PDA

View Full Version : Official Spin, Unnamed Sources, and the Art of Managing Perceptions



ehnyah
08-17-2005, 07:21 AM
By Greg Guma
Source: Vermont Guardian

In The Secret Man, Bob Woodward's new book about his Watergate source Deep Throat, he notes, "Washington politics and secrets are an entire world of doubt." Even though Woodward knew that the identity of his source was W. Mark Felt, then associate director of the FBI, what he could never be sure about was why Felt decided to gradually reveal the details of the Nixon administration's illegal activities.

Three decades later, the Bush administration has made it immeasurably more difficult to be sure about what motivates many sources of information - both on and off the record - or trust that what we learn from the media will turn out to be true.

In July, Jeff Ruch, who directs Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, issued a relevant but discouraging assessment to the Subcommittee on Regulatory Affairs of the U.S. House Committee on Government Reform: "The federal government is suffering from a severe disinformation syndrome."

Ruch was referring specifically to recent surveys by his organization and the Union of Concerned Scientists revealing that federal scientists are routinely pressured to amend their findings. One in five scientists contacted said they had been directed to inappropriately exclude or alter technical information, Ruch testified, and more than half reported cases where "commercial interests" forced the reversal or withdrawal of scientific conclusions.

But government isn't alone in confusing public understanding of crucial issues. Media organizations also contribute. A recent example is Newsweek magazine's Aug. 1 cover story on Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts, which aggressively dismissed reports that Roberts is a conservative partisan. Two primary examples cited were the nominee's role on Bush's legal team in the court fight after the 2000 election, described by Newsweek as "minimal," and his membership in the conservative Federalist Society, which was pronounced an irrelevant distortion. Roberts "is not the hard-line ideologue that true believers on both sides had hoped for," the publication concluded, and "seems destined to be confirmed."

The facts suggest different appraisal, however. According to the Miami Herald, Roberts was a significant "legal consultant, lawsuit editor and prep coach" for Bush's arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court in December 2000, and, as the Washington Post has revealed, he was not just a Federalist Society member, but on the Washington chapter's steering committee in the late 1990s.

More to the point, his roots in the conservative vanguard date back to his days with the Reagan administration, when he provided legal justifications for recasting the way government and the courts approached civil rights, defended attempts to narrow the reach of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, challenged arguments in favor of busing and affirmative action, and even argued that Congress should strip the Supreme Court of its ability to hear broad classes of civil-rights cases. Nevertheless, most press reports on Roberts echo Newsweek's excitement about his "intellectual rigor and honesty."

Whether such coverage qualifies as disinformation is debatable, but it does serve as an example of how journalists assist political leaders, albeit sometimes unwittingly, in framing public awareness. As a practice, this is known in both government and public relations circles as ?perception management.?

An evolving tactic


In 1987, the Department of Defense developed a propaganda and psychological warfare glossary that included an official definition of the term. Perception management incorporates tactics that either convey or deny information to influence "emotions, motives, and objective reasoning," explained the DoD. For the military, the main targets are supposedly foreign audiences, and the goal is to promote "actions favorable to the originator's objectives. In various ways, perception management combines truth projection, operations security, cover and deception, and psychological operations." The Reagan administration preferred a different term, "public diplomacy," while the Bush administration calls it "strategic influence," but both refer to the same thing.

Organized government efforts to manipulate public perceptions date back at least to the 1950s, when people at more than 800 news and public information organizations carried out assignments for the CIA, according to The New York Times. By the mid-1980s, CIA Director Bill Casey had taken the practice to the next level: a systematic, covert "public diplomacy" apparatus designed to sell a "new product" - counter-insurgency in Central America - while reinforcing fear of communism, Nicaragua's Sandinistas, Libya's Muammar Qaddafi, and other designated enemies. Sometimes this involved "white propaganda" - stories and editorials secretly financed by the government - much like the videos and commentators recently funded by the Bush administration. But other operations went "black" - that is, they pushed obviously false story lines.

