New York Times

The New York Times appears in the record of the Central Intelligence Agency in four capacities: as a provider of press credentials to Agency employees abroad between 1950 and 1966, as the paper in which Seymour Hersh published the first account of Operation CHAOS on December 22, 1974, as one of the three national papers that answered the San Jose Mercury News "Dark Alliance" series in October 1996, and as the publisher of the December 16, 2017 article that disclosed the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.

Credentials for CIA employees, 1950 to 1966

The Church Committee reported in 1976 that until February 1976 the CIA maintained covert relationships with about 50 American journalists or employees of American media organizations, that about half were paid, and that "more than a dozen United States news organizations and commercial publishing houses formerly provided cover for CIA agents abroad," a few of them unwittingly. The committee did not name the organizations.¹

Carl Bernstein named the Times in his October 20, 1977 Rolling Stone article, which carried the subtitle that the Church Committee "covered it up." Bernstein wrote that, according to CIA officials, the Agency's relationship with the Times "was by far its most valuable among newspapers"; that from 1950 to 1966 about ten CIA employees were given Times cover under arrangements approved by the publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger; and that the cover arrangements were part of a Times policy, set by Sulzberger, of assisting the Agency. A senior CIA official who, Bernstein wrote, reviewed part of the Agency's files on journalists for two hours on September 15, 1977 found documentation of five instances between 1954 and 1962 in which the Times had provided cover. The documents, Bernstein wrote, carried standard language "showing that this had been checked out at higher levels of the New York Times" and did not mention Sulzberger by name. According to Bernstein, the credentialed employees posed as stringers or worked in clerical staffs of Times foreign bureaus, and the cooperation included passing on information and "spotting" prospective agents among foreigners.²

Bernstein reported that Arthur Hays Sulzberger signed a secrecy agreement with the CIA in the 1950s, a fact confirmed by his nephew C. L. Sulzberger, who said it was a pledge not to disclose classified information given to the publisher; other Agency officials, Bernstein wrote, said it covered the Times's dealings with the CIA, including cover. Bernstein described C. L. Sulzberger, then a Times foreign-affairs columnist, as one of a dozen or so "known assets" whose CIA files "contain reports of specific tasks," and quoted a senior CIA official on his access in Europe: "He was very eager, he loved to cooperate." Turner Catledge, managing editor from 1951 to 1964, had written in 1974 to the reporter Stuart Loory that "the CIA and other hush-hush agencies sought to make arrangements for 'cooperation' even with Times management" and "we always resisted." Bernstein also reported that Allen Dulles and Sulzberger were close and that the arrangements were left to subordinates so that the principals had "plausible deniability."³

A clipping of a Times article by John M. Crewdson dated January 30 carried the headline "C.I.A. Tried in 50's to Recruit Times Man." It reported, from CIA documents the Times had obtained, that in 1952 a CIA representative named Richard S. Suter approached the Times reporter Wayne Phillips, then also a student at the Russian Institute of Columbia University, about serving as an undercover operative abroad; Phillips, who said he never worked for the Agency, said the contact was broken off in the summer of 1953 after he wrote to Allen Dulles asking about Suter's credentials, and that Suter then told him he had "gone in the front door" by writing to Dulles "when they were trying to get me in the back door." The article also quoted an unnamed former Times correspondent who said he had been advised before going abroad in the late 1940s by Arthur Hays Sulzberger that the CIA might ask him to supply Times credentials to individuals going abroad for other purposes, that he was not "under any obligation" to agree, and that the publisher would be "happier" if he refused; the correspondent said he rebuffed every request.⁴

On February 10, 1976 the Washington Star reported that CIA Director George Bush had met the previous week with Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, editorial page editor John Oakes and vice president Sydney Gruson, and separately with executives of CBS, to ask for support in keeping secret the names of journalists who had worked for the Agency. The Star, citing the Washington Post, reported that officials of both organizations had offered general support; Sulzberger said the subject of disclosing names to the Senate committee "never arose," and managing editor A. M. Rosenthal said that he and the Times supported "complete disclosure" of the names of any of its own correspondents who had cooperated with the CIA.⁵ After Bernstein's article, the Star reported that the Times said it had "absolutely no information" to add to a statement Arthur Ochs Sulzberger had issued the previous year, in which he said he had never heard of the Times being approached.⁶

