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A series of 3 articles from the New York Times, originally OCRed from multiple scans of the articles from the printed newspaper.
New York Times – December 25, 1977 - Article freely available in English:
The network of agencies using news outlets, books and other methods are detailed
The following article was written by John M. Crewdson and is based on his own reporting and that of Joseph B. Treaster.
For most of its three decades of existence, the CIA engaged in a relentless, though largely unrecognized, effort to shape foreign opinion in favor of U.S. foreign policy.
Although until recently the CIA counted a number of American journalists among its paid operatives, with a few notable exceptions, they do not appear to have been part of its extensive propaganda campaign.
Instead, the agency channeled information and disinformation through a once-substantial network of newspapers, news agencies, and other communications entities, most of them based abroad, which it owned, subsidized, or otherwise influenced over the years. CIA propaganda appears to have contributed to at least some distortion of current events both in the United States and abroad, although the amount and nature of disinformation collected by the American press abroad are impossible to determine.
Recent attention to the CIA's involvement in the press has focused on reports that the agency employed American journalists as agents and counted others as information sources or "assets" useful to its operations.
The recurring allegations led the House Select Committee on Intelligence to schedule hearings on the matter, beginning Tuesday, and prompted The New York Times to investigate the CIA's relationships with American news organizations.
Although the three-month investigation by a team of Times reporters and researchers showed that the CIA employed relatively few American journalists among the hundreds who worked abroad over the past 30 years, it did provide an overall picture of an agency that sought to shape information and opinions through a vast network of news organizations it controlled to a greater or lesser degree.
The CIA refused all requests for details about its secret relationships with American and foreign journalists and the newsgathering organizations that employed them, even though most of them have since been terminated.
A CIA official, explaining that these relationships were entered into with promises of "eternal confidentiality," said the agency would continue to refuse to discuss them "in perpetuity."
But in interviews with dozens of current and former intelligence officers, journalists, and others, the scope and substance of these relationships became clearer. Among the key characteristics that emerged were the following:
The CIA owned or subsidized at various times more than 50 newspapers, news agencies, radio stations, periodicals, and other communications entities, sometimes in the United States but mostly abroad, which served as vehicles for its propaganda efforts, as "covers" for its agents or partners. A dozen other foreign-based news organizations, though not funded by the CIA, were infiltrated by CIA-paid agents.
A dozen American publishing houses, including some of the largest in the industry, have printed at least twenty of the more than 250 English-language books financed or produced by the CIA since the early 1950s, in many cases without being aware of the agency's involvement.
Since the end of World War II, more than 30, perhaps as many as 100, American journalists employed by some twenty American news agencies have worked as salaried intelligence agents while performing their reporting duties. A few others have been employed by the U.S. military and, according to intelligence sources, by certain foreign services, including the KGB, the Soviet intelligence agency.
Over the years, at least 18 American reporters have turned down sometimes lucrative offers from the CIA to undertake clandestine intelligence missions.
A dozen employees of American newspapers, wire services, and news magazines, though never paid, were considered by the agency as valuable sources of information or assistance.
Over the past 30 years, at least a dozen full-time CIA officers have worked abroad as reporters or non-editorial employees of American news agencies, in some cases with the approval of the organizations whose titles they held.
According to several former CIA officials, the agency's extensive propaganda campaign was conducted with the understanding that the fake news it disseminated could be, and sometimes was, considered authentic by the American media.
The agency's legislative charter has been interpreted as prohibiting propaganda by Americans, but it says nothing about the legitimacy of the domestic effect, unintentional or intentional, of propaganda disseminated abroad.
Lyman B. Kirkpatrick, who served for many years as the CIA's inspector general, said he could not recall any agency employee ever raising questions about the ethics or legality of its mass communications efforts.
Lawrence K.R. Houston, its retired general counsel, said he always understood that the law prohibited the CIA from employing American journalists, although he claimed no one ever consulted him on the matter.
The CIA's efforts to shape foreign opinion range from falsifying historical documents, as with the late Nikita S. Khrushchev's 1956 denunciation of Stalin, to embellishing and distorting factual accounts, such as providing detailed quotes from a Russian defector, to outright fabrication, as with a report that Chinese troops were being sent to aid the Vietnamese communists.
