UNFINISHED BUSINESS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000403630011-7
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 27, 2012
• Sequence Number: 11
• Publication Date: July 1, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

,.Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/28: CIA-RDP90-00965R000403630011-7
ARTICLE AP D
ON PAGE
COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW FILE
July/August 1985
11
ITWIJMSIIIED BtTSU
Who's deceiving whom?
TO THE REVIEW:
When a journalist sets out to accuse govern-
ment officials of lying and other deceptions
he should take pains to make sure of his own
facts. Anthony Marro, I fear, made some
serious errors in "When Government Tells
Lies" (CJR. March/April). The following list
is not necessarily exhaustive, but it is indic-
ative of carelessness. I won't accuse Marro
of lying.
Marro suggests that President Reagan was
wrong when he said that there were enough
arms found on Grenada to supply thousands
of terrorists. He said that reporters "found
some of the warehouses half-empty . . . and
many of the weapons antiquated. possibly
more suited for defense by an island militia
than for the export of revolution and terror-
ism."
According to the Defense Department's
list of weapons found on Grenada, there were
1,626 Soviet AK47 assault rifles, 1.120
model 52 Czech rifles. 4,074 KS rifles, and
2.432 Mosin Nagent 7.6 mm Soviet rifles.
There were many other rifles, plus machine
guns and mortars. These numbers would
seem to justify President Reagan's statement.
It is possible that Marro was misled about
the antiquity of the rifles by a story by Wash-
ington Post reporter Loren Jenkins which
said that some of the rifles were .30-30 Mar-
lin carbines made in 1870. That story was
discredited when arms experts pointed out
that no such Marlins were made in 1870 and
.30-30 ammunition was not introduced until
1895. Unfortunately, The Washington Post
never acknowledged this error.
Marro writes that "the Reagan adminis-
tration insisted that its changes in the Social
Security Disability law were intended only
to get rid of people who had no right to the
government aid in the first place." He is
evidently referring to an amendment to the
law that was passed by Congress in 1980,
during the Carter administration, in response
to a GAO investigation which showed that
billions of dollars were being paid to indi-
viduals whose claims to disability were
fraudulent. Congress required that the recip-
ients of disability benefits be checked and the
cases of fraud weeded out. Marro is incorrect
in attributing this change in the law to the
Reagan administration. It did, however, im-
plement the law, and, because of the protests
that were amply reported in the media, Con-
gress asked that safeguards in the review pro-
cess be introduced to reduce the hardship on
persons whose benefits were cut off without
adequate justification. Marro was perhaps
misled by the impression created by Bill
Moyers's documentary "People Like Us"
that the change in the law was part of the
Reagan budget cutbacks. This error was
pointed out to CBS. but it never did anything
to correct the misleading impression on the
air.
C Marro attacks the State Department's 1981
white paper on El Salvador on the basis of
an article by Jonathan Kwitny published in
The Wall Street Journal in June 1981. He
writes that Kwitny "found the evidence [of
outside aid to the Salvadoran guerrillas]
something less than it had been made out to
be." Marro is apparently unaware of the fact
that it has been demonstrated that Kwitny did
not himself make any discoveries about the
white paper. Philip Agee, the CIA defector,
charged that Kwitny's article had been
cribbed from his analysis of the white paper
without giving him any credit, or even men-
tioning his name. A comparison of Kwitny's
article and Agee's work shows that there was
indeed a close correspondence between the
two. Even some of Agee's errors showed up
in Kwitny's piece. Kwitny acknowledged
having seen Agee's article. He said he was
unaware that it had had any distribution ex-
cept to a few old friends of Agee's.
There were some errors in the white paper,
to be sure, but neither the criticisms of
Kwitny nor of Robert Kaiser of The Wash-
ington Post discredited its basic findings, and
both the Cubans and Nicaraguans have sub-
sequently admitted that they were giving sub-
stantial aid to the guerrillas in El Salvador
during the period covered by the white paper.
Where was the more significant deception
- in the white paper or in articles by Kwitny
and Kaiser, both of whom leaned heavily on
Agee without giving him proper credit?
REED IRVINE
Chairman
Accuracy in Media
Washington, D.C.
Anthony Marro replies: Except for the AK-
47 assault rifles, all of the weapons listed by
Irvine are classified by Jane's Infantry Weap-
ons (1982-83 edition) as being "obsolete."
