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New York Times – December 27, 1977 Article freely available in English:
The CIA's many connections with journalists varied widely in degree and value.
The following article was written by John M. Crewdson and is based on his own reporting and that of Joseph B. Treaster.
A few years ago, a correspondent for a major Midwestern newspaper, arriving in Belgrade, was invited by colleagues to meet with his newspaper's local "freelancer."
Knowing that his newspaper employed no one in Belgrade—or so he thought—the correspondent climbed the stairs of the freelancer's hotel and saw the man running screaming down another flight of stairs to catch a plane to Prague.
The correspondent was puzzled, but said he later learned that the man was a CIA operative who had fled to protect his "cover," and that he had obtained his press credentials directly from the newspaper's publisher.
He and the publisher had agreed to keep the matter secret, apparently never anticipating that one of the paper's legitimate correspondents might suddenly appear.
This case was just one of dozens uncovered during a three-month investigation by The New York Times into the CIA's three decades of involvement in the communications industry in the United States and abroad. The Times verified the names of 200 individuals and organizations that various sources identified as having possible ties to the intelligence services.
Nearly 20 correspondents were identified, reporting that they had turned down job offers from the agency.
But the Times also obtained the names of more than 20 American journalists who had worked since World War II as paid intelligence agents, in most cases for the CIA, and at least a dozen other American reporters who, though unpaid, were counted by the CIA among its operational "assets."
In addition, at least 12 full-time CIA agents have worked abroad over the past 30 years, posing as employees of American news agencies.
Of the more than 70 people identified by the Times as falling into one of these categories, several are dead, and about 20 could not be located. But several others have confirmed their involvement, and several have spoken freely about their experiences, though nearly all have asked that their names not be used.
"I want to live here in a country I love without having to worry about a bomb falling on my window," said one man, a former ABC News correspondent who worked for the CIA in the 1950s.
On ABC, William Sheehan, a senior vice president, said the network was "satisfied that no member of our staff has such a dual role."
All the interviewees, including a man who had freelanced for Time in Rome, insisted that they had been able, though in some cases at great psychological cost, to maintain a separation between their intelligence work and their journalism careers.
None said the CIA had ever encouraged them to skew their dispatches to serve its objectives or otherwise compromise themselves journalistically.
Some expressed fear that the publicity would cost them their jobs or make future employment more difficult. The CIA made no financial provision to soften the blow of separation when it terminated its relationship with the last of its reporting agents last year, and one of them, until recently a CBS reporter in Europe, packs packages at a Florida department store.
The Cold War Climate
Several journalists and CIA officials interviewed emphasized that at the height of the Cold War, it was acceptable to cooperate with the agency in ways that the CIA and the journalism community now deem inappropriate.
“The right thing to do was to cooperate,” said a retired intelligence officer. “I guess it seemed strange in 1977. But cooperation didn’t seem strange then.”
Earlier this month, the CIA issued a new executive order prohibiting, except with the explicit approval of the CIA director, any paid or unpaid operational relationships with journalists at mainstream American news organizations.
The agency’s long-standing relationship with American journalists first came to public attention in 1973, when William E. Colby, then CIA director, provided Washington reporters with some background details.
The Washington Star reported on this practice, leading to investigations by two congressional committees. One of the committees, the House Select Committee on Intelligence, will hold hearings on the matter starting today, and its Senate counterpart is also considering a public inquiry.
The issue was resurrected three months ago when independent investigative journalist Carl Bernstein wrote in Rolling Stone magazine that some 400 American journalists had "covertly carried out assignments" for the CIA since the agency's founding in 1947, in many cases with the knowledge and approval of senior intelligence officials.
However, all past and present CIA officials interviewed for the Times investigation unanimously stated that the number of journalists paid by the CIA was, as one former official put it, "fairly modest."
"If you look at a 25-year history, you might come up with totals of 40 or 50 people," the former official said. Others estimate the number could be as high as 100.
