“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.”240
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.241 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.242
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.”243 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.244 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.245 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.246
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.247
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.248
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.249
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.”250
Over the years, the CIA had sponsored classified and unclassified research, conf
erences, 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.”251
Because of fear of protests, the university officer who knows of a CIA relationship—in many cases the president of the university—keeps the matter to himself. When it comes out, it appears that the CIA—rather than the university—was trying to hide something. For example, in June 1991, a major controversy erupted over the fact that M. Richard Rose, the president of the Rochester Institute of Technology, had taken a sabbatical to work for the CIA without informing the university where he would be working. The fact that the university had received contracts amounting to $5 million over five years then became an issue.
Rose later admitted that he had made a mistake by failing to inform the trustees that he would be working at the CIA. He also admitted he should have let others at the university know of the CIA contracts.252
In the end, there was nothing wrong with the relationship—only that Rose had chosen to keep it secret.
Still another kind of controversy erupted in the fall of 1990 at the University of Connecticut, where a CIA officer from the Foreign Resources Branch had asked for information on foreign students enrolled there.253 Under Executive Order 12333, which governs the agency’s domestic activities, this was perfectly permissible. So long as the target is foreign, the CIA can obtain information on students and attempt to recruit them for later spying once they return to their countries. But by asking for lists of foreign students, the FR officer had used an unnecessarily intrusive and clumsy approach. It would have been far better for him to ask contacts he had developed for names of possible candidates for recruitment.
To try to demonstrate that the CIA is not a bogeyman, Turner and Hetu began inviting presidents of universities to the CIA for all-day programs designed to acquaint them with the agency and what it does. Later, under Casey, the CIA started an officer-in-residence program, paying CIA officers—eleven at last count—to teach at universities for two-year stints. In that way, the CIA hoped to show students that agency officers are human beings. Finally, under Turner and Hetu, the agency began selling maps and analytical studies to the public.254
Besides coordinating academic exchanges, clearing manuscripts, and responding to press inquiries, Hetu arranged during his four-year tenure for hundreds of background briefings for reporters interested in particular issues being pursued by the agency’s analysts. For example, a newsmagazine interested in the Soviet economy might obtain a briefing from CIA analysts working on the issue. It was never startling stuff, but reporters found the briefings helped to fill in gaps. By enhancing the CIA’s credibility and building bridges to reporters, the practice helped the agency as well.
By executive order, the CIA may not disseminate propaganda, whether true or false, in the U.S. If there is any possibility that information disseminated abroad might unintentionally wind up influencing the U.S., the activity must be approved by the DCI. But in the case of briefings to reporters, the source—the CIA—is known and openly acknowledged to reporters. The practice of giving briefings therefore does not violate any U.S. government policies.
When Casey became DCI, he abruptly ordered Hetu to stop the briefings. Hetu wrote him a one-page memo explaining that the practice helped the CIA’s credibility with the media.
“We have never been burned,” Hetu wrote.255
The next morning, Casey asked Hetu, “Have you stopped the briefings?”
“I wrote you a memo on it,” Hetu replied.
“I didn’t ask you to debate it,” Casey said. “I asked you to stop it. Now I’m ordering you to stop it. Stop it today. If you have any scheduled today, cancel them.”
Later that day, Casey called Hetu.
“You can let them come in if they will do some work for us overseas and report to us when they get back,” Casey said.256
Hetu realized Casey was asking him to break the CIA’s policies against using the press in operations, policies that went back even before the Church Committee hearings.
“It’s against our policies. We’re not allowed to task them,” Hetu said. “We would get nailed.”
Soon, Casey replaced Hetu with George V. Lauder, a former CIA operations officer. Ironically, Lauder reinstituted the briefings, but on a much more limited basis. With the stated objective of lowering the agency’s profile, Casey on June 4, 1981, reorganized the office of public affairs as a branch within a larger office. As in the agency’s relations with Congress, the CIA’s relations with the press quickly began to deteriorate.
