Washington Post

The Washington Post appears in records of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation as the paper of Philip Graham and Katharine Graham, whose Newsweek subsidiary the Agency used for cover; as the employer of reporters the CIA placed under physical surveillance in 1971 and 1972; as the only recipient of the 1971 Media, Pennsylvania FBI documents to publish them; and as the paper in which Walter Pincus and Roberto Suro published the first of the major rebuttals of the San Jose Mercury News "Dark Alliance" series.

Newsweek, Frank Wisner and the Grahams

Carl Bernstein, formerly of the Post, wrote in Rolling Stone on October 20, 1977 that when the Washington Post Company bought Newsweek, publisher Philip L. Graham "was informed by Agency officials that the CIA occasionally used the magazine for cover purposes, according to CIA sources." A former CIA deputy director was quoted: "It was widely known that Phil Graham was somebody you could get help from. Frank Wisner dealt with him." Bernstein described Frank Wisner as the Agency's "premier orchestrator of 'black' operations" with a propaganda apparatus he called his "mighty Wurlitzer," and wrote that Graham "probably Wisner's closest friend" while apparently knowing "little of the specifics of any cover arrangements with Newsweek." Bernstein reported that in 1965 and 1966 an accredited Newsweek stringer in the Far East was a CIA contract employee at an annual salary of $10,000, according to Robert T. Wood, then a CIA officer in the Hong Kong station.¹

On the Post itself Bernstein wrote that information about Agency dealings with the newspaper "is extremely sketchy," that according to CIA officials some Post stringers had been CIA employees but the officials did not know whether Post management was aware, and that all editors-in-chief and managing editors of the Post since 1950 said they knew of no formal Agency relationship with stringers or staff. Katharine Graham told him she had never been informed of any such relationships; in November 1973 she telephoned Director William Colby to ask whether any Post stringers or staff members were associated with the CIA, and Colby assured her that no staff members were employed by the Agency but declined to discuss stringers.²

The Church Committee stated in 1976 that the CIA maintained about 50 relationships with American journalists or media employees, and did not name the organizations.³

Surveillance of Post reporters, 1971 and 1972

The CIA Office of Security's submission of May 16, 1973 for the CIA Family Jewels compilation describes an operation named CELOTEX I. "At the direction of the DCI, a surveillance was conducted of Michael Getler of the Washington Post" on October 6 to 9, October 27 to December 10, 1971 and January 3, 1972, with an observation post in the Statler Hilton Hotel "where observation could be maintained of the building housing his office." The surveillance "was designed to determine Getler's sources of classified information of interest to the Agency which had appeared in a number of his columns." CELOTEX II, from February 15 to April 12, 1972, covered Jack Anderson and his assistants Britt Hume, Leslie Whitten and Joseph Spear from a post opposite Anderson's office.⁴

The minutes of the Director's morning meetings in the same compilation record the Agency's reading of the Post. On August 6, 1971 the Director called attention to a Getler article, "CIA Patrols Into China Said Halted," and directed that the Legislative Counsel write to Senator John Stennis stating that Senator Clifford Case had been briefed and "obviously leaked it." On November 10, 1971 the Director remarked that it was "leak day" in the Post and listed three articles. On November 20, 1972 the Deputy Director for Intelligence noted Anderson's column in that day's Post quoting an Agency report "on a famous singer," and the Director, who had a brief conversation with Anderson, said the Director of Security was looking into the matter. A memorandum in the same file on the Agency's contact with the mobster John Roselli identified Anderson, who had published Roselli's account, as "also Editor of the Washington Bureau of the Washington Post, Sunday supplemental 'Parade.'"⁵

The 1971 FBI documents

On March 24, 1971 the Post published on its front page, under the headline "Stolen Documents Describe FBI Surveillance Activities," the first account of documents taken in the burglary of the FBI's resident agency in Media, Pennsylvania. According to a review of Betty Medsger's book by David J. Garrow in the Post, five sets of 14 memoranda were mailed by "Liberty Publications" to two members of Congress and to writers at three national newspapers; "four of the recipients quickly handed the packages over to the FBI. Only Medsger chose differently." Attorney General John N. Mitchell telephoned Post editors and Katharine Graham to ask that the story not run, and Graham approved publication. A review essay by Aryeh Neier in the New York Review of Books stated that the copies sent to Jack Nelson of the Los Angeles Times were apparently diverted and never reached him, and that Medsger was the only recipient to pursue the story.⁶

Glomar Explorer, 1975

The State Department's Foreign Relations series records that on March 19, 1975, the day after Anderson's broadcast, the Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times published front-page accounts of the Project Azorian recovery vessel. The CIA's own history states that "senior CIA officials in 1975" had attempted to persuade members of the media not to broadcast or publish reports concerning the project.⁷