Since that time, thousands of correspondents for American news agencies have worked abroad.
Several former intelligence officers have pointed out that the CIA itself does not know precisely, and probably never will, how many American journalists it paid over the years. The agency's files are widely scattered and incomplete, they say, and some of the arrangements made abroad may never have been recorded at CIA headquarters.
A Delayed Effect
As attention on the CIA's past attempts to use the press in its propaganda efforts has renewed in recent months, foreign correspondents have reported that heightened suspicion among citizens of other countries has made information gathering more difficult.
A Times survey of its own foreign correspondents repeatedly recalled that in some parts of the world, American journalists, like those in most other countries, have always been suspected of serving as second-tier intelligence agents.
But one correspondent cabled from India that "a rather new practice among some of us is to avoid public contact with people known to the CIA." Such contacts, he wrote, "can only confirm the suspicions."
In all, the Times' three-month investigation revealed that at least 22 U.S. news organizations had employed, sometimes only occasionally, American journalists who also worked for the CIA. In a few cases, the organizations were aware of the CIA ties, but most appear not to have been.
These organizations, some of the most influential in the country, but also some of the most obscure, include ABC and CBS News magazines, Time, Life, and Newsweek, the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the Associated Press, and United Press International.
Also included were the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, the Christian Science Monitor, the Wall Street Journal, the Louisville Courier Journal, and Fodor's, a travel guide publisher.
Lesser-known organizations include the College Press Service, Business International, the McLendon Broadcasting Organization, Film Daily, and a now-defunct underground newspaper published in Washington, D.C., the Quicksilver Times.
Edward VW. Estlow, the president of Scripps-Howard, said that while some of the organization's correspondents may have had such connections "at the time, we combed our organization about five years ago" and could find none at that time.
For the most part, according to past and present CIA officials, the journalists who worked for the agency were a mix of freelancers and freelance writers, with a few staff correspondents.
Freelancers and freelance writers, the officials said, were not subject to the demanding schedules of senior foreign correspondents at major newsgathering organizations and were also more likely to need the extra money the service provided.
One former senior official said he always preferred "hard-working" reporters with an anti-American reputation, men "who didn't get enough satisfaction from their work" rather than those seeking financial rewards. "I wasn't looking for mercenaries," he said.
In general, the pay was not high. Several former station chiefs said that a local freelancer performing occasional assignments could be paid just under $50 a month. For others with more commitment, the sum could be as high as a few hundred dollars.
For coverage, the money went through the financial departments of news agencies, but in most cases, the agency preferred to pay its agents through accounts at major New York banks.
Journalists at major publications who might have greater access to foreign officials and broader local contacts were sometimes offered sums equal to their regular salaries. However, Wayne Phillips, then a reporter for The Times in New York in the early 1950s, said the CIA offered him $5,000 a year if he agreed to work for them abroad.
Another man, a Time magazine correspondent in Brazil, said he was offered a similar sum around the same time. Keyes Beech, a longtime Far East correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, said the CIA offered him $12,000 a year "to do investigations and deliver messages" during his tours in Asia.
Both Mr. Beech and the Time correspondent said they declined the CIA's offers and that the deal with Mr. Phillips fell through due to complications.
In nearly every organization where employers have been found guilty of assisting the CIA, executives have stated, in some cases after conducting internal investigations, that they had no knowledge of their correspondents' past dealings with the CIA.
Eugene Fodor acknowledged in an interview that he had allowed CIA agents to "cover up" abroad by working as reporters for his series of travel guides. "They were all very professional and high-quality," he said of the agents. "We never let politics interfere with our books."
Elliott Haynes, whose father co-founded Business International, a highly respected business intelligence service, also acknowledged CIA ties. He said his father, Eldridge Haynes, provided cover for four CIA employees in different countries between 1955 and 1960.