The Times published its own survey in December 1977. Crewdson and Joseph B. Treaster, in an article dated December 26, 1977 that the Times called the first of a series, wrote that a three-month inquiry by a team of Times reporters indicated that the CIA had counted a number of American journalists among its paid agents but that, "with a few notable exceptions," they did not appear to have been part of its propaganda campaign, which instead ran through a network of news organizations that the Agency owned, subsidized or influenced, most of them overseas.⁷ Earlier, on May 3, 1966, a CIA memorandum had commented paragraph by paragraph on the articles of April 25 and 26, 1966 in a Times series on the Agency, describing one passage on a 1950s appropriation request as "totally incorrect in its implications."⁸

Hersh and the Agency, 1972 to 1975

CIA records place Hersh in contact with the Agency's congressional liaison two years before the CHAOS story. On July 5, 1972 the Senate Armed Services Committee staff told the Agency's legislative counsel that Hersh's July 3 Times article confirming cloud seeding over Indochina would draw formal inquiry.⁹ On November 30, 1972 a memorandum recorded that Representative Lucien Nedzi had told the Agency that Hersh had raised allegations of narcotics moving from Indochina on Continental Airlines flights and of Agency pressure on an American traveling to China. A second Agency document of the same period, "Comments on Allegations made to Chairman Nedzi," answered Hersh's reported allegation that the CIA conducted surveillance in 35 or 40 cities with the word "Completely false."¹⁰

Minutes of the Director's morning meetings, included among the attachments to the CIA Family Jewels compilation, record the Agency's handling of Times inquiries that winter. On November 15, 1972 the Deputy Director for Plans reported that a Times reporter named Harper was working on a story linking the Agency to Cuban emigres, the break-in at the Chilean Embassy, action against Daniel Ellsberg and Watergate, and concluded that such a story "could have no basis in fact" and that it would be inadvisable to try to straighten out the reporter. On December 29, 1972 the minutes record that Hersh, preparing a story on Watergate, had asked whether Eugenio Martinez had been employed by the Agency, and that the Acting Director recommended that the Agency "not assist Mr. Hersh's efforts." On January 18, 1973 Nedzi briefed Agency officials on his November conversation with Hersh, including allegations "that we are engaged in extensive domestic operations," and the Director said the Agency should assemble a senior team to outline for Nedzi "what we do and do not do in the United States."¹¹

Hersh's front-page article of December 22, 1974 (datelined December 21) reported, from "well-placed Government sources," that the CIA had conducted "a massive illegal domestic intelligence operation during the Nixon Administration against the antiwar movement and other dissident groups," that files on at least 10,000 American citizens were kept by a special unit reporting to Richard Helms, and that a check of the Agency's domestic files ordered by James R. Schlesinger had produced evidence of dozens of other illegal activities. The article said Colby had been informed the previous week of the Times inquiry and quoted him at a Council on Foreign Relations meeting: "I think family skeletons are best left where they are, in the closet." The clipping survives in the Agency's own internal press digest of December 27, 1974.¹²

The Glomar Explorer

The CIA's internal history of Project Azorian records that the first press leak was in the Los Angeles Times in February 1975 and that "extraordinary efforts by DCI Colby and others were able to contain the spread of the story for a time."¹³ A note in the State Department's Foreign Relations series, citing CIA Executive Registry files, states that Colby urged Hersh to delay publication in conversations on February 1, 1974 and February 10, 1975, and that on March 19, 1975, the day after Jack Anderson broadcast the story, the Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post published front-page accounts.¹⁴ Hersh's March 19 Times article reported the project's purpose, cost and results; at a White House meeting that morning Colby told Gerald Ford, "I go back to the U-2," in arguing against official confirmation.¹⁵

