LETTER TO BOB WOODWARD FROM GEORGE V. LAUDER

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000807570013-4
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 4
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: November 21, 2012
• Sequence Number: 13
• Publication Date: February 20, 1986
• Content Type: LETTER

Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/11/21: CIA-RDP90-00965R000807570013-4
Central Intelligence Agency
Washington, D.C.
[phone]
George V. Lauder
Director, Public Affairs
23 April 1986
Herewith a copy of the Woodward letter per
your request.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/11/21: CIA-RDP90-00965R000807570013-4
 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/11/21: CIA-RDP90-00965R000807570013-4
CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
PUBLIC AFFAIRS
Phone: [phone]
20 February 1986
Bob Woodward
THE WASHINGTON POST
1150 15th Street, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20071
During the past few weeks the Director and I have received phone calls
from leading journalists asking if it were true, as stories circulating in
Washington assert, that CIA has collaborated closely with you in writing your
new book. Indeed, the February edition of THE WASHINGTONIAN (p. 17) says that
"Mr. Casey is cooperating with Woodward's book on the Intelligence
Community." Substantiation for these stories seems to be some details, such
as what you were served for breakfast by Mrs. Casey at your meeting with me
and the DCI at his home. Since neither the Director, Mrs. Casey nor I have
talked about that breakfast or indeed about our other contacts with you, the
information being spread in town could only have come from you.
To set the record straight, the meetings I arranged for you with the
Director and other senior Agency officials were at your request and for the
express purpose of providing background information; they were not for direct
publication or attribution to the DCI or the Agency. These ground rules were
made clear at the time the meetings were arranged and you agreed to them. In
fact, in securing the DCI's agreement to meet with you on 13 October 1984, the
Director stipulated that, "If I agree to see Woodward, I don't want to ever
see anything in print from that session." You specifically agreed to that
stipulation. Presumably the dribs and drabs of information about your
meetings that are circulating in journalistic circles are hype for your book,
but we consider them a violation of the ground rules you agreed to when the
interviews were arranged.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/11/21: CIA-RDP90-00965R000807570013-4
 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/11/21: CIA-RDP90-00965R000807570013-4
Bob Woodward 19 February 1986
Page 2
As you also know, this office interacts daily with lots of
people--journalists, scholars, officials and others--who seek to understand
better the Agency and Intelligence Community. The initiative is always
theirs, not ours; we do not solicit articles, studies or books. We do provide
unclassified data about the Agency and Intelligence Community activities when
we can. We did that with you, too, in response to your request for background
for what you described to us as a series of articles you planned to write on
national security under the Reagan administration. Additionally, we responded
to your overtures to the KGB with a defensive briefing, but none of that makes
us co-collaborators in your project or indeed in whatever association you
ultimately had with the KGB.
We know and you do, too, that at no time during our interaction with you
did we intend to be contributors to any book you might be writing. Such
collaboration would, in fact, be a violation of Presidential Executive Order
12333. We scrupulously observe that directive. Thus, if you are saying or
implying that we are co-collaborators you are suggesting that we are in
violation of the Executive Order. We do not take that kindly. We resent both
the violations of the ground rules under which we agreed to talk to you and
the implication that your product has our approval. It doesn't.
Yours,
George V. Lauder
Director, Public Affairs
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/11/21: CIA-RDP90-00965R000807570013-4
 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/11/21: CIA-RDP90-00965R000807570013-4
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