During the first Bush administration, domestic disinformation was handled through the CIA's Public Affairs Office. This operation was charged with turning intelligence failures into successes by persuading reporters to postpone, change, hold, or even scrap stories that could adversely affect purported national security interests. The Clinton administration's version, outlined in Directive 68, was known as the International Public Information System (IPI). Again, no distinction was made between what could be done abroad and at home. To defeat enemies and influence minds, information for U.S. audiences was "deconflicted" through the IPI's work.

One strategy was to insert psyops (psychological operations) specialists into newsrooms. In February 2000, a Dutch journalist revealed that CNN and the U.S. Army had agreed to do precisely that. The military was proud enough of this "expanded cooperation" with mainstream media to publicly acknowledge the effort.

As the Iraq War began, word leaked out that a new Pentagon Office of Strategic Influence was gearing up to sway leaders and public sentiment by disseminating sometimes-false stories. Facing censure, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld publicly denounced and supposedly disbanded it. But a few months later, he quietly funded a private consultant to develop another version. The apparent goal was to go beyond traditional information warfare with a new perception management campaign designed to "win the war of ideas."

How does perception management work? One important tactic is to influence opinion by presenting theories as if they are facts. For example, "Bad as things are in Iraq," began an Associated Press story in April 2004, "a quick U.S. departure would make them worse...encourage terrorists, set the stage for civil war, send oil prices spiraling, and ruin U.S. credibility throughout the Middle East." Only two sources, both obscure Middle East scholars, were directly quoted in the story, plus unnamed "regional experts."

Another approach is to massage information, thus promoting the preferred spin. For example, stories that assert that the Iraq insurgency is losing momentum may stress the number of incidents during a specific period, meanwhile ignoring data such as the number of wounded, civilian contractor deaths, and Iraqi military casualties.

Sometimes, however, the only approach that works is to fabricate the news.

Selling the war


The jailing of New York Times reporter Judith Miller for refusing to reveal how she learned the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame, who was outted by columnist Robert Novak two years ago, sparked widespread condemnation from the press. Many journalists expressed deep concerns that their future ability to gain the trust of confidential sources would be undermined. Miller was, after all, a Pulitzer Prize-winner and the author of best-selling books; in short, an eminently reputable journalist who didn't deserve punishment for protecting sources.

However, Miller's real importance in the world of unnamed sources leads in a different direction, exposing how perception management techniques have been applied during the Iraq War.

On April 21, 2003, the front page of the Times carried a story by Miller titled, "Aftereffects: Prohibited Weapons; Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, An Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert." In the lead paragraph, Miller claimed that she had discovered the proof of weapons of mass destruction, a central Bush Administration argument for the war.

Based upon what members of Mobile Exploitation Team (MET) Alpha related to Miller, she reported that a mysterious, unnamed scientist had led them to a site where he had buried evidence of an illicit weapons program. Her story included the scientist's charges that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had transferred illegal weapons to Syria, and was cooperating with al-Qaeda. The revelation supported charges from the White House that Iraq was developing such weapons, and had lied about it to the United Nations.

The catch was that her story came entirely from secondary sources and had no independent confirmation. She never met the scientist and her copy was submitted to military officials before it was released. Yet, when Miller appeared on PBS' NewsHour the same day, she said, "Well, I think they found something more than a smoking gun," and turned her one unnamed scientist into several. Other news outlets quickly jumped on her article and statements to argue that the war was justified after all. By the next day, headlines across the country proclaimed "Illegal Material Spotted."

As it turned out, the evidence wasn't there, and a day later Miller was reporting that there had been a "paradigm shift." Now she said MET Alpha was looking for "building blocks" and "precursors" to those weapons, another effort that ultimately proved fruitless. Next, her unnamed source informed her that the focus had changed to a search for scientists who could prove there had once been a WMD program.

This was only one of many stories produced by Miller that backed up administration arguments, only to be proven wrong or obsolete later. In many cases, she subsequently "clarified" or backed away from an initial characterization. But just as important as the content, disseminated widely through her appearances on programs like Oprah and Larry King Live, were her associations and actual sources of information.

