The CIA’s long-held agenda to control the American press

(WMR)—The U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has refused to hear the appeal of the decision of the U.S. Court for the Eastern District of Virginia ordering New York Times reporter James Risen to testify before a grand jury and reveal his CIA source, believed by the Justice Department to be former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling. Federal prosecutors believe that Sterling was Risen’s source for whom the Department of Justice believes revealed information to Risen that he published in his book State of War.

Despite ordering a change in how federal prosecutors deal with journalists over government leaks, Attorney General Eric Holder has shown no inclination to drop the subpoena of Risen to reveal his sources. Holder is carrying on a campaign against Risen that began with his Bush predecessor, Michael Mukasey. Among the information allegedly passed to Risen by Sterling are details of the CIA’s Operation Merlin, a Clinton administration CIA operation to sell faulty equipment to Iran to stymie its nuclear program. The fact that Holder’s Justice Department is still pursuing a case against the leak of information from an operation from over 14 years ago is yet another indication of the draconian policy Barack Obama has adopted on ensuring the most opaque administration in recent history.

Risen and his attorney have indicated they are prepared to take the case to the Supreme Court. If the Supreme Court denies standing in the matter or takes the case and rules against Risen, the reporter faces prison time until he reveals his source or sources to prosecutors.

The Justice Department, in reality, is acting on behalf of the CIA to stem the flow of information about the details and illegalities of the U.S. intelligence community. There has been a decades-old battle between Langley and the non-co-opted press in the United States. A recent book, The Family Jewels: The CIA, Secrecy, and Presidential Power, by John Prados, provides details of the lengths to which the CIA would go to control the press and ensure that unfavorable stories about the CIA and overall U.S. foreign policy never saw the light of day.

Prados writes: “The standard Central Intelligence Agency response to all its problems is to try and keep them from the public, partly through secrecy, partly by means of manipulation.”

Risen has every reason to be fearful of the New York Times’ commitment to his legal battle with the CIA because of the paper’s past coziness with CIA officials. Prados describes how, in 1954, CIA director Allen Dulles convinced the Times publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, to keep reporter Sydney Gruson in Mexico. Gruson was an opponent of the CIA-installed junta that, in 1954, overthrew the democratically-elected government of President Jacobo Arbenz. The junta canceled Gruson’s visa and forced him to report on the junta’s atrocities from Mexico. Sulzberger ordered Gruson to stay in Mexico to keep him from revealing details of the CIA’s role in the Guatemalan coup.

In 1963, Washington reporters Paul Scott and Robert Allen, who issued the Allen-Scott Report” from their offices in the National Press Club Building, found their telephones tapped on the order of CIA director John McCone. During their reporting of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Scott’s and Allen’s phone calls with members of Congress, assistants to Attorney General Robert Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon Johnson, and a staffer for President John F. Kennedy were being recorded by the CIA with the help of the Bell Telephone Company.

A detail that is not contained in Prados’s book. At the same time the CIA was tapping the office telephones of Scott and Allen in the National Press Club, a Press Club bartender named John Prokoff, an emigré from Russia said to be a strong right-winger, overheard reporters’ conversations at the bar. Prokoff had some sort of relationship with the U.S. government because he was instrumental in setting up a covert meeting between ABC News’s John Scali and a Russian KGB officer in Washington to begin a series of back channel communications between President Kennedy and Soviet Premier Khrushchev that would lead to the agreement by Moscow to remove nuclear missiles from Cuba in return for the removal of U.S. Jupiter nuclear-tipped missiles from Turkey. Older members of the Press Club recall Prokoff being extremely anti-communist and anti-Soviet, although he turned out to be useful in passing a message to the KGB station in Washington.

The CIA has always spied on and harassed journalists to undermine them. They spied on reporters from the old Statler Hilton Hotel in Washington, DC (left). The CIA also placed telephone taps inside the National Press Club Building (right).

