), whose international staff served the CIA in ways reminiscent of the Lovestoneites in the AFL’s Free Trade Union Committee. The ANG was a founder member of the Inter-

228

T H I N G S F A L L A PA R T