According to former CIA officials, the agency has long had an "early warning network" within the U.S. government that advises diplomats and other key officials to ignore information disseminated by the agency abroad. The network, they said, has worked well, with only occasional failures.
But there is no such mechanism to alert this country's newspapers, magazines, and radio stations about foreign wire reports that arrive by teletype and are distorted or, in a few cases, completely false. There is, say former officials, no practical way to let Americans know that some of the stories they read over their morning coffee were written not by a foreign correspondent but by a CIA agent in a corner of an American embassy.
Domestic “rebroadcasting” of articles was considered inevitable
The CIA accepts as an inevitable consequence of its propaganda battles the fact that some of the information reaching American readers and viewers is tainted by what the Russians call “disinformation.” The agency has even coined terms to describe the phenomenon: backfire, or rebroadcasting, or domestic fallout.
“What is particularly dangerous” about fake news, a former senior CIA official recently said, “is the risk of backfire. It is real, and we recognize it.”
A 1967 CIA directive stated simply that “fallout in the United States from a foreign publication that we support is inevitable and therefore permissible.” Or as one former CIA officer succinctly put it: “It hits where it hits.” »
The agency's preferred medium for launching what it calls "black," or unattributed, propaganda has always been foreign-based media outlets in which it had secret financial interests, or foreign reporters and editors who were among its paid agents. At one time, according to agency sources, there were as many as 800 "propaganda agents," mostly foreign journalists. Asked in an interview last year (1976) whether the CIA ever told these agents what to write, William E. Colilby, the former CIA director, replied, "Oh, sure, all the time."
Most often, former officials have said that CIA propaganda consisted of factual accounts the agency believed were not widely disseminated, or essentially accurate accounts with some distortions or embellishments. But one authoritative former official stated that "there were also outright fabrications."
It appears that the CIA considered foreign citizens as its primary targets in its efforts to shape opinion. As one former CIA operative who had conducted his share of propaganda operations put it: "I didn't want Walter Lippmann. I wanted the Filipino Walter Lippmann."
Some former agency employees, however, have stated in interviews that they believe that, aside from unintended repercussions, some CIA propaganda efforts, particularly during the Vietnam War, were conducted with a view to their possible impact in the United States.
And while nearly all American journalists employed by the CIA in years past appear to have been used for intelligence gathering or to support existing intelligence-gathering operations, a few cases have emerged in which these operatives became, wittingly or unwittingly, conduits for disinformation to the American public.
An agency official said that the CIA had in the past used agents paid by the Associated Press and United Press International foreign bureaus to push dispatches prepared by the agency onto the news wires. In some cases, such as in the Associated Press's Singapore bureau in the early 1950s, the agents were locals known as "local hires." But in other cases, they were Americans.
Although the Associated Press and United Press International are two of the world's largest newsgathering organizations—the Associated Press estimates that its dispatches alone reach half the world's population in one form or another—they received no special attention from the CIA.
"We will not tell United Press International or The Associated Press headquarters in the United States when something is planted overseas," said a CIA official, who conceded that, as a result, such stories were likely to be carried on those agencies' domestic news feeds, "if they were good."
United Press International said it was confident that none of its current employees were involved in any way with the CIA, but was unable to say what might have happened in the past. An Associated Press official said his organization had investigated similar reports in the past and concluded "that none of its employees were involved in CIA activities."
One story good enough to be widely circulated, former officials said, was a report from the early 1950s fabricated by the CIA and disseminated by an agent at one of the major American news agencies, which alleged that Chinese troops were aboard ships bound for Vietnam to aid the communists in their battle against the French.
While such examples of propaganda planted directly in the American media are relatively rare, another former CIA official claimed that throughout the 1950s and 1960s, when the agency's propaganda network was at its height, it was "common for things to appear in the American press that had been picked up" from foreign publications, some but not all proprietary, into which the CIA had placed its propaganda.