By her own admission, the majority of stories she wrote about weapons of mass destruction came from Ahmad Chalabi, the exiled leader of the U.S.-backed Iraqi National Congress who hoped to replace Saddam Hussein. "I've been covering Chalabi for about 10 years," Miller told Baghdad Bureau Chief John Burns, another New York Times Pulitzer Prize winner who became angry with her over an article on Chalabi. "He has provided most of the front page exclusives on WMD to our paper." Furthermore, MET Alpha used "Chalabi's intel and document network for its own WMD work," she admitted.

Equally relevant was Miller's association with the Middle East Forum, which promoted her as a speaker on "militant Islam" and "biological warfare." Founded by Daniel Pipes, the forum was in the forefront of the push for an invasion of Iraq before the war. Pipes in turn maintained close relationships with Douglas Feith, an undersecretary at the Department of Defense, and leading neoconservative Richard Perle.

In Woodward's book on the Iraq War, Plan of Attack, Secretary of State Colin Powell describes Feith as running a "Gestapo office" determined to find a connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. In A Pretext for War, a book on the abuse of U.S. intelligence agencies before and after 9/11, James Bamford describes how Feith and Perle developed a blueprint for the Iraq operation while working for pro-Israeli think tanks.

Their plan, called "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," centered on taking out Saddam and replacing him with a friendly leader. "Whoever inherits Iraq," they wrote, "dominates the entire Levant strategically." The subsequent steps they recommended included invading Syria and Lebanon.

After joining the Bush administration, Feith created the Office of Strategic Influence. Senior officials have called it a disinformation factory. He later launched the Office of Special Plans (OSP). Officially, its job was to conduct pre-war planning. But its actual target was the media, policymakers, and public opinion. According to London's Guardian newspaper, the OSP provided key people in the administration with "alarmist reports on Saddam's Iraq." To do that, it circulated cooked intelligence from its own unit and a similar Israeli group. There was also a close relationship with Vice President Cheney's office.

According to Bamford, OSP's intelligence unit cherry-picked the most damning items from the streams of U.S. and Israeli reports and briefed senior administration officials. "These officials would then use the OSP's false and exaggerated intelligence as ammunition when attempting to hard-sell the need for war to their reluctant colleagues, such as Colin Powell, and even to allies like British Prime Minister Tony Blair," he reports. Senior White House officials received the same briefings.

The final step was to get Powell to make the case to the UN. This was handled by the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), a secret office established to sell the war. WHIG provided Powell with a "script" for his speech, using information developed by Feith's group. Much of it was unsourced material fed to reporters like Miller by the OSP. Such techniques continued to prove useful after the invasion.

ehnyah
08-17-2005, 07:38 AM
Shaping the environment


Like other forms of perception management, the manipulation and misuse of reporters isn't new. In the 1960s, the FBI used large dailies like the San Francisco Chronicle to place unfavorable stories and leak false information. In Chicago, such "friendly media" assisted with smears of black nationalist groups on the radio and in print. Sometimes reporters were unwittingly exploited, but often they knew what they were doing: writing dubious stories that made FBI speculation and falsehoods sound true. When challenged, they too vigorously protected their sources.

Vermont's media saw perception management at work in 1978, when a young woman named Kristina Berster was caught crossing the border illegally from Canada into Vermont. The FBI knew only that she was a West German citizen and was wanted for something called "criminal association," a crime that didn't exist in the United States. But FBI Director William Webster realized that her arrest could help buttress his claims that urban terrorism was increasing. He was in the process of lobbying for more agents and expanded authority to investigate those who were "reasonably believed" to be involved in "potential" terrorist activities.

Within a few days, Webster had organized a press conference to announce that a foreign terrorist had been caught in a conspiracy with U.S. citizens. FBI agents quickly contacted their favorite reporters as off-the-record sources, and U.S. newspapers, including those in Vermont, spread the news in bold headlines: "Terrorist held after attempt to enter U.S."