According to Jane's, the Mosin Nagent rifles
are "not found in first-line service with any
regular arm v. " the Czech Model 52s are no
longer in service in Czechoslovakia, and the
Soviet KS rifles are no longer used in the
Soviet Union "except for ceremonial pur-
poses. ,'
Irvine is right in saving that Congress,
during the Carter administration, mandated
a review of Social Security disability rolls.
What I was referring to by "changes" were
the new criteria set by the Reagan admin-
istration - criteria that congressional over-
sight committees and federal judges have
since found went well beyond any mere weed-
ing out of fraudulent claims and instead re-
suited in a wholesale purge of the rolls.
Senator John Heinz characterized the Rea-
gan administration's review process as being
"out of control," adding that "Congress
simply did not intend for American workers
who had paid into this system and were en-
titled to benefits to be removed from the rolls
in this insane fashion."
Irvine has contended for several years that
Agee's criticisms of the so-called white paper
were a source of information, and possibly
a source of inspiration, for Kwitny and The
Wall Street Journal. I was aware of this when
/ wrote. the piece, just as I was familiar with
the long rebuttal by Frederick Taylor, the
executive editor of the Journal, which was
published in August 1981. Kwitny has said
that he had a copy of Agee's critique, but
that the main sources of information were
the State Department documents themselves
and the officials who were quoted in his ar-
tick. The point of Kwitny's piece was not
that the State Department's claim that arms
were being shipped into El Salvador was in
error, but only that its "evidence" was much
less solid than it first was made out to be.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/28: CIA-RDP90-00965R000403630011-7
 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/28: CIA-RDP90-00965R000403630011-7
ARTICLE AP D
ON PAGE___
COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW
September/October 1985
FILE ONLY
IJTWtMSIIED JJIISILNESS
I am sick and tired of Reed Irvine's being
allowed to spew his inaccuracies about me
without my being allowed comment. (Unfin-
ished Business, OR, July/August). I realize
that OJR has merely joined a parade of dis-
tinguished (and undistinguished) publica-
tions in having printed this garbage without
offering me so much as a phone call, and my
general respect for your magazine is one
reason I write.
Most important: I am aware of no errors
- mine, Philip Agee's, or anyone else's -
either in the story I wrote about the State
Department's white paper on El Salvador that
appeared in The Wall Street Journal, or in
the elaboration of the same material that ap-
peared in my book Endless Enemies. Nor
does Irvine cite any errors while filling your
columns with libelous generalizations.
When Agee raised the issue of plagiarism.
I did not even remember that a paper he wrote
was in the voluminous file I had assembled
on the white paper. Anthony Marro's reply
to Irvine covers me in part by noting that the
documents themselves (which I got a trans-
lator to translate) and the State Department's
admissions of errors in private interviews
with me provided the heart of the article.
Besides saying that I am a plagiarist, Philip
Agee also says that the CIA, in fact the wo e
American military apparatus. is a conspiracy
against freedom and justice. Does Irvine also
agree with that'' If Irvine will join me in the
belief that Agee says things that are pro-
foundly wrong. why does Irvine for years on
end raise the word of this man as proof that
I am a plagiarist and KGB dupe?
While I appreciate Marro's good intentions
in offering my defense. I would rather speak
for myself. Marro writes, "The point of
Kwitny's piece was not that the State De-
partment's claim that arms were being
shipped into El Salvador was in error. but
only that its 'evidence' was much less solid
than it first was made out to be."
Well, the State Department's claim was in
error, and, most likely, knowingly so. If not,
the claim would by now have been made on
better evidence. Obviously, weapons have
been carried into El Salvador from Soviet-
bloc sources, though probably far fewer than
have been carried in from Western sources.
But the point of the white paper was that
shipments of Soviet-bloc arms were so large
and well-orchestrated as to be responsible for
the guerrilla presence, making the war "a
textbook case" of Soviet-bloc aggression,
rather than an uprising of discontented Sal-
vadorans.
Not only do the "captured documents"
on which the white paper purportedly was
based fail to support this assertion, but
nothing I have seen or heard either in El
Salvador or here supports it either. By the
evidence, it simply isn't true, which I thought
was the point of Marro's piece ("When the
Government Tells Lies," OR, March/April)
that started all this.
JONATHAN KWITNY
New York, N.Y
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/28: CIA-RDP90-00965R000403630011-7