Keeping the Press from the Action

By Janice Castro

For the first time, a major U.S. military operation is blacked out

No sooner had President Reagan taken to television with the announcement that the U.S. had joined forces with six small Caribbean countries to invade Grenada than the press scrambled to do its job. Within hours, the first wave of more than 300 newspaper, magazine, wire-service, radio and television journalists were arriving on the island of Barbados, which, though some 160 miles northeast of the action, was the closest they could get. But there were no pictures of the combat on television screens that night or the next night, nor any dispatches from newspaper reporters on the ground. Members of the press were not allowed any nearer.

At an extraordinary Pentagon press conference eight hours after the President's Tuesday announcement, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and General John Vessey Jr., Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, briefed reporters in Washington on the progress of the fighting while attempting to explain why journalists were not being allowed to observe it. The reasons: the necessity for complete secrecy to ensure the success of the surprise attack, and concerns over correspondents' safety. When would the press be allowed in? "I hope as soon as tomorrow," said Weinberger, adding, "I wouldn't ever dream of overriding the commander's decision that he was not able to guarantee any kind of safety for anyone."

That justification for an unprecedented news blackout instantly raised a furor. Major news organizations fired off stiff protests. The American Society of Newspaper Editors formally complained that the exclusion went "beyond the normal limits of military censorship." Two more days passed before the first handful of reporters were escorted to Grenada.

Despite this news blockade, six reporters and one photographer, including TIME Correspondent Bernard Diederich, had managed to get to Grenada in a small fishing boat as the invasion was starting. On Day 2 of the invasion, having learned that telex and telephone lines had been knocked out in the fighting, four of the reporters--Don Bohning of the Miami Herald, Edward Cody of the Washington Post, Morris Thompson of Newsday and Greg Chamberlain of Britain's Guardian--accepted a U.S. military offer to be airlifted to the U.S.S. Guam, a helicopter carrier, in the belief that they could file their dispatches back to the U.S. from there. Instead, the reporters found themselves, as Bohning later put it, "more or less captives of the U.S. Navy," forbidden to send their stories. Not until Thursday did they get back to Grenada.

Said Washington Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee: "As long as I have been in the business, the press has been on military landings right along with the troops." In fact, starting with the Mexican War in 1846, reporters have taken risks right along with the soldiers. During the years of war in Southeast Asia, more than 50 were killed. To suggest that the press was kept out for its own good, said an incensed CBS News President Ed Joyce, "is an insult to the men and women who died covering wars." On its editorial page on Friday, the New York Times referred to the photograph that shows the first American Marines raising the flag on Mount Suribachi in Iwo Jima. Wrote the Times: "How much safety does he [Weinberger] think was guaranteed to Joe Rosenthal of the Associated Press, who took the famous picture?"

There are more dangerous places than Grenada these days, including El Salvador and Lebanon, where reporters are reasonably free to go wherever they choose. But the safety of journalists may not have been the primary concern of Defense officials. "We learned a lesson in the Falklands," one U.S. lieutenant colonel candidly told an American reporter. The officer was referring to the Thatcher government's severe restrictions on British journalists covering the Falklands conflict last year. British reporters were required to agree in advance to heavy censorship, and no live television pictures were transmitted from the battle zone. Nevertheless, they were allowed to accompany the task force and go in with the first troops. Says ABC News Vice President David Burke: "And they don't even have a First Amendment!"

U.S. journalists do. In practice, however, U.S. combat reporters have always agreed to sensible limits on what they report, especially in situations where dispatches could conceivably endanger the lives of U.S. fighting men. American reporters have often accompanied troops to battle under restrictions. When President Johnson sent the Marines to Santo Domingo in 1965, no journalist broke the embargo placed on the prebattle confidential briefings that the President provided. During the Viet Nam War, reporters were allowed to go along on nearly all missions. When U.S. soldiers secretly crossed the border into Cambodia in 1970, General Creighton Abrams lent his personal aircraft to reporters, and trusted them to hold their stories until the action was well under way.

That spirit of trust and cooperation between press and government was absent right from the start of the week's dramatic events. When CBS Correspondent Bill Plante asked White House Press Spokesman Larry Speakes on Monday afternoon whether an invasion was imminent, Speakes checked and came back with the reply: "Preposterous!"

As it turned out, Speakes simply had not been told the truth by Administration officials. Afterward he complained bitterly to senior White House aides in an interoffice memorandum. If he had known the facts, says Speakes, he could have kept the secret without telling an outright lie. "I could say, I'm sorry, I can't answer that question,' " he explains. "Or, 'I'll check on that.' " Says ABC Paris Bureau Chief Pierre Salinger, a former press secretary who was kept similarly in the dark about the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 by President Kennedy: "You can always make a deal with the press when it knows it is dealing with a national security situation." Argues syndicated Columnist Jody Powell, who was President Carter's press secretary: "The Government has not only the right but sometimes the obligation to lie. If I had been asked hours before an invasion if an invasion was about to take place, I would have denied it and tried to make it a convincing lie."

In the absence of independent reporting from the scene of the battle, and with little detail coming from the Pentagon, reporters did what they could; the television networks used file footage, lively electronic graphics and innumerable maps of Grenada. ABC stood its Pentagon correspondent, Jack Smith, in front of a table model of the island with a pointer to explain what the Pentagon said was happening. On Wednesday, CBS Correspondent Sandy Gilmour chartered a plane in Barbados to capture the first television pictures not supplied by the Government. He taped the naval activity around Grenada from a distance until a U.S. jet fighter cut precariously close to chase his plane off. When the Department of Defense finally provided a short videotape of Cuban weapons caches found in warehouses on Grenada, Cuban prisoners and a few seconds of combat, CBS aired it with a prominent label on-screen reading, "Cleared by Defense Department Censors." At week's end NBC filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Government, demanding the unedited footage that was shot by military photographers.

Even after some reporters were given a limited tour of Grenada by military officials on Thursday, news executives felt that they had got only what one of those reporters, ABC Correspondent Richard Threlkeld, called "a worm's-eye view, just a little segment of what was going on." Journalists who attempted to reach the island on their own by private boat, as TIME's Diederich and his companions had done earlier, were run off by U.S. destroyers and other naval vessels.

Last week's press protests undoubtedly strike some Americans as special pleading. Says the Washington Post's Bradlee: "Their attitude is, 'There you go, bleeding again!' " But any break, even for only a few days' time, in the vital U.S. tradition of reasonably open press coverage during military combat has implications that are exceedingly troubling (see ESSAY). Sums up the U.P.I.'s veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas: "The American people should not have been left in the dark." Indeed, they should never be left in the dark.

-- By Janice Castro.

Reported by Patricia Delaney/Washington, with other bureaus

With reporting by Patricia Delaney This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.