Initially, journalists presented the government's version without asking many questions. After all, why else the high bail, 24-hour guard for the judge, metal detectors, and armed officers on the courthouse roof? As the trial proceeded in U.S. District Court in Burlington, new information about potential "threats" was distributed to the press, reinforcing the idea that foreign terrorism loomed over the Green Mountains.

However, once local reporters had time to observe the defendant, a small, fair-haired woman with a mild demeanor and open smile, the huge security team began to look like overkill. And as the media coverage shifted, the general public also gave the case a second look and the story gradually unraveled.

The verdict, delivered on Oct. 27, 1978 after more than five days of deliberations, was a felony and misdemeanor conviction for lying to a customs official, but acquittal on the crucial conspiracy charge. The government had lost its main case. Afterward, several jurors said that they found Berster's situation compelling and expressed hope that the guilty verdict on minor charges wouldn't prevent her from winning asylum.

But beyond this small New England state, the smear campaign rolled on. In New York City, a banner headline in the New York Post the day after Berster's conviction trumpeted, "No Asylum for Terrorist."

This story has a happy ending: When Berster returned home to Germany, the old charges against her were dropped. But it also demonstrates how perception management works. Manipulating the press and exploiting fear are powerful tools, and too often used to justify bigger budgets or intrusive security measures.

Today, controlling public opinion clearly involves more than what was once simply labeled propaganda. Over the years, businesses and governments have developed a large toolbox of tactics to promote the stories they want to see and prevent others from being aired or published. In some cases, this involves what has become known as spin, or "white propaganda," arguments that tend to move opinion in a specific direction. For journalists, the pitfalls include institutional constraints, commercial imperatives, close relationships with sources that have hidden agendas, the temptation to focus on easy targets, and a tendency toward self-censorship. There is also a great danger, exacerbated by the Internet, that rumors or speculation will be confused with reality.

In other words, perception management is about more than censoring or pushing an individual story. Rather, it involves the creation of an overall environment that promotes the uncritical acceptance of questionable assumptions - and a press corps willing to promote them.

As Noam Chomsky puts it, "The point is not that the journalists or commentators are dishonest; rather, unless they happen to conform to the institutional requirements, they will find no place in the corporate media." The fact that the interests of owners shape what is defined as news is one of the main structural "filters" underlying newsgathering, he notes.

When confronted with such a critique, many journalists reject it as "conspiracy" thinking. Translation: it's paranoid, extreme, and therefore irrelevant. Unlike any other employees, most insist that they are independent of supervisory control or outside influences, and free to pursue any story, wherever it leads, as long as they adhere to the first commandment - objectivity.

But as anyone who has worked in a news organization knows, each story involves a series of subjective judgments about what is important, relevant, or permissible. And almost every source - from a disgruntled local bureaucrat to Deep Throat - brings an agenda of his or her own

- Greg Guma is co-editor of Vermont Guardian, a statewide weekly, and the author of Uneasy Empire: Repression, Globalization, and What We Can Do.

© 2005 Vermont Guardian

http://mediachannel.org/blog/node/632

Related:

Machiavelli and U.S. Politics, Part 1: Pattern and Perception

"the practice of politics in the United States is a lie wrapped in hypocrisy inside a half-truth."

http://www.fff.org/comment/com0508d.asp

"Terrorism is the best political weapon for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death."
~ Adolf Hitler

"There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn't work."
~Irving Kristol founder of American neoconservatism

"The greatest purveyor of violence on earth is my own government"
~ Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

"Promote, then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened."
~President George Washington

ehnyah
08-17-2005, 12:20 PM
http://tinyurl.com/5vwpn (uidaho.edu)

How America's Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up

BY CARL BERNSTEIN



In 1953, Joseph Alsop, then one of America?s leading syndicated columnists, went to the Philippines to cover an election. He did not go because he was asked to do so by his syndicate. He did not go because he was asked to do so by the newspapers that printed his column. He went at the request of the CIA.




