Inside the CIA (39 page)

If these assistants had anything to say to the press, it was very specific, very circumscribed, and only on orders of the DCI. For example, when Francis Gary Powers was scheduled to testify before congressional committees about the U-2 incident, then CIA director John McCone directed Grogan to call a dozen members of the press—from Ben Bradlee of
Newsweek
to John Scali of ABC. Contrary to press reports, Grogan told them, McCone would not be appearing before congressional committees that week to testify on the incident himself.

“He has notified the committees that are concerned,” Grogan told the press, “and they, with him, will set dates . . . when he will appear before Congress.”
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In addition to conveying such messages, CIA directors such as John McCone and Richard Helms talked with particular reporters or columnists who tended to be favorably disposed to the agency.

“Arthur Krock and Scotty Reston [the
New York Times
columnists] were friends of McCone,” Elder said. “He talked with them on a background basis.”

But mostly, reporters who called the CIA for comment on allegations about the agency encountered silence on the other end of the line.

“The necessity of procuring good intelligence is apparent,” George Washington said in a letter to one of his officers during the American Revolution, “and need not be further urged. All that remains for me to add is that you keep the whole matter as secret as possible.”
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With that in mind, the CIA for most of its existence has treated the American press as an adversary—a target that was to be manipulated at times but never confided in or trusted. If the CIA thought it could use the press to its advantage, it did.

Over the years, the agency put dozens of American journalists or foreign journalists working for American media on its payroll, tasking them to obtain secrets. The Church Committee and William Colby put an end to the practice, recognizing
that to use the press for clandestine purposes impaired its credibility and hampered its effectiveness. When he became director, George Bush further tightened the restrictions. But as the Church Committee conducted its hearings and the media played up the abuses engaged in over the years by the CIA, the agency’s disdain for the press intensified.
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The CIA had an Alice in Wonderland approach: If the agency were to deny a charge, the reasoning went, then the CIA’s decision not to comment on other charges would be interpreted as meaning those charges were true. If other intelligence services knew that the CIA talked to the press, they would never deal with the agency. Sources and methods must be protected, the CIA said, refusing to acknowledge that there were shadings of secrets, that the fact that the CIA has a headquarters building in Langley could be considered a method, and that everything about the CIA is classified. Yet it was unrealistic and self-defeating for the agency to withdraw from American society.

America was not like other countries, where secrecy was often considered a virtue. America had been founded by men who considered the press to be an essential partner to government. They had won their freedom from the British Crown in part because of the ability of an unfettered press to publish tracts questioning established authority. The experiment had worked well. A free press stimulated the country’s robust economy and competitive spirit. In the end, the CIA, like any other American institution, needed the support of the American people, who formed their views in part from what they read in the press.

Other more established government agencies such as the FBI were more sophisticated at dealing with the press. They knew how to tell their stories, how to head off bad raps, and how to balance criticism without giving away all their secrets or appearing to sources to be untrustworthy. At any given moment, the FBI is pursuing thousands of criminal investigations, each one of which must be kept secret. The FBI, like the CIA, could pay someone to say “no comment” each time a question came in about its work. But the FBI realized there were ways to help the press around these sensitive areas, to
deal with allegations without giving away everything the FBI does—ways the CIA had yet to understand.

The CIA could be so good at influencing other governments, yet it seemed naive, almost obtuse, in dealing with the American press. It was one of the CIA’s greatest failings. Often, it was simply a disinclination to focus on the problem.

“I don’t know if the CIA should explain itself better. I suppose it could, but I have to admit, I don’t know how it would go about that,” said Richard M. Bissell, Jr., deputy director for operations from 1958 to 1962.
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“I don’t think we could do a better PR job. Not in a democratic society,” said John McMahon, deputy director of Central Intelligence under William Casey. “You have to live with the fact that when it screws up, it’s going to get a lot of publicity, and when it does good, you’re not going to see it. That’s the life of an intelligence officer. If the people [in the agency] can’t deal with that, they ought to be Fuller brush salesmen. That’s the nature of the work.”
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William Colby understood the need to let the American public know what the CIA does. “A public informed of the CIA’s accomplishments and capabilities will support it,” he wrote in his book
Honorable Men.
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Yet even Colby, who helped bring the agency into the modern world, considered the duties of his press assistant primarily to be to keep the CIA informed about what was being said about the agency.

“Your comment is usually ‘no comment,’” Colby told his press assistant.
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That bunker mentality began to change when Stansfield Turner became DCI on March 9, 1977. Two months later, Turner appointed Herbert E. Hetu, a former career Navy public affairs officer, to open the CIA’s first office of public affairs. The idea was that the office would function more or less like the public affairs offices of other government agencies. Like the assistants who previously dealt with the press, the office also clipped articles so the CIA knew what the press was saying about the agency.

Both Turner and Hetu believed that to the extent practical, an agency funded with tax dollars ought to let the public know what it is doing. They got a boost from Executive Order 12036,
signed by President Carter on January 24, 1978, which authorized the director of Central Intelligence to “act, in appropriate consultation with the departments and agencies, as the intelligence community’s principal spokesperson to Congress, the news media, and the public.”

The idea was heresy at the CIA, particularly in the Directorate of Operations, which looked upon Hetu as something approaching a traitor.

“I am not here to give away secrets,” Hetu told operations officers in meetings. “I am trying to be the lightning rod to make your jobs easier.”
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But Hetu came away feeling he was hated by the clandestine service.