Sometimes foreign publishers and editors were unaware of the origin of these stories, but more often, it was what the CIA called "in the know." The agency preferred, one official said, to give its propaganda "to someone who knows what it's about." When that wasn't possible, he said, "we gave it to anyone."
Propaganda was implemented in many ways.
The propaganda took many forms and surfaced in many forums. It ranged, according to officials, from innocuous things, such as letters to the editor in major American newspapers that did not identify the author as an agency employee, to much more significant items, such as reports on Soviet nuclear tests that never took place.
Such stories were disseminated in a variety of ways, in addition to the use of media "assets." According to former officials, one common focus of propaganda activity was the press clubs that exist in almost every foreign capital and serve as mailboxes, message centers, hotels, and restaurants for local correspondents and those just passing through.
Until a few years ago, one former official said, the director of the Mexico City press center was a CIA agent, as was the director of the local press club in Manila.
"He used his job very successfully," recalled a CIA man who spent many years in the Philippines. "Some guys are lazy. They'd sit at the bar, slip them stuff, and make phone calls."
With more diligent correspondents, the man continued, "it was a matter of making things available if they wanted to use them. My mission was to get local people to write editorials. It wouldn't be embassy material, it wouldn't be a U.S.I.A. (United States Information Agency) document; it would be from a thoughtful local commentator, and it would, I hope, carry more weight."
The U.S.I.A., the United States Information Agency, a branch of the State Department, has the official responsibility of spreading the American message abroad. According to several former CIA officials, the U.S.I.A. was aware, though sometimes only vaguely, of the agency's propaganda.
"One of the problems that was never really resolved journalistically," recalls a former CIA official, "was the relationship between the U.S.I.A. and the CIA's media activities. They knew, but they didn't have the muscle or the funds to do anything about it."
From the CIA's perspective, its own "black" propaganda was far more effective than the "white" version, or the version attributed and disseminated by the USIA to anyone who would listen.
In Argentina, for example, while the USIA openly made films available to groups interested in various facets of life in the United States, clandestine CIA agents relied on news reports of world events shown in local theaters. The objective of this particular operation, recalled one CIA official, was to "convey the American point of view on Castro to the hemisphere. The Argentinians didn't think Castro was a threat; they were so far away. So we would film the event and then invent a commentary."
One of the CIA's most ambitious propaganda campaigns took place in June 1956, a few months after Mr. Khrushchev, then Soviet leader, had delivered a "secret" five-hour speech at the closing session of the 20th Communist Party Congress in Moscow, from which all foreign delegates had been excluded.
When news spread in the West that Mr. Khrushchev had made a stunning break with his predecessor, Stalin, whom he described as a savage and half-mad despot, word spread within the CIA that a copy of the text had to be obtained at all costs.
The amended text was released to CIA media outlets abroad.
By the end of May, the agency's counterintelligence personnel had successfully obtained a copy in Poland. A few days later, it was released to the American media via the State Department, and the CIA has since cited obtaining this "secret speech" as one of its greatest intelligence triumphs.
What it did not say about this, however, was that the text it obtained was a redacted version, prepared for delivery to Eastern European nations, from which 34 paragraphs of documents concerning future Soviet foreign policy had been removed.
Although the text made available to American newspapers was the actual redacted version, another text, containing precisely 34 paragraphs of documents on future foreign policy, was released by the CIA on several other channels around the world, including the Italian news agency ANSA.
The 34 paragraphs of the foreign version, former officials said, were not written by Mr. Khrushchev's speechwriters, but by counterintelligence experts at CIA headquarters in Virginia. This attempt to provoke consternation in Moscow would have been brilliantly successful.
One of the dilemmas posed by the CIA's use of its media abroad, particularly those published or broadcast in English, was that they were likely to be closely monitored by American correspondents who lacked fluency in the local language and thus become prime sources of potential "rebroadcast" in the United States.
Former agency officials said that English-language media were used with impunity under the CIA's charter, on the grounds that the target of the propaganda was not American correspondents or tourists traveling abroad but English-speaking foreigners, a line of reasoning that, according to one former agency official, "always struck me as absurd."