Stephen Engelberg had just begun covering the intelligence beat for the New York Times when he wrote a story saying Vitaly S. Yurchenko, the high-ranking KGB officer who had defected to the U.S. in August 1985, had “identified several employees of the Central Intelligence Agency as Soviet agents.” According to the September 27, 1985, story, it was not clear “whether those reportedly involved were contract employees or full-fledged CIA officers.”
The night before the story ran, Engelberg called Lauder at home and read it to him over the phone. In journalism, one cannot be more fair than that. By reading the story to him, Engelberg had provided the agency with every opportunity to deny the story, or to offer reasons why it should not run.
Based on Lauder’s response, the story that ran the next day said, “George Lauder, a CIA spokesman, said he would have no comment on any defections or on suggestions that double agents had been discovered.”257
Nevertheless, later that day, the CIA issued a statement denying the Times’ story.
“An agency spokeswoman, without identifying the defector, said only that a story in Friday’s edition of the New York Times on CIA turncoats ‘is untrue,’” United Press International reported.258
Engelberg felt he had been stabbed in the back. He had gone to the trouble of reading the story to Lauder before it ran, laying all his cards on the table. If Lauder had issued a denial then, the denial would have appeared in the story. If Lauder had questioned a particular fact, Engelberg would have had an opportunity to go back to his sources and question them further.
As it was, the agency had lied. Yurchenko had identified Edward Lee Howard, a former CIA officer, as an agent for the KGB. Technically, the CIA could argue that Howard was a single employee and was no longer working for the agency. The Times, on the other hand, had referred to “CIA employees,” implying that there was more than one and that they were still employed by the CIA. But that was nit-picking and possibly not correct either. In addition to Howard, Yurchenko provided clues that are still being pursued about others who worked for the KGB. When Engelberg’s story appeared, they may still have been detailed to the CIA or may still have been working for the agency as contract employees.
Thus the thrust of Engelberg’s story was correct. The CIA had publicly called into question the accuracy of his work after he had taken unusual pains to make sure it was accurate.
Understandably, Engelberg was furious. He called Lauder and ripped into him.
“This is dirty pool,” he told him. “You had your shot last night, you waited until the story appeared, now you issue your statement. You’re calling me a liar in public, and I resent it.”259
“My absolute bottom line was we weren’t going to tell anybody any lies,” Lauder would
later say. “To the best of my knowledge, we never did.” But he said he has no recollection of the details of the story.260
After that experience, Engelberg operated differently. He wrote a subsequent story saying that Yurchenko had identified a former National Security Agency employee as working for the Soviets. At the time, the FBI was keeping the former employee, Ronald W. Pelton, under constant surveillance while the bureau tried to develop more information on him. The Times story could have warned Pelton that he was under suspicion, prompting him to try to hide his tracks or try to flee. So far as anyone at the FBI knows, Pelton did not learn about the story. But this time Engelberg was not going to give the CIA the opportunity to pass on his story. He simply ran it without calling Lauder for comment. If the CIA had approached Engelberg to hold off on the story, the reporter would most likely have told the agency to bug off.
“At that point, I was so angry at George Lauder and the CIA that it would have taken a lot for me to hold anything back,” Engelberg would later say. “I was not going to call George Lauder and say, ‘George, this is what I got,’” Engelberg said. “He had lost that right.”261
When William Webster became director of Central Intelligence, those kinds of encounters became a thing of the past. Besides the president, Webster saw the press and Congress as his two most important constituencies. As Webster would often state, it was all part of keeping the agency accountable and remembering that it was there to serve the American people. He had learned a few things about handling the press from the FBI, which was highly sophisticated at feeding reporters just enough to keep them happy without blowing cases.
Webster wanted a change in the way the CIA dealt with the press, and he gave considerable thought to whom he should appoint as his director of public affairs.
“The PR person is one of the most important choices you make over time, because you can’t see the press as much as you’d like to,” Webster explained later in his office at the CIA. “They [the press] figure that if the PR person is trustworthy and helpful and honest, that must be the kind of person I [as director] want. If they are not, they figure I [the director] put them there.262
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