Show and Tell?

For months, right up to last week, William E. Colby, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, spent a good deal of his time on an unusual undercover task. By phone calls, visits and through his emissaries, Colby made contact with a number of news organizations. His purpose: to persuade them, on national security grounds, not to print a story that they all knew about--the attempt by the CIA to raise a sunken Soviet submarine from the ocean bottom.

Colby's request immediately created a dilemma for the newsmen. Each organization had to decide whether to withhold knowledge from the public of a secret Government operation or publish a story that, as Colby argued, might damage the nation's defenses. In short, the press was face to face with an old question: When does the right of the people to know end and the need to protect national security begin?

Personal Plea. In the recent past the problem was simpler. Editors had few qualms about revealing CIA operations--like domestic spying--that were clearly illegal. But the case of the Soviet sub was different. The CIA was operating in its legitimate sphere--foreign intelligence; and the operation was still going on, Colby had personally pleaded for restraint, and there was in any disclosure a risk of severe damage to U.S.-U.S.S.R. detente. In hindsight, however, some journalists are wondering whether the CIA wanted the story out for its own reasons (see THE NATION).

For more than a year Colby was able to keep the lid on. Seymour Hersh of the New York Times first heard of the salvage operation's code name, "Project Jennifer," but without details, in 1973.

By early 1974, Colby knew what Hersh knew and privately cautioned the Times not to pursue the story. In September 1974, Lloyd Shearer of Parade magazine learned from a crewman on the Glomar Explorer, the Howard Hughes ship, about the quest and tried to confirm it through Hughes' Summa Corp., without success. Alerted by Summa, Colby some months later reached Shearer, confirmed the basic facts and persuaded him to keep mum, arguing that recovery of the sub might yield some "ultrasecret" Soviet coding equipment.

By midwinter, however, a number of other news organizations were on to the story. On February 8, the first edition of the Los Angeles Times carried a front-page article on the Jennifer mission, but it was incomplete and garbled the details (e.g., the paper placed the submarine in the Atlantic, not the Pacific). A CIA official was quickly on the telephone to L.A. Times Editor William F. Thomas. Unable to get the story killed, he managed to talk Thomas into burying it on page 18 in later editions. Later Colby briefed Thomas, and, says the editor, "publication would have had some negative results." Shortly afterward, TIME learned about the story, but at Colby's personally telephoned request, decided not to run it because of the CIA's claim that it was a legitimate project involving national security. The Washington Post, NBC, ABC, Newsweek and the Washington Star all got wind of the project. In each case, after a call or visit from Colby there was a decision not to go ahead. Last week, however, Jack Anderson, claiming that an

A.C.L.U. lawyer was about to break the secret, revealed on his radio broadcast the outlines of the salvage effort. At that point the New York Times ran a ready-to-go story by Hersh, devoting a full page to his reportorial details.

Was it right for the Times to rush the revelations into print? Times Managing Editor A.M. Rosenthal, who had originally postponed the story at Colby's request, had been willing to hold off until the mission was completed or called off, or until its cover was blown. Said Rosenthal: "The advantages of immediate publication did not outweigh the considerations of disclosing an ongoing military operation." But after Anderson's broadcast, he felt that the issue of publication was academic. "In future cases," says Rosenthal, "it's impossible to say how I would act. My answer is: show me the case, let me read the story, and then I'll come to a decision."

To some, like former California Governor Ronald Reagan, CIA operations are inviolate.

Last week Reagan excoriated the press for being irresponsible in its revelation of the CIA operation. But most newsmen side with the Rosenthal "case by case" approach. Explains Benjamin C. Bradlee, executive editor of the Washington Post:

"When you have these decisions, you have a balance. On the one side, there's a claim by a government of some standing that what you're about to print will harm the country's security. And on the other side you have the conviction that you're being conned." The burden, in short, is on the editors to make up their minds in each instance.

Watchful Press. George E. Reedy Jr., the onetime press secretary to Lyndon Johnson and now dean of Marquette University's College of Journalism, does not accept so balanced a view.

Says he: "I don't think newspapers should be in the business of deciding what should or shouldn't be in the national interest. They should print the news. If every newspaper decided what is or is not in the national interest, you soon wouldn't have any newspapers, you'd just have Government propaganda sheets." Jack Anderson, in his turn, claims that since Watergate, "a lot of editors and reporters are wearing a hair shirt, trying to prove too hard how patriotic and responsible we are. The country was better served by a watchful press." Adds Columnist Tom Wicker of the New York Times, who criticized his own paper's restraint: "It is hard to see how a news organization--let alone so many --could have thought such a story ought to be withheld."

There seems little doubt that certain CIA and other Government secrets can be violated only at peril to the nation. Some projects, notably the CIA'S 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, may well need what Justice Louis Brandeis called "the disinfectant" of public exposure. But in the case of Project Jennifer, given what editors knew at the time, they were right to use restraint.

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