Employer Uninformed
In many cases, according to the sources, management officials were unaware that they had harbored CIA agents or officers on their staff, and several former agency officials said that in cases where a working journalist was recruited as an agent, their superiors were not required to be informed.
When adding an American journalist to his list of agents, one former official said, "I didn't ask how much his employer was aware of this activity."
According to the sources, most reporter-agents were asked to sign agreements pledging to keep secret any confidential information they received. But the agreements also bound the CIA to a confidentiality agreement, and the former official said most reporters "wanted it for their own protection."
Only in cases where a news organization provided "cover" to a legitimate CIA agent, officials said, was the organization's leadership certain of being aware of the arrangement.
In several cases, the jobs they provided were not for news coverage, but for ancillary functions such as advertising, circulation, and distribution. For example, for an eight-year period in the 1950s, three business managers in Newsweek's Tokyo bureau reported to the CIA.
Edward Kosner, Newsweek's editor-in-chief, stated that the magazine's policy "ever since I've been here, Newsweek employees work for Newsweek and only Newsweek." But he added, "I can't really go back in time."
But correspondent jobs were also provided, and in some cases, the CIA even reimbursed the news organization for the additional expenses it incurred. "We could contribute financially to the construction or expansion of an office," said a former CIA official.
Even then, according to several sources, it was unlikely that senior information officers would be called upon to iron out the details, even though most CIA directors, particularly Richard Helms and the late Allen Dulles, had been close friends with the chief executives of some of the country's most influential news organizations.
Keeping a "Lofty" Plane
When these men met, as they often did, it was usually on what one CIA official called a "lofty" plane. "They were surveying the world," he said, adding that he never heard of recruiting reporters or providing cover, "and on several occasions, I was there drinking brandy and smoking cigars."
After Mr. Dulles died, Mr. Helms, reached at his Washington residence, said, "I've decided I'm never going to talk about this again." Mr. Colby consistently declined to comment in detail.
But John A. McCone, who was CIA director from 1961 to 1965, confirmed the impressions of other agency officials about the lack of high-level involvement.
In an interview at his Seattle home, Mr. McCone said, "As far as significant discussions with Time or Newsweek, the Washington Post, or the New York Times, saying, 'Look, we need a freelancer in Brazil and we'd like him to be on the cover of Newsweek,' there hasn't been anything like that, to my knowledge."
Mr. McCone said there have also been no significant discussions that he's aware of regarding the CIA employing an American journalist part-time abroad.
"I think if there were formal relationships with congressmen," Mr. McCone said, "they should be renewed. I wouldn't say a responsible editor would say, 'I have an agreement with Allen Dulles, and it goes without saying I have the same agreement with John McCone.'" »
Asked if anyone had approached him after taking over from Mr. Dulles to renew such an agreement, Mr. McCone replied: "No one."
The Most Used Major Outlets
The Times study showed that the CIA relied more on its ties with Time, Newsweek, CBS News, and the Times itself than on its contacts with other news organizations.
Several sources said that nothing in the files the CIA turned over to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence last year indicated that men like Henry Luce, the founder of Time Inc., or Arthur Hays Sulzberger, longtime publisher of The New York Times, were ever solicited or personally approved such arrangements.
The Times has repeatedly stated that it could find no record of such arrangements with any member of its staff who had knowledge of them. Edward S. Hunter, a retired CIA officer who was Newsweek's Hong Kong correspondent in the late 1940s, said he believed only Harry Kern, then the magazine's foreign affairs editor, and not Malcolm Muir, the magazine's founder, knew of his intelligence ties.
Mr. Kern said that if he ever knew of such connections, he didn't recall them. Mr. Muir said he never knew that "the Newsweek guys" had received money from the CIA.
