Working for the Company?

New-old charges about spooks in journalism

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 for the difference between journalism and government," said Donovan. Sydney Gruson, executive vice president of the New York Times Co., declared that the paper had no knowledge of any such arrangements. The Times and CBS asked the CIA to open its files on the firms' employees.

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 foreign correspondent for the Washington Post.

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 isn't a foreign correspondent worth his salt who hasn't frequently had lunch with someone from the CIA," said Times London Bureau Chief R.W. ("Johnny") Apple. "Of course, you hope to get more than you give." Bernstein cautions that his CIA sources --at least 35 present and former officials--may be exaggerating the extent of agency penetration into the news business: "A CIA official might think he had exercised control over a journalist; the journalist might think he had simply had a few drinks with a spook."

Bernstein does not condemn colleagues who did odd jobs for the CIA. "Some of what happened was, in the context of the times, understandable," he says. "Some is less understandable. This is just a story to try and find out what happened and why." But it may be more than that. Though the article has so far received little attention in the foreign press, there is the possibility that some nondemocratic governments, having long used the specter of CIA ties as grounds for expelling troublesome correspondents, will now cite, however incorrectly, Bernstein's story as justification for their acts.

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