The agency encouraged the dissemination of stories in other countries
In foreign countries, the agency did everything it could to encourage "rebroadcasting." In Latin America, for example, fearing that its disinformation efforts would be forgotten as soon as they appeared, the agency launched an operation known as KM FORGET, in which news stories broadcast in one country were cut and mailed to others for inclusion by local media. Such efforts increased the likelihood that the information would be seen by an American correspondent and forwarded to their home country.
Although the agency insisted that domestic repercussions were undesired but inevitable, there is evidence that this may have been welcome in some cases. One of the CIA's most significant propaganda campaigns of the last decade was the one it conducted against Chilean President Salvador Allende Gossens, a Marxist, in the years leading up to his election in 1970 and up until his overthrow and death in 1973.
According to the Senate Intelligence Committee report, millions of dollars were spent by the CIA.
An assessment of CIA propaganda obtained by the committee, prepared shortly after Mr. Allende's election in September 1970, noted a "continuous recirculation of documents on Chile" in several Latin American capitals, with reprints by American newspapers.
"Articles also appeared in The New York Times and The Washington Post," the summary continues. "Propaganda activities continue to generate good coverage of developments in Chile, consistent with our thematic focus." »
In interviews, several former CIA officers discussed what they said were, in their view, obvious attempts to indirectly propagandize the American public through "replays" of foreign press reports.
One CIA official recalled the CIA's heavy-handed propaganda campaign during the Vietnam War, conducted on the principle that "anything bad that happened in Vietnam must be the enemy's fault."
A former CIA officer recalled that at the time of the "incursion" of American forces into Cambodia in the spring of 1970, the Hong Kong station "received a cable from headquarters asking us to do everything in our power to present this situation in as favorable a light as possible."
Most Chinese in the region, he said, were dissatisfied with the American military presence in Southeast Asia and were only further inflamed by the favorable portrayal of the motives for the American invasion and its success. But he noted that the newspapers in which these stories were published were read by a number of influential American correspondents.
Some American Journalists Received Misleading Information
One reason the CIA relied heavily on foreign "assets" in its black propaganda efforts, another former official said, was that most American journalists, even those paid by the agency, were too scrupulous to "accept information they knew to be false."
But other sources cited occasions when American journalists accepted misleading information from the CIA believing it to be legitimate.
Generally, said a former CIA official, these stories were basically accurate, albeit with "embellishments" provided for operational purposes. He recalled one such report, a dispatch to the Christian Science Monitor from Rangoon nearly 20 years ago, which he said "was really faked."
The article by Arnold Beichman, a special correspondent for the Monitor, tells the story of a young Russian named Aleksandr Kaznachevev, who, a few months earlier, had gone to the American embassy in Rangoon and requested asylum. Asked about the nature of this embellishment, the former CIA agent replied: "Defectors generally don't speak English very well."
Mr. Beichman's account contained numerous quotes from Mr. Kaznachevev, some remarkably well-worded, about "hatred" for the Soviet system that had driven him from his country.
According to the article, the quotes were taken from a recording Mr. Kaznachev had made. But Mr. Beichman said in a recent telephone interview that he could not say where he obtained the information cited. "I can't say whether I heard a recording or saw a transcript," he said. "I don't know how to verify that."
Mr. Beichman said he had never met Mr. Kaznacheyev, but had "reconstructed the story with officials at the American embassy." "For all I know," he conceded, "he may never have set foot in the embassy. It could be a fraud."
There have been other cases over the past five years where American news agencies have been duped by the CIA. A former CIA official, for example, recalled a riot at a Soviet trade fair in the Far East that he said was orchestrated by the CIA.
The agency, he said, then published an article in a major American magazine citing this "riot" as evidence of discontent with Russians in that part of the world. Some correspondents were also quick to admit that they had been repeatedly duped by the CIA.
One journalist specializing in Latin America recalled meeting a few years earlier with a CIA station chief in a country he declined to identify, who gave him what appeared to be an exclusive story. The station chief stated that the local Communist Party, which had until then pursued a peaceful line in its quest for power, had a stockpile of 400 rifles supplied by outside supporters.
The correspondent learned that this story was unfounded.
The correspondent, unable to verify the information, decided to use it rather hesitantly in an article on the general situation in the country. He later discovered that the CIA documents were unfounded.