Bush, the Post and the press executives, 1976

The Washington Star reported on February 10, 1976 that, according to the Post, officials of the New York Times and CBS had offered general support to Director George Bush's appeal to keep secret the names of journalists who had worked for the Agency, and that the Senate Intelligence Committee had been informed that one news executive told Bush: "We protect our (news) sources. You protect yours." The Star reported that CBS's Walter Cronkite believed the names should be put on the table.⁸

Pincus, Woodward and Iran-Contra

Gary Webb wrote that after the Mercury News series, he obtained a Mercury News clipping of February 18, 1967 headed "How I Traveled Abroad on CIA Subsidy" by Walter Pincus of the Post, in which, Webb wrote, Pincus described traveling to international youth conferences in the late 1950s and early 1960s while "gathering information for the CIA" and "smuggling in anti-Communist propaganda," after a CIA recruiter approached him. Webb quoted Pincus: "I had been briefed in Washington on each of them. None was remotely aware of CIA's interest." Webb also wrote that Pincus reviewed Philip Agee's Inside the Company for the New York Times Book Review on August 3, 1975 and that the review identified him only as a Washington journalist; and that on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour on May 12, 1986 Pincus said the Post goes to the administration with what it has on a story, "listen[s] to what their arguments are," and has "withheld a great deal of information."⁹

A CIA memorandum of November 3, 1987 records that on November 2 Bob Woodward told the Agency that he and Pincus were writing an article to precede the report of the Iran-Contra committees, that Senator David Boren had told him he was convinced the late Director William Casey had "cooked the books," and that one of Woodward's key sources was a Senate staff member "deeply involved in the preparation of the Iran-contra report."¹⁰ Lawrence Walsh, the Iran-Contra independent counsel, wrote in Firewall that Pincus had published a "false report that we were considering indicting the nation's still admired former president," that he suspected the story had come from C. Boyden Gray, counsel to President Bush, who "had been known to float stories through persons close to the publisher of the Washington Post," and that he "had no proof."¹¹

ITT, Letelier and the 1977 psychic-research item

In November 1976 the Post reported that the Justice Department had charged Hal Hendrix, described as a former Pulitzer Prize-winning newsman who lived in Miami, with withholding information from a Senate subcommittee investigating International Telephone and Telegraph and the CIA in Chile. An Associated Press report carried by the same paper stated that at the November 30, 1976 hearing in Miami, at which Hendrix pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor, a Justice Department lawyer said the CIA had been told of his intention to withhold from the committee that he had been in contact with the Agency, and that the court record "makes clear" that CIA cables revealed his information "came from the CIA station chief [in] Santiago and to some extent from the American ambassador himself."¹² A Post article of November 1, 1976 on the Orlando Letelier investigation reported that the CIA believed the Chilean military did not take part in the killing, and that Bush had expressed this view to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.¹³

A CIA Office of Technical Service memorandum of November 17, 1977 records that the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence's interest in the Agency's research on extrasensory perception "was occasioned by the article 'Psychic Spying' which appeared in the Parade Section of the Washington Post on 7 August 1977." The article, "Psychic Spying?" by John L. Wilhelm, a former Time science correspondent, ran in the Post's Outlook section (pp. 1-5). Committee staff were briefed on November 16, 1977 by David Brandwein and left with "a brief article on Mr. Pat Price," the Stanford Research Institute subject.¹⁴

Dark Alliance, 1996 to 1998

The Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General recorded two Post articles: "Running with the CIA Story: Reporter Says Series Didn't Go as Far as Readers Took It" on October 2, 1996, and, on October 4, 1996, "The CIA and Crack: Evidence Is Lacking of Alleged Plot," by Pincus and Suro, which concluded that the evidence did not support the claim that the Contras "played a major role" in crack's spread.¹⁵ Webb wrote that Mercury News editor Jerry Ceppos told him by telephone that the Post piece did not say any of the facts were wrong, "they just don't agree with our conclusions," and that its evidence was "a lot of unnamed sources, mainly." Webb described the article as admitting the basic facts, quoting unnamed law enforcement officials that Danilo Blandon sold "$30,000 to $60,000 worth of cocaine in two transactions," and burying the sentence that "the CIA knew about some of these activities and did little or nothing to stop them"; he wrote that the Post "falsely claimed" the series had made a "racially charged allegation" that the Contras targeted the black community. Webb wrote that Ceppos sent the Post a letter pointing to factual errors and that "the Post held Ceppos's letter for weeks, ordered him to rewrite it, and then refused to print it."¹⁶

Webb wrote that when the New York Times reported the leaked conclusions of the CIA Inspector General's second volume on July 17, 1998, "the Los Angeles Times found nothing newsworthy about it and the Washington Post concurred."¹⁷