Contra drug trafficking coverage

The record compiled by the Senate subcommittee chaired by John Kerry places the Times in the 1985 and 1986 press chronology of the Contra supply network. It lists Times reports on July 8, 1985 (the statements of the mercenaries Steven Carr and Peter Glibbery that they had flown weapons to the Contras), on August 8, 1985 (a front-page report that National Security Council aides were helping the Contras raise money from private sources), and on August 25, 1985 (on John Hull as the FDN contact in Costa Rica). It lists a May 6, 1986 Times report on page A6 quoting a Justice Department spokesman that charges regarding gunrunning were false and that "all leads have been completely exhausted." The same chronology records that at a meeting that day with Kerry's staff a Justice Department official said the department's public statements to the contrary were "inaccurate," and that Leon Kellner, the United States Attorney in Miami, later testified that he told the spokesman, Pat Korten, that his statements to the Times had not been correct. On June 12, 1986 the Times carried Hersh's front-page article on Panama's General Manuel Noriega.¹⁶

Gary Webb wrote in Dark Alliance that in May 1986 the Justice Department spokesman Terry Eastland had "planted a false story in the New York Times" that the department had cleared the Contras, and that the Washington Post and the Times "decided in 1986 that there was no story here."¹⁷

The Times's two articles on the Mercury News series appeared on October 20 and 21, 1996, according to the Justice Department Office of the Inspector General, which also recorded that the Times concluded, from unnamed sources, that there was "no evidence" that Norwin Meneses or Danilo Blandon had ties to the CIA or held official positions with the Contras.¹⁸ Webb wrote that the Times and the Los Angeles Times "took the same tack" as the Post, admitting the basic facts and arguing that they did not prove what the series had not claimed.¹⁹ On May 11, 1997 the Mercury News editor Jerry Ceppos published a column acknowledging shortcomings in the series; Webb wrote that the Times, "which hadn't found the original series newsworthy enough to mention," carried the column on its front page and praised Ceppos's courage in an editorial.²⁰

On July 17, 1998 the Times reported on its front page, under the headline "C.I.A. Says It Used Nicaraguan Rebels Accused of Drug Tie," that the Agency "continued to work with about two dozen Nicaraguan rebels and their supporters during the 1980s despite allegations that they were trafficking in drugs." Representative Maxine Waters read the headline and sentence into the Congressional Record that day and stated that the report appeared to come from a leak of the still classified review by Inspector General Fred Hitz.²¹ Webb wrote that the article reported the decision to keep the paid agents "was made by top officials at headquarters," and that the Los Angeles Times and the Post did not take it up.²²

Inslaw

On October 21, 1991 the Times op-ed page carried "A High-Tech Watergate" by former Attorney General Elliot Richardson, counsel to INSLAW. The article stated that former Justice Department employees had told Richardson that Earl Brian was "linked to a scheme to take Inslaw's stolen software" for a $250 million Justice Department contract, cited claims by Michael Riconosciuto, "an out-of-fiction character believed by many knowledgeable sources to have C.I.A. connections," that the software had been taken as a payoff connected to the October Surprise, and described the death of the freelance journalist Danny Casolaro, whom Richardson said had been murdered although authorities concluded suicide. Brian sued; on November 29, 1995 the New York Court of Appeals, in an opinion by Judge Titone, held the article to be nonactionable opinion.²³

The 2017 AATIP article

The Times published "Glowing Auras and 'Black Money': The Pentagon's Mysterious U.F.O. Program" on December 16, 2017 under the bylines of Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean. It stated that the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program was run by Luis Elizondo, that it began in 2007 and was "largely funded at the request of Harry Reid," and that most of the money went to a company run by Robert Bigelow; it discussed a video of a 2004 encounter between Navy jets and an unidentified object.²⁴ Bryan Bender reported in Politico that Christopher Mellon, by then a paid adviser to To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science, had acted as Elizondo's "unofficial public relations manager" and "started dangling the story to the New York Times, POLITICO and several other mainstream outlets," that the Times "was granted permission to broadcast the videos," and that Politico was shown the videos but not given copies. Both papers published on December 16, 2017.²⁵