Another case in which the CIA passed information to an American journalist, according to an agency official, involved C. L. Sulzberger, the foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times.
The CIA official, who had prior access to the relevant agency files, stated that a column on the Soviet KGB that appeared on September 13, 1967, under Mr. Sulzberger's name in the Times was, "verbatim," a briefing document the CIA had prepared for Mr. Sulzberger on the subject.
Mr. Sulzherger denied ever "taking a CIA document, putting his name on it, and sending it to The New York Times."
In addition to its efforts to publicize current events, the CIA has also repeatedly attempted to intervene directly with the American media to shape their reporting.
In some cases, the agency's overtures were rejected; in others, they were accepted. Some news organizations, according to some sources, even gave the CIA the opportunity to intervene in this way without being asked.
A former official recalled a case several years ago in which the now-defunct Collier's magazine received an article from a correspondent in the Far East, mentioning that two apparently private companies in the region, Sea Supply in Bangkok and Western Enterprises in Taiwan, were the CIA's main operational subsidiaries in that part of the world.
Collier's editors, the former official said, submitted the article to the CIA for censorship. The agency official who read the manuscript pointed out that the CIA's ties to both companies were an open secret throughout the Far East, but the magazine suppressed the article anyway.
Much of the CIA's domestic censorship efforts appear to have focused on imminent information not about world affairs but rather about its own operations.
In the months leading up to the 1961 invasion of Cuba by CIA-trained exile forces at the Bay of Pigs, for example, the agency successfully suppressed several articles, including a major piece by David Kraslow, then at the Miami Herald, on the training of exile forces in Florida.
Mr. Kraslow, now publisher of the Miami News, said his editors asked him to pass the details he had discovered to Allen W. Dulles, then director of the CIA, and that Mr. Dulles warned that their publication would not be "in the national interest." Shortly thereafter, the CIA moved the training from Florida to Guatemala.
The agency denigrated a book after trying to suppress it
Three years later, when David Wise and Thomas B. Ross published "The Invisible Government," the agency's first reaction was to try to suppress the volume.
The CIA seriously considered, among other things, buying the entire first edition of the book to keep it from public view.
Cord Meyer Jr., the CIA official in charge of many of the agency's propaganda activities, went to Random House, the book's publisher, and was told that the agency was free to buy as many copies as it wished, but that additional copies would be produced for public sale.
This idea was abandoned, but former CIA officials have said that a propaganda campaign was launched to encourage critics to denigrate the book as ill-informed and dangerous.
Mr. Meyer, who remains a senior CIA official, declined to discuss this episode or any other aspect of his career with the agency.
What a former senior CIA official described as another "period of great crisis" for the agency occurred two years later, in 1966, when The Washington Post published a report on the situation in the United States. The New York Times bureau undertook to produce a series of articles aimed at determining whether the CIA was, in fact, an "invisible government."
Telegrams were sent by editors to most of the Times's foreign bureaus, asking correspondents to write memos on various aspects of CIA operations in their regions, and the former official recalled that consternation within the agency was almost immediate.
The agency's fear that the Times might disclose sensitive secrets was allayed, however, when the newspaper submitted the articles before publication to John A. McCone, who had by then retired as CIA director. According to Tom Wicker, then the Times' Washington bureau chief, Mr. McCone deleted some material from the series before publication.
The Times' investigation uncovered yet another instance of CIA interference with the newspaper's reporting. In 1954, Allen Dulles, then head of the CIA, told a Times official that he did not believe Sydney Gruson, the newspaper's correspondent in Mexico, was capable of reporting objectively on the impending revolution in Guatemala.
Mr. Dulles told the Times that his brother, John Foster Dulles, then Secretary of State, shared his concerns, and he asked the newspaper to keep Mr. Gruson, whom the agency considered to have "liberal" leanings, out of the story.
It was only several years after the overthrow of Colonel Jacoba Arbenz Guzmän, the leftist Guatemalan leader, that it became known that the CIA had played a central role in promoting the revolution that led to his downfall. Evidence in the agency's files suggests that the CIA feared that Mr. Gruson's reporting might portend a premature discovery of his role.
