CIA JOURNALISTS: THE LOOPHOLE GAME

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP99-00498R000100140110-7
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 20, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 25, 2007
• Sequence Number: 110
• Publication Date: May 1, 1978
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Approved For Release 2007/09/25: CIA-RDP99-00498R000100140110-7
ARTICLE APPEARED
ON PAGE 8,9 & 10
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L AST DECE.11BER, ON THE
eve of the House Intelligence
Committee's hearings on the
Central Intelligence Agency's ties to
the press, CIA director Admiral Stans-
field 'Turner announced new regu-
lations that, on their face, appeared to
end the government's use of reporters
as spies.
Turner issued the new directive not
long after the publication by Rollo{g
S!onr of Carl Bernstein's article claim-
ins; that .`'more than 400 American
journalists ... have secretly carried out
assignments for the Central L teIli-
gence Agency." The directive also
came only a few weeks before the New
,9a/: Times published a three-part series
on the CIA's infiltration ofthe press. The
r:t knew the series was coming, of
course, since it had been months in
preparation. At the same time, the'
agency was gearing up for the hearings
:hat began later in December before the
House Intelligence Subcommittee
headed by Representative Les Aspin,
the Wisconsin Democrat.
The CIA's new regulations were de-
signed, therefore, to reassure the public
that the agency's use of reporters was
an old story, unworthy of press or con-
gressional interest. It's over; we can all
relax. Or can we?
The CIA directive, dated November
3U, in fact contains a loophole that the
agency has fought tenaciously to
preserve: the prohibition does not
apply to the literally thousands of un-
affiliated American journalists and
free-lance writers in the United States
and abroad. Nor does it prevent CIA
agents from claiming they are inde-
pendent writers or journalists. .
In order to understand the latest CIA
move in the continuing chess game over
the clandestine use of journalists, it is
necessary to go back to November
1973, when William E. Colby: -then
Approved
INQUIRY
1 May 1978
head of the agency, lunched witlL
group ofeditors at the \\'ashington Star.
C:celby yolunttCrcd that the CIA was in-
deed using the press for cover, but he
said he was curtailing the practice. The
Star. in a page-one story by Oswald
Johnston, reported that the CIA had
..some three dozen American journal-
ists" working abroad as spies.
The story failed to alarm either the
press or Congress, a fact that must have
surprised and pleased the CIA. Indeed,
the issue did not crystallize until the
Church committee in the Senate and
the Pike committee in the House began
investigating intelligence abuses after
the Times's Seymour Hersh, in Decem-
ber-1974, revealed the CIA's program of
domestic spying.
The Pike report was published in the
Village Voice in February 1976, thanks to
Daniel Schorr, after the House of Rep-
resentatives had voted to suppress it.
According to the report, in 1975 the CIA
still had 11 full-time- officers posing as
journalists; until 1973, five such agents
had represented major American news
organizations. In addition, the report
said, numerous "stringers and frce-
lancers are still on the payroll."
On Fclrruary 11, 1976, five days be-
fore the Pike report was published, CIA
director George Bush promulgated a
new policy toward the press: the CIA
would no longer pay any "full-time or
part-time news correspondent accred-
ited by any U.S. news service, newspa-
per, periodical, radio or television net-
work or station."* ('The statement was
somewhat confusing, perhaps deliber-
ately so, in its use of the words "accred-
ited by." In normal newspaper par-
lance, reporters arc not "accredited by"
their employer, but are "accredited to"
some official agency that issues a press
credential-whether it be the White
House, Congress, the State Depart-
ment, a local police force, or the foreign
ministry of another government in the
*.Val long after Bush issued his new pulire
/ asked the (1.1 whether the prohibition applied
at rqualls? to intelligence officers working under
journalistic corer as to reporters working for the (I.1.
11 scented possible that the agnur night seek to make
some conceptual or.lrmmnlir distiurlian brluYen the ta?
sides of the sane tarnished coin. I was told the
polka applied both to journalists working for the (1.1
and to Chi officers working as journalists. -
abroad. It seemed an odd usage for an
agency with unlimited resources and:
presumably unlimited access to infor-
mation. Any one of the CIA *s reporter,
spies could have explained the correct
terminology to headquarters.)
In June, in a little-noticed speech to
the Cleveland City Club, Bush dis-
cussed his February policy statement.
"I had thought that this statement
would be more than clear,- he said,
"hut the media has continued to won-
der whether there were some loopholes
left." And well the press might have
wondered. The dimension of the loop-'
holes was made clear in the final report
of the Church committee: "Of the ap-
proximately 50 U-S. journalists or per-
sonnel of U.S. media organizations who
were employed by the eta or main- I
tained some other covert relationship i
with the CIA at the time of the [Bush)
announcement, fewer titan vine-Ina f trill be
leratinaled under the new (:la guidelines."
(Emphasis added.) The reason: the
prohibition "does not cover 'unaccred-
ited' Americans serving in U.S. media
organizations," such as executives "or
free-lance writers"
One might be tempted to dismiss '.
free-lance-i.e.. una[Iilittted-inde-11
pendent writers as providing a rela-
tively insignificant part of the total
news flow to theAnierican public. True
enough. But they are not insigniftcani
to the CIA; far from it. The CIA refused to
th
f?n.....,.1.
nrovirtr, an
names t
e
y
o
committee, which had to be content
with reviewing sanitized "summaries"
of the files of the CIA's reporter-spies.
Even so, the committee discovered that
of four categories of journalists who
worked for the CIL%, the largest category
included "free-lance journalists,"
"stringers," and something called
"itinerant authors."
Although the Church committee had
thus unmasked the duplicitous nature
of the c]A's policy statement of Febru-
ary 1976 and had pinpointed its worst
loopholes, in the controversy that fol-
lower[ the press and public preferred to 11
play a guessing game about which net-
,work correspondents orAau Fork 7Yntes
reporters might have been CIA agents in
the past-ignoring the current prob-