A LETTER FROM THE PUBLISH

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP99-00418R000100100052-4
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: November 21, 2012
• Sequence Number: 52
• Publication Date: September 30, 1974
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/11/21 : CIA-RDP99-00418R000100100052-4
2 0 SEP 1ct74
? Cloaks, daggers, clandestine cash, and spooks were the agenda
last week as the U.S. and the world asked new questions about CIA op-
erations. The TaiE correspondents dispatched to report on our cover
story had an old acquaintance with the curious ways of intelligence op-
erators, both foreign and domestic. "I've spent much of the last five
years of my journalistic career worrying about spooks of one stripe
or another," says Washington Correspondent Stanley Cloud, who in
1969-70 served in our Moscow bureau. "There the problem was the
KGB," recalls Cloud. "We worried about phone taps,
room bugs, whether we were being followed and just
who among the Russians was and was not an agent."
Cloud's next assignment helped give him backgound
for this week's cover subject: "In Southeast Asia, it was
not the KGB but the CIA thatwas a concern of most jour-
nalists. In Laos, where the CIA conducted a secret war,
our every move was known and, we assumed, plotted
on some map somewhere. The CIA was everywhere,
but claimed to be nowhere."
For State Department Correspondent Strobe Tal-
bott, who contributed the main part of the story, the
cu. was suddenly right there last week when Director
William Colby granted TLNtE a rare on-the-record in-
terview. This was quite a departure for the former East-
ern European correspondent who spent several years
steering clear of all contact with the CIA. He explains:
"In the Communist countries, Western newsmen are
widely regarded by local authorities as licensed spies.
That made us all the more chary about getting near
the agency and its outposts, even for the legitimate pur-
pose of seeing what the CIA was up to."
Our account of CIA involvement in Chile was writ-
ten by Associate Editor Edwin Warner and reported
mainly by Washington's Latin American specialist Jer-
ry Hannifi.n, with supplementary material from Lon-
don Correspondent William McWhirter and Buenos
Aires Bureau Chief Rudolph Rauch, who covered the
overthrow of Allende. While reporting from Chile last
year at the time of the truck drivers' strike before the
coup, Rauch had asked a group of truckers who were en-
joying a hearty barbecue on the tailgate of one of the ve-
hicles blocking the road leading into Santiago just where
they had got the money for such a feast: "From the
CIA," was the laconic reply, and the incident was in-
MERRIcx chided in our Sept. 24, 1973 story. What seemed like a
joke then has since turned out to be more than that. Some of the
truck drivers may indeed have been getting money from the CIA.
In New York, Reporter-Researcher Sarah Bedell queried a C2.-
demics on the role of the CIA and checked the main story, which was
written by Associate Editor Frank Merrick. Although a former cor-
respondent. Merrick had never had an encounter with the CIA. -But
then, being in the Boston and Chicago bureaus, I wouldn't have,"
says Merrick. "At least I don't think so."
?
-- Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/11/21 : CIA-RDP99-00418R000100100052-4