At one staff meeting, an officer said, “You are hurting us when potential agents read we have a PR office. They could get killed.”

Hetu wondered if they were right. During his tenure at the CIA, Hetu had come to be impressed by CIA employees. In his twenty-five years in the government, he had never encountered such honest, smart people. Hetu did not know anything about intelligence. He simply had a gut feeling that the CIA could be doing a better job in the press area. In the end, Hetu did not decide on his own what would be released. He attended staff meetings with the DCI so he was fully informed on major issues. Then Turner and his deputies decided what to release.

Almost immediately after taking the job, Hetu was faced with a controversy over the publication of
Decent Interval
by Frank Snepp. A former CIA officer, Snepp had written about his experiences in Vietnam without clearing the manuscript with the CIA, as required by his preemployment agreement. The contracts state that anything CIA employees write must be cleared to make sure the material does not contain classified information. In the past, the clearance process had been handled haphazardly by the Office of Security and the general counsel. Former employees were discouraged from writing books because they feared that the long process would gut their work.

Indeed, over the years, the CIA had been engaged in the business of trying to suppress books rather than encouraging
them. In 1964, for example, John A. Bross, then the CIA’s comptroller, got the bound galley proofs of David Wise and Thomas B. Ross’s book
The Invisible Government.
The book was an exposé of the CIA, FBI, and other agencies that had engaged in illegal activities. Bross obtained the galleys through a friend of a family member who was then working for Random House.
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With the authorization of John McCone, then DCI, the CIA asked Bennett Cerf, president of Random House, if the agency could buy up the first printing.

“Cerf responded that he would be delighted to sell the first printing to the CIA, but then immediately added that he would then order another printing for the public, and another, and another,” according to Wise’s subsequent book,
The American Police State.
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The agency dropped the idea.

While the CIA would have liked to have brought legal action against the authors, they were journalists, not former employees. The CIA has gone to court only to enforce contracts signed by CIA employees when they enter and leave employment.

The first test of this restriction came in 1974, when Knopf published
The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence
by Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks. Marchetti had been executive assistant to the deputy director of Central Intelligence. As a CIA employee, Marchetti had signed the preemployment contract, giving the CIA a legal basis for moving against him. Acting on behalf of the CIA, the Justice Department first sued Marchetti to prevent him from publishing a magazine article about the agency. Then Marchetti and his publisher sued the CIA over the deletions the CIA insisted upon in the book. The CIA won in both cases, and the Supreme Court declined to hear the appeals.
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Eventually, Knopf published the book with 168 blank spaces to show where the CIA had required deletions. Over the years, the CIA approved new material for publication, filling in some of the blanks. The publisher included it in subsequent editions in different typefaces. By highlighting the secret nature of the material, the publisher made the book appear even more desirable.

William Colby would later admit he should have taken the advice of John S. Warner, then the CIA’s deputy general counsel, who said the CIA should demand deletion only of classified material that had not appeared publicly. As a negotiating ploy, Colby had ordered Warner to demand deletion of all the classified material. Later, Colby said, the CIA could back down on many of the items that had already appeared publicly. The strategy backfired, and the book has continued to sell well ever since.
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Like Marchetti, Snepp had not cleared his book with the agency. Because Snepp had violated his employment agreement, the agency took him to court and won. Snepp had to turn over all his royalties to the government.
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On the other hand, when Philip Agee resigned from the CIA and wrote his 1975 book,
Inside the Company: CIA Diary,
there was nothing the CIA could do because the book was published overseas.

With the Snepp experience fresh in his mind, Hetu decided the CIA needed a more systematic approach to clearing books. It was obvious employees such as Snepp would rather risk legal action by bypassing the clearance process than submit their manuscripts to possibly arbitrary censorship. Indeed, after looking over the Snepp book, the CIA decided only a few sentences would have been deleted if it had been submitted for review prior to publication.

Hetu set up a Publications Review Board within the Office of Public Affairs to review books and other manuscripts. With Hetu as its chairman, the board included a lawyer from the office of general counsel. The review board drew up strict standards. To show that material should be deleted, the board had to demonstrate that the item was classified. Even then, if the material had already appeared publicly, the board sometimes let it pass. But when William Casey became CIA director, the board stuck it to Stansfield Turner when he submitted his book for review. It demanded more than one hundred deletions in
Secrecy and Democracy: The CIA in Transition.
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Another area that needed improving was the agency’s relations with the academic world. Like any large technologically
oriented company, the CIA needed a wide range of contacts with universities, both to recruit new employees and to sponsor research and obtain fresh insights. Recognizing that, William J. Donovan had persuaded President Roosevelt of the need for a coordinated intelligence service that would “draw on the universities for experts with long foreign experience and specialized knowledge of the history, languages, and general conditions of various countries.”
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Over the years, the CIA had sponsored classified and unclassified research, conferences, and special projects on everything from new security devices, technology transfer, terrorism, and the illicit arms market to the future of Japan, human rights, population trends, and changing commodity markets.

But any CIA contact with the academic world tends to be regarded with suspicion by some students and faculty members. Because of that reflex response, faculty members and universities involved in CIA projects often want to keep their involvement secret. That only exacerbates the problem. By CIA policy, a senior officer of a university must give his approval before a CIA contract can be awarded. When he was DCI, George Bush told the American Association of University Professors that the only ties the CIA sought with campuses were those made with the “voluntary and witting cooperation of individuals who can help the foreign policy processes of the United States.”
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