Mr. Gruson, now an executive vice president of The Times, said in an interview that he later learned that Arthur Hays Sulzberger, then the newspaper's publisher, had collaborated with the CIA to keep him in Mexico City and away from Guatemala during the revolution, under the pretext that he had received information that the fighting might spread across the border into Mexico.
Not all of the CIA's propaganda efforts were conducted through the news media. For example, some of the thousands of books published by or on behalf of the CIA contain propaganda ranging from fiction to outright deception.
One of these books, according to some sources, is "The Penkovsky Papers," published for what the Senate Intelligence Committee called "operational reasons" by the CIA. The book purports to be a diary kept by Soviet double agent Colonel Oleg Penkovsky in the months before his exposure by his Soviet superiors, his trial, and his execution. In the book, the colonel's name is transcribed in CIA style.
Although the information in the book is largely authentic, sources have stated that it was not taken from Colonel Penkovsky's diary (which did not exist) but was compiled from CIA files by Frank Gibney, then an employee of the Chicago Daily News, and Peter Deriabin, a KGB defector employed by the CIA.
"It was not a diary," said one CIA official, "and it was a major deception in that respect." Another former official acknowledged that the book had been "doctored," and a third added dryly, "Spies don't keep diaries."
Authors Received Operational Assistance
Reached by telephone in Japan, Mr. Gibney conceded that "the journal itself did not exist." He said he took most of the information directly from CIA interview reports with Colonel Penkovsky during his brief visits to the West.
In several other cases, according to agency sources, the CIA helped authors write hooks it believed could serve operational purposes, even when the agency had no hands to prepare the manuscript.
One such case, sources say, was the agency's decision to cooperate with John Barron in his research for a recent book on the Soviet KGB. This decision, sources say, was a response to the KGB's publication A few years earlier, a small, roughly accurate volume entitled "Who's Who in the CIA" had been published.
This book named dozens of CIA personnel. The CIA is still angry about the widespread deception and identification of its personnel by a hostile intelligence service.
Barron's book contains a 35-page collection of names of KGB officers serving under various cover around the world. Mr. Barron stated in an interview that although he received "a lot of help" from the CIA, the list of names had been compiled from various sources around the world.
One of the CIA's most intriguing disinformation campaigns in recent years has been its attempt to discredit the Cuban revolutionary movement in the eyes of other Latin American nations by making it appear to be controlled to some extent by Moscow.
The agency's strategy, one official said, was to take an East German woman named Tamara Bunke, who had joined Major Ernesto Ché Guevara's guerrilla movement in Bolivia, and present her as "the greatest and most intelligent communist who ever lived," as well as an agent of the East German Ministry of State Security and the Soviet KGB.
Asked how the agency had disseminated its fabrication, the official recalled that it had provided "materials and information" to Daniel James, an American author and former editor of the New Leader, living in Mexico, who published a translation of Major Guevara's Bolivian diaries in 1968.
In his introduction, Mr. James noted that Ms. Bunke, who had taken the nom de guerre Tania and is barely mentioned in the diaries, had nevertheless been identified a few months earlier by "a low-level East German defector" as an agent of the East German security agency.
The CIA's portrayal of a woman helped make her a heroine
Mr. James provided no evidence in the book to support his claim that, during her time with Major Guevara's group, Miss Bunke was "attached to the Soviet KGB." He stated in an interview that this was his own conclusion, although he acknowledged speaking to the CIA about the book.
"I got information from them," he said. "F got information from a lot of people." He stated that he knew Winston Scott, then the CIA's station chief in Mexico City, and that he had asked Mr. Scott "for anything they could get for me or to help me."
He declined to say whether the agency provided him with any information about Miss Bunke.
Perhaps partly because of the CIA's portrayal of Tania, the deceased woman became a heroine of the revolutionary left worldwide. Her pseudonym was adopted by San Francisco heiress Patricia Hearst after she was kidnapped in 1974 by the Symphonic Liberation Army and announced she had decided to join the group.
Recalling this, the CIA official chuckled: "National fallout," he said.