Alsop is one of more than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty-five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters. Some of these journalists? relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services ? from simple intelligencegathering to serving as go-betweens with spies in Communist countries. Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadors-without-portfolio for their country. Most were less exalted: foreign correspondents who found that their association with the Agency helped their work; stringers and freelancers who were as interested it the derring-do of the spy business as in filing articles, and, the smallest category, full-time CIA employees masquerading as journalists abroad. In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements America?s leading news organizations.



The history of the CIA?s involvement with the American press continues to be shrouded by an official policy of obfuscation and deception . . . .

Among the executives who lent their cooperation to the Agency were William Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Henry Luce of Time Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the Louisville Courier-Journal and James Copley of the Copley News Service. Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include the American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company, the Associated Press, United Pres International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald-Tribune.

By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc.

. . . . .

From the Agency?s perspective, there is nothing untoward in such relationships, and any ethical questions are a matter for the journalistic profession to resolve, not the intelligence community.

. . . . .



THE AGENCY?S DEALINGS WITH THE PRESS BEGAN during the earliest stages of the Cold War. Allen Dulles, who became director of the CIA in 1953, sought to establish a recruiting-and-cover capability within America?s most prestigious journalistic institutions. By operating under the guise of accredited news correspondents, Dulles believed, CIA operatives abroad would be accorded a degree of access and freedom of movement unobtainable under almost any other type of cover.



American publishers, like so many other corporate and institutional leaders at the time, were willing us commit the resources of their companies to the struggle against ?global Communism.? Accordingly, the traditional line separating the American press corps and government was often indistinguishable: rarely was a news agency used to provide cover for CIA operatives abroad without the knowledge and consent of either its principal owner; publisher or senior editor. Thus, contrary to the notion that the CIA era and news executives allowed themselves and their organizations to become handmaidens to the intelligence services. ?Let?s not pick on some poor reporters, for God?s sake,? William Colby exclaimed at one point to the Church committee?s investigators. ?Let?s go to the managements. They were witting? In all, about twenty-five news organizations (including those listed at the beginning of this article) provided cover for the Agency.

. . . . .

Many journalists who covered World War II were close to people in the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime predecessor of the CIA; more important, they were all on the same side. When the war ended and many OSS officials went into the CIA, it was only natural that these relationships would continue. Meanwhile, the first postwar generation of journalists entered the profession; they shared the same political and professional values as their mentors. ?You had a gang of people who worked together during World War II and never got over it,? said one Agency official. ?They were genuinely motivated and highly susceptible to intrigue and being on the inside. Then in the Fifties and Sixties there was a national consensus about a national threat. The Vietnam War tore everything to pieces?shredded the consensus and threw it in the air.? Another Agency official observed: ?Many journalists didn?t give a second thought to associating with the Agency. But there was a point when the ethical issues which most people had submerged finally surfaced. Today, a lot of these guys vehemently deny that they had any relationship with the Agency.?

. . . . .

The CIA even ran a formal training program in the 1950s to teach its agents to be journalists. Intelligence officers were ?taught to make noises like reporters,? explained a high CIA official, and were then placed in major news organizations with help from management. ?These were the guys who went through the ranks and were told, ?You?re going to be a journalist,? the CIA official said. Relatively few of the 400-some relationships described in Agency files followed that pattern, however; most involved persons who were already bona fide journalists when they began undertaking tasks for the Agency.

The Agency?s relationships with journalists, as described in CIA files, include the following general categories:

? Legitimate, accredited staff members of news organizations ? usually reporters. Some were paid; some worked for the Agency on a purely voluntary basis. . . .

? Stringers and freelancers. Most were payrolled by the Agency under standard contractual terms. . . .

? Employees of so-called CIA ?proprietaries.? During the past twenty-five years, the Agency has secretly bankrolled numerous foreign press services, periodicals and newspapers ? both English and foreign language ? which provided excellent cover for CIA operatives. . . .