The situation regarding William S. Paley, the chairman of CBS Inc., is less clear. Sig Mickelson, former president of CBS News, said he was in Mr. Paley's office a few years ago when two CIA officials admitted that Austin Goodrich, the network's correspondent in Stockholm, was working for the CIA. CBS said in a statement that Mr. Paley did not recall this meeting, although he did recall a meeting with Mr. Mickleson and someone from the CIA to discuss "obtaining press credentials for a CIA officer assigned to an area of key interest to the agency, but of minor interest to CBS News."
"No one currently at CBS," the statement said, "knows if these credentials were actually obtained."
When such agreements were reached, an agency official said, they were usually worked out "at the mid-management level" within the CIA and the relevant news organizations, but even then, almost informally.
No Binding Contract
"It wasn't formal, there was no contract, nothing that could be transferred," the official said. "It was simply an agreement. There were occasional meetings to discuss it. But it never resulted in any form of formal agreement."
The official declined to identify the mid-level news executives involved in these agreements, some of whom are believed to still be active in the news industry.
A CIA operative who worked for an American newspaper, Robert Campbell, got a job as a reporter several years ago at the Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky. The CIA had planned, one official said, to give Mr. Campbell some journalism experience before sending him abroad on a cover assignment, but due to complications, he never went overseas. Courier Journal executives said they only learned after Mr. Campbell's resignation that he had worked for the CIA.
A CIA official said the Ridder newspaper chain, now part of the Knight-Ridder organization, had agreed to participate in a similar arrangement, as had the San Diego-based Copley News Service.
B. H. Ridder Jr., Knight-Ridder vice president and president of Ridder Publications, said, "If such services were provided, they would only have been at the request of the government. I'm not at liberty to discuss those matters, frankly."
Copley said none of his executives were aware of such arrangements with the CIA, and none of the sources interviewed could provide the names of Copley correspondents who were allegedly simultaneously paid by the CIA.
A former Copley correspondent, however, recalls that over the years, during important events in Latin America, she sometimes found herself surrounded by half a dozen foreigners wearing Copley's credentials. When she inquired with editors in San Diego, she said she was invariably told she was the only Copley correspondent on the scene.
CIA agents working under cover are not immune to the often considerable pressures faced by their colleagues posing as American businessmen abroad or working under some other "unofficial" cover.
Equal attention must be paid to both careers. "Newspaper cover doesn't last long," said one former CIA agent. "Local reporters will spot an imposter unless they're willing to spend 99.9 percent of their time working honestly." "He doesn't do any quality work, in which case he's practically useless to us."
One such example is Robert G. Gately, a CIA agent who took a job in the late 1950s as Newsweek's Far East sales manager in Tokyo. When his work for the magazine began to suffer, he was unable to talk to his immediate superiors about other issues he was working on and so lost his job.
He ended up working in the Tokyo bureau of Asia Magazine, a regional newspaper supplement published in Hong Kong, only to lose his job again due to poor performance.
Reached at his home in suburban Washington, Mr. Gately declined to answer any questions about his former job.
One sign of the general lack of awareness among news executives about the industry's ties to the CIA was the astonishment in the Times' New York offices a few years ago when the newspaper's correspondent in Germany mentioned in a letter that Henry Pleasants, a freelancer who wrote music reviews for the paper, was also the CIA station chief in Bonn. After the affair was revealed, the Times terminated his employment with the paper.
The same lack of awareness at the highest levels appears to have been observed in other news organizations. Several editors close to the late Henry Luce, for example, have stated that he never gave them the slightest indication, if he had known, that one of Time magazine's reporters was on the CIA payroll.
James Linen, Time's editor for 11 years, said that although he never knew for sure whether any of his correspondents worked for the CIA, "I always assumed some of them must have." But he said he never took steps to find out.
Insurance for Some
Several major media outlets have asked the CIA for information about any ties their employees may have had with the agency, and in some cases, partial insurance policies have been provided.
For example, Benjamin Bradiee, editor of the Washington Post, said his newspaper was informed by the CIA that records dating back to 1965 revealed no ties to its correspondents, but that the agency's policy was "not to report on freelancers."
