Word: bernstein
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American correspondents working abroad have for years traded half-joking innuendoes about colleagues they suspected of moonlighting for the Central Intelligence Agency, but no one ever knew for sure. Carl Bernstein claims he knows. In the issue of Rolling Stone on sale Oct. 4, the former Washington Post Watergate sleuth alleges that at least 400 employees of American news organizations have worked directly for or informally aided the agency over the past 25 years, often with their bosses' approval...
...Bernstein quotes CIA sources as saying that major news organizations-including the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc.-issued credentials to full-time intelligence agents and allowed their own employees to share information with the CIA and perform various tasks for it. Most of these relationships have ended, Bernstein says, but as of last year some 75 to 90 American journalists were still bound by secret agreements with "the Company...
...Some of Bernstein's charges were denied as quickly as the text of the article was made available by Rolling Stone. "No CBS News person has ever served as an agent of the CIA or any other intelligence agency while in the employ of CBS," insisted the network. Time Inc. Editor-in-Chief Hedley Donovan said he had never condoned or known of any CIA use of TIME correspondents and said he would be "amazed" if any such arrangements had ever been approved by the late Henry Luce, Time Inc. cofounder. "Harry Luce had a very scrupulous regard...
Actually there is less to the Rolling Stone article than its length (12,000 words) would lead one to expect. Though Bernstein is the first CIA watcher to number the agency's journalist-helpers as high as 400, most of his article summarizes charges already made by other investigators. Moreover, his disclosures deal primarily with the cold war days of the '50s and early '60s. "All these issues looked very different when there was a broad consensus in American society about who were the good guys and who were the bad guys," says Robert Kaiser, a veteran...
...Bernstein's article names few names. One who was singled out, Times Columnist C.L. Sulzberger, denies that he actively aided the CIA, but Columnist Joseph Alsop admitted to Bernstein that he occasionally spooked for the agency before his retirement in 1974: "I'm proud they asked me and proud to have done it. The notion that a newspaperman doesn't have a duty to his country is perfect balls." Not many colleagues would agree, but a few insisted last week that there is nothing wrong in a journalist's talking to an intelligence source. "There...