? Columnists and commentators. There are perhaps a dozen well-known columnists and broadcast commentators whose relationships with the CIA go far beyond those normally maintained between reporters and their sources. They are referred to at the Agency as ?known assets? and can be counted on to perform a variety of undercover tasks; they are considered receptive to the Agency?s point of view on various subjects.

. . . . .

MURKY DETAILS OF CIA RELATIONSHIPS with individuals and news organizations began trickling out in 1973 when it was first disclosed that the CIA had, on occasion, employed journalists. Those reports, combined with new information, serve as casebook studies of the Agency?s use of journalists for intelligence purposes.

? The New York Times. The Agency?s relationship with the Times was by far its most valuable among newspapers, according to CIA officials. [It was] general Times policy . . . to provide assistance to the CIA whenever possible.

. . . . .

CIA officials cite two reasons why the Agency?s working relationship with the Times was closer and more extensive than with any other paper: the fact that the Times maintained the largest foreign news operation in American daily journalism; and the close personal ties between the men who ran both institutions.

. . . . .

? The Columbia Broadcasting System. CBS was unquestionably the CIA?s most valuable broadcasting asset. CBS president William Paley and Allen Dulles enjoyed an easy working and social relationship. Over the years, the network provided cover for CIA employees, including at least one well-known foreign correspondent and several stringers; it supplied outtakes of newsfilm to the CIA; established a formal channel of communication between the Washington bureau chief and the Agency; gave the Agency access to the CBS newsfilm library; and allowed reports by CBS correspondents to the Washington and New York newsrooms to be routinely monitored by the CIA. Once a year during the 1950s and early 1960s, CBS correspondents joined the CIA hierarchy for private dinners and briefings.

. . . . .

At the headquarters of CBS News in New York, Paley?s cooperation with the CIA is taken for granted by many news executives and reporters, despite the denials. Paley, 76, was not interviewed by Salant?s investigators. ?It wouldn?t do any good,? said one CBS executive. ?It is the single subject about which his memory has failed.?

. . . . .

? Time and Newsweek magazines. According to CIA and Senate sources, Agency files contain written agreements with former foreign correspondents and stringers for both the weekly news magazines. The same sources refused to say whether the CIA has ended all its associations with individuals who work for the two publications. Allen Dulles often interceded with his good friend, the late Henry Luce, founder of Time and Life magazines, who readily allowed certain members of his staff to work for the Agency and agreed to provide jobs and credentials for other CIA operatives who lacked journalistic experience.

. . . . .

At Newsweek, Agency sources reported, the CIA engaged the services of several foreign correspondents and stringers under arrangements approved by senior editors at the magazine.

. . . . .

?To the best of my knowledge:? said [Harry] Kern, [Newsweek?s foreign editor from 1945 to 1956] ?nobody at Newsweek worked for the CIA.... The informal relationship was there. Why have anybody sign anything? What we knew we told them [the CIA] and the State Department.... When I went to Washington, I would talk to Foster or Allen Dulles about what was going on .... We thought it was admirable at the time. We were all on the same side.? CIA officials say that Kern's dealings with the Agency were extensive.

. . . . .

When Newsweek was purchased by the Washington Post Company, publisher Philip L. Graham was informed by Agency officials that the CIA occasionally used the magazine for cover purposes, according to CIA sources. ?It was widely known that Phil Graham was somebody you could get help from,? said a former deputy director of the Agency. . . . But Graham, who committed suicide in 1963, apparently knew little of the specifics of any cover arrangements with Newsweek, CIA sources said.

. . . . .

Information about Agency dealings with the Washington Post newspaper is extremely sketchy. According to CIA officials, some Post stringers have been CIA employees, but these officials say they do not know if anyone in the Post management was aware of the arrangements.

. . . . .

? Other major news organizations. According to Agency officials, CIA files document additional cover arrangements with the following news?gathering organizations, among others: the New York Herald Tribune, the Saturday Evening Post, Scripps?Howard Newspapers, Hearst Newspapers, . . . Associated Press, United Press International, the Mutual Broadcasting System, Reuters and the Miami Herald. . . .