Even news executives who had close working relationships with the CIA at home may not have known which of their foreign correspondents worked for the agency.
Joseph G. Harrison, longtime foreign editor of the Christian Science Monitor, said he was "happy to cooperate" with the CIA in the 1950s, providing the agency with letters and memoranda from correspondents containing background information not included in their dispatches, and occasionally assigning it a story in which the CIA had expressed interest.
But Mr. Harrison said he never knew that one of his reporters in the Far East was also a CIA political adviser to the Asian head of state he was writing about.
Not all American journalists with intelligence ties were paid by the CIA. One, Panos Morphos, a war correspondent for Newsweek in Central Europe, was an operative in the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA's World War II predecessor.
Others, according to CIA officials, were considered paid agents of foreign intelligence services, some friendly and others not. One, a Time magazine correspondent in Eastern Europe, worked for a Soviet-bloc intelligence service. But a former Time editor said the magazine was aware of this connection and "considered it a kind of double bonus."
At least one other journalist may have been a double agent. Edward K. Thompson, a former editor of Life magazine, said a U.S. intelligence official told him in 1960 that one of the magazine's staffers was working simultaneously for the CIA and a hostile foreign intelligence service. He said Life never employed the man again.
Several former CIA officials have spoken of a "minor "flap," the agency's term for a compromising situation, that allegedly occurred in the mid-1950s in the Middle East when the management of a major American news agency discovered that one of its correspondents was secretly working for the agency.
A Declining Practice
No official directive was issued within the agency, then or later, requiring management approval for subsequent stories. But the agency began hiring fewer reporters for major news organizations, partly because approval from CIA headquarters became harder to obtain and partly because, as one former official put it, "the assumption was they would turn you down and their bosses wouldn't let you."
Moreover, the former official said, to take advantage of the local contacts of top correspondents in a foreign capital, "all you had to do was go to the cocktail parties they invited you to."
As a result, the agency began to focus on hiring larger news organizations in favor of smaller ones. In Tokyo, where Newsweek's bureau alone had at least four CIA employees in the 1950s, a CIA man named Glenn Ireton was sent in the mid-1960s as a correspondent for Film Daily.
Mr. Ireton died, and Film Daily went bankrupt.
According to agency sources, before an American journalist could be offered a job, CIA investigators in the United States had to discreetly check the journalist's background for any signs that he or she might be a security risk.
An agency official acknowledged that the investigations were conducted without the subjects' knowledge, but explained that, according to CIA regulations, "anytime you had any kind of relationship with a person, you had to check it out."
In most cases, the investigations were a formality, but one former station chief recalled how a married couple living in Mexico City, both distinguished correspondents whom he had considered prime candidates for recruitment, failed a background check due to alleged left-wing political affiliations.
A former CIA station chief explained his reasons for contacting a local correspondent, whom he described as "the guy who knows where all the skeletons are, what the real story is on this or that. The station chief, a new guy, makes an appointment with him. They talk. The agency agent has information that makes him look good. If these meetings don't prove fruitful for the agency agent, they will end. It is therefore up to the journalist to make them useful." »
Although not classified as CIA agents, these correspondents were often considered "assets" of the local CIA station and listed as such in agency files.
Not all relationships between journalists and the CIA were financial, nor were they all established abroad. Many correspondents who spent their careers in Washington developed close ties with senior CIA officials.
Charles J. V. Murphy, then a writer for Reader's Digest, was approached by Allen Dulles after the latter left the CIA in 1961 to help him prepare his memoirs, and he was indeed given an office at agency headquarters. The memoirs were never published, and Mr. Murphy lost his office shortly after he was discovered by John McCone, Mr. Dulles's successor.
New York Liaisons
Several major American news organizations were themselves considered assets, albeit in a different sense. In New York, where most major publishing and broadcasting organizations are headquartered, a man from the CIA's Manhattan office was responsible for liaison with several publishing companies.