More CIA chicanery involving the Times took place between the Fall of 1965 and early 1966, when Times managing editor Turner Catledge commissioned a global team of Times reporters, led by Tom Wicker, to write a five-part series on the CIA. CIA director William Raborn contacted Catledge and Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger after hearing of the plans for the series on the CIA. The two Times officials agreed to allow retired CIA director McCone to review the article drafts before publication. Even the CIA-edited and reviewed series, when it was published, was attacked by the CIA. Plans for a book based on the series were quashed by pressure on the Times from CIA officials Richard Helms and Tracy Barnes.

The CIA waged a vicious campaign against the San Francisco-based political journal Ramparts. The CIA accused the magazine of having ties to foreign Communists even though neither the CIA nor the National Security Agency produced a single shred of intelligence proving such ties. Nevertheless, the CIA assigned a full-time operative, Edmund Applewhite, to wage war against Ramparts.

The CIA had agents assigned to neutralize reporters believed by Langley to pose a threat to the CIA’s covert operations. The CIA attempted to spike a book on the Bay of Pigs invasion fiasco by Washington Post reporter Haynes Johnson. Authors who wrote books critical of the Warren Commission Report on the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy were targeted. Prados reveals the actual CIA psychological operations officer who came up with the term “conspiracy theories” to debase books and articles critical of the Warren Report and those suggesting the CIA was involved in the assassination of the president. The CIA officer’s name is Wiliam V. Broe, who was chief of the CIA’s Western Hemisphere Division.

Another author who came in for criticism from the CIA was Alfred McCoy, whose book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, detailed the CIA’s involvement in opium production and heroin smuggling during the Vietnam War. CIA pressure on McCoy’s publisher, Harper & Row, led to a number of changes in the book, however, some of the CIA’s demanded changes actually proved some other facts that McCoy originally found elusive.

The CIA even spiked the works of its own former officials. Air Force General Edward Landsdale, who figured prominently in the JFK assassination and the Vietnam War, found all CIA references in his book that was published by Harper & Row, In the Midst of Wars, edited out after pressure on the publisher was exerted by his old colleagues at Langley.

Washington Post reporter Michael Getler found himself subject to a full-scale CIA surveillance operation code-named Project CELOTEX I, after he revealed CIA patrols deep inside China in 1971. The CIA monitored Getler from a spy post at the Statler Hilton Hotel that was set up to surveil columnist Jack Anderson. Projects CELOTEX-II and MUDHEN were directed by the CIA against Anderson and his assistants, Britt Hume, Les Whitten, and Joe Spears. Some of Anderson’s nine children and their friends, those old enough to drive, parked their cars in places where CIA surveillance teams were parked and blocked the agents from following Anderson’s car when it left the family’s home. The teenagers also flashed their headlights at one another, causing the CIA to believe some sort of secret code was in use.

But it wasn’t CIA agents that independent reporters had to be wary of. The CIA enlisted a number of journalists to spy on their colleagues and criticize their reporting. One of these CIA agents-of-influence was columnist Joseph Alsop. Another was Cyrus “Cy” Sulzberger, the nephew of Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who “managed” to land a job as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. After Cy Sulzberger opposed the paper’s publication of the series on the CIA in 1966, earning him his friendship with his colleague Harrison Salisbury who supported the series, Cy Sulzberger’s own links to the CIA became apparent.

The French have a saying, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose—the more things change, the more they stay the same. The CIA’s pursuit of Risen and the fact that the Times still can’t be trusted to protect its own journalists shows that calls for a federal media shield law to protect journalists is a fool’s errand. The government has always decided which journalists and authors will survive and which will be cast into oblivion. Once it was journalists like Anderson, Scott, Allen, and Wicker who were subject to CIA harassment and pressure. Today, it is Risen, the Associated Press and Glenn Greenwald, who are up against the wall. The French saying is right on the money.

Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.

Copyright © 2013 WayneMadenReport.com

Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).