The Wrong Occupation

Angry black to a TV sound man: "Cops are getting funnier looking every day."

Sound man: "I'm not a cop, I'm a sound man."

Black: "I bet you got credentials, too. The FBI supplies the best credentials. We know, and you know, that one of the best ways to spy on black people is to impersonate a TV man."

--from the movie, Medium Cool

The dialogue is fictional. To some, perhaps, unbelievable. But from the conspiracy trial of the so-called "Chicago Eight" comes evidence that the movie black's suspicions are not all that farfetched. Carl Oilman, 27, a cameraman and sometime reporter for San Diego's KFMB-TV, and Louis Salzberg, 40, a press photographer, each testified to having accepted money from the FBI for work he performed under professional cover as an accredited newsman.

Oilman first made contact with the FBI nearly two years ago, after becoming "concerned" about activities he observed in his job that he "considered to be a threat to the security" of the U.S. He soon found himself on the FBI payroll at about $150 a month, plus expenses. Whenever he heard of "a subversive Communist front organization, the S.D.S., or how a bunch of radicals--I knew most of the radicals --were going to burn their draft cards, I would call the FBI." He tried, he says, to keep his news and FBI work separate, but as his Bureau activities became more demanding, he found "I couldn't do this one hundred percent of the time." When, for example, David Dellinger (now a defendant in Chicago) spoke at a rally at San Diego State College shortly before the Republican convention, Oilman "went down there not as a newsman but to gather news for the FBI." It was this occasion that provided the basis of his testimony at the trial in Chicago.

There or Here. Oilman has returned to his old job at the San Diego station. "I came back from the trial prepared to take the consequences," he says, "prepared to be fired, but it's been two and a half weeks now and nothing has happened. I told the news director at the station that I didn't think that what I had done would affect my work." Despite criticism from his colleagues, Oilman adds: "I would do it all over again."

Louis Salzberg would also do it all over again, "twice, if necessary," he says, "because Uncle Sam should have cracked the whip and put these people away a long time ago." In Salzberg's case, it was the FBI that first got in touch with him nearly three years ago. A staff photographer for New York City's Spanish-language newspaper El Tiempo, he was asked if he would be interested in passing photographs of possible subversives along to the Bureau. "If we're talking about Commies, about Reds," he recalls telling an agent, "then fine. I been in the Army twice, and I say what's the difference in going after them over there or over here."

Salzberg went after "them" with diligence, rarely missing a rally or a demonstration, ingratiating himself with radical leaders, and Dave Dellinger in particular, passing along "thousands" of prints to FBI agents. When he was fired from his El Tiempo job last January, the FBI helped him set up his "New York Press Service," a photo agency dedicated to photographing people in the movement. "The next time your organization schedules a demonstration," Salzberg's solicitation letter read, "let us know in advance. We'll cover it like a blanket and deliver a cost-free sample of our work to your office. No obligation to purchase, naturally."

No Congratulations. Says Salzberg: "It wasn't just a front. We sold pictures, and the boys who worked for me didn't even know about the FBI. It was just that I was a functionary and the FBI sort of coaxed me--got me involved in publications I didn't know about or suggested I ought to cover this or that demonstration." For his "services," Salzberg (code name: "Winston") received $6,700, all in cash, plus another $2,300 for expenses, delivered in high cloak-and-dagger style in parking lots, parks, street corners and zoos. He protests that he did not do it for the money. "I personally feel that by any means necessary Communism must be stopped. What surprises me is that newspaper editors haven't called me up to congratulate me."

It is highly unlikely that any will. Most newsmen consider their relationships with their sources as sacrosanct as those of a lawyer with a client or a priest with a penitent. They react to one of their number moonlighting for a federal agency as they do to police, FBI or other investigative agents posing as newsmen. Although FBI agents were specifically ordered not to pose as reporters in June 1968 by then Attorney General Ramsey Clark, many journalists suspect that the practice continues among plainclothes police. "It may be argued," wrote Columnist Murray Kempton, "that reporters do not deserve to be trusted as people; but that is something else from a condition where they cannot be trusted because one of them might be a cop."

The Gilman-Salzberg cases come at a time when journalists are increasingly disturbed over Government agencies using the press for their own ends. Recently in New York, a radio station was approached by the CIA looking to recruit foreign correspondents as agents. Over the past year, law enforcement agencies have stepped up the use of subpoena powers for "fishing expeditions" in the files of newspapers and TV news film libraries. And just last week in Chicago, hundreds of feet of network news-film--some of it never intended for broadcast--were introduced into the conspiracy trial over defense objections that such a move violates the freedom and independence of the press. "It's just that I am in the wrong occupation," Carl Oilman said last week. "If I had been a construction worker or a ditch digger, none of this would have mattered." Precisely.

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