The man, who remains on active duty and has asked that his name not be used, was a frequent visitor to Life magazine, where he would look at never-before-seen photographs taken by the magazine's global battalion of photographers.
He was also known to be a frequent lunch companion of editors at The New York Times, where his main interest seemed to be which correspondents would soon be returning to the United States on leave and might be available for a debriefing.
Until a few years ago, it was practically standard practice for American correspondents returning home or preparing to go abroad to spend time with CIA experts discussing the regions of the world that concerned them, and this practice continues, although less extensively than in the past.
According to former agency officials, these reporters were often asked to keep an eye out for certain items of information of interest to the CIA when they arrived at their overseas posts, and many of them cooperated.
On yet another level, the CIA sometimes paid the expenses of a correspondent who agreed to undertake such assignments, particularly if the correspondent was traveling to a region where the agency was not well represented.
"If a guy went to Iraq," said one former officer, "the CIA would say to him, 'Will you stay a few more days if we pay your expenses?'" He added that many did.
A senior CIA official said that one journalist who accepted money to travel was Hal Hendrix, who as a reporter for The Miami News won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
Mr. Hendrix said in an interview that he never had anything but a "normal journalistic relationship" with the CIA and that he had never accepted money from the agency for any reason.
Mr. Hendrix, the official said, was considered an asset by the agency, and some of the confusion over how many journalists had past dealings with the CIA can be attributed to the distinction, clear to those inside the agency but not to many outside it, between the two.
"The essence of an agent," one official said, "is that they are under a certain degree of control and they carry out assignments because you pay them to do so." »An "asset," on the other hand, can be anyone the CIA finds useful as a source of information or in any other way.
Errands for the Agency
According to a CIA official, Kennett Love, a former Middle East correspondent for The New York Times, had a cooperative relationship with the CIA that, although never paid, allowed him to "run errands."
Contacted at his home in California, Mr. Love said that shortly after the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Muhammad Musaddiq in 1953, he helped the CIA distribute copies of a statement naming Ardeshir Zahedi as Mr. Musaddiq's successor. But Mr. Love said he was unaware at the time that Joseph C. Goodwin, the American official who had asked for his help, had been a CIA operative and that he had never done anything else for the CIA.
Another journalist who would have been an "asset" was Jules DuBois, the late Latin American correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, described by a former official as "well-known and favorable" to the agency despite never being paid by it.
When Harold G. Philby, the British double agent, lived in Beirut in the years before his defection to the Soviet Union, the CIA, whose suspicions were aroused but not confirmed, closely monitored his movements.
Several Americans in Beirut were enlisted to help, officials said, including Sam Pope Brewer, then a correspondent for The New York Times who, according to one authoritative account, had been an agent for the Office of Strategic Services while reporting for the Chicago Tribune during World War II.
"We were all told to keep an eye on Philby, and Sam was one of us," said a former CIA official. Mr. Brewer died last year.
For several years in the 1950s and 1960s, former agency officials said the CIA placed great emphasis on the number of agents "recruited" by each CIA agent working abroad. As a result, one said, a number of people were listed as agents "who didn't even know they had been recruited."
In such cases, the official said, an individual may not realize that what they consider a social relationship with a CIA agent is taken much more seriously by the agency.
Several longtime CIA employees expressed considerable skepticism about the value of an American journalist as an intelligence operative, particularly in Africa, Asia, or the Middle East, where they would have a greater chance of being noticed. “If you’re seriously interested in espionage,” said a former station chief, “you don’t run around with guys who spend a few weeks in Jakarta. All they want to do is ask your opinion. I’d treat them like the plague; what can a white-faced American journalist do for you, anyway?”
But others disagree. In one case, a retired CIA officer recalled that a correspondent “could do things for me. It was marginal, it wasn’t clandestine. He asked questions, he did snooping. There was no money, no subversion. But he could do these things.”
