national Federation of Journalists, a society of anticommunist newspapermen established in Brussels in 1952 in opposition to the Prague-based, communist-dominated International Organization of Journalists.11 Following a major expansion of the ANG’s international program in 1960, funded by seed money from the AFL-CIO and a grant from “a private philanthropy,” an ANG staffer, Ronald Watts, was dispatched to Brussels to oversee the development of free trade unionism and “professional journalism” in Africa and, with occasional assistance from the Asia Foundation, the Far East.12 Meanwhile, another ANG international affairs representative (Richard P. Davis, later succeeded by John K. Sloan) took up residence in Panama City to run the Inter-American Federation of Working Newspapermen’s Organizations (IAFWNO), a hemispheric trade union secretariat with close links to the CIA’s South American labor front, the American Institute of Free Labor Development. Overseen by Charles A. Perlik, the American Newspaper Guild’s energetic Secretary-Treasurer, Watts, Davis, and Sloan offered journalists from the Third World a host of free services, including technical assistance, educational and training seminars, and “leadership development.” These activities were financed from the ANG’s International Affairs Fund, which in turn was subsidized by an assortment of foundations all later identified as CIA pass-throughs: the Granary Fund, the Andrew Hamilton Fund, the Broad High Foundation, the Chesapeake Foundation, and the Warden Trust. Grants received from these sources between 1960 and 1967 added up to a total of just under a million dollars.13
As with other citizen groups allied with the CIA in the early Cold War, it would be simplistic to depict the U.S. press corps as merely parroting the “Company” line. Some publishers and reporters politely declined invitations to double as secret agents. Despite being another of Allen Dulles’s many friends in journalistic circles, David Lawrence, founding editor of
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1960s, both Joe and his co-columnist, younger brother Stewart (an OSS-er and early CIA booster), became increasingly critical of what they perceived as a loss of nerve within the Agency. Stewart complained that
“Bold Easterners,” Old Grotonian swashbucklers like himself, were being forced out by intelligence technocrats with slide-rule minds, the “Prudent Professionals”—and the brothers grew correspondingly less cooperative.16
“The analytical side of the Agency [was] dead wrong about the war in Vietnam—they thought it couldn’t be won,” Joe told Carl Bernstein in 1977. “I stopped talking to them.”17