"And that's just a small part of the list," in the words of one official who served in the CIA hierarchy. Like many sources, this official said that the only way to end the uncertainties about aid furnished the Agency by journalists is to disclose the contents of the CIA files - a course opposed by almost all of the thirty-five present and former CIA officials interviewed over the course of a year.



COLBY CUTS HIS LOSSES



THE CIA'S USE OF JOURNALISTS CONTINUED virtually unabated until 1973 when, in response to public disclosure that the Agency had secretly employed American reporters, William Colby began scaling down the program. In his public statements, Colby conveyed the impression that the use of journalists had been minimal and of limited importance to the Agency.



He then initiated a series of moves intended to convince the press, Congress and the public that the CIA had gotten out of the news business. But according to Agency officials, Colby had in fact thrown a protective net around his most valuable intelligence assets in the journalistic community.

. . . . .

After Colby left the Agency on January 28th, 1976, and was succeeded by George Bush, the CIA announced a new policy: ?Effective immediately, the CIA will not enter into any paid or contract relationship with any full?time or part-time news correspondent accredited by any U.S. news service, newspaper, periodical, radio or television network or station.? . . . The text of the announcement noted that the CIA would continue to ?welcome? the voluntary, unpaid cooperation of journalists. Thus, many relationships were permitted to remain intact.



The Agency's unwillingness to end its use of journalists and its continued relationships with some news executives is largely the product of two basic facts of the intelligence game: journalistic cover is ideal because of the inquisitive nature of a reporter's job;[i] and many other sources of institutional cover have been denied the CIA in recent years by businesses, foundations and educational institutions that once cooperated with the Agency.



Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977

------------

ehnyah
08-17-2005, 12:21 PM
[Earlier in the article, Bernstein had stated the following:] Many journalists were used by the CIA to assist in this process and they had the reputation of being among the best in the business. The peculiar nature of the job of the foreign correspondent is ideal for such work; he is accorded unusual access, by his host country, permitted to travel in areas often off-limits to other Americans, spends much of his time cultivating sources in governments, academic institutions, the military establishment and the scientific communities. He has the opportunity to form long-term personal relationships with sources and ? perhaps more than any other category of American operative ? is in a position to make correct judgments about the susceptibility and availability of foreign nationals for recruitment as spies.

http://www.class.uidaho.edu/mickelsen/images/Rums%202.jpg

According to The New York Times, which broke the story February 19, 2002 "The Pentagon is developing plans to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign media organizations as part of a new effort to influence public sentiment and policy makers in both friendly and unfriendly countries."

The leak clearly ambushed the Pentagon, which quickly retreated in a fog of contradictory statements that culminated in an announcement just a week later by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that the whole idea had probably been scrapped.

"I met with Undersecretary Doug Feith this morning and he indicated to me that he's decided to close down the Office of Strategic Influence," Rumsfeld told a Pentagon news conference.

That didn?t mean, of course, that the idea was dead, or couldn?t be moved to another agency with more experience in "disinformation," such as the Central Intelligence Agency.
Remarks by the President
on the Office of Strategic Influence

February 25, 2002
(Remarks During Presentation of World Trade Center Bullhorn)

[...]

Q: Sir, have you told Secretary Rumsfeld to get rid of the Office of Disinformation that he's talking about?

THE PRESIDENT: I told Secretary Rumsfeld -- I didn't even need to tell him this; he knows how I feel, I saw it reflected in his comments the other day -- that we'll tell the American people the truth. And he was just as amazed as I was about reading, you know, some allegation that somehow our government would never tell the American people the truth. And I don't -- I've got confidence, having heard his statement, I heard him this morning talk about it, that he'll handle this in the right way.

[...]

ehnyah
08-17-2005, 12:44 PM
http://media.portland.indymedia.org/images/2003/06/266924.jpg

PhilosophyGenius
12-07-2005, 06:29 PM
intersting stuff