Once a journalist signed up, the CIA provided training in the “craft” of espionage, the use of secret writing, how to conduct surveillance or organize clandestine meetings, and so on.
Varied Training
The training, said another former station chief, was "tailored to each case" and could last "a day, sometimes a week, sometimes longer."
"Under no circumstances," he added, "did we try to turn media people into real spies. It doesn't pay to give them the whole course."
Far from the adventures of James Bond, the assignments given to journalists most often consisted of writing longer, more detailed versions of the dispatches they had filed with their press outlets.
It was not uncommon for reports to the CIA to be peppered with unprintable gossip and innuendo that could be useful to the agency in gaining an advantage with a foreign political figure "whose wife was jealous of such-and-such a minister," as one former CIA officer put it.
Another former officer said that often a journalist would be "extremely valuable to any intelligence-gathering operation." He can navigate the city. He can open a post office box, he can open a safe house, he knows how to get a phone in a place where it sometimes takes three years.
The value of these individuals, the man said, was more "as a support asset, not necessarily someone you want to use as a spy."
There were, however, instances where American journalists were of considerable value as intelligence agents, particularly in Europe. "He could talk to people the station and the embassy couldn't reach," said a CIA agent. "He could identify and talk to the Soviets, could travel to places we couldn't go." One example cited by the CIA agent: the Soviet Union. "It was considered by many to be too risky to have men undercover there," he said. "The only person we had there for years was an economist."
In rarer cases, there were at least two several years apart in Hong Kong and Beirut. The CIA attempted, successfully in one case, to use American reporters for the delicate mission of acting as intermediaries for a member of a foreign intelligence service who wanted to defect to the United States, a delicate task usually reserved for trained professionals.
At least once, the agency even used an American journalist in an unsuccessful attempt to induce another journalist to "defect." He persuaded Edward Hymoff, then a correspondent for the International News Service, to offer $100,000 to Wilfred Burchett, the Australian journalist who had established close relationships with North Korean communists.
Mr. Hymoff had said that he had argued with CIA officials and that Mr. Burchett could not be persuaded, and this proved to be the case. Other American reporters also recalled carrying out assignments for the CIA. This, they said, seemed somewhat silly to them at the time.
CIA Flattery
Noel Busch, a Time magazine reporter in the Far East, said the agency asked him in the mid-1950s to interview an Asian politician with an in-depth profile.
Mr. Busch said he told the agency that the man was not important enough for Time or any other magazine to pursue such a story, but he said the CIA had agreed to pay him $2,000 for the article if no one else wanted it.
No one else did, and Mr. Busch said he later learned that the CIA had simply wanted to "flatter this guy by contacting him through an American correspondent." He said he left Time shortly afterward to join the Asia Foundation.
Perhaps more typical was the CIA agent, a Time magazine freelancer in a distant Asian capital, whose mission was to "move around local society and report what they heard." The agent was eventually fired after several years for having nothing of interest to report.
The executives of several news organizations emphasized that it was much harder for them to exercise control over the activities of their part-time reporters, or "stringers," than over those of their permanent correspondents.
Fred Taylor, editor of the Wall Street Journal, said that one of his European freelancers had been employed by the CIA a decade ago and that he had never been aware of it, and that he could neither confirm nor deny it today. "Who knows what the freelancers were up to?" he said.
This work, however, was not without serious, even dangerous, aspects. Darriel Berrigan, a Bangkok-based New York Times freelancer and longtime CIA operative, was murdered under mysterious circumstances in 1966.
Some intelligence officials believe the CIA's new, stricter regulations governing relations with American journalists will be temporary, a pragmatic response to the ongoing controversy over the agency's past relations with the press.
"The pendulum will swing," said a man who held a senior CIA position for many years, "and one day we'll be recruiting journalists again."
"When that day comes," he added confidently, "I'll have no problem recruiting. I see a lot of them